I wish I had never read this,

[flaine]

Looking at the Wikileaks today I ended up on wikipedia "Womens rights in Saudia Arabia".

I am beyond sickened by what I have just read.
Never mind the gender segregation, mutilation and discrimination against girs/women, just check out the section on 'breast feeding sons'

Perversion beyond belief.!!!!

How can these people behave like this.

what did you expect tho hardly a suprise is it?????

Booty, i know what you mean, but think of these women as abused themselves, they know know better, their mothers are treated like this, they have lived like this for generations of their family. Women have no say. The son in teenage years would over rule the mother, all male relatives would back the men against any woman, and if she kicks up too much of a fuss, she will be taken aside and reminded of her religion and her need to adhere to it. Or else.

Literally, in the case of egypt there is no fight left, barely in the male, and not in the female. They have accepted the way it is, it's an utterly hopeless existence.

They study, but little point, the education system is so dreadful now, many of the students just pay their way through the course, get the certificate, but have no knowledge of the subject. Even if they don't cheat, there are barely any jobs for either sex. Women are mostly married off to stop them being a burden to their family. Their H can tell them to stay at home or they will be divorced and lose all their value as a female, because they have been married and therefore no longer virgin, so they have to take literally whatever bloke wants to take them on.

There ARE a few strong women, Centre for Women's Rights and a couple of women that have stood up over the years, but their stories are shocking..

Nawal El Sadawi

her daughter Mona Helmey continues her work, but I think from afar.

Fabulous work over decades but sadly a microscopic drop in the ocean.

Unfortunatley, Egyptians think that the only way to do things is the way that they do it. But they do it wrong 99% of the time and it ends up as a mess.

This combination of arrogance and ignorance with a liberal amount of stubbornness means that there really is not much chance of anything changing anytime soon.

The religious men will put up the fight of all fights to defend their right to 4 wives, to absolute power and never being denied a thing.

It'll get a whole lot worse for women before it gets any better.

Why then, if this is not a religious teaching but a social conditioning, is it so prevalent in the middle east and not in the west?

because religion has more of a hold, it is the very fabric of life there.

All religions were created in that region. Where the trading routes crossed, people peddled theories.

It sounds awful to say, but religion in these regions is the back bone to morality.

I mentioned the appearance of propriety earlier and it being utter bollocks, well it is. Without religion, it's be sodom and gemorrah.

'H' had 22 women hurling themselves at him all within a month, and funny enough, during Ramadan. This was while I was in the UK last year. They knew I was away, grapevine, and knew his needs (and his wallet) would be up for grabs.

Men see women as an object to pick up and put down as and when they see fit. Children, vulnerable runaways are often horrifically sexually harrassed and abused, and there is nothing that they can call on to help them. The police would be just as likely to abuse them further.

Without someone in a big beard telling them that they must never have sex out of wedlock, that women must cover etc etc, it is likely that there could be a free for all.

That is to say if the situation was changed over night.

We as western women have had our right to vote, be educated, work all fought for and eventually granted to us, then we had world wars to get us into the work place and the 60s to bring us into an arena where we can openly have, talk about and admit to enjoying sex. Prior to this it would have been harder for women to have broached such subjects. The advent of the pill, equality legislation.

None of this has happened in the ME and such regions.

Going to Egypt is literally like stepping back in time, back to the 50s, the big beards and the Govt are more than happy to keep it that way, as nothing gets questioned and challenged. They are living in a Dark Age of sorts.

Sad to say, but to have female freedom, to have equal human rights, the basic population has to have evolved more than it has done in this region.

They are not ready to be freed yet, they have a long way to go until they are. It is also in the best interests of far too many men that they never see equality. the west is consistenly demonised, by imams, by the media, and by the sheltered population.

With Freedom comes Responsibility. They are just not ready for either.

Glad I'm with Christopher Hitchens, God is not Great. Religion had an awful lot to answer for.

on a tad lighter note: my mother is indian and in her grandmothers time, women would use this method as a way of deciding how to link families. if she really didnt like some bith she would go round give their baby a bit of boob, that way the children were breastfed by the same women (if only for 30 seconds) and couldnt get married, when it came to the discussions as to who to pair up, a women could interject and claim to have suckled a lad or lass, so no marriage.

Thank-you for your interesting responses to our questions LittleMiss

But now I feel less angry but more depressed about the situation of women's rights and equality in ME

Yep, Booty, sad to say, so do I.

Very interesting LittleMiss. I misguidedly went for part of a holiday to Cairo in my mid twenties with a female friend. My god we ended up cowering in our hotel room as we couldnt take the misogynistic abuse we got from walking the streets (in "good" areas and pretty covered up).

I worked on a project in Saudi and had access to some of their government produced pamphlets. Honestly they were crazed really lunatic. They described London as "city of 20,000 harlots". Any woman that was single was painted as a strange, sex crazed freak. Frightening.

