A female cat has more freedoms than a woman [in Afghanistan] … A cat may go sit on her front stoop and feel the sun on her face. She may chase a squirrel into the park. A squirrel has more rights than a girl in Afghanistan today, because the public parks have been closed to women and girls.”
—Meryl Streep, at the United Nations, September 23, 2024
A VERY Late Breaking News Story
I’m a chess nerd. I “follow” professional chess – the major tournaments and matches – with a similar devotion to the way millions of U.S. sports nerds follow football.
Anna Muzychuk of Ukraine is the eighth highest rated woman chess player in the world, and trust me, that is an amazing thing to be. She gets invited to numerous international tournaments, and none is more prestigious – or remunerative – than the women’s World Rapid Chess Championship, which Muzychuk won back in 2014 and 2016. She was certainly viewed as a top contender in 2017 too, but she declined to play, and she explained why in a Facebook post:
In a few days, I will lose two world titles, back to back, because I decided not to go to Saudi Arabia. I refuse to play by special rules, to wear abaya, to be accompanied by a man so I can leave the hotel, so I don’t feel like a second-class person. I will follow my principles and not compete in the World Fast Chess and Blitz Championship where in just 5 days I could have won more money than dozens of other tournaments combined. This is all very nasty but the sad part is no one seems to care.“
I bet you never heard this story before, right? Don’t feel bad. Like I say, I’m a chess nerd, and I only learned about it the other day, when Anna’s words were reposted on Facebook by the Portland Chess Club.
I don’t think the story was ever even covered by mainstream news organizations in the USA.
Gender Apartheid and Rape Culture
A friend of mine recently sent me this opinion piece in the New York Times, which links the luridly atrocious Pelicot and Diddy rape cases – which have made recent headlines – with commonplace “acquaintance rape” in Western countries like the United States and France. The writer, Elizabeth Spiers, begins the piece like this:
I was raped in college by an ostensibly nice guy who was not a stranger to me. I think that’s a banal statement of fact, but if that sentence makes you uncomfortable, I understand why. I describe it this way to point out how common my experience is.”
And she concludes thusly:
I don’t believe my rapist was a psychopath. He was a guy who found a way to justify his behavior. It must be easy to do when the men around you talk about women as things to be conquered and even trade manipulative strategies on how to do it, all under the guise of fraternity bonding.
“The stories that make the headlines are unforeseeable, but the attitudes that enabled these horrors and allowed the men to get away with it for so long are not. They are ubiquitous, even among men you may know and love.”
Like (hopefully) most men in our culture, I’ve never raped anyone nor been raped, but I did come of age steeped in a culture where, pervasively, “men … talk about women as things to be conquered and even trade manipulative strategies on how to do it, all under the guise of fraternity bonding.” I formed my own identity and personal code of sexual ethics in opposition to that culture, but I grossly and naively (for most of my life anyway) overlooked the connection between that culture and the appalling frequency of sexual coercion and assault (which I mostly only thought about abstractly, as a statistic).
And in fact, the types of conversations I’ve had with women (and sometimes men) over the years that have pertained to topics like sexism and misogyny have been largely focused on phenomena such as “mansplaining” or the fact that men are more likely than women to speak out in large groups, or that women always seem to be the ones who do the dishes after a party – relatively “soft” (though hardly insignificant) stuff. This has been the level at which I and my peers have been trying to “evolve” and “work out” some of the perennial issues of inequality between women and men.
Yet what a disconnect between such concerns – substantive and critical as they are – and the prevalence of sexual and other physical violence on women, here in our “modern” society, and – even more horrifically – in cultures around the world where there aren’t even laws against this sort of thing, where violence against women and brutal repression of female personhood are explicitly accepted and woven into “tradition.”
Recently, on his TV show, Bill Maher exhorted Gen-Z activists to direct their fury at what he aptly calls gender apartheid. I’ve been advised not to link directly to that Maher clip, because part of what he says is potentially offensive and unrelated to gender apartheid, so I’ll just quote him at length here, because I think the following words that he offered are vastly important:
Today, right now, hundreds of millions of women are treated worse than second-class citizens. When you mandate that one category of human being don’t even have the right to show their face, that’s apartheid. And it goes on in a lot of countries. For the last couple of years, a lot of women in Iran have been saying ‘Take this hijab and shove it,’ because in 2022, a young woman named Mahsa Amini was arrested for wearing her mandatory hijab incorrectly, and then died in police custody, and now security forces have killed over 500 people protesting her death … Amnesty International says that Iranian authorities are waging a war on women that subjects them to constant surveillance, beatings, sexual violence, and detention.
