‘If the shoe doesn't
fit, must we change the foot?’
--Gloria
Steinem
Gloria Steinem,
feminist writer and editor, is a most uncommon woman. An untiring activist for
women’s rights, a ceaseless campaigner for social justice, this poster girl of
the feminist movement and the ‘It’ girl of the 1960s has mellowed into a
seasoned yet influential writer and thinker. However, over a career spanning five
decades she has remained steadfastly non-traditional, always thinking outside
the box, consistently refusing to conform. Co-founder of New York Magazine and Ms,
she has been a prodigiously prolific writer and speaker, drawing attention to
issues of race, sex, ethnicity, conflict and abuse in its many forms; but her
prism for viewing the world has remained a feminist one. On a recent visit to
New Delhi, to deliver a lecture on ‘Feminist Approaches to Combatting Sex
Trafficking and Prostitution’ organised by a women’s self-help group called
Apne Aap, she spoke to Rakhshanda Jalil
about the compulsions and contradictions of the feminist movement today.
Feminism
today is a house divided. Feminists are clashing and disagreeing on most issues
that face those who are campaigning for equal rights. These disagreements
occasionally seem like a generational gap, but sometimes they appear as a clash
between academics and activists, or between liberals and radicals. What do you
make of these differences?
That hasn't been my experience. On the contrary, there is probably more
agreement within the global women's movements than in other global movements.
For instance, women may want to give birth or limit birth, but they join forces
for reproductive freedom as a human right that's at least as important as
freedom of speech. After all, whether women can decide when and if to give
birth is the single greatest element in whether we're healthy or not, educated
or not, active outside the home or now, and how long we live. There's also a
majority shared belief that decisions about our bodies should be made by us and
not our governments.
Ending violence against females is also a common cause, whether this
means ending honor killings and dowry murders and female genital mutilation and
son preference or sexual assault and domestic violence and body imagery that
creates eating disorders.
Access to education is a widely-held goal, whether this means literacy
or professional schools. So is equality in the media. Also, women in elected
and other public decision-making positions is a big common cause, from Congress
in Washington, which is way down the world list for female representation, to
Liberation Square in Cairo.
As a path to these goals and more, women gather together in small groups
to discover shared experience and support each other -- that's as tried and
true in the India of SEWA and Apne Aap as it is in the villages along the
Zambezi River or teenage activists and healthcare professionals and women
executives in New York. We've learned that humans are communal creatures who
need to form alternate "families" for support, that someone who's
experienced something is probably more expert than the experts, that the
personal is political, and that change grows from the ground up like a tree.
Women often tell me they're surprised at the similarity of struggles in dealing
with male-dominant systems -- even very far away.
Maybe language
differences need bridging. For instance, academics may say "agency"
and "discourse" when they just mean free will and talking. I'm always
threatening to put a sign on the road to Yale or Harvard that says,
"Beware! De-construction ahead!" But just as we ask physicians to
describe our health options in words we can understand, activists can ask
academics to make their work actionable; otherwise it won't get off the page
and into real life -- which is also what academics want. And academics are
giving us the huge gift of our history, learning from the past, less
reinventing the wheel.
One
major point of conflict among feminists appears to be on the issue of sex
trafficking and prostitution. While one group is clamouring for legalisation of
sexual labour and unionisation of sex workers, another set believes
legalisation. What is your view?
We've
mostly passed the polarization into "criminalization" versus
"legalization." I don't know any feminist groups that want to arrest
the women or men -- and certainly not the children -- who perform sex acts for
money -- which of course is the surrealistic and unjust punishment that still
happens in most of the world. I also don't know any feminist groups that think
traffickers who buy, kidnap and deceive human beings into sex slavery shouldn't
be arrested.
To state a complex
issue in an everyday way: An adult may have the right to sell her or his body,
but nobody has the right to sell somebody else's body.
In the U.S., we've also
learned a lot from the ten Nevada counties where prostitution is legal -- as it
is in, say, Germany. The women's movement had to march to keep the state
government from denying welfare, unemployment and other benefits to women who
wouldn't take this job -- because it was presented as "work like any
other." In Germany, too, legalization turned the government into a procurer
-- until there were massive objections. Traffickers also use legalized areas to
"break in" new captives with drugs, beatings, the Stockholm Syndrome.
