Adani, Facebook and the 2019 Australian election
Adani’s Abbott Point coal terminal
Adani, Facebook and the 2019 Australian election
What connects Adani, Facebook and the Australian election? Money. Vast sums of money that Adani will lose if the huge coal mine in the Carmichael Basin in central Queensland does not go ahead (which would scuttle other, smaller tho still huge, coal mines in the area), and vast sums Adani will make if the coal mine happens.
In the aftermath of the US election it was revealed that the Trump campaign spent $100million on a Facebook campaign.’
This included discussion factories in eastern Europe that would generate fake news and then generate fake discussions, both positively and negatively slanted towards Trump’s election.
This is all available on the public record, and was mentioned in the US probe into possible foreign meddling in the US elections (like the US do is virtually every election in the world!).
The Adani empire/conglomerate consists of companies that are vertically integrated. Adani Australia mines and exports coal on Adani ships to Adani-owned ports in India to be burnt in Adani power stations. This has a few points of interest.
One is that Adani India can decide what it pays for Australian coal to the point where the coal miner may never make a profit and never pay any tax, and most likely will have no money available to rehab the mine sites at the end of their working lives.
Another is that the 20-30 Adani coal fired powered stations do not run on the low quality Indian coal, but rather require higher quality Australian coal that is found in the Carmichael Basin.
Having built these power stations, paid the required baksheesh, and no doubt wanting to expand power generation in power thirsty India, getting the Adani mines on Australia up and running becomes vitally important.
How important? Well, conservatively the value of the Indian power stations must be upwards of $5billion, assets that may be stranded if the mega mine does not happen. So you can see there is quite a bit at stake.
How much is it worth to Adani to make sure that the mine goes ahead? How much in the way of donations found its way into the coffers of the National and Liberal parties over the past weeks leading up to approval announcement just prior to the setting of the election? How many Adani employees suddenly donated $3-5000, how many family members all of a sudden could afford to make a political donation? Speculation of course, but we will possible never know until it is too late.
I imagine that if it cost Adani $100m to get the approvals and open the mine it would be a good investment. Adani could quite easily learn the lessons of Trump and run a massive campaign of fake news, disinformation, fake news groups, with no money flowing directly into the LNP coffers and therefore not subject to declaration or even acknowledgment.
Affecting the Facebook feeds of a targeted group of people, such as working class areas worried about climate change and who are also concerned about electricity prices and the rumours of recession that ‘some Facebook pages’ are spruiking if Adani is rejected, is very simple and direct, and totally deniable for the politicians.
The ability of Adani to influence the Australian 2019 election, dubbed the ‘climate election’ in a virtually anonymous way represents a very clear threat to the democratic processes.
It also represents a very clear threat to the future of life on this planet. This is not the time to ‘take prisoners’!
Mark O’Brien, April 16, 2019
See also How Australia’s coal madness led to Adani by James Bradley
Nepal trekking adventure
After being in Kathmandu for a few days we headed off on our Nepal trekking adventure. Pokhara was the next destination as a great place to visit while our visas were in process, a three- to four-hour motorbike ride, again through the ghats, which neither of us was thrilled about. With scarves wrapped around our heads to stop the smoke and dust and our luggage tied onto the bikes, we were off. The ghats were much easier to navigate going downhill though we were both very relieved to reach the cleaner air at the bottom.
We stopped along the way at a Tibetan orphanage, which was amazing, enjoying the Tibetan Buddhist influence in Nepal, which is very strong.
Pokhara is the jump-off point for most people who go to Nepal to trek, and as such was full of fit and mostly young Westerners. A beautiful place set around a lake with majestic peaks all around.
Pokhara teemed with funky-looking Westerners and the usual semi-Western restaurants and occasional bars catering to them.
The whole town is geared towards trekking: touts, guides and porters, shops selling warm clothes and other walking paraphernalia. Accommodation was varied and usually cheap, with every room seemingly offering fantastic mountain vistas.
There are many different walks on offer and we elected to do the walk up to the Annapurna base camp, a four-day walk up to 4130 metres, way higher than I had ever been before. After the first day, which began, after we were driven to the starting point, with a steep thousand-step climb, Venu felt sick and decided to return to Pokhara, and after arranging to meet in a few days, I plodded on by myself.
I had never walked with a backpack before and found that first section really hard going, marvelling at the porters climbing it loaded down with up to four backpacks. Once I had made it to the top, however, my outlook changed. The altitude did make it hard to walk, but the vistas, the spaciousness of the Himalayas and the comradery with other walkers I met whenever I wanted, meant it was well worth it.
The Himalayas. The rice terraces from time immemorial cascading down the mountains, sometimes in every direction, a clear reminder of the meagre lives that have been eked out over centuries, and the sheer hard work that made and still makes life possible there.
And of course there were the wizened old women who passed by with the loads of firewood, kerosene, bottled water and food supplies for whatever restaurant they were supplying, which dwarfed them, who just seemed to keep going. The equally wizened old men loaded down with more than a donkey-load climbed up and up, never stopping for a breath, rarely talking or looking anywhere other than at the next step, just continual motion as if stopping might be fatal.
I came across a few Israeli groups walking unimpeded by backpacks, which they had assigned to a porter, occasionally a Sherpa, who’d soldier on with two and sometimes even four backpacks on his back.
The porter very happily carrying the Israeli’s packs
I liked to tease them a bit, my Aussie conditioning around laziness and unfairness kicking in, but they were quite happy to not have to carry their own stuff while also providing a well paid job for the locals. They said that after their years of army training and service they’d had enough of physical stress. OK, fair enough.
The pathways were well marked and every hour or so there was a village with one or two cafés where there’d always be someone sitting having a chai and a joint, gearing themselves up for the next stint. There were also stone guesthouses that were fairly basic and not particularly well insulated, and cold showers that nobody seemed to be taking advantage of, not surprising as it was approaching freezing point once the sun went down. I appreciated the heavy coat and boots I had bought in Kathmandu.
I heard of someone being injured falling onto some rocks, and who, with a broken leg, was being carried down the mountain by the porters. Tough all round. Glad it was not me, but I was somehow reassured that if something happened, I would indeed be able to get down the mountain to Pokhara where at least there was some semblance of medical care.
It being late April it was the beginning of the avalanche season, and we were all warned about putting our packs down on the path, anywhere, and to beware of river crossings, which is where the avalanches would usually hit. I heard the odd crack as I was walking along but did not see one until coming down the mountain a few days later.
Crossing an avalanche from the day before
I heard of a walker who’d put his pack down to walk up a bit to take a photo when an avalanche happened and swept it away. His backpack reappeared some days later floating downstream on top of the ice, totally dry, with everything still inside. Lucky.
The climate varied quite a lot on the walk, with a tropical bamboo forest appearing around one bend, and some sacred Assamese monkeys jumping around the top of a waterfall and staring at me. That this tropical microcosm somehow existed at this altitude surprised me.
The mountains were just magnificent and the air, while thin, was clear, clean and fresh, and I felt quite high, and rarely smoked any of the Nepali charis that was usually on offer wherever I stopped.
I loved the rice paddy vistas, the rocks that were everywhere, exposed by erosion, the sheer wildness of the nature. As most of the trees had been chopped down for firewood over the years there was much erosion everywhere I looked
An older avalanche that was slowly disappearing as the stream melted the ice from underneath.
Finally at dusk after four days I arrived at the Poon Hill camp where there were a few tents set up. Even up here, at 3200 metres, there were water bottles and food for sale: that someone had carried everything for two days (they walk much faster than me!) boggled my mind. Snow was melted for cooking and washing, but all bottled drinking water was carried up.
There was not much up here but I really loved the stillness, the hum of the mountains resonating like a deep OM, the Hindu sound of the universe, in the core of my being. The magic of the Himalayas. I had initially intended going all the way to Annapurna Base Camp but I was already labouring in the thin air, and anyway felt it would be much the same there as it was at Poon Hill only higher! I had the mountain experience I was looking for. I’d had enough and was ready to go down again.
It was a bit too cold to sit outside at night for long so after a little conversation and not much in the way of oxygen, I retired to a warmish bed where I soon fell asleep.
Morning arrived, bitterly cold, and after a quick breakfast and brisk face wash, it was time to come down the mountain. I elected to go a different route, one that would take a day less and bring me close to Pokhara. It took me through another valley and upon musing that I wanted to see an avalanche, one happened right in front of me. Spectacular! Awesome power.
I had seen a low stone wall ahead of me and had the thought that it would be a good spot to have a rest and watch an avalanche from!