There was a mass sexual assault, well it became a bit of a habit, for 2 possibly 3 years

here

BBC wrote about about harassment in Egypt too

I had an AWFUL lot of time to observe life there, from the outside. Stuck indoors literally weeks at a time with no contact (nor desire for such) with the immediate outside world I would ponder all sorts of subjects to try to understand what really was going on around me.

I tried to figure out what I needed to do, to think to believe to accept my life there. To. Fit. In.

3 years. I gave up, I know that I could never ever brush aside the position I was supposed to fill, the behaviour I was supposed to put up with, and turning a blind eye to everything else that goes on, because 'That's the way we do things here'

The sexual harassment is yet another method of getting women out of the society at large and back home where they belong, on a long chain between the stove and the bedroom.

In the end, like in Afghanistan under the Taliban, women would not be allowed out unless supervised by a male relative or husband. If sexual harassment is not stopped, that's how it could all end up.

We in the west, can't help them. Our word means nothing. They have been brainwashed for so long about us that no amount of us saying this is not right will get them to re-think, as we are all whores that drink and screw and god knows what....

The objectification of women in western society, padded bras for children, micro skirts, binge drinking etc etc, etc. All of this merely adds fuel to their fire. Our rightful spluttering outrage at the treatment of our ME sisters will be taken entirely the wrong way and will only serve to be counter productive.

This has to come from within. As indeed the fundamentalism/jihadi issue, it can only be cleared up by MUSLIMS. If I get angry any more it's mostly at moderate western dwelling muslims that IMO are NOT doing enough to stand up for equality, for inclusion and countering the ridiculous crap spewed forth by Saudi etc.

LMHHHF - sorry, I honestly didn't pick up from that reference that your post was all about Egypt .

According to wikipedia, the Christian church in Egypt is the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria about which I know nothing. No western christian religions (except for maybe some small number of loonies) espouse any of the practices you mention in Egypt. I don't think this is simply because religion has more hold. In Ireland for example, religion has had a strong hold until recently and while there were lots of problems, it was nothing like as extreme as you have described. Same in Italy, Spain, Poland etc. which are Roman Catholic and north of Scotland which is presbyterian. This type of attitude towards women is either a cultural middle eastern issue or islamic issue. There always seems to be lots of debate about this, even among muslims.

As I said, it's societal, it's not religious per se.

islam doesn't condone the practices, christianity doesn't condone these practices/customs. FGM was outlawed in 2008, still goes on, and actually is increasing.

Religion is involved, but not necessarily responsible. Society is responsible. the threat the big stick is religion. Nice girls don't do this, that and the other.

I have suddenly had to do some high speed back verbal peddling with seemingly well (western) educated people about creationism

To cut long story short. I used to call the place Open Insane Asylum. Stuff that goes on there truly is beyond bonkers. Day to day stuff, once you have lived there, you can pretty much believe anything.

Best not to try to understand the situation out there, can't be done from afar, and I would not wish that life on my worst enemy.

Naturally now, I don't do religion in anyway shape or form.

I know my morals, I know what is right and what is wrong.

I don't need some bloke in a robe or with a beard telling me what he wants me to do.

Come to think of it, seeing the way men are out there, I won't let another man, any man, tell me what to do anymore, been there, done that, they don't have MY best interests at heart.

Perfumeditsawonderfullife asked:

Why then, if this is not a religious teaching but a social conditioning, is it so prevalent in the middle east and not in the west?

You said:

because religion has more of a hold, it is the very fabric of life there.

I assumed (perhaps wrongly) that you were suggesting that if christianity had more of a strong hold in the west, we would see the same problems. We wouldn't. I accept you may not have meant to suggest this.

Jumpty, I would disagree with you there. I'm thinking of Ireland as an example, it was only in the last 40 years that we have drifted away from a kind of quasi-theocracy. Not encoded, not particularly enshrined, but there all the same. Think of the Magdalen Laundries for 'Fallen Women', Ann Lovett who in 1985 was found dead at age 15 having secretly given birth to a baby. Culture & religion are intertwined, and religion arises from culture.

Jumpty, you are right, I didn't mean to suggest that religion itself causes the problems, the religions are themselves USED to hide behind.

Basically IMO, they want to make the women do what they are told. What can they use as a threat, you will not go to heaven, people will think badly of you, you will never get married... Women are in huge 'over-supply' on the market.

walking, I agree that Magdalen Laundries were dreadful as well as forced adoption which affected some in my family. I'd hate to live in any sort of theocracy but the situation in Egypt as described by LMHHHF and in Saudi Arabia by the OP is leagues beyond that. This must have something to do with either middle eastern culture, islam or both. It's not religion in general.