This Is For The Men Who'll Roll Their Eyes

dear sidra...congratulations. wonderful thoughtprovoking creative piece. it reminded me of my late writer friend saeed anjum from norway who said to pakistani muslim men...if you want your son to be a prince you have to treat his mother like a queen. a child of a slave never becomes a prince.
i wish this piece was also in urdu so that more men could read and understand. can any of your friends translate it .
if not then give me your blessing and i will try to translate it in urdu and show you for your permission and then put it on my website
www.drsohail.com
...sincerely sohail

You and me both, Sidra, but I must say some of these things have changed in some parts of India.
I don't know about PMS, though. Not everyone has it, but those that do really do suffer. I don't see it as entirely normal, and I wish it could be fixed. You clearly don't suffer...lucky you.

sigh! .. i guess you will be waiting for a long long time .........

I told my mum, this is exactly the kind of girl I want to marry

Sidra...believe me, there are a lot fo men who are waiting too.
More power to your kind...

The powerful never give away thier power over the oppressed, it has to be snatched away...you cannot plead to the good morals, common sense or reason.

But this fight has to start at home, with mothers who insitute these rules that maybe the fathers and brothers put down.

Re: # 3

neembu ji,

I agree. Internet helps bring out the real agenda of these hate filled perverts who are sure of their hatred like they are of their essentialistic 'superiority' - whether derived from God, scriptures or even darwinism.

Actually the problem is that the male child is being SPOILED when they are young.
So, instead of telling my daughter that her brother is 'superior' I tell her that the brother is 'dumb' compared to her. This simple act of reverse -discrimination only makes the things even for her viz a viz the brother- and the advantage that the society at large provides to her brother is negated.

And, ofcourse the patrairchal God is most angry about it. Because he does not want to send my daughter to heavens in equal terms with her brother.

NB posted this UP:

From the Sydney Morning Herald
Misogyny bares its teeth on internet
Date: August 21 2007


Anna Greer

A woman's place isn't in the kitchen these days but some malcontents are trying to make sure that it's not on the web either. The internet is proving to be a hostile place for women.

Death threats, rape threats, verbal abuse, condescending and unwelcome comments about looks and intelligence are all par for the course for many female web users.

Last year a University of Maryland study found that web users with female pseudonyms are 25 times more likely to be harassed online than users with male or ambiguous pseudonyms. And, according to haltabuse.org, women make up 70 per cent of the victims of cyber harassment and stalking.

The internet is looking more and more like the Wild West than the decentralised utopia for which people might have hoped.

An internet war is being fought against the online feminist community by a hive of crackers and tech geeks who call themselves "Anonymous".

Feminist forums have been hacked, passwords have been stolen, emails have been commandeered and used for whatever nefarious purpose the cyber miscreants wish. Websites such as Women's Space and Gentle Spirit have been forced to shut down. One outspoken woman who blogged anonymously even had her photo put up on the net and a hunt was undertaken by members of "Anonymous" for her place of residence.

What many who engage in online "flamewars" - raids and attacks such as these - fail to see is that they're messing with real people's lives. The internet allows an incredible disconnect between reality and virtuality.

Everything seems to operate on the level of the abstract - it's a game. The language used is militaristic, targets are dubbed "challengers" and the attacks are strategically planned. It's literally revenge of the nihilist nerds.

This isn't the first co-ordinated attack the group has launched and there doesn't seem to be an ideological pattern to their actions. But it is no coincidence that it was so easy to mobilise Anonymous against women bloggers.

And it's not surprising that those who joined the raids used methods such as vicious hate speech, threats of rape and murder and seeding comment threads with child porn in an attempt to silence women on the web.

Misogyny is quick to surface when there are no rules of social decorum to temper it. People have free rein to be bigoted and badly behaved without fear of real-world social ostracising.

I guess it's not so different to the real world where humanism occasionally gets pushed aside in favour of mob justice and vigilantism.

To show how vile these messages can get, this is an example of a comment left on the blog Women's Space: "I'd like to tie you down, take a knife, and slit your throat. I'd penetrate you over and over in all orifices, and create some of my own to stick myself in." Shocking? Yes. Rare? Not on the internet.

The culprits can't be traced because they often mask their IP addresses with an anonymiser, which hides their location and their computer information. Internet laws are notoriously fraught and even if you are able to find out who is responsible it's difficult to prosecute.

Often there is little recourse - even thoughthe attacks are clearly illegal - other than to weather the storm.

The forums at my site were once attacked and flooded with offensive images and threads.

I don't know where the culprits came from but it took me hours to restore the forums and get rid of the offensive material. I no longer have forums on the site. Thankfully it was mostly just an annoyance more than a serious threat.

Whether the attacks are for kicks, to get a rise out of feminists or for a more sinister purpose doesn't matter. The outcome is the same: women's voices are silenced and their mobility, visibility and participation on the net is reduced.

The online feminist community will recover, however, and these attacks have given food for thought to women with a presence on the net. A strong supportive community is needed to deal with this issue that just won't go away.

If women and their websites come under attack for their views there needs to be as much support given by other web users to ensure they don't feel so intimidated they stop participating. That the internet also serves to build community means that this will be easy enough to do.

Anna Greer is the editor of the online feminist magazine Wo-Magazine.com.

Well said!

Sidra where do you live?