Once I arrived there I took a photo of myself and then I heard it: a loud crack reverberating around the valley. I looked up and saw the avalanche, quite high and of no danger to me! I could see it rushing down the mountain in a big cloud of snow and ice flooding down like a solid waterfall. It was stunning, and I was very grateful to see it without having to be worried about it impacting on me.
I sat a little longer, quite amazed at how I ‘knew’ the avalanche was about to happen, rolled myself a little joint, which I smoked, and then started walking again.
This path also went through a huge rhododendron forest, which was stunning as they were in bloom at this time. I saw a lookout tower, which I climbed, and finding it sublimely peaceful, sat and meditated for a while.
It was very quiet, still, the hum of the mountains, the hint of a breeze through the forest, the only things to hear.
When after some time I stood up and looked out, I saw a glimpse of what I could only imagine was a snow leopard disappearing into the trees. Wow! It took my breath away. A snow leopard! People search for them for lifetimes and never see them! I was pretty sure it was one, as what I saw, in an instant only, was the right size and moved like a cat, furtive and assured at the same time.
I felt blessed. What a day I was having!
After walking for another two hours I came to a village where I found a place to stay and had some dinner. After dinner I started feeling bad, a stomach bug, and so the night was largely spent cramping while squatting on the toilet. Whether delayed altitude sickness, dehydration, amoebas or simply a psychic release, it was very unpleasant and exhausting.
I’d heard that there was a great viewing area to watch the sunrise hitting the triple peaks of Annapurna that I couldn’t come all this way and not see, so with little sleep and pretty constant cramps and an empty stomach I arose at 5am and trudged in the dark with the other walkers up to the viewing area.
The shades of pink that flavoured the snow-covered peaks as the sun rose were stunning, breathtaking, the second time in 20 hours I’d lost my breath to beauty. The sense of awe, majesty and reverence was written on everyone’s face. We all sat quietly, nobody moved to say anything, enraptured by the beauty that seemed to enter us all.
Annapurna peaks, a double exposure photo I made
And I was cramping! I left after a little while to visit the toilet again, and after forcing some scrambled eggs and toast down my throat it was time to move on and try and get down the mountain. Resting here for a day didn’t seem like a good option so I decided it was better to push on. I knew there would be places to stop every hour or so and another hiker had given me some pills, which seemed to help.
Exhausted, I arrived back in Pokhara the following evening, and after finding Venu — easy really, just find the coolest looking café and coolest scene and he would be in it — and after a mutual debrief and eating some food, I slept for 14 hours. My stomach had settled down; it seemed I just needed a Nepali cleanout!
This is an excerpt from Busted in India by Mark O’Brien, now available on Amazon
#metoo, healing the sexes together
by Marion Ellyard
I work as a trauma specialist and an intimacy coach in the Byron Bay area and I also accompany people who have experienced sexual abuse, men and women, on their healing journey. I look at the world as an ongoing evolutionary process of awakening of consciousness, from ignorance to more love, understanding and knowing.
For me the #metoo movement is an important part of this awakening process but not the end part — just the beginning of a new meeting between the masculine and feminine principles.
Historically speaking the world’s sexuality has been distorted for millennia and it has undergoing major changes currently through media and technology. Until recently most people lived in a pair bonded relationship. Whilst this is still the most common form of intimate relating, what people expect from a relationship and their sexuality has changed radically. Women want to work and be part of the workforce, while sexual and emotional needs have assumed far greater importance.
The downside is that traditional family values are out the door with couples losing skills and being able to connect a community that would support them to work through the issues naturally arising in a long-term bonded partnership.
We know littles of ancient times where possibly sexuality was lived in a completely different context, supported in rites and rituals of tribal and spiritual knowing, free from the notion of romantic love, ties of money and land ownership or bloodlines.
Instead we as a society are without a solid ground beneath our feet to instruct us how to manage our sex lives, desires, relationships and families. This community disconnect, in my opinion, directly abets the hostility and abuse that we inflict on each other, masculine to the feminine and feminine to the masculine. Basically for me what we are being made aware of through the #metoo movement, has its roots in a society that has lost its natural way and its knowing of sexual energy, how to express it consciously and how to live it authentically.
There is a gender war going on, a dissatisfaction with the polar opposite other, which may have started as early as when societies shifted from matriarchy to patriarchy around 3,000 years ago. It is hard to say when exactly sexual exploitation began though certainly it was present before the Christian era. Today we are all aware of this global issue due to the media that we live in a world where rape, child abuse, human trafficking and a suppression of the masculine and feminine sexuality are very present. Sexuality has lost its sacred pathway and hence is expressed in all sorts of distorted forms of deviant behaviours, assaults and rape of the non-consenting individual.
For me the #metoo movement is a welcome cry out from the silence that we all knew was there but nobody wanted to really look at. Finally we are screaming out at the world: Something is wrong, we need help, we need solutions, we do not want to live under these circumstances any more! It’s a recognition of a global crisis, a historical issue that I believe we now need to face and heal on our soul journey back to love. Love cannot happen unless the inner and outer genders are back at peace, united and in unison.
I like to start every journey in my work with a question: How would we like the sexual and relationship world to look like if we could design it in a way we wanted it?
When one voice rises powerfully what often gets overlooked is the deeper layers of the situation. It is easy to appoint an abuser and an abused but it will never result in a resolution, just in more separation.
The question to ask is:, What are our men missing that they are acting out in such ways towards the female? Is it just education about sex? Is it about having an outlet for their true original sexual energy? What trauma are these people carrying to cause such harm, hurt and further separation? And how can we address that at its root cause?
The question to ask is:What are our men missing that they are acting out in such ways towards females?
Ultimately in trauma research a person who harms another acts from a place of unresolved pain within themselves. Certainly the behaviour needs to stop, but the energy of sexual assault, humiliation, power dynamics, hatred and disrespect of the female gender will find new outlets to express itself unless we address the cause.
There is a wounding in our society between the masculine and feminine: this is where I see the solution to address our social structures, the function and natural expression of sexual energy, relationship styles and systems all afresh. The reason for these uninvited sexual assaults are complex and while there is an absolute need for it to stop, we live in a sexually traumatised culture that is not healed that easily.
One of the main pieces we know today from cutting-edge therapists working with sexual abuse is that no matter how much women feel angry and abused, terrified and humiliated, if the feminine wants to heal she needs to forgive. The trauma needs to be released from the body and she needs to regain dignity, true power and safety.
Ultimately she needs to recognise that the healing journey is her own and if she doesn’t forgive she will continue to suffer. If she cannot reach a place of deep compassion towards the suffering in the world, which is the ultimate quality of the feminine, she will remain disembodied and a victim and suffer her whole life from insecurity and distrust.
There are certain steps that need to be taken for the healing of an abused woman, and she can come out of such healing a deeply awakened person that can then use her own healing process to help others, help hear and understand the distraught misled masculine and create a better world for other women around her.
This piece is really important to understand that my hope is as we move from a world that has told women for thousands of years that they are worth less than men, that they are weak, dependant and stupid, that they should earn less than men and that they are sexual objects subjected to an uncontrollable male sex drive all the while not having one of their own, that we move into a world where women understand their true power and beauty.
Thus the healing I can see for our evolution is through women who are embodying compassion, true power, true radiance and sexuality, vulnerability and strength, who love being mothers, love holding and being held. It will ultimately come from the women’s path of empowerment that this situation will shift on the planet.
I believe if us women can find the path back to our true essence much in the world could be healed and men would feel met and start to respect us as they can see we love them, want them and appreciate them in their qualities and in their desires and we are ready to meet them powerfully.
Consider a father mother and child triangle. Due to often cultural or religious beliefs or previous abuse the mother has experienced, or simply ignorance on her and her partner’s behalf, her sexuality towards the father can shut down. But sexuality is not a force we can ongoingly control by our mind. So at some stage the man’s sexual energy could be, for example, projected onto the child as parental disconnection, or someone else’s sexually or ‘normally’ lost in pornography.
75% of sex offenders have been sexually abused themselves as a child so the problem is much more deeply rooted, often passed down generation to generation, than simply hoping it could be solved by simply telling man to stop, accusing them and shaming them further.
Many times when I work with women who have experienced sexual abuse, a significant part of why the abuse happened because their mother was absent from the home. The feminine wasn’t present to teach the little girl her power, to protect her, to role model to her how a radiant woman lives, breathes and loves and how her man respects her. So the little girl doesn’t develop a holistic sexual identity, she doesn’t feel safe in the world and she attracts abuse from her own insecurity.
