Women Around the World: Year in Review

So, another year is done. How did 2017 shape up for women and girls around the globe? Here is a selection of news:

Council on Foreign Relations:

• Record-breaking Women's March on January 21, 2017
• Global #MeToo campaign
• Legal advances in the Middle East
• U.S. Women, Peace, and Security Act is enacted
• U.S. slashes funding for global women’s health
• Legal reform on child marriage
• Gains in women's political leadership
• Low participation in peace talks
• Global migration crisis grows
• Female fighters combat terrorism

Women Leadership in the Worldwide Community:

• Almost four in ten businesses have no women in senior management positions in G7 countries
• The proportion of senior business roles held by women globally stands at only 24%
• There is an increase in the percentage of firms that have no places for women in senior management
• In G7 countries only 22% of companies have women as part of their senior staff
• 39% of companies have no women in senior roles whatsoever in G7 countries
• In Japan, with its powerhouse economy, only 7 percent of companies have women in senior roles
• Germany, another country with a strong economy, has only a 15% rate of countries with women in senior roles

News Deeply:

• women's march
• U.S. cuts funding to UNFPA
• Canada announces international assistance policy
• Family Planning receives funding boost
• advancements in women's rights globally
• Global #metoo campaign
• widening of the Global Gender Gap

The Lilly:

• the year in Movies

Book: The Origins of Sex

From the Guardian:

We believe in sexual freedom. We take it for granted that consenting men and women have the right to do what they like with their bodies. Sex is everywhere in our culture. We love to think and talk about it; we devour news about celebrities' affairs; we produce and consume pornography on an unprecedented scale. We think it wrong that in other cultures its discussion is censured, people suffer for their sexual orientation, women are treated as second-class citizens, or adulterers are put to death.

Yet a few centuries ago, our own society was like this too. In the 1600s people were still being executed for adultery in England, Scotland and north America, and across Europe. Everywhere in the west, sex outside marriage was illegal, and the church, the state and ordinary people devoted huge efforts to hunting it down and punishing it. This was a central feature of Christian society, one that had grown steadily in importance since late antiquity. So how and when did our culture change so strikingly? Where does our current outlook come from? The answers lie in one of the great untold stories about the creation of our modern condition.

Mistresses Who Changed History

From Slate:

Before Monica Lewinsky, Camilla Parker Bowles, or Marilyn Monroe, there was Hagar—the world's first known mistress.

Several millenniums later, the mistress remains a tenuous position, as historian Elizabeth Abbott explores in her new book, Mistresses: A History of the Other Woman, out this week. Since Hagar's era, however, a handful of women have learned to parlay their scandalous relationships into positions of power—and some have changed history in doing so.

The accompanying gallery illuminates the lives of 10 women who used their time wisely. Each won a place in the history books because of their male attachments. But without their own formidable talents and intellects, most would not have been so admired by their lovers in the first place. Beauty, for these seductresses, was only the beginning.

See also: "Why mistresses have everything to do with marriage" from Huffington Post.

Ethiopia: Campaign Against Female Circumcision

From Ezega:

In recent months local and national initiatives have shown a clear intensification of the struggle against the practice of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), also known as female circumcision.

The ancient practice of removing the outer female genitalia and “sewing” the vaginal opening shut has long existed in the region under the pretext of cleanliness and religious piety.

After years of United Nations and international NGO advocacy, recent “homegrown” campaigns have signaled a local increase in the struggle to eliminate the practice in Ethiopia. For example, recent Ethiopian Television programs have targeted the practice by assembling both religious scholars and traditional leaders to advocate against FGM.

Ida Craddock - Ahead of her times

Further to my post:  "Heaven's Bride - The Unprintable Life of Ida Craddock" comes this article on Ida Craddock from Boston.com:

In today’s America, sex and religion are often seen in opposition to each other, and there’s a long history of that battle, from the Puritans to the Protestant establishment’s investment in antiobscenity laws. But for some on the vanguard of the progressive era, freedom meant mingling of sexual and spiritual expression. Ida C. Craddock, writer, lecturer, sometime pastor and counselor, was among what her biographer calls “an advanced band of troublemaking inquirers,” a freethinker who “imagined a sexual revolution in specifically sacred terms.” Her work and life are barely known today, but in this brilliant new book by Leigh Eric Schmidt, a professor of the history of religion at Harvard, modern readers may find themselves not only captivated by a fascinating character but also intrigued by ideas considered obscene and blasphemous in their time.

