Because No Argument That Victims Are Also Beneficiaries Is Sustainable

Ahmed Hassan of Pakistan's English-language DAWN briefly summarizes why "post-feminism" is a bit premature.

Burying of women alive defended in [Pakistan's --fl] Senate

ISLAMABAD, Aug 29: Balochistan Senator Sardar Israrullah Zehri stunned the upper house on Friday when he defended the recent incident of burying alive three teenage girls and two women in his province, saying it was part of “our tribal custom.”

Senator Bibi Yasmin Shah of the PML-Q raised the issue citing a newspaper report that the girls, three of them aged between 16 and 18 years, had been buried alive a month ago for wishing to marry of their own will.

...

Ms Shah said that the hapless girls and the women were first shot in the name of honour and then buried while they were alive. She also said that no criminal had been arrested so far.

Read about it here.

First of all, which ever part of the story you pick, what a monstrous fucking crime!!!

The good news is that most members of the upper house were stunned. The bad news (as Twisty Faster puts it) "calling into question the tribal customariness of this practice is all well and good, but in so doing the senate seems to be intimating that a pre-existing woman-burying custom might, under some circumstance, be regarded as a mitigating factor." She also makes a plea, in the strongest and most humane terms, that people *talk* about *this* as eagerly as we talk about first-lady fashions or Senator McCain's motivation for selecting Governor Palin. (And she said that here.)

Much has been made of the problems feminism faces in non-western, non-white, non-middle-class cultures. Well fine. It's true. Much has also been made of arguments for greater respect for "cultural relativity" and "tribal customs." Also fine. Also true.

So what to do about that little cognitive connundrum? Besides throwing up your hands and twitting about bikini waxes and wide stances?

As luck would have it Kimberle Crenshaw, in a 1991 essay called Beyond Racism and Misogyny that I found collected in Strode and Wood's The Hip Hop Reader from Pearson Longman press, outlined a pretty good approach in the aftermath of a racially questionable obscenity prosecution of the rap band band 2 Life Crew for the album As Nasty As They Wanna Be.

While rejecting the prosecution's (and 'winger columnist George Will's) uncharacteristic concern for the way the album objectified black women (she makes a good case that "Black women were appropriated and deployed in the broader attack against 2 Live Crew.") Crenshaw was also unimpressed by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s assertions that the intensely misogynistic lyrics merely made fun of Black sexual stereotypes.

The problem being that

[such defenses] call on Black women to accept misogyny and its attendant disrespect in service of some broader group objective. While one version argues that accepting misogyny is necessary to anti-racist politics, the other argues that it is necessary to maintaining the cultural integrity of the community.

In other words, Crenshaw points out, one can not consistently insist that...

...Black women are expected to be vehicles for notions of "liberation" that function to preserve their own subordination.

Same deal with Pakistan's Baloch culture, or any other culture (white, western, 21st-century, affluent ones no less than any other) that claims it should be privileged in order to preserve its tradition of *de-privileging* of some of its members. And not because "we" somehow "know better." Because, instead, their very claim to moral legitimacy collapses under its own contradictions.

So. Do me a favor. With a clear conscience and a love of humanity, spread the word of what happened to the five young Baloch women, and pass along a reminder that Senator Sardar Israrullah Zehri's toleration of judicial horror as punishment for the exercise basic human rights jeopardizes his culture rather than defending it. Fucking monsters.