None of it being anybody’s fault, the missing male and female role models have left us with a society of lost genders. However, I believe that evolution is guiding us to see through all the suffering, divorces and court cases and children that suffer through all this, and that it is time to start to truly look and understand more about the true meaning of relationship, its original spiritual context, its path of healing and it potential for changing the world.
Both men and women need to wake up to this fact together and many men out there are equally devastated at the sexual assaults that are happening against women and children worldwide.
May the #metoo movement become a movement that starts the ball rolling for the world to wake up. Over 50% of marriages break down (although the causes of this are myriad) over 75% of both men and women have secret affairs, every fourth woman is sexually abused on average in most countries. There is something wrong people, and we need to take a look at it.
The more suppressed the feminine is the less met a man will feel truly appreciated in his whole being, the less he can trust himself to be worthy. In his own pointless self destructiveness, suppressing the most beautiful mirror he could possibly have to his own radiance and beauty, he loses himself in despair. He is hardly able to control his strong sexual urges in his teenage years, knowing no other way out than to look at porn and abnormal sexuality that degrades women due to overstimulation.
Due to a lack of education of the principles of tantric sexuality and divine feminine and masculine polarities, the vaster part of our society has become unhappy. A woman who isn’t taught and allowed to radiate her true beauty and sexual potency cannot initiate the man to worship her, protect her and look after her, to treat her with respect. And hence we are all looking for each other, only seeing the disempowered parts of one another.
In ancient times work with archetypes helped people to find the true essence of themselves again and this work is also deeply needed today.
… if the feminine wants to heal she needs to forgive. The trauma needs to be released from the body and she needs to regain dignity, true power and safety.
Deep healing and re-education is needed to replace the ancient initiations tribal people practised to initiate men and women into their roles, their sexuality, supported by a group of people they could trust and lead a life where they do not sit on top of each other as a nuclear family, contrary to the needs of both the feminine and masculine principles.
The general unhappiness of people, with its roots in the oppression of healthy sexuality, the lack of support of a real community and the old cultural paradigms, has led us to a decline in sexual wisdom of incredible dimensions and suffering. So when I look at #metoo I see a huge invitation for the world to have a closer look at humanity and the values and morals and behaviours we live by.
I see an evolutionary path where at last men and women can meet again as respectful partners, lover, families and friends, recognising the unique gifts we bring to each other. Both men and women need to realise that deep listening is needed, big changes, complex research, support of each other and appreciation to heal in these radical times we live in. …
Share #metoo, healing the sexes together by Marion Ellyard with your friends on Facebook
See Marion’s page on this site
#metoo, a year on, the end of the boys club
Since the #metoo Pandora’s Box kicked off in the last part of 2017 the Western attitude towards women has been rocked in ways the women’s liberation movement of earlier times could have only dreamed about. #metoo has changed the very language that is used to call out and condemn the chauvinism that has defined much of human history, incorporated as it is in the major religions.
What began as a movement about sexual abuse of women by powerful men and the sexual ‘favours’ required for career advancement or simply to keep jobs has ‘viralled’ into every crevice of our society.
No longer are smutty comments like what ScoMo made about Pamela Anderson after she appealed to the Australian Government on behalf of Julian Assange allowed to simply slide like they have always done.
The collapse of the blokey empire
Nearly every day, and sometimes multiple times a day, there is a report of some guy being pulled up making some blokey statement. What was normal even a year ago is now a place where only idiots will tread.
What is becoming obvious is that this change is not a fad that will fade away once the next ‘thing’ comes along. Women are no longer automatically prepared to let boorish comments, or ‘accidental’ contact, assumptions of second class citizenship and the assumption that men are better at making important decisions than women are, pass with being challenged. The genie is out of the bottle and it ain’t goin’ back in, ever!
There is a tsunami of femininity that is building to sweep away, much to the discomfort yet ultimate betterment of men everywhere, the entire history of women’s subjugation, at least in Western culture. This subjugation is so deep in the unconscious from centuries of conditioning that often neither women or men are aware of its manifestations until an individual women makes a stand on a particular issue.
A big part of the revolution that we are seeing is the rise of smart and highly intelligent women like NZ PM Jacinta Arden who is rattling cages in a very non-cage-rattling, smiling and gracious manner. A country’s political leader taking three months off to have a baby? Or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the 29 year-old woman who was working at a bar in New York only a year ago and who was in the November 2018 elections in the US elected to Congress with 78% of the vote. She wore borrowed designer clothing as she didn’t have the money to buy them, and discusses her policy positions live while cooking her dinner! Wow!
The decision of Marianne Williamson, a respected US spiritual teacher (Remember Mandela’s inauguration speech that included the quote of hers about ‘Who are we to be small…’?) to run for US President in 2020 (her slogan is 2020 Vision) is another example of the surge in kick-ass women standing up for everyone, male, female or another gender, who is tired of the old paradigm.
The highly publicised election of Kerryn Phelps, a gay woman with a resume and life/work experience and authority that few men in Australia can compete with, was a watershed moment in Australian politics and something to be celebrated. Paternalism in politics and public life appears to be finally on the way out and the old guard are desperately clinging on.
The fact that the levels of disgusting misogyny that was directed at Julia Gillard is no longer even remotely tolerated in Australian media or politics is an indication of the speed at which change is happening.
Naturally some men, and some women also, are starting to feel uncomfortable with and frightened by the changes in the paradigm about how women are to be seen and treated. Witness the popularity within his supporter base of Trump which only increased, among both women and men, by his pussy grabbing comments.
Some people like living with the unspoken rules of engagement with the opposite sex, as it works for them knowing their position and being able to use it to get what they want. How does a man relate to women if not through the prism of sexual desirability?
To these people I say relax, enjoy the ride. It is rocky and going to be rockier as deeply held assumptions of gender roles, along with gender itself, are publicly and privately challenged.
This movement, as it has morphs from #metoo into something greater, appears to be about the rise of women and the underlying assumption that men are somehow going to be the losers in this revolution, but that is a false assumption. The rise of women and feminine values and women’s increased participation in the development of ethics and real human rights is not about the fall, or the lessening of men, and can only benefit men as women assert their right to an equal seat at every table.
One thing for women though is that women do not want to be objectified, then women also cannot make derogatory remarks about men’s bodies and appearance.
Clearly our world is heading towards, and some might say has already arrived there, catastrophe on many levels. Equally clearly the male dominated paradigm that has got us here is not going to get us out of this mess we are in.
For too long the dominant paradigm has been the masculine ‘either or’; we can have jobs or protect the environment; we can work long hours so we can have the nice holidays and house, or be there for the kids; if I am to be effective I need to be an arsehole; if we are going to protect our borders then we need to put refugees in indefinite detention; if we want renewable power we better get used to paying more for a unstable network; if a woman wears a sexy dress it is an invitation to rape, sexual abuse and sexual objectification; we have to deal with the real world etc.
These are false choices which reflect the limitations of binary male thinking. Women see things differently, and have a different logic where they see no point in having a cake if they cannot eat some and pass it on to the kids!
#metoo requires men to open their minds in ways they have never done before, to step into the unknown and face the false choices that they have been ruled by.
As far as our world is concerned the #metoo movement has arrived not a second too early.
Share #metoo, a year on, the end of the boys club with your friends on Facebook
By Mark O’Brien, December 2019
Decompassion in the age of Trump
Are we all turning into pathetic Trump imitators?
It seems like every day over the last two years the media have reported on Trump’s latest cringe-worthy statement about women, about nazis, about the environment or the fake news organisations.
Outrage follows outrage, and most people on the planet are still capable of being shocked by what passes for the new normal.
What has disturbed me, nearly as much as Trump himself, is the Trumpist approach to belittling one’s opponent that appears daily on Facebook and other social media.
We get self-righteous and outraged when Trump talks about grabbing women by the pussy, or that another women is ugly and undeserving of respect, yet we laugh at the belittling of Trump himself and the size of his penis that the world was busy with for some time and the caricatures of his no-longer-20-year-old body and hairstyle. I dare to say that if Hillary had been elected any public statues of her naked no-longer-20 body would have been tolerated.
Has Trump succeeded in dragging the conversation down to his level? Has his presence at the top of the political heap not only given his supporters a platform and permission to bellow their hard-right opinions but also the rest of us licence to indulge in boorish adolescent thinking and all the childish put-downs that pop into our heads?
Has Trump made us all feel it is OK to be puerile and childish and just as unable to have decent and respectful conversations with our perceived political adversary as he is? Where ‘enemy’ has supplanted ‘adversary’?
Trump has not only succeeded in trashing the dignity and authority of the US President and seemingly the political processes worldwide, but has given everyone else a licence to do the same, a licence that everyone from kids to commentators to little old ladies are using with no regard to decent and supposed civilised behaviour.
