Japanese women are no longer the world's longest living, their longevity pushed down in part by last year's devastating earthquake and tsunami, according to a government report Thursday. The top of the global life expectancy rankings now belongs to Hong Kong women.
As if the last few weeks never not horrific enough in terms of the number of barbaric atrocities committed against women, the so-called moral police has done its bit in Mangalore. In the latest instance, as in some others, there is little moral about the people involved; it seems like a clear cut case of opportunistic hooliganism enabled by political muscle. In the wake of such incidents, a familiar pattern has emerged- outrage erupts, some