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so, when i was in the west bank back in the summer of 2006, israel was bombing lebanon, and i realized i might be pregnant. my partner was in the states at the time, so i had to rely on a couple of friends to help me procure a home pregnancy test in israel since we couldnt find one in the west bank. as we were sitting in the park in jerusalem at night, eating cake, and hiding from the guards, one of my friends explained that she would most likely not be able to have kids. i nodded my head. and then she went on a small rant about how immoral it was to have kids, and be a breeder.
whoa. that word, breeder, was like a smack in the face. i wont go deep into the racial implications of that word, but as bfp pointed out earlier this week, black women in the states have historically been forced to be pregnant and to produce offspring, but not to be a mother. being able to not choose to bear a child can be a privilege. and so can being allowed to be a mother.
later that night when i was finally home, i saw the two pink lines appear on the plastic wand. and my suspicions were confirmed, i was ‘with child’.

i was pro choice before i became pregnant, but it was being pregnant for ten months that made me proclaim, loudly, to anyone who would listen: i am so pro-abortion because no one, and i mean no one, should have to be pregnant if they dont want to! anyone who thinks that adoption is an alternative to an abortion is nuts, it totally ignores that you have to be fucking pregnant for a fucking year first.

i know that giving birth, and/or being a mother is not always a choice. in a lot of the world a safe abortion is not necessarily available. here in egypt, is in a lot of the world, abortion is outlawed. and even in countries where abortion is legal, it can be out of the price range for the majority of women. in a lot of countries, an abortion is not feasible for a woman because of the red tape that she needs to go through. or the distance that the nearest clinic is. or if her family or partner discover that she has had an abortion she will be turned out of her house with no resources, no money, no job, no safety net, nothing. or she will be beaten. or the only type of abortion available are so dangerous to the woman’s health that she risks her very life in having one.

in the eastern congo, rape is used as a primary weapon of war. and women are kidnapped and raped for months until they become pregnant, then they are set free in the mountainous jungle. abortion is illegal in this country. and i talked with methodist christian ladies who were working day and night to be able to provide the morning after pill for every woman they can in their region. the work they do is but a drop in the bucket. they never have enough supplies.

maybe its because i grew up around girls in the states who didnt have a choice to become a mother. they had sex. they got pregnant by accident. and then they were stuck, threatened, beatened with no resources to be able to get to a clinic, that i dont assume that a woman chose to give birth; simply because she cares for her child. nor do i know what kind of internal choices she has made to be able to love a child.

i do know that it took everything inside of me to not start crying and never stop when i sat in rooms full of congolese rape survivors nursing their children. i know that they told me that their children were a gift, and i believed them.

this is why i work hard to do what i do. why i created the lilith plan. provide alternatives to clinical abortions that are not always available and can be traumatizing even if available. i research plants, herbs, flowers for their abortifacient qualities. i study acupressure texts. i build del-ems. i make the information available through any means i can find. cause a lot of women, women that we see everyday with their children never had the choice whether or not to become pregnant or be a mother. they walk by us, not screaming their life stories at us. and we judge them, not even with the little facts about them that we have, but with the stories and narratives that we make up about them in our heads.

i saw the lilith plan in a vision one night as i was meditating. and am slowly working to make it a reality.

“We may not currently have the might of the Israeli army and the power of traditions confine us in certain roles, however, we know that one woman standing behind another in a line of solidarity is a force more powerful than both.”
–kefah, speaking in at-tuwani village, west bank, palestine

i am going to start with kefah. kefah will be on a speaking tour in italy this fall.