Clearly Trump is unsuited to the position he holds, and from what I can gather he never really thought he could win and just ran to boost his own brand. He is a product of and currently the supreme leader of the boys’ club that has run America since inception.
Trump may not even be the worst president – remember Reagan? He was as much in the pocket of big oil and big business. As was ‘W” who started bogus wars that have defined Western politics for nearly 20 years. Even Obama flew to Saudi Arabia to kiss butt and sign weapons deals.
Trump’s environmental policies may be catastrophic in the short term but they also seem to be pushing the worldwide trend towards reducing emissions and dealing with rubbish etc. His boorish attitude towards women gave the metoo# movement more traction than it otherwise would have gotten, to the point where in November 2018 a woman of the calibre of spiritual teacher Marianne Williamson (remember Mandela’s inauguration speech – Who are we to be small? …) to run for president.
I also get a bit offended by the treatment of Melania who is even more an accidental First Lady. Who knows what deal she made with the devil for her previous life as Trump’s wife, and now she is expected to be on top of everything. Yes she posed naked for magazines, but so did millions of other women. Yes she married for money, lots of it, but again so did/do millions of others.
After the obvious humanity and presence of the Obamas it is easy to see Trump as everything NOT Obama, and maybe that is why he was elected.
Trump is teaching the world about the lack of compassion, dignity, responsibility, kindness, empathy, intelligence, about the fear of strangers and those needing help, about might is right (which by definition every US President demonstrates) and we are lapping it up. Trump shows the world that it is OK to lie, to make up stories to fit a pre-determined diatribe. As readers of his random tweets do also.
In November 2018 Trump was broadly ridiculed regarding his response to the California fires which was about how not raking up leaves etc. had added to the fires’ intensity. Well guess what, the report into the Ash Wednesday fires that devastated similar communities in Victoria recommended regular controlled burning of forest undergrowth to deprive wildfires of fuel and reduce their intensity.
We do ourselves a disservice by jumping on the ‘let’s ridicule-Trump’ bandwagon whenever it rolls around. It is degrading to him and to us, and it is not creative, it is not supportive of the person we want to be or the society we want to live in.
I do not agree with Trump and dislike him and his ilk for all the havoc and destruction they have wreaked and continue to wreak on the planet and its peoples. Insulting him personally, however, is simply just as mean-spirited as Trump himself. We must do better.
By Mark O’Brien
Editor of Byron Body & Soul, Mark O’Brien is the author of a wide range of articles. see https://byronbodyandsoul.com/author/mark/
Decompassion in the age of Trump is published in the 2019 issue of the Byron Body & Soul Guide
#metoo expanding its reach
#metoo expanding its reach? In mid February 2018 there was yet another US school shooting, this time in Florida and there were 17 deaths. While previous responses to mass shootings were ignored by Trump, this has been turbo charged by the #metoo campaign.
Truly powerful voices have rattled the cage of even Trump who, in a hopeful moment gave what was obviously a sop to the protests and chose to ban a device that turns a a semi-automatic weapon into an automatic weapon! I mean really? Does he really beleive that is gonna be enough for women? That kind of drip feed might be enough for guys, who go, ‘gee, I understand how difficult it is’ to make changes, but for an angry woman, or girl, no friggin way!
Hold onto your seats folks cause I reckon #metoo has unleashed something that has never been seen before in history, and briefly glimpsed in the 60s and womens lib movement! Previously ‘untouchables’, the elite, are now extremely vulnerable to the forces of #metoo.
It is interesting that on a personal level for Trump. I think we all think that he is a male chauvinist pig, one who perhaps has never really been ‘nailed’ by a woman in his life. He is in for one hell of a surprise, with the thousands of individual woman and girls coming out swinging, who do not care about the odds of winning or who loses their heads. Trump’s room to move just got radically stifled. To paraphrase Trump, it may be that he is about to have his balls squeezed in a way he never imagined.
Trump just happened to be president in the time of #metoo, possibly he even kicked it off with his pussy grabbing claim, and it is not gonna give him an easy ride anywhere or anytime soon.
These voices are all women’s or girls. Teenage girls yelling into microphones, mothers screaming into TV cameras. This either was not happening before or was not been aired by the media. What has happened is #metoo, that has empowered women and made the media snap to attention.
If we consider for a moment what happens when the damn bursts for the women in our lives, what happens when it all gets too much, when she reach breaking point from not being heard or supported. Everyone would know that, either from their mum, their partners, their sisters of their daughters, the maelstrom that breaks plates, that sends psychic missiles to anyone within range. The rage that is released and briefly owned is immense and not to be trifled with.
#metoo has released and harnessed this rage, and it is not going away any time soon. #metoo is the phenomena that the male power structures have been dreading for thousands of years. It is the reason for all of the oppression and put downs and sexual abuse and degradation over millenia; to shut women up!
Sorry, but the game is up! Getting a woman to shut up now, well, good luck trying to do that! Women are being empowered, are claiming and wielding their long buried rage-fuelled power, and heads are gonna roll, and keep rolling, as anyone caught up in #metoo can testify to.
Interestingly enough, as women are empowered, so are men who have been doing the on-the-ground dirty work for the power elites, for the religions, as if #metoo has helped them grow some balls too.
Make no mistake, the current free-for-all enjoyed by the weapons industry is going to end soon. With the mid term elections being held in October in the US, a coalition of gun control activists have just spent $230,000 on a double page spread, in the New York Times, listing 100 US politicians who receive donations from the NRA. See ‘Complicit’: US politicians who received money from NRA named in ad
See also on this website, #metoo, Sex abuse as abuse of power
See the #neveragain movement of students for gun control that has just been birthed
Also see Schools threaten to punish students joining walkouts over gun control
Share #metoo expanding its reach with your friends on Facebook.
#metoo, Sexual Abuse as Abuse of Power
Mark O’Brien writes about how as #metoo grows and spreads its tentacles across the globe, it broadens from being about men abusing women to anyone abusing anyone. #metoo is more about the systemic abuse of power than just sexual abuse.
This article was published in the 2018 issue of the Byron Body & Soul Guide in Byron Bay, along with some other articles written by three local women therapists either involved in the area of sexuality and relationship or working with men. See the bottom of the page for links to each of these pieces. Contact info is on each of the articles.
I have followed with great interest the snowballing #metoo movement that as of late November 2017 has hit Australia, with some male celebrities finding out that women on the wrong end of sexually inappropriate or abusive behaviour years ago have long memories.
I actually feel that #metoo has the potential to change the world in a way that feminism never could, bringing a post feminism appetite for confrontation into the work places, living rooms and bars where it was never welcome before.
It is so important that as a society, as culture, that we move past the insidiousness of sexual abuse, whatever the genders of those involved. Where #metoo started being about men abusing women, as other stories were told it has broadened into abuse of anyone by anyone.
I was reading some time ago about rape as an historical weapon of war. It was, and still is in some parts of the world, common for winning armies to systematically rape the surviving female populations, to degrade them and their men, possibly to impregnate them thus leaving a living breathing reminder of that degradation. The powerlessness and humiliation of the vanquished was driven home as their spirit and humanity was crushed.
Modern psychology tells us that rape is rarely about sex and always about power. So, from what I have seen and read, non-rape sexual abuse is also about power: the casting couch, the casual accidental gropes, the put downs, the sexual favours demanded by unscrupulous men and offered by ambitious women in exchange for security and safety, are all somehow the last vestiges of the domination and control of society by groups of men.
Everyone was a bit shocked, apparently, when Donald Trump bragged about grabbing women by the pussy, doing what he wanted with women. I was a bit puzzled by the outrage, as isn’t the reason traditional men like Trump seek positions of influence, isn’t the lure, sexual power? Isn’t this lust for power ultimately about power over others?
In all of the stories we are hearing about sexual abuse (and it seems to me that #metoo is an extension of the change ushered in by the unveiling of sexual abuse in the Catholic church) it comes down to the same misuse of power. In this instance it manifests as sexual abuse. Once we shift the conversation to one of a systemic abuse of power then it in turn opens up the subject of the abuse of sexual power.
Psychology tells us that people who feel inherently powerless will exercise their power over those a few rungs of the ladder beneath them. Shit flows downhill and always has. It is not right, and maybe this is the point of#metoo – stop this downhill flow!
Traditionally men have used power to get sex, while women have used sex to get power.
And of course that is just a part of the abuse thing.
The Harvey Weinstein furore was largely about the casting couch scenario where women were pressured to provide sexual favours as a stepping stone towards career advancement.