Heaven’s Bride: The Unprintable Life of Ida C. Craddock

From Killing the Buddha, comes this interesting article "The Sexologist's Secret":

In Heaven’s Bride: The Unprintable Life of Ida C. Craddock, American Mystic, Scholar, Sexologist, Martyr and Madwoman, Leigh Eric Schmidt gives us a story of high tragedy and heart-breaking ridiculousness, set at the crossroads of religion and sexuality in late Victorian America.

Born in 1857 in Philadelphia and raised in comfortable circumstances by her widowed mother, Craddock was a precocious student—by the time she finished high school she had a working knowledge of Greek, Latin, French, German, and Italian. She hoped to become the University of Pennsylvania’s first female matriculant, but after passing its entrance exams with flying colors—“four days of written examinations on ancient and modern geography, mathematics, English grammar and composition, Latin grammar and hexameter verse, and Greek grammar and prose composition … followed by a fifth day for an oral examination on Cicero’s orations and Horace’s odes”—she was rejected by the board of trustees three times, even after Susan B. Anthony took up her cause. Instead of the important academic career she’d dreamed of, she taught stenography at Girard College, a charity school for orphans. (She would publish two textbooks on the subject, Primary Phonography: An Introduction to Isaac Pitman’s System of Phonetic Shorthand and Intermediate or Full Phonography.)

Medieval Asobi

Article from Nodo50.org:

In medieval Japan, sexual entertainers and their customers enjoyed great freedoms until a growing orthodoxy stifled their trade, Janet Goodwin tells a UCLA audience. An early Heian period painting shows three women in a boat rowing alongside a larger boat carrying male passengers, some dressed richly and some ascetically—aristocrats and monks. The kimono-clad women were asobi, or sexual entertainers, singing their siren song to lure the aristocrats to some temporary pleasure shack.

With the monks in the rear . . . the large boat was probably on its return from some chartered pilgrimage to a sacred site. The asobi knew well the sea lanes for pilgrims who were ready to unburden themselves of their journey’s abstinence. . . weaker pilgrims might have looked for the asobi even on the way to sacred sites.

London: Sin City

I came across this ever so interesting article on London, 18th century city of vice and immorality posted on Canadian Content. Hope you enjoy this snippet:

Sin City: One in five women in 1700s London was a prostitute

Eighteenth century London evokes images of fine Georgian buildings, many of which are still standing, and fine art.But in reality, it more of was a modern day Sodom, the biblical city synonymous with sexual depravity, and from which English gets the word "sodomy" (to North Americans, the eighteenth century is ancient history, but to the British it is relatively recent).

It was a city of depravity and vileness (as for it high crime and murder rate, and the brutal methods of punishment, that's another story).It is thought that there were almost 63,000 prostitutes in London in the 1700s and that a staggering one in five of London's women were "harlots."In fact, London's prostitutes generated an estimated gross turnover of around £20 million (£1.5 billion in today's money).

This was big business. Famous prostitutes became the celebrities of their time in Britain, including Lady Hamilton, the mistress of Lord Nelson. The fictional Moll Flanders is reputedly based on the real life Moll King. One of her customers was the author of Moll Flanders, Daniel defoe.The 18th Century British artist William Hogarth, who painted scenes of London that were as accurate as he could get them (18th Century London is often referred to as Hogarthian London), immortalised London's prostitution industry in A Rake's Progress (1732-33).

Grotesquely (though, remember, only to the eyes of someone in the 21st Century) child prostitutes also plied their trade in London, some as young as eight. The British even believed that sexual intercourse with a child cured veneral diseases.And, of course, veneral diseases were rife, such as syphilis and gonorrhea.

Egypt: Ban "fake" hymen

From Associated Press:

Conservative Egyptian lawmakers have called for a ban on imports of a Chinese-made kit meant to help women fake their virginity and one scholar has even called for the "exile" of anyone who imports or uses it.

The Artificial Virginity Hymen kit, distributed by the Chinese company Gigimo, costs about $30. It is intended to help newly married women fool their husbands into believing they are virgins — culturally important in a conservative Middle East where sex before marriage is considered by many to be illicit. The product leaks a blood-like substance when inserted and broken.

Gigimo advertises shipping to every Arab country. But the company did not answer e-mails and phone calls seeking comment on whether it had orders from Egypt or other parts of the Middle East.

The fracas started when a reporter from Radio Netherlands broadcast an Arabic translation of the Chinese advertisement of the product. That set off fears of conservative parliament members that Egyptian women might start ordering the kits.