In the U.S., the average age of entry into prostitution is thirteen; just a
little older than in India. Our girls are less likely to have been
"sold" because of poverty, but between 70% and 90% of prostituted
females have been sexually abused as children, and so often have come to
believe they have no other value.
In Amsterdam where
legalization was pioneered, the Mayor reports that there's no way to keep out
organized crime. Demand for prostitution creates trafficking, and many now
regret it. Legalization is what the traffickers want. They put a lot of
corrupting cash into lobbying for it, and also hide behind such titles as
"peer AIDS educators" or "facilitated migration." Inside
the women's movement, I've noticed that household workers are the most worried
by efforts to legalize prostitution -- because they feel the most vulnerable if
it's "a job like any other". Body invasion plus the exchange of
bodily fluids makes it a job unlike any other. In South Africa, I met
village women who compared prostitution to selling organs in order to survive,
but then changed their minds after many body invasions a day.
But at least now, we
know what works: de-criminalizing the women, men and children, offering them
services and real alternatives; prosecuting the traffickers, pimps and brothel
owners to the full extent of the law; and educating customers on the realities
of the global sex trafficking for which they are the demand. That's what has
worked in Sweden and other Nordic countries. They are the only ones in which
trafficking has decreased. This approach is also beginning to work in places
like Atlanta and Chicago.
Obviously, the long
term answer is creating economic alternatives. Where ever there is the most
equality between women and men, there is the least prostitution and
trafficking. Where ever there are strong race, class and caste hierarchies,
prostitution is also greater because so-called "superior" groups of
women are sexually restricted, and so-called "inferior" groups of
women are sexually exploited.
The really long
term answer is Eroticizing Equality -- at least that's now a
slogan on T-shirts! Also, young men are more likely to understand that
cooperation is pleasurable, domination is not.
It
has been a long battle. Looking back, tell us, briefly, what have been the
highs and lows?
The
highs have been the successful contagions of mutual values and brave actions
among diverse women -- and some men, too. The lows have been seeing that
majority support for issues doesn't mean they triumph. We don't yet have
democracies. Money often trumps majorities, and religions are often patriarchal
politics that can't be criticized.
In
your memorable ‘Address to the Women of America’ (1971), you had said: ‘Sex and
race because they are easy and visible differences have been the primary ways
of organizing human beings into superior and inferior groups…’ Would you not
add religion to sex and race as a way of putting people into easy and visible
groups? I am asking this question specifically in the context of Islam and the
way the West, in particular views Muslims?
Yes,
that's often true of religion, but I would still say sex and race -- and often
caste and class -- are still different because they are much less likely to be
changeable than are our religious beliefs or even our religious identities.
There may be huge differences within one religion. Think of the difference of,
say, Sufis from much of Islam, or the difference between such Christians as
Quakers -- who reject violence and hierarchy -- and fundamentalist Christians
who "beat the devil" out of children and even murder abortion
doctors.
In
the Indian sub-continent, we have had a long history of discrimination against
women and the girl child. Activists in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh have, in
different ways and different degrees, been waging a war against gender-based
discrimination. Legislation, no matter how gender-sensitive, can only go so
far. What are the other issues in our part of the world –apart from unequal sex
– that appear urgent to you? And how best can we tackle them outside the realm
of legislation?
I
wouldn't attempt to judge which issue is the most important for anyone else;
each of us knows what hurts the most. I would just say that inequality in the
family normalizes inequality everywhere else, including by caste or class or race
or ethnicity. Cults of gender are relatively new in human history -- from 500
to 5000 years old depending on what part of the world you're in -- but that's
still less than 5% of human history. They arose gradually with patriarchy and
its control of reproduction and the bodies of women.
Sometimes, a reporter
will ask me: Aren't you interested in anything other than the women's
movement? I always say: Tell me something? In forty years, no one
has ever been able to come up with anything that wasn't transformed by an
understanding that human beings are linked, not ranked, and are also linked,
not ranked, with nature.
Now that new Doomsday
Weapons have coincided with hierarchical beliefs, I think we all wonder if it's
too late for us on this Space Ship Earth. But if even one generation of
children were born wanted, loved, and raised without hierarchy and violence, I
think we have no idea what might be possible.
(My interview with Gloria Steinem appeared in The Herald, Karachi, June 2012)