There are some things in this to consider: The first being the victimhood of the women who have made the allegations against him.
Did the women who found themselves in Weinstein’s hotel room really not know why they were invited there? Did they know what they were getting into? Is it credible that they didn’t? It is obvious that some women in fact misuse/use (grey area) their own sexual power, and willingly have sex with one of the Harveys of the world to achieve their own ends. Are they leapfrogging their competition? Who was the predator here? Him? Her? Both?
Have we heard from actresses (or actors) who gave Harvey and his ilk what they wanted and in return got that role, that career? What does this say about their using their sexual power to defeat other applicants?
For sure it is not black and white and someone may actually be naive enough to not know and tacitly agree with the quid pro quo entailed in engaging with someone like Weinstein but it beggars belief that none of the complainants knew. Lions live in lions’ dens, so beware.
When the stakes, like kickstarting a highly paid and glamorous life as an actor or actress, are so high, people can convince themselves to do whatever is required to succeed.
Many women are attracted to powerful men. Power is a powerful aphrodisiac, maybe even the strongest. Is it merely an ancient survivalist choice, to be protected from savage beasts and perhaps other men, or is it simply about security? ‘Security for sex’ arrangements are commonplace.
I’ve observed in spiritual circles women are attracted to the guru or the yoga teacher and happily queue up to have sex to gain some supposed spiritual advantage. And of course the allegations, often demonstrable. of sexual impropriety and abuse of power by gurus are legion. Where does personal responsibility end and sexual abuse begin?
Consider Kevin Spacey, who, up until this storm blew up was many people’s favourite actor and is now, due to a history of occasional sexual misconduct and possible abuse as he came to terms with his latent homosexuality, having his name scrubbed from productions wherever possible. Being high on celebrity and wealth no doubt changes our values and our sense of what is reasonable behaviour with lots of boundary pushing. Because we can!
I am not excusing historical abuse, but mores change – would we like to see our parents charged because they physically punished us, an action that is now illegal, considered domestic abuse? Spacey never defended himself so we have no idea of what the real story was other than there being allegations. However, the career one of our most brilliant actors is over, with a faint aroma of witchhunt and tall poppy syndrome hovering around.
It is curious that #metoo erupted initially in Hollywood where the line between predators and victims wobbles a lot. The ‘casting couch’ has survived because it has worked for all concerned. I think it does the movement a disservice if we are just talking about celebrities as the issue is way more real for everyday women working to put bread on the table with few options when confronted with the abuse of power by someone in a more powerful position.
So far the #metoo phenomena has not hit the music industry. No doubt it will.
I am in no way disputing that sexual abuse is real and highly prevalent in Western culture.
Non-consensual sex of any description is unacceptable, taboo, let’s be very clear about that. But we are not talking murderers here, nor politicians who kill innocent people with their vote. We are not talking arms dealers, ice traffickers or slave traders but people who played by the rules as they knew them, quid pro quo. In our newly found self righteousness we can get confused between what is truly evil and behaviours that are no longer tolerated.
Is #metoo simply a manipulated distraction while Trump eviscerates the US economy and society?
If we consider #metoo to be about sex abuse then it risks getting stuck in the blame and shame thing we are currently seeing, where there are victims and perpetrators that must be shamed off our TV screens and newspapers, regardless of how long ago events happened. Are we going to see parents who smacked their kids years ago charged under current child abuse laws forbidding smacking?
If #metoo remains about sex then we may see relations between men and women becoming so PC and dry that all spark and fire and juice and spontaneity, those sexy shades of grey, are lost. And then we are in trouble, at risk of becoming desexualised consumer machines. Men and women do function in different ways and are turned on different ways.
If we can see #metoo as simply being about the abuse of power, then that is something that is much less highly charged emotionally, easier to identify and understand and work with. And we get to keep our playful sexuality.
See also #metoo expanding its reach in response to the massive response to the Florida school killings in mid February 2018
See The Myth of the Seducer, an article critical of the views of French actress Catherine Deneuve and others who in January 2018 defended the right of men to pester women.
See also Women, men and the whole damn thing by David Leser, another male author venturing into dangerous territory and who pulls it off.
See also #MeToo isn’t enough. Now women need to get ugly by one of my favourite authors, Barbara Kingsolver – the title of the article is descriptive enough!
See also Germaine Greer criticises ‘whingeing’ #MeToo movement
See also the following for other takes by three Byron Shire women therapists on this issue.
#metoo, Explorers in the Underworld of Love, Lorella
#metoo, Three Foundational steps to sexual empowerment, Eve
By Mark O’Brien, December 3, 2017
Share #metoo, Sexual Abuse as Abuse of Power with your friends on Facebook.
The Burkha: Women as a battlefield
In this 2008 article written by Waleed Ali, The Burkha: Women as a battlefield, Waleed challenges a lot of assumptions than Westerners are again making in 2016 about the relative freedom of Muslim women who wear burkhinis.
No article of clothing so controversially evokes hostility and revulsion in Western societies as the headscarf, or hijab, worn by many Muslim women. Sampling the vitriol of a thousand talk-back radio callers, this cannot plausibly be denied.
Any hijab-clad Western Muslim can confirm it by painful, personal experience. A report in 2004 published by Australia’s Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission reported several distressing personal accounts from hijab-wearing women of the kind of abuse they had faced in the years since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
Most commonly, these included physical assaults such as being spat at, having objects, such as eggs,
bottles or rocks, thrown at them from moving cars, and having their hijabs pulled off. Other reports include people deliberately setting their dogs on Muslim women, punching them, attempting to drive them off the road or to hit them with a car, and threatening rape and extreme violence. Some of these events resulted in women being hospitalised. Often, these women reported that bystanders watched on, yet did nothing.
With these social dynamics in place, and with a long Western history of obsession with Muslim women’s attire, the veil, whether the face-covering niqab or the more common hijab, was always going to find its way into political discourse.
And indeed, recent years have evidenced such political fixation. The most famous example is the French law, first proposed in 2003 and passed in 2004, which bans students in state schools from wearing overt religious symbols. The ban is generic, but it was unquestionably directed at the Muslim girls who wear the hijab.
Rationalisations of the law were always destined to be unsophisticated. Take, for example, the argument I heard while watching BBC World in January 2004 that, because the French Government believed many Muslim girls were forced to wear veils, a law banning them in schools was a necessary response. Of course, even assuming the dress code of French Muslim girls is imposed upon them, forcing them not to wear veils is precisely the same oppression—it is just the opposite manifestation.
No-one to blame but herself. She displayed her beauty to the entire world… Strapless, backless, sleeveless, nothing but satanic skirts, slit skirts, translucent blouses, miniskirts, tight jeans: all these to tease man and appeal to his carnal nature.
Australia’s Sheikh Feiz Mohammad
In Australia, by August 2005, (then) Australian Federal Government MP Bronwyn Bishop had warmed to the idea, advocating a headscarf ban in Australian public schools. It was an especially provocative suggestion coming from a woman and a politician who, in other circumstances, is known to have a libertarian streak.
Here, she was clearly coming from a place of hostility, as her comments made apparent. ‘In an ideal society you don’t ban anything,’ she said. ‘But this has really been forced on us because what we’re really seeing in our country is a clash of cultures and indeed, the headscarf is being used as a sort of iconic item of defiance by the sort of people who want to overturn our values.’
Subsequently, on radio, Bishop would say that hijab-wearing women were ‘in a position of being a slave’ and ‘can’t deal with the choices that freedom offers’. She was unable to ‘accept someone who wants to be a little bit of a slave, or a little bit subservient’.
They were comments remarkable for their incoherence.
Somehow, we were expected to believe in the image of a Muslim woman who was simultaneously cowed, deprived of choice and enslaved, yet defiant and provocatively iconic. This internal contradiction never seems to have occurred to Bishop. Indeed, when confronted with the thought that many of the women she considered enslaved actually feel entirely free, she responded with even more rabid incoherence: ‘Nazis in Nazi Germany felt free and comfortable, but that’s not the sort of standard that I can accept as being free.’
But this was not about intellectual consistency. It was about hostility, and a broader prejudice, a fact only reinforced subsequently when Bishop clarified that her invective was not applicable to other forms of visible religious distinction, such as Jewish yarmulkes. For Bishop, no such ban was necessary because Jews did not use the ‘skullcap as a way of campaigning against the Australian culture, laws and way of life’. This was explicitly, specifically, about Islam.