i met kefah in the fall of 2004 under horrible circumstances. we were living in the southern west bank. and a couple of international friends had been walking with palestinian children passed an israeli settlement, when the israeli settlers jumped out of the woods and beat my two friends down. luckily, the kids weren’t physically hurt, but they were scared, very scared. but my two friends were taken to the hospital with a punctured lung, broken knee and arm, and psychological trauma. so i and a couple of other internationals who were living in palestine went to at tuwani and walked with the children the next day passed the settlement. and the day after that.
those kids were amazing. they faced death just so they could go to elementary school.
the israeli soldiers told us that if the settlers attacked us, they would not protect us. and we believed them since a lot of the soldiers were from neighboring israeli settlements.
at night we slept in the women’s museum, a palestinian women’s craft co-op started by kefah.
kefah is amazing. she is a wife, a mother to four sons, a self-avowed feminist, a leader in her village, a visionary, a business woman, a community organizer. when i think of revolutionary motherhood, i think of kefah.
and she has a great raunchy sense of humor.
kefah expanded for me what i understood motherhood to mean. well, actually not just kefah, a lot of palestinian women did that for me. women who daily confront israeli soldiers just so they can work in their fields, harvest plants, leave their house, go to the clinic, go to the neighboring town. women who do it with a babe riding on their shoulders. women who do it with little money and a lot of strength. women. who. do. it.
dont get me wrong, i dont romanticize living under an occupation. its not pretty. its too little food, and too many people dying. its your husband, your son, your father, your brother in jail and you trying to figure out how to get the money to get him out, if that is even allowed. its eid under curfew. its watching your house be demolished simply because it was standing and then rebuilding it just to watch it be demolished again. its your mosque, your school be demolished. apartment buildings being shelled. its never having enough. its living on the breath of survival. its life. and its painful.
revolution aint pretty and it doesnt come cheap.
but it was kefah that i became friends with. and kefah who i watched as she organized women while mothering young boys.
and it was kefah and her village, at tuwani, that i wanted to return to when i tried to return to palestine in the winter of 2009.

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in late december of 2009 israel decided to bomb gaza. and bomb her and bomb her. my lil family and i traveled during the bombing. first to scotland to see our friends theresa and jim. and then we got on a plane in mid january and flew to tel aviv, israel. (you have to enter israel in order to enter the west bank). instead of allowing us to enter israel, the airport security put me, my partner, and my one year old daughter in israeli jail for three days. (and no, we dont know why they would not allow us to enter israel, israel is like that, we have some good guesses, but no hard facts…)
there is a lot i can say from those three days in jail. i can tell you that all the guards are hopped up on speed and uppers and live in a world of paranoia that wafts through the jail like cigarette smoke. i can tell you that they refused to give us diapers for aza so she had to piss on the floor for a day until the cleaning lady came in and told the guards to give us diapers or else. i can tell you that in the cell next to us was an eight month dutch nigerian pregnant lady with her husband who had their passports confiscated. and that through the vents aza and i heard the guards torturing him while they videotaped it.
and there are things i cannot tell you. i cannot tell you the sound of aza screaming because she was locked in a room for over twenty four hours, ill never forget it, but ill never be able to describe it either. i cannot tell you the soft look in aza’s eyes when the guard told me: i dont care what happens to your daughter, whatever happens to her is your fault. because you are in here.
even though i had spent the past couple of days trying to get the fuck out of there.
i can tell you how by the end of that experience, no matter how horrifying many of the guards had been, i was so grateful that i was not them. that i still walked with my humanity. that i still could feel compassion for them even if they could not afford to do so for me.
i can though tell you that what we experienced was normal. and whatever was abnormal about our experience in jail was due to the privilege we were extended as us citizens.
after three days they let us go and flew us to amsterdam.
the bombing of gaza ended while we were in jail. and obama was inaugurated a day after we got out. i can tell you that i wasnt feeling very much hope as i watched pieces of the inauguration celebration from our hotel room television set.
i was missing palestine deeply. i wanted kefah to meet aza.

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a lot of people want to quibble over israel and palestine. they want to start with the right of israel to exist. they want to start dividing up land for a two state solution. they want it over with. done with. cause they are tired of it.
no body i have ever met is more tired of the occupation than palestinians. bone tired. they dont get a day off from genocide.
and that means they dont get a day away from struggle.
people ask me what do i think about hamas and their refusal to acknowledge israel’s right to exist.
ummm…i have a lot of critiques of hamas. a lot. but israel does not have a right to exist. no nation based on occupation and genocide does (and that most definitely includes my home country the us of a). and no one should require that the oppressed acknowledge the ‘right’ of the oppressor to abuse, violate, and murder. no real peace can be bought at such a price. (i do not believe in rewriting history and so israel does exist, whether or not it has a right to. and we have to deal with it as it exists. but damn, dont ask for the natives to thank the conquerors for their chains…)
and there are few places where this is better articulated than in palestinian hip hop.

so i will end with darg (da revolutionary arabian guys) team. a few amazing mc’s from gaza. they had been trying for months to be allowed to leave gaza and after the massacre on the mavi marmara a couple of months ago and in response israel opening the gazan borders, darg team was able to escape to switzerland where they are hanging out now, planning to come to the states in september and go on tour. if we can get the visas and the funds for them to do so.