Sheik Sayed Askar, a member of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood who is on the parliamentary committee on religious affairs, said the kit will make it easier for Egyptian women to give in to temptation. He demanded the government take responsibility for fighting the product to uphold Egyptian and Arab values.

From the Blogosphere

This week from the Blogosphere:

• The Myth of the Chastity Belt by Master Jack
• On Patriarchy by Historiann
• Its History - The Ideal Medieval Women by A Look Into The Past (Stephanie Allen)

Kenyan Women: "Sex Strike"

From Al Jazeera:

Women's groups in Kenya have started a week-long "sex strike", in an attempt to press the country's leaders to resolve rifts and work together.

Ten non-governmental organisations urged women across the nation to boycott sex with their husbands and partners along with a statement calling for reforms in government and action on promoting women's rights.

Rukia Subow, chairwoman of the Women's Development Organisation, said the group believed the boycott would persuade men to press the government to make peace.

"This is a national boycott to show that the women of this country have resolved to push for reforms," she said. "We want an urgent solution to the political problems facing this country."

The group would pay prostitutes so they would participate in the strike, Subow said.

Men's "sex spray" cure for female woes

From the Times of India:

A spray, initially sold as a cure for men’s erectile problems, can improve sex lives of millions of women, who regularly have to fake orgasms, say its promoters.

Jack Vaisman, the chief executive of Advanced Medical Institute, has said that the "nasal spray technology" can boost ladies’ flagging sex-drive.

Costing 4000 pounds for men, the treatments would now be marketed to women using the slogan: "Stop faking, get real."

Vaisman, however, said that the spray stimulated the production of dopamine.

Female Circumcision

A number of articles have appeared reporting on the decrease in female circumcision in Egypt. And the reversal is coming from women who have undergone the process themselves.

From The State:
"In this small Nile River farming village, Maha Mohammed has started to doubt whether she should circumcise her two daughters.

A year ago, she had few qualms about female genital mutilation, the practice of cutting a girl's clitoris and sometimes other genitalia. She herself was cut two decades ago, and she fears her daughters will not find husbands otherwise.

But Mohammed also has heard that circumcision can be medically risky and emotionally painful. And a strong-willed neighbor, another woman, has been dropping by her house regularly to persuade her to say no.

"I hear that girls suffer not just physically but psychologically," the 31-year-old Mohammed said. "But I am afraid. I don't want my daughters to have uncontrollable demands for sex."

Such doubts are significant. With vigorous grass-roots campaigns and the passage of tough laws against circumcision, Egypt seems to be making a dent in this deeply ingrained practice, thousands of years old. The number of young girls circumcised is now steadily declining in a country where an estimated 96 percent of married Egyptian women have had their genitals cut.

The most recent comprehensive study predicts about 63 percent of Egyptian girls 9 years old and under will be circumcised over the next decade. The numbers are lower in urban areas like Cairo - about 40 percent - but higher for rural areas in the south - about 78 percent, the government's 2005 demographic and health survey predicts.

The lower circumcision rate in urban areas is attributed to higher income and education levels and greater access to information. But in the villages along the Nile, where the rate is highest, a grass-roots effort is under way to bring information straight to people's homes.

But when village women do go public, the results are astonishing. Of some 3,000 families targeted over the past few years in several nearby villages, more than half say they have abandoned the practice, nearly 800 are undecided and fewer than 500 say they will continue to circumcise their daughters."

From the Miami Herald:
"The key is convincing villages that stopping circumcision is an Egyptian idea -- not one imported by international aid groups or Western governments, Fouad said. The group also promotes homegrown activities such as community plays, discussions with local doctors and religious debates.

Along with local groups taking action, Egypt's government has also been discouraging the practice in recent years. But activists stress that laws alone aren't enough.

Many women fear potential husbands will reject daughters as impure or immoral. Medical rumors -- including that circumcision is the only way to control a girl's sexual desires -- are rampant. Others believe that abandoning the practice is caving to Western pressures to change their society."

The article was also featured in:
Fox News ; the Star Tribune ; MSNBC ; USA Today ; Pravda ; and Chicago Sun-Times.

From Independent Online (SA):
"An estimated 70 million girls and women in 27 African and Middle Eastern countries have been "circumcised", according to Unicef.

Countries where more than 50 percent of girls and women ages 15 to 49 are mutilated include: Burkina Faso, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gambia, Guinea, Mali, Mauritania, Sierra Leone, Somalia and Sudan (north).

Countries where 10-50 percent of females aged 15 to 49 are mutilated include: Benin, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Ivory Coast, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, Tanzania and Yemen."