The comments triggered a national debate that sought the views of almost everyone except headscarf-wearing Muslim women themselves. The Age in Melbourne ran a spate of opinion pieces on the topic over several days, but not one was from a woman who actually wears the hijab—despite the fact that such publishable pieces were submitted. This is a common feature of these discussions, and has been for centuries. Western politicians and commentators presume to tell us what the hijab symbolises and why women who wear it do so.
Only The Sydney Morning Herald published a single contribution from a hijab-wearing woman, Amal Awad. Her argument was clear simple and sincere. ‘I would ask Bishop how on earth she equates covering one’s hair with a form of suffocated freedom,’ she begins. ‘I am not locked in a golden cage and I am especially thankful that I am not imprisoned by prejudices.’
Awad’s exasperation with the dehumanising debate is clear: ‘Who cares that a headscarf does not preclude one from having interests and goals, and an intelligent mind to pursue them?’
On one level, it seems the political fixation with Muslim female dress remains alive and well. But on another, it has little to do with dress code. The Muslim woman, in her varying degrees of cover, has become merely a symbol: a battleground from a much broader polemic. She is not a person with interests, aspirations, struggles and feelings. She is a concept. And it is a battle many preachers in the Muslim world are all too happy to join. It is one of the saddest facts of contemporary Islamic discourse that Muslim women are so often reduced to the same symbolic function that they are in the Western conversation. Here, too, they are not people.
They are appropriated, usually by men, as symbols of Islamic identity, purity and resistance to Western cultural hegemony. And, just as in the West, the hijab has become the central, obsessive fixation of the discourse.
A potent example is Amr Khalid, the populist Egyptian preacher with a popstar following among Arabic-speaking Muslims across the world. Khalid speaks on a diverse range of topics, and has found favour particularly with the British Government for his ardent opposition to suicide bombing, whether in London or Tel Aviv. Yet, a large proportion of his preaching is focused on women. And such is the rhetorical environment in which he works, that it is possible for him to claim that ‘the most important thing in a woman’s life is the hijab’, without earning so much as a raised eyebrow.
Elsewhere, he elaborates further that for a woman to take it off is ‘the biggest sin, the biggest sin, the biggest sin’.
Some hyperbole is inevitable in Khalid’s televangelist style. But even so, this kind of discourse is deeply nonsensical. On no account is a failure to wear the hijab ‘the biggest sin’. That title could more plausibly be reserved for idolatry, murder or even adultery. And just as the common Western fixation on the hijab demeans Muslim women by reducing their significance to nothing more than a cloth, so too is it deeply degrading for Khalid to assert that the hijab is ‘the most important thing in a woman’s life’. It is as though education, health, love, family and spirituality are mere footnotes to the primary function of women as living mannequins. This is what her life has become.
Such, lamentably, is the prevailing nature of contemporary Muslim apologetics. Because it imagines itself in an enduring struggle for religious and cultural preservation against the forces of an invading Western culture, it regularly adopts a defensive, even patronising stance. And because it almost never comes from the mouths of women, it invariably expresses an inherently male perspective—one that assumes women must dress to accommodate the frailties of men. This finds its most contemptible expression in attempts to draw a connection between revealing clothing and rape:
A victim of rape every minute somewhere in the world. Why? No-one to blame but herself. She displayed her beauty to the entire world… Strapless, backless, sleeveless, nothing but satanic skirts, slit skirts, translucent blouses, miniskirts, tight jeans: all these to tease man and appeal to his carnal nature.
The comments belong to Australia’s Sheikh Feiz Mohammad and unleashed a fierce outcry when they became public in May 2005. He earned a swift scolding from a broad range of Muslim organisations. Outraged Muslims swarmed talk-back radio to register their anger for the public record.
And rightly so.
Mohammad’s rhetoric finds a frightening echo in the work of Muhammad Saalih al-Munajjid, a popular Saudi imam whose website contains a bank of thousands of responses to questions submitted from around the world. Asked why it is necessary for Muslim women to cover themselves, he resorts to misogynist type:
‘When women go out showing most of their bodies—as the questioner mentions—this is one of the greatest causes of crime and corruption of men’s morals, and of the spread of immorality …. What does a woman want when she shows her body and exposes her charms to onlookers? Does she just want them to look and stare, and what is the affect [sic] of that on rapists and the foolish? How are you going to stop them from getting what they want by attacking you and trying to rape you?
Are you going to show some meat to the hungry and then try to stop them from eating it?’
Suddenly, women are captive to the impulses of rapists. It is as if the rapist is the victim of the devious taunts of uncovered women. His behaviour is presented almost as the inevitable, even if foolish, response to sexual stimuli. As inevitable, at least, as a hungry person feeding on meat. We are invited to conclude it is unreasonable to expect men to resist raping uncovered women. In this way, rape is normalised, and it is women who must pay the price for such criminality by modifying their appearance and behaviour.
But it is also an intellectually ridiculous argument. It makes the ignorant and infantile assumption that rape is a sexual crime, when this is almost never the case. Rape is about power and violence. It is most commonly committed by people who know the victim; not strangers aroused by revealing clothing.
Ninety-year-old women living in nursing homes get raped. Are we to believe this is a product of sexual enticement? Can we possibly be stupid enough to believe that a hijab would have made any difference? It certainly hasn’t prevented the rape of countless women in the Muslim world.
It is one of the saddest facts of contemporary Islamic discourse that Muslim women are so often reduced to the same symbolic function that they are in the Western conversation. Here, too, they are not people.
They [the symbol of the hijab and the burkha] are appropriated, usually by men, as symbols of Islamic identity, purity and resistance to Western cultural hegemony.
Yet, this kind of argument is not as rare as it should be. It was almost precisely replicated by Australia’s Sheikh Taj al-Din al-Hilali in an infamous sermon that exploded into international scandal in October 2006. After asserting that, in the case of adultery, ‘the responsibility falls 90 per cent of the time with women’ because they possess ‘the weapon of seduction’ al-Hilali indicated that such seduction could end in rape.
Not surprisingly, such a discourse is notably at odds with the messages that tend to come from Muslim women on the rare occasions their view is sought. In the midst of the storm surrounding al-Hilali’s remarks, several female Muslim voices managed to find their way into the public space in protest.
Saara Sabbagh, a youth and cross-cultural community worker who has studied Islam formally in Syria, remarked that al-Hilali’s comments demonstrated he was ‘truly out of touch with … the reason we wear a head dress’. Sabbagh insisted it ‘has nothing to do with conservatively dressing to prevent men from targeting [women]’.
Sherene Hassan, speaking as a board member of the Islamic Council of Victoria, insisted that ‘men do not enter the equations. I don’t [wear the hijab] to hide from men’. Her hijab was primarily about her ‘devotion to God’. Maha Abdo of the Muslim Women’s Association in Sydney, reiterated the point: ‘The hijab is not a tool to be a deterrent for sexual assault or any assault, or physical assault, for that matter. It is a spiritual connection between myself and God.’
These attitudes reflect the findings of a September 2006 study published by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, which examined the reasons why hijab-wearing Muslim women in Germany choose to dress as they do.
The survey of 135 religious women of Turkish extraction elicited an emphatic response: 97 per cent said they wore the hijab as a religious matter—not as a matter of cultural resistance or to protect themselves from rape.
Ninety per cent said they felt the hijab gives them self-confidence. Most said their decision to take to the hijab was purely a personal one not influenced by their father, husband or brothers. Indeed, the study found that female role models in the family more often provided the inspiration.
Obviously, one should not read too much into this. It is only one study with a small sample of a Western Muslim population with a single ethnic background. It is unlikely to tell us a great deal about the reason women in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia or Uzbekistan wear the hijab. But the point is that while a flood of outsiders are keen to speak unflatteringly on their behalf, few people seem eager to ask Muslim women. We might be surprised at the responses if we did.
In my conversations with hijab-wearing women, I encounter a startling diversity of motivations for their dress. Some echo their German sisters, viewing it purely as a private religious matter with no deliberate social meaning. For others nit is nothing more than a cultural practice. A few consider it an important part of their identity. Most draw on a combination of reasons, which might change over time. None tell me they wear it to avoid rape. None tell me they wear it on the instruction of men.
In fact, it is far more common for their husbands and fathers to put pressure on women, not to wear the hijab, but to remove it.
Such perspectives go missing when outsiders monopolise the conversation, speaking for Muslim women they would apparently prefer to remain voiceless. In purely Qur’anic terms, there is little justification for popular sexualised rationalisations of the hijab. It is true that the verse widely considered to mandate the hijab explains that it is for women’s protection; so they are ‘not harassed’. But it also explains that the prescribed dress code is designed so that Muslim women will be ‘known’.