“on December 27th 2008 Israel started it’s first strike on Gaza killing hundrends no thousands of lives for 23 days. DARG TEAM after the war recorded and filmed it’s first video clip ‘23 yoom”.
today, one year after the war and DARG TEAM steps in again but this time calling every one to participate and start rebuilding what the war left behind.”

rebuild by us

(it’s in arabic. i really can’t translate it.)

the question i hate the most when i write or speak about palestine is: but is there any hope? did you feel any hope when you were there?
what. the. fuck?
hope? fuck hope.
i saw mamas breastfeeding babies. and old men tending flocks of sheep in full defiance of the israeli military. i saw wild poppies covering a graveyard. and a boy etching graffiti on the apartheid wall. and a 12 year old girl in hijab and school uniform sing umm kulthum with a tenor that would make the stoic weep. i have seen a full bellied palestinian pregnant woman turn her back to an israeli soldier who had a gun pointed at her so she could talk on the cell phone to her four year old son and tell him that she would be home soon. and communities get together and remove the large earth mound road blocks that the israeli army puts down in the middle of highways to cut off transportation between neighboring cities. and grandmothers who will yell at soldiers and lock arms protecting their sons. thrown rocks off of mountains with seven year olds (who had a much better arm than me) and drank tea in front of the rubble that used to be my hosts bedroom.
hope? i have seen much more than hope.
i have seen life. and love. and revolution.

and someday i will see kefah again.

The ongoing quest of the French government to preserve their country’s “secular traditions” came to the fore once again Tuesday when the lower house of France’s parliament voted to ban women from wearing any face-covering veil, such as the infamous burqa or the less “extreme” niqab — a move obviously targeting French Muslim women, of which perhaps 1,900 wear a face-covering veil. France has the highest population of Muslims in Europe, comprising about 5 million of France’s population of 64 million people.

I’m sure you remember the “no hijabs in public schools” ban France passed in 2004 after almost a decade debating it, barring students from wearing a headscarf or any other piece of clothing that would indicate the religion of the student wearing it. To be fair, that does include Jewish yarmulkes and cross necklaces, however, the surrounding debate was particularly focused on the Muslim hijab. It just seems that since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, Western countries have been not-so-subtly putting their Islamophobia on display.

Of course, this is not to say that all Muslim women disagree with the banning of the burqa or niqab. Some Muslim feminists have spoken out in favor of the ban. I fully support the right of Muslim women to not be forced to wear face-covering veils. However, I think banning religious clothing at the governmental level is taking the issue in a scary direction. I believe in choices, and banning burqas and niqabs eliminates the ability of women who actually wear the veils of their own volition to continue to make the choice to wear them, however few the women may be that make that choice. The author of the Huffington Post article, Caryl Rivers, makes a lot of good points, but I really do believe that in order to truly gain equal rights for Muslim women in their culture it’s going to have to come from changing Muslim men’s “hearts and minds” and not changing Muslim women’s clothing.

In the Salon article linked above, Eqyptian feminist Mona Eltahawy states:

I support banning the burqa because I believe it equates piety with the disappearance of women. The closer you are to God, the less I see of you — and I find that idea extremely dangerous. It comes from an ideology that basically wants to hide women away. What really strikes me is that a lot of people say that they support a woman’s right to choose to wear a burqa because it’s her natural right. But I often tell them that what they’re doing is supporting an ideology that does not believe in a woman’s right to do anything. We’re talking about women who cannot travel alone, cannot drive, cannot even go into a hospital without a man with them. And yet there is basically one right that we are fighting for these women to have, and that is the right to cover their faces. To tell you the truth, I’m really outraged that people get into these huge fights and say that as a feminist you must support a women’s right to do this, because it’s basically the only kind of “right” that this ideology wants to give women. Otherwise they get nothing.