“Yasmine Mohammed is a human rights activist who got married off to a Muslim man with fundamentalist views about women … He forced her to wear the hijab all the time, including once beating her because she took her hijab off at home, because the apartment had a window through which people might see in. And this is in Vancouver.
“Here’s what Yasmine said about veiling: ‘It just depresses your humanity entirely. It’s like a portable sensory deprivation chamber and you’re no longer connected to humanity. You can’t see properly. You can’t hear properly. You can’t speak properly. People can’t see you. You can only see them. Just little things. Passing people on the street, and just making eye contact and smiling; that’s gone. You’re no longer part of this world and so you very quickly just shrivel up into nothing under there.’” …
Fifteen countries in the Middle East, including Gaza, have laws that require women to obey their husbands … and those societies also have guardianship laws, which means a woman needs permission from her husband to work, to travel, to leave the house, to go to school, to get medical attention. Honor killings, where women are murdered by their own fathers and/or brothers happen so frequently they can’t even have an accurate account of how many. In 59 countries there are no laws against sexual harassment in the workplace and many have no laws against domestic violence or spousal rape. Twenty countries have marry-your-rapist laws! Multiple societies have laws about what jobs women can and can’t do. Thirty countries practice female genital mutilation, and 650 million alive today were married as children. … [T]his is the apartheid that desperately needs your attention – gender apartheid. This is what should be the social justice issue of your time.“
Thank you, Portland Chess Club!
There’s a through line that connects all of this horror and oppression of women, from “honor killings” in Middle Eastern countries to acquaintance rape in the United States to lower wages and sexual harassment in the workplace to inequitable allotment of household chores, to dismissive speech and other run-of-the-mill discourtesies.
But I frankly think Bill Maher gets to something fundamental when he identifies opposition to gender apartheid as something that ought to be a unifying cause, something millions of people should be screaming about and protesting all over the world with vehemence and passion – on a continual basis.
Because this type of sanctioned, codified dehumanization of women is foundational. It’s the worst of the worst.
And if we’re going to meaningfully engage with an issue as overwhelming as misogyny and mistreatment of women all over the world, we have to address foundational dimensions. Comparatively speaking, cultivating a more nuanced awareness of “mansplaining” is like …. oh I don’t know, sweeping the floor while the termites have infested everything underneath.
Of course you can do both – you can sweep and also clear out the termites — but my point is that you have to do both, because otherwise the “easy” sweeping part is far less meaningful.
And that’s why I’m grateful to the Portland Chess Club for reposting Anna Muzychuk’s bold words, seven years later (who knows why? but I don’t care), because I wouldn’t have known about them otherwise.
I deem Anna a heroine for our times, someone whose self-sacrificing gesture (she really did give up a lot of money; Saudi Arabia had upped the prize fund for the tournament 500%) we SHOULD know and care about.
I want there to be more like her. A lot more.
And I think Anna should be celebrated and recognized much more than she has been.
C’mon, Men!
But this is not just women’s fight – or at least it shouldn’t be – though it’s a battle that women have been largely braving alone, for millennia.
It’s really all our fight.
We men need women and girls to be whole, and we need to fight for their right to be whole, to be fully and gloriously all they can be. Rather than being afraid of that, we should hunger for it. We men are incomplete, we don’t even know ourselves, when the other half of our species is stunted, diminished, abused.
We need to forcefully stand against all forms of sexism and misogyny, explicitly, publicly and privately, whenever and wherever we see it. We need to be courageous about it, calling it out and not tolerating it, and acting to undo and remedy gender injustice wherever we can, in whatever ways we can.
We need to risk pissing off other guys, and/or being mocked for sounding righteous (and actually, when we speak our truths, we should try not to sound superior or righteous, but hey, just let’s do the best we can, yeah?).
This is the least we can do, guys.
Are you with me?
Hey, maybe having a woman president will help too. I hope so.
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