Even the doyen of crime-writing, Ruth Rendell has taken a stand:
From the Guardian:
"Lady Rendell, a long-term campaigner against the practice of female genital mutilation (FGM), spoke out as the police prepared to announce a new initiative against it later this week.

She said that it would be classified "not as a quaint custom but as child cruelty, as child abuse, because that's what it is".

"Even if it may be committed without child abuse or cruelty in mind, that's what it is. I think that if we can persuade the Home Office to do more when the police are doing so much, I see that at last there has been a breakthrough and things are going to change. I hope so."

Rendell helped introduce tough new laws in 2004 that made it an offence to send a child abroad for the procedure, banned in the UK since 1985.

Tens of thousands of young girls in this country are believed to be at risk of FGM, but the peer conceded cultural sensitivities made it difficult to tackle.

Women who have undergone female genital mutilation are twice as likely to die in childbirth and four times more likely to give birth to a stillborn child, experts say.

Workers in the sector say it is typically carried out on girls aged between four and 13, but can sometimes be inflicted on newborn babies or on young women before marriage or pregnancy."


Further reading:
Female Genital Mutilation

Women in Sierre Leone

I was reading the article "Women urged to put on veil to maintain respect" - in which women attending the celebrations in Freetown, marking the anniversary of the birth of Fatima Zahra (daughter of the Prophet), were urged to don the veil in order to protect themselves from any unwarranted sexual harrasment.

One of the women attending, "Rugia Marrah said putting on the veil is an age-old tradition even in Roman times before the birth of Christianity. The occasion was also used to extol the virtues of the Virgin Mary who was equated with Fatima Zahra. The two were declared as role models of societies at all times.

The wife of the Iranian ambassador to Sierra Leone Mrs. Fatima Maliki spoke on the virtues of Fatima Zahra who she said is a role model for all women.

The Chancellor of the Iranian Cultural Consulate Mohamed Reza Ghezel Sofla said "Fatima is the brightest example for all women" He added;" Humanity is still in the wilderness and therefore cannot prevail. The current global problem is that humanity has failed to emulate role models like Fatima".

Another female participant Mrs. Nyallay spoke on the virtues of the virgin Mary whose birth and life are also narrated in the holy Quran She urged women to emulate the virtues of Mary so that they would be assets to society.

The occasion attracted people from over the country and was characterized with joy. It provide a forum for the discussion of gender issues of contemporary times and for encouragement for a shift from traditional African perceptions that hinder women's empowerment."

However, it was another comment attributed to Rugia Marrah that startled me: "out of every 100 women 33 acquire AIDS, which she said could be acquired through promiscuity."

Hmm, AIDS can also be acquired through various other means, not just promiscuity - and whose promiscuity is Rugia Marrah referring to. Men are promiscuous - not just women. I do hope that her comments do not naively imply (as they seem to do) that women who do not wear the veil are promiscuous??

And her statistics are also quite startling - 33 out of every 100 women have AIDS. That's one third of all women in Sierra Leone!! The mind boggles at such a thought - can this be true???



Some articles of interest (pdf form):
AIDS in Sierre Leone
Tackling HIV / AIDS in Post-War Sierre Leone

Bride's "white lie"

Yes, the saga of the bride who was not the virgin she purported to be continues.

Further to: "Virgin Appeal" - from Australian newspaper "The Age":
"The ruling ending the Muslim couple's union has stunned France and raised concerns the country's much-cherished secular values are losing ground to cultural traditions from its fast-growing immigrant communities.

The decision also exposed the silent shame borne by some Muslim women who transgress long-held customs demanding proof of virginity on the wedding night.

In its ruling, the court concluded the woman had misrepresented herself as a virgin and that, in this particular marriage, virginity was a prerequisite.

But in treating the case as a breach of contract, the ruling was decried by critics who said it undermined decades of progress in women's rights. Marriage, they said, was reduced to the status of a commercial transaction in which women could be discarded by husbands claiming to have discovered hidden defects in them.

What began as a private matter "concerns all the citizens of our country and notably women," a statement from her ministry said.

The hitch is that both the young woman and the man at the centre of the drama are opposed to an appeal, according to their lawyers. The names of the woman, a student in her 20s, and the man, an engineer in his 30s, have not been disclosed.

The young woman's lawyer, Charles-Edouard Mauger, said she was distraught by the dragging out of the humiliating case. In an interview on Europe 1 radio, he quoted her as saying: "I don't know who's trying to think in my place. I didn't ask for anything. ... I wasn't the one who asked for the media attention, for people to talk about it, and for this to last so long."