I agree with her on basically every point she makes, yet I can’t reconcile my feelings about government-enforced bans on religious clothing. I just don’t think that simply legally preventing women from wearing burqas, niqabs, or hijabs is going to cause transformative change in Islamic culture. This is a crude analogy, but it seems like banning black women from relaxing their hair. Yes, black women would be unable to cowtow to the oppressive beauty standards forced on us by Western culture, but would their minds be freed as well? Would black men suddenly stop desiring women with long, straight hair? With the banning of burqas and niqabs, are sexist, oppressive Muslim men and the governments they run suddenly going to stop treating women like second-class citizens? I don’t see that happening. Western governments using women’s rights as an excuse to ban Muslim religious garments just smells like Islamophobia couched in “progressive” rhetoric. Some leaders in the U.K. have actually voiced their concern over the “growing threat of Islamism“.

So what can we expect this ban on face-covering veils to do for Muslim women’s rights in France? Eltahawy had this to say:

What I hope it will do is that it will create a situation where a woman can say to a man, look, you know that I have to go out and work so that we can continue to live here, and I can’t go out with my face covered, even though you want me to, because that’s what the law says. I hope the law gives women this kind of out. I have no idea if that’s actually going to happen or not.

I can’t get behind legislation like this when the only benefit for women would be that you get to tell your husband that you’re required by law to not wear the veil, and the many benefits for the government and Islamophobic French people include not having to be visually reminded there’s Muslims in their communities and also stopping the spread of “Islamism”. I don’t trust the women’s rights angle at all from Western governments when it comes to Islam. We continue to ally with countries that do much more than just expect women to cover themselves head to toe when in public — we’re in bed with countries that beat and jail women who have been gang raped and impregnated because the rape constituted the woman committing adultery. I personally don’t think her lack of burqa helped at all in that situation.

So I’m not exactly joining the cheerleading squad because France decided its Islamophobia was good for women’s rights. Of course I don’t want Muslim women to be forced to cover themselves head to toe. But I firmly believe true change in the Islamic world will never come via simply outlawing certain types of clothing, and I question the veracity of France’s reasons for doing so. The fact that they’re mentioning things like “defining and protecting French values” sounds eerily familiar and to me, is more of a nationalist concern than a concern for women’s rights.

There needs to be substantive change in Muslim men’s attitudes towards Muslim women rather than superficial change mandated by a government that seeks to erase those parts of immigrant populations they find distasteful.

Ultra-Orthodox Jews protest the integration of a girls’ school because they don’t want their Ashkenazi daughters studying with Sephardim.

Tens of thousands of black-clad ultra-Orthodox Jews staged mass demonstrations on Thursday to protest a Supreme Court ruling forcing the integration of a religious girls’ school.

Protesters snarled traffic in Jerusalem and another large religious enclave, crowded onto balconies in city squares, and waved posters decrying the court’s decision and proclaiming the supremacy of religious law.

There were a few small scuffles, and a police officer emerged from one of them holding his eye, apparently slightly injured.

It was one of the largest protests in Jerusalem’s history, and a stark reminder of the ultra-Orthodox minority’s refusal to accept the authority of the state.

Also, the throngs of devout Jews showed to which extent the ultra-Orthodox live by their own rules, some of them archaic, while wielding disproportionate power in the modern state of Israel.

Parents of European, or Ashkenazi, descent at a girls’ school in the West Bank settlement of Emanuel don’t want their daughters to study with schoolgirls of Mideast and North African descent, known as Sephardim.

The Ashkenazi parents insist they aren’t racist, but want to keep the classrooms segregated, as they have been for years, arguing that the families of the Sephardi girls aren’t religious enough.

Of course it’s just about morals and religion, and not about bigotry. We’ve heard this line before, haven’t we?

And this quote is rather telling:

Esther Bark, 50, who has seven daughters, said the issue is keeping the girls away from the temptations of the modern world. ”To suddenly put them in an open-minded place is not good for them,” she said.

He has a great article up about how many of the cliches we use when discussing Israel and Palestine are inaccurate and harmful to the peace process. He cuts through most of the usual platitudes (“It’s Israel’s fault” / “It’s Palestine’s fault”) in favor of a more nuanced and tough take. I’d excerpt, but the whole thing is just so good you should head over and read.

“I never met a hero I didn’t like. But then, I never met a hero. But then, maybe I wasn’t looking for one.”

That’s a line from a Lester Bangs piece, I believe, actually, his epic interview with Lou Reed. Anyone who’s read Bangs knows that he loved Reed passionately, obsessively–and so his willingness to confront Reed, to basically fuck with him over the course of the interview, was pretty impressive, even if it was just a rock profile.

Lester Bangs met a lot of my heroes, but one of the things that made him great was that ongoing willingness to question people, even people he’d allowed care of all the hopes and dreams that we pin on the best rock songs.