This indicates that the Islamic modes of dress were introduced as a means of identification. In truth, the sexualisation of the hijab is more male than divine. It is a product of its male appropriation in a struggle for identity. Muslim thinkers who promote such apologia have far more in common with hijab-fixated Western commentators than either cares to realise or admit. Both take a simple piece of cloth, and transform it into an apocalyptic cultural struggle.
Both use it to assert the superiority of their cultures. Each, in the process, shockingly simplifies the culture of the other and even themselves. Both dehumanise the women they have appropriated as symbols by presuming to reveal to the world the single true meaning and significance of the hijab on behalf of those who wear it. Both are deeply entrenched in nonsense. This is bad enough when confined to the level of cultural polemic. It is positively disastrous when it seeps into the realm of public policy.
Burqas found their way into feminist theatre, such as The Vagina Monologues, where Oprah Winfrey lifted the garment off an Afghan woman to reveal her face to the world. The symbolism is discomforting.
The Afghan woman’s rescue would be performed, not by her own will, but by her American saviour.
The Reverend Fred Nile suggested that Muslim women should be prohibited from wearing their loose-fitting religious dress in public. This was necessary, he argued, on security grounds: he was convinced there was a danger Muslim women could hide weapons beneath their concealing garments.
This suggestion, and the assumptions on which it was based, were obviously preposterous. If taken seriously, it would also have implied the prohibition of winter coats or barristers’ robes. But then, weapons could equally be hidden in shoes or bags. The logical extreme of Nile’s absurd proposal was enforced public nudity—at least for Muslims.
And so the regression was complete. The veiled Muslim woman had already moved from a seductress of loose moral virtue, to the embodiment of sexual and social repression. Now she had become a security threat. But just as Muslim women can become the symbolic target of much political venom, so too can they suddenly find themselves at the centre of self-described political benevolence.
Indeed, if we are to believe the rhetoric of Western political leaders, they are so concerned by the plight of Muslim women, in particular, that it shapes their foreign policy. They are prepared to go to war to liberate them if necessary.
In a statement for Women’s Equality Day in August 2002, then US President George W. Bush claimed credit for ‘restoring fundamental human rights to Afghan women’ by toppling the Taliban, who ‘used violence and fear to deny Afghan women access to education, healthcare, mobility and the right to vote’. Some nine months earlier, just after coalition forces had invaded Afghanistan, President Bush relinquished a regular radio spot reserved for an address to the nation, handing it instead to his wife, Laura. It is safe to assume she was acting on her husband’s request when she used this forum to:
… kick off a world-wide effort to focus on the brutality against women and children by the al-Qa’ida terrorist network and the regime it supports in Afghanistan, the Taliban … Afghan women know through hard experience, what the rest of the world is discovering: The brutal oppression of women is a central goal of the terrorists …
Three days later, Cherie Blair, wife of [then] British Prime Minister Tony Blair, reinforced the first lady’s sentiments, telling The Guardian that ‘the women of Afghanistan have a spirit that belies their unfair, downtrodden image. We need to help them free that spirit and give them their voice back’.
Around the same time, but almost certainly not coincidentally, the US Department of State issued a Report on the Taliban’s War Against Women. Written in a highly editorialised style, it briefly describes the horror of life as a woman under the Taliban, relaying stories of women who were beaten or shot for being alone in public. That said, the content of the report is unsurprising: the misogynist brutality of the Taliban is well known and beyond question. But the report is remarkable for its existence. The US Department of State does not often publish such passionate assessments of women’s rights.
As Australian social scientist Shakira Hussein notes in this context, typically, gender justice issues are either confined to the domestic political arena, or as is often the case for conservative politicians, excluded from the political conversation altogether. Indeed, it is fair to say that neither Blair nor, especially, Bush have strong reputations as champions of women’s rights. Yet, suddenly these rights had risen to political prominence.
For the first time in living memory, gender justice had made its way onto the foreign policy agenda. ‘Because of our recent military gains in much of Afghanistan, women are no longer imprisoned in their homes’ said Laura Bush in her radio address. Making the foreign policy link explicit, she continued: ‘The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women.’
Around the same time US secretary of state Colin Powell promised that: ‘The rights of women in Afghanistan will not be negotiable.’
Not only were women’s rights a concern; they could be invoked as part of a legitimate pretext for going to war. Western politics had managed to get in touch with its feminist side. Afghan women were entitled to wonder what they did to deserve such special magnanimity.
After all, people in search of a women’s rights cause are hardly bereft of options. The world is tragically full of them. As new converts to feminism, Western politicians could well have declared a war on child sex slavery in Thailand, dowry burnings in India, or the selective abortion of females that occurs throughout the world, but especially in India and China. Yet, there was no activist foreign policy to eradicate female genital mutilation in sub-Saharan Africa.
Nor have we heard a word against breast-ironing – a horrific practice particularly common among Christian and animist communities in the south of Cameroon, where a fire-heated stone is pressed hard on the chests of young girls to stunt breast growth as a way of making them less sexually attractive and protecting them from sexual harassment. It can cause severe pain and abscesses, infections, breast cancer, and even the complete disappearance of one or both breasts. As many as a quarter of Cameroon’s teenage girls suffer from this practice.
Central in the Afghan war, once more, was Muslim women’s dress. The burqa, an all-covering garment with a mesh patch over the eyes to allow for vision, became the defining image of the downtrodden Afghan woman and, by extension, the war. The US Department of State’s report told stories of women ‘donning the tent-like burqa’. Hussein recalls that, in the United States, the Feminist Majority Foundation cut burqas into blue squares, and sold them for US$5 for people to wear as a ‘symbol of remembrance for Afghan women’. Remembrance!
Burqas found their way into feminist theatre, such as The Vagina Monologues, where Oprah Winfrey lifted the garment off an Afghan woman to reveal her face to the world. The symbolism is discomforting. The Afghan woman’s rescue would be performed, not by her own will, but by her American saviour. Defeating gender injustice is not merely an intellectual exercise. Often the most brutally misogynist practices arise only in regions of high illiteracy and intergenerational poverty.
Accordingly, they are not confined to national or religious borders: honour killing, for example, where a woman is killed by her family members on suspicion of even the mildest form of sexual impropriety for bringing shame upon them, is found among Sikh and Hindu communities in the subcontinent, Christian communities in the Middle East, and even Greek and Italian migrant communities in Britain. These communities span a broad range of religions, but tend to have poverty and ghettoisation in common. Clearly, there is more to misogynist brutality than religious, cultural or ideological identification. It is a sociological phenomenon as well.
Certainly, though, the intellectual battle is indispensable for change. But it is a battle that must be won in the West as much as the East. Only when Muslim women are treated as human beings whose views matter and who are valued in their own right, will we have cause for optimism.
As long as they remain symbols, and as long as those symbols are invoked by opposing sides in obnoxious rhetorical wars of culture, they will continue to be little more than a battlefield. Relentlessly discussed, never consulted, invariably exploited.
Previously published in Kindred magazine, September 2008, and extracted from People Like Us: How arrogance is dividing Islam and the West by Waleed Aly, published by Picador, Pan Macmillan Australia, 2007.
Waleed Aly is an author and a lecturer in politics at Monash University, and works within that university’s Global Terrorism Research Centre. Previously, he worked as a commercial lawyer, and he also has experience in human rights and family law.
Since this article was published in 2008, Walid Ali has become one of Australia’s most respected commentators, and has won numerous journalism awards, including the 2016 Gold Logie award for the most popular television personality.
Share Women as a Battlefield with your friends on Facebook.
Screen addiction as electronic cocaine and digital heroin
An article by Dr. Nicholas Kardaras, It’s ‘digital heroin’: How screens turn kids into psychotic junkies published in the New York Post in August 2016 discusses screen addiction as electronic cocaine and digital heroin and talks about kids’ brains behaving like brains on drugs.
Dr. Peter Whybrow, director of neuroscience at UCLA, is quoted as calling screens “electronic cocaine” while Chinese researchers call screens “digital heroin”.
Brain imaging demonstrates that digital addiction controls the brain’s frontal cortex, the are responsible for executive functioning like impulse control, moral balance, exactly the same as cocaine does.
Feeding one’s digital addiction also raises dopamine which is the feel-good neurotransmitter that provides the reward feeling as in sex.
Which raises questions about what kind of people are going to evolve out of this technology. Perhaps not since the discovery of the internal combustion engine, or electricity, has new technology changed how an entire population acts.
If video gaming can give the same neural high as sex, why bother having girlfriends and boyfriends, why bother connecting at all?