The issue is particularly distressing for France because the government has fought to maintain strong secular traditions as demographics change. An estimated 5 million Muslims live in the country of 64 million, the largest Muslim population in Western Europe."

So, are we championing the rights of a woman in the face of cultural tradition ...... and if so, what right do we have to do so. The woman in question is not seeking to appeal the decision - neither is the young man in question. So, what right do we have ... ???

"Virgin" Appeal

Further to my earlier post on the "Myth of the Modern Virgin" - it would seem that an appeal in underway in the case of a Muslim man annulling his marriage on the grounds of his wife's lack of virginity.

France's Justice Minister, Rachida Dati, has asked that this case be appealled. The verdict caused a furore in France when it was handed down, and now it has made international headlines.

From the "International Herald Tribune":
"Politicians, feminists and human rights activists have denounced the court's ruling as an affront to the legal equality of men and women and a violation of a woman's privacy.

"The annulment of a marriage by the court in Lille has sparked lively social debate. This private affair goes beyond the relations between two people and concerns all citizens of our country, especially women," the justice ministry said.

Dati has lodged a request for the public prosecutor's office to file an appeal against the court's judgement, the ministry said in a statement.

In an online interview broadcast by the Figaro newspaper, Prime Minister Francois Fillon said that while he understood the reason behind the judge's decision, the case merited an appeal."

Other newspapers ran the story:
"The Australian" ~~~ "The Sydney Morning Herald" ~~~ "The Star" ~~~ "The Australian" (May 30th edition) ~~~ "The Irish Times" ~~~ "BBC News" ~~~ "Arab News" ~~~ "Gulf Daily News" ~~~ "The Times" ~~~ "Fox News" ~~~ "Dawn"

Myth of the Modern Virgin

In this modern day and age, are women being pressured to be "pure"or to at least portray the persona of being "pure" on their wedding day???

It would seem that Virginity in a bride is most desirable. According to a recent poll of conducted by Australian mens' magazine "FHM": "Of 57,000 men polled ...... 28 per cent hoped to marry a virgin, while 41 percent wanted a bride who had five partners or fewer, and just 5 per cent wanted a bride who had slept with more than 15 men."

The survey ran for a period of two weeks in May; and of the men who were surveyed, it was found that most were in their "late 20s, who had jobs and were university educated."

Further, according to the article by Caroline Marcus in the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper today:
"But the ideal may be far from reality, with 2005 research from the Australian Longitudinal Study of Health and Relationships showing that only 11percent of women and 5percent of men aged 16 to 35 had only slept with their current partner. The same study showed Australian men aged 30 to 39 had on average 9.5 sexual partners and women in that age group, 4.7.

University of New England sexuality expert Dr Gail Hawkes said the response was "astounding". "You would not be surprised if we saw that in 1960, not 2008," Dr Hawkes said."

The Brisbane Courier Mail ran a story from France yesterday in which a man divorced his wife on the grounds that she was not a virgin. Apparently there was a huge uproar when it was discovered that a "court had annulled the union of two Muslims because the husband said the wife was not the virgin she had claimed to be. Politicians, feminists and human rights activists denounced the verdict, handed down last month but reported in the national press only on Thursday, as an affront to the legal equality of men and women and a violation of a woman's privacy.

The hoodwinked husband's lawyer responded just as forcibly that civil marriage was a legal contract. The court invalidated this one because the wife had lied about what French law calls an "essential quality" of a contracting party, he said.

Prominent feminist Elisabeth Badinter said the courts should defend Muslim women, not pressure them. "The end result will be that some Muslim girls will rush to hospitals to have their hymens sewn back together again," she told France Inter radio.

Muslims make up about eight per cent of the population in France, which has vigorously defended its secular system against their occasional religious demands by banning Islamic headscarves in the civil service and in state schools.

Xavier Labbee, the husband's lawyer, denied that religion had anything to do with the verdict. "The law says that when there is an error concerning essential qualities of one of the spouses, an annulment can be sought," he said on LCI television.

The same clause has been used in French courts to annul marriages in which one person discovered only afterwards that the other had concealed a divorce or had a physical or mental disability that made a normal sexual life impossible.

The rector of a large mosque in the northern city of Lille, where the case was tried, also denied Islam played any role. "

In the US, I have seen a number of programs in which young people are undertaking vows of celibacy (not necessarily virginity) in an attempt to retain some sort of control over their own morality. Rather than having someone attempt to force their moral views upon them, these young folk are steering their own course.

Are we returning to a time when moral standards were a lot different and stricter than they are today??? Is that essentially a bad thing???