Helen Thomas did that. Only she did it with people who make policy and decide who lives and dies.

I’m Jewish. Polish and Russian Jew, actually, on my father’s side, which in some people’s minds makes me not actually Jewish, but I went to Hebrew school and temple as a kid and recently fasted again on Yom Kippur just to see if I could do it. I eat bacon and have tattoos and don’t really believe in God per se, but being Jewish is an important part of my life–as important as being a woman, being American, and other things I can’t change.

My family was chased out of Europe. I’m sure that someone related to me died in Poland’s camps, though I don’t know of them–my family was tight-lipped about that part of their history. I went to the kind of slacker Hebrew school that the parents (and in my case, grandparents) of well-off Jewish kids sent their kids to to learn some of their history and enough Hebrew to stammer through a Bar or Bat Mitzvah so they could be showered with gifts, and maybe some religion along the way. I dropped out (for lack of funds for a Bat Mitzvah) and have since joked about being and made a T-shirt proclaiming me a “Hebrew School Dropout.”

Part of Hebrew school was always being taught to identify with Israel. I guess they mostly failed at that, since I’m a pissed-off lefty who wants to cry at this point every time someone in the press or someone I know conflates “Israel/Israeli Government” with “Jews” (sample: New York Times headline “Is the Embargo Good for the Jews?” when it’s about Israeli national interests. Also, the answer is simple. No.)

I don’t identify with Israel anymore at all. It’s not a place I ever want to go and certainly not a place I want to live. Like many nations in our sort-of-post-colonial world, it’s got a problematic history that will never completely go away–and I have steered mostly clear of those questions in my career. When I write about Israel, it tends to get personal. As you can see.

My reaction to the Israeli raid on the Freedom Flotilla was mostly blind rage. I wanted to cry, to scream. I couldn’t write anything about it and still can’t really. It hurt. So maybe I’m more understanding this week of Thomas than I would have otherwise.

I usually have a knee-jerk reaction to anti-Semitism. It slaps me across the face, reminds me that though I live every day with white privilege, there is a special kind of racism directed at me too, one that at one point wiped out millions.

Yet I’m having a hard time being outraged at Helen Thomas. (Link has the full transcript.)

Let me be clear: Poland and Germany are about the LAST places she should tell Israelis to “go back to.” Wow, was that ever a bad choice. And the kind of “just get out” anti-Zionism always strikes me as, well, as problematic (Adam Serwer was great on this) as telling me and all the rest of us white Americans to go back to whence we came. But I don’t get that visceral feeling from Thomas that I do from many, that she blames all Jews for Israel. And it annoys me just as much when Zionists tend to elide Jews into Israel, like whatever they deem “good for Israel” is automatically what I should support. No. Criticizing Israel is not anti-Semitic. Maybe I’m making excuses. It’s not for me to say. She resigned and she was probably right to do so.

Anyway. The title of this post. It references a song, just like my last one (and probably like all of them; I am forever stealing great lines from my pop idols). David Bowie put “Heroes” in quotes on the title of his album and his song for a reason. He was a pop star on his third or fourth or fifth persona (depending on when you start counting) by the time he made that record and he knew better than anyone that your public face is one you create and put on. (Oh, there will be more on Bowie.) For me, part of being a hippie lefty feminist type is not looking to people to be heroes.

Oh, I look up to people. I look for life assistance in pop stars all the time. In fact, I’m more comfortable doing that than I am with political figures. I’m a journalist; I figure they deserve my unending skepticism. So do members of the press corps, even ones with a stellar history of fighting for things that I believe in like the right of women to be in the press corps, and most importantly being the lone voice in that White House corps that actually pushed back against whichever administration was in office.

Maybe it’s a combination of years in journalism (many in pop culture journalism especially) meeting people I looked up to and realizing that they’re just people. But I don’t think having heroes is especially helpful. It’s an essentially conservative notion, really–the idea that it’s been done before and better than we can and we just have to try to get back to some period when people were Great. It’s an Ayn Randian notion of Super-people that we can never hope to be. It’s great to have inspiration from those who came before, to acknowledge and learn and know our history. But we can’t expect our heroes to be perfect. We have to acknowledge also that they are people.