“According to a 2013 Policy Statement by the American Academy of Pediatrics, 8- to 10 year-olds spend 8 hours a day with various digital media while teenagers spend 11 hours in front of screens.
One in three kids are using tablets or smartphones before they can talk.”
Remember this report is 3 years old, and quite likely this situation has deteriorated since.
So yes, there is a significant problem here, with digital detox just as severe as drug detoxing; maybe even more so given a child’s whole society is geared around digitalism.
Dr Kaderas states that in his clinical work he has found it “easier to treat heroin and crystal meth addicts than lost-in-the-matrix video gamers or Facebook-dependent social media addicts.“
He also states that hundreds of studies of studies show screens increase derision, aggression and anxiety levels, sometimes leading to psychotic behaviour in video gamers.
Famously the most high-tech people (Steve Jobs, Google bosses etc) keep their kids in low tech environments, enrolling them in low- or no-tech schools like Montessori, Waldorf and Steiner schools. Seems they have a greater respect for technology than the rest of us.
Personally I can say I have a digital addiction going on, sitting as I do in front of a screen all day and crave it when out. I can see how my mind becomes full of virtual rubbish, as though I am in a dream, and it takes meditation and also exercise to flush this toxic buildup out of my brain.
Screens are very seductive, no wonder people fall in love with them!
By Mark O’Brien, September 2016
Share Screen addiction as electronic cocaine and digital heroin with your friends on Facebook.
UFC as a sign of our times
I was driving around recently and was really disturbed to see every bar crowded with under 35s (Y Gen?) watching a UFC match. I instantly saw UFC as a sign of our times and a manifestation of all that is wrong in our increasingly disconnected and violent world.
For those who do not know about UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) you have two people in a circular ring set in a cage with a referee, who are allowed to use any means to defeat their opposition, and it is last man standing, or if one surrenders.
Kicking, punching above and below the belt (genitals and gouging eyes etc are off limits, but everything else seems to be OK), bashing someone when they are on the floor and haven’t surrendered cause there is too much money at stake, fighting like Roman gladiators for a purse, modern day ‘freedom’.
Where the Roman gladiators were slaves with no choice, the ones today clearly choose this as a profession. A sign of urban desperation perhaps?
How is it possible to love when your profession is about hurting others? Soldiers at least may have a ‘love’ of their country, however that ‘love’ looks like. One has to shut down one’s humanity, any feeling of connection with something greater, with love, to do this kind of thing
The emphasis here is to ‘kill’ the opponent, to finish them. It has spawned the mixed martial arts studios who ignore the foundation of martial arts, being a spiritual as well as a meditative and physical practice, and train their students in one-punch fighting – ie, where you learn how to hurt another, with the emphasis on one punch that will ‘win’ you any given fight.
In Australia over the last few years there seems to be a news report every week of another person outside a nightclub or bar who has been killed by a one-punch fighter.
It tends to look like this: somebody has a dispute inside a bar, walks outside to hail a taxi, and someone comes up to them and whack! Down, hitting head on the curb, and dead.
Perpetrators are usually caught via CCTV footage and go to gaol for lengthy stretches that destroy their and their family’s lives, along with the lives of the dead man’s family and friends being irrevocably altered.
I have watched a couple of UFC Mixed Martial Arts bouts, and have been appalled by the brutality on show. The cheering for the likely victor when he smashes his fist into the face of a guy lying on the ground is a bloodlust I have never seen before.
I have watched the occasional boxing match in my life, though I eschewed this also as it became less about art, a la Mohammed Ali, and more about the power to knock someone’s head off. And of course the characters becoming more and more unsavoury didn’t help my interest much either.
(AP Photo/Frank Franklin II)
MMA fighters suffer traumatic brain injury in almost a third of professional bouts: study
I enjoy to watch AFL (Australian football), a strong contact sport where people can get hurt, although the ever-tightening rules are reducing the incidences of serious injury, with the vast majority of injuries coming from non-contact events, like ACL damage to knees.
So I am no prude, and enjoy watching young men battling with each other over a ball. But, for me there are limits to what I can relate to.
Extremism made extremely normal!
Maybe UFC is just another of the extreme sports obsession appearing all over the world, a sign of people pushing all boundaries. While boundary pushing is human, often these boundaries also have moral components which are not part of the training package.
Its accepted that the advertising industry thrives by making people believe that what they have is not enough, that they need another one of ‘those things’, a bigger TV, a faster car and that buying this will make them happy.
This dissatisfaction with ‘what is’ has also extended to people’s bodies too. Bigger tits, tighter ass, longer dicks, cooler tattoos and piercings, plastic surgery, are all available to make one more individual, more unique, and more attractive to potential mates.
Ultimately it is our dissatisfaction, (or at least that is what we are told, that sex is dissatisfying) with sex is behind most marketing programs.
Is our addiction to screens fuelling our blood lust?
See Screen addiction as electronic cocaine and digital heroin on this site for information about research that shows how screen time changes out brain, and maybe reduce our ability to feel empathy.
When kids spend an average, say 8 hours a day, looking at a screen, be it TV, a phone, ipad or computer, their brains behave exactly as if they were on cocaine.
This impacts the brain’s frontal cortex, impacting the ability to control impulses, functioning like releasing a brake on manifesting our craziest ideas.
Given the age demographic of UFC watchers, most of the these people grew up with masses of screen time and the advent of serious computer games and the ubiquitous nature of technology in their lives.
Is WFC therefore simply a byproduct of technology that has run so much faster than out ability to understand it?
The dead, killing eyes
The looks in the eyes of the UFC combatants can be terrifying, as though you are looking into the depths of hell. Dead, killing eyes. The total disregard for the wellbeing of another, regardless of the pre- and post-fight camaraderie, is scary to me, a bit like the Lord of the Rings and metaphors of the darkness waiting to be unleashed.
The fact that women also do this is anathema to me. Yes, women have fought for their right to die on a battlefield, to use guns, to fly fighter jets etc, (all of which I find a bit weird personally anyway but accept) but to me there is something very weird about putting women in a cage and let them go at it until only one is standing.
Great role modelling!
I understand and support women being able to physically defend themselves and who wish to compete as well, but UFC fighting in a cage is not part of any definition of the feminine I can relate to.
Nor is it something I would want my daughter or niece to aspire to.
The UFC has plans in 2016 for running big events in Perth, although the government is refusing permission on the grounds of being against fighting inside a cage. Possibly a few political or community donations may soften this opposition and the event will go ahead.
Sex sells… what exactly?
We are told constantly about peak sexual experiences, especially the ones we are missing out on, and of course as we reach one peak we are told of the next one, much like being in the Himalayas where you only see the next peak.
We know about various peak-type sexual experiences, and the g-spot orgasm, the rolling cervical orgasms, anal sex and orgasms, bondage, the use of drugs etc are all sexual achievements we roll out amongst our friends.
Ultimately the quest for higher and higher is the same, neurochemically, as any other addiction we might have. Whether it is sex, gambling, drugs, shopping, food, it all hits the same brain centres and releases the same neurochemical reward. See articles on the Reuniting website by Marnia Robinson for more on this.
But what of connection? Nobody seems to ever talk about how great the connection with their lover is! Nobody ever talks about the simpler and far deeper pleasures, and life altering qualities, of connection. Why: because there is nothing to sell!
It is our dissatisfaction with ourselves sexually that drives most of our economic activity, and, in my opinion, our addiction to ever increasing thrills and moving closer to our edge than ever before in history.
This quest is largely to get the ever-increasing dose we want to become used to, of our neurochemical reward, hormones that connection and connected sex brings. See The Real Cause of Addiction
When we are (or even believe we are) sexually unsatisfied we are very easy to manipulate and controllable via excitement. UFC provides the kind of extreme excitement that hits and ultimately exhausts the brain’s reward centres, and we need an ever-increasing excitement level to get the same neurochemical hit and the resultant high.
It seems to me that UFC is the height of decadence, the manifestation of an insatiable bourgeois lust for blood.
I wonder how far off it is that crowds at a UFC match will be asked to give a thumbs up or thumbs down like the Romans were, about whether a combatant should live or die.
By Mark O’Brien, August 2016
This article resonate with you, or want to share with friends? Share UFC as a sign of our times with your friends on Facebook.
Pictures by Allan Allport, taken from MMAWeekly
For further reading see the following
It’s easy to be seduced by UFC but violence will grow from legitimising the cage by
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/boxing-mma-study-examines-threshold-before-fighters-suffer-brain-damage/
Screen addiction as electronic cocaine and digital heroin
The Likely Cause of Addiction Has Been Discovered, and It Is Not What You Think
Reuniting, with Marnia Robison and Gary Wilson