Sady wrote about this in the context of that awful M.I.A. interview, and I think made an excellent point:

Speaking out about politics is tricky; as anyone with even marginal self-awareness knows, it requires you to be more or less constantly opining on morals and an ideal future world, while also being a person with moral failings (I have them, God knows) who has made plenty of compromises or choices about how to live in the world as it presently exists. Hence, my flip-the-fuck-outery over being interviewed; being regarded as an authority is a little hard to take, given how familiar I am with my own imperfections. But lots of people on this here planet are privileged in one way or another, including people who speak out against privilege. Lots of people are inconsistent, incapable of being hardcore moral vegans at all times; pretty much everyone has unpleasant aspects to her personality. If we make personal perfection a prerequisite for speaking out, the result will be silence. It simply will be. There will be one woman, living alone and off-the-grid in a yurt, eating nothing but pickles, interacting with no-one but the squirrels, who walks out to her favorite pooping tree every morning and delivers a brief monologue to it about social justice. She will be the Perfect One, the Chosen One; she will be allowed to speak. And it won’t be a problem. Largely because no-one will actually hear her.

Helen Thomas was/is not my hero. Helen Thomas is someone I look up to and is still. She said something stupid. Hell, maybe deep down she does hate me and the rest of the world’s Jews. I can still take away the things she did that have made my personal journey, career, and life better and easier. I don’t require Gloria Steinem to not have written that atrocious op-ed about gender being a bigger handicap than race to be grateful to her as well for the things she did.

It’s hard to look forward if you keep lookin’ back. We need not to look at the last generation and venerate; we need to do things for this generation. We don’t need heroes. We need, maybe, “heroes.” “Heroes” that we are conscious are two-dimensional things we’ve created that stand in for real flesh-and-blood people who fuck up, who have opinions we loathe, who say stupid things to the wrong people. We need to understand this, and it is good for us, because it allows us to realize that our own fuckups don’t keep us from being “heroes” too. Even if it’s just for one day.

(By the way, if you wanna call me a self-hating Jew, etc. etc. in comments, feel free. It won’t be anything I haven’t heard before. Don’t expect me to come here and argue with you, though.)

In light of yesterday’s discussion of SatC, I thought I’d direct your attention to Muslimah Media Watch’s discussion of the film.

If any non-Arab, non-Muslim readers are itching to say (or repeat), “Well, I don’t think it’s racist, and my opinion is valid, too, and also you’re just looking for stuff to complain about!” just please, please remember that these women may have a wee bit more expertise on the subject than you do. Do you enjoy it when a member of a privileged group lectures you on what is and isn’t offensive to your group? No, it’s frustrating and insulting! Stay civil, all.

I’m not going to write too much about this, but here a few articles that may be of interest:

Peter Beinart, not exactly an uber-liberal, writes that we shouldn’t blame the Israeli commandos for the flotilla disaster; we should look at Israel’s right-wing leaders, and their American supporters.

The New York Times op/ed page takes a fairly even-handed response, calling for an investigation and pushing Obama to take a stronger stance.

Tom Friedman writes something typically ridiculous, which seems to be based primarily on who his friends are and what happened when he was in Istanbul this one time. In a post which is truly a thing of beauty, Alex Pareene rips the column apart, and oh-so-accurately describes Friedman as “a barely literate cartoon mustache of oversimplification whose understanding of global politics is slightly less comprehensive than a USA Today infographic and who possesses about as much insight into world events as a lightly vandalized Wikipedia stub entry.”

Megan McArdle — also far from being a staunch lefty — further elaborates on Beinart’s point that the Gaza blockade isn’t only about preventing terrorism (although obviously that’s part of it), but is also a form of collective punishment.

Jeffrey Goldberg is more sympathetic to the Israeli position on this one.

Mattbastard also points out that the flotilla disaster is a side issue, and the real problem is the Gaza blockade.

Daniel Drezner doesn’t mince words when he says that Israel’s response is just fucked up.

Bradley Burston at Haaretz says that Israel is no longer defending itself; it’s defending the siege.

Finally, the importance of context when looking at the videos of the raid.

This guest post is a part of the Feministe series on Sexual Assault Awareness Month.

I think a TRIGGER WARNING is appropriate here.

Why does the institution of marriage exist? Even highly romanticized commercials for De Beers speak to the primary historic nature of the marriage contract: material well-being, as well as securing that well-being for the future generation. This isn’t to say that people who wound up, and continue to wind up, married to each other have no emotional investment in the enterprise. But even the many symbolic acts that occur across cultures when people tie the knot also tend to have practical roots, no?

In light of all that, it almost weirds me out when anyone professes to be shocked by the phenomenon of child marriage. “Really,” I want to say. “Have you taken a look at the world you live in as of late?”

In Yemen, a study by Sanaa University found that something like half the women are married off before they are 18. Last year, a 12-year-old Yemeni girl, Fawziya Ammodi, and her baby died after three days of painful labour – it was a highly publicized case, but how many such cases never even get on anyone’s radar?

Still, Yemeni society, already in a precarious position for many socio-economic reasons, is held together by seriously entrenched tribal customs, and it won’t let go of those customs without a fight. Plenty of parents think that they are setting their little girl up with a better future when they marry her off. This is why you can’t address the issue of child marriage without addressing poverty. Giving parents an actual financial incentive to not marry off their little kid is the challenge – as opposed to any sort of initial ideological conversion.

Armed conflict plays its part as well. Living in the Middle East, I heard plenty of young Palestinian girls married off to older Saudi men, for example. In fact, a Saudi friend of mine was once accosted by an older Palestinian woman who mistakenly believed him to be on the prowl – “What you do with our girls is shameful!” she screamed.

You can’t address child marriage without addressing sex either. What is one of the biggest arguments for child marriage? The idea that it cuts down on wanton sluttitude, of course. One of the things that more traditional cultures inevitably get right is the whole notion that hey, children are sexual beings to one extent or another. What they tend to do with that notion is another matter entirely, of course. Girls in particular are seen as both as “threat” and a kind of product that can’t stay on the shelf for too long, lest it get spoiled. How do you begin to deal with that? I believe that making this an issue of health is a good start. Sure, giving birth when you’re 12 used to be the norm across the board once upon a time – and it was also during that time that people didn’t live for very long, now, did they?

I believe that one of the really unhelpful ways in which we, as outsiders, treat child marriage is in the hand-wringing. Let’s say you meet a woman from an African nation and, in the course of getting to know her, find out that the first time she was actually married was, like, 12. Going “OH MY GOD! THAT MUST HAVE BEEN HORRIBLE! OH MY GOD! SOMEBODY GET THE SMELLING SALTS!” is completely uncalled-for. It can often be pretty demeaning, actually.

The one time I really got a chance to have a candid conversation with a woman who had that background, the way she related to what happened struck me. She was honest about the fact that getting married made her feel mature. She was honest about the brutality of her first sexual encounter with her husband at age 14 (she didn’t use the word “rape,” so I won’t put words in her mouth – although I believe that rape is exactly what happens in this type of situation, I can’t find another word to define it). She was honest about how glad she was that she didn’t get pregnant during her first marriage. She also fully believed that her parents wanted nothing but the best for her. She was honest about the fact that when her first husband died, she mourned him. Would she want the same for her daughters? No. But by the time we spoke, she was living in an altogether different life.

Shocking? To someone like me, yes. But I remember – Shakespeare’s Juliet was 13. We rightfully label Humbert Humbert as a monster, but we can’t deny the fact that “Lolita” has entered the vernacular not as the rape victim that Nabokov described, but as an underage sex kitten. “If she’s old enough to bleed, she’s old enough to breed” is not just a sexist joke employed to get a rise out of you, it has its basis in a certain culture and a certain worldview. It goes back to the idea of what a partnership between a man and a woman (the act of marriage is supposed to make a “woman” out of a girl, of course) means to us. And it goes back to the nature of how millions of people on this planet live their lives – how harsh the experience can be, and how utilitarian in many of its goals, with a girl’s body as a handy tool. If the tool breaks, so what? There’s plenty more where it came from.

In that sense, the fight that’s going on over child marriage in Yemen is only the tip of the iceberg.

What the…?

A US Army general in northern Iraq has defended his decision to add pregnancy to the list of reasons a soldier under his command could face court martial.

It is current army policy to send pregnant soldiers home, but Maj Gen Anthony Cucolo told the BBC he was losing people with critical skills.

That was why the added deterrent of a possible court martial was needed, he said.

The new policy applies both to female and male soldiers, even if married.

It is the first time the US Army has made pregnancy a punishable offence.

I understand not wanting soldiers to get pregnant while in combat zones. I don’t understand court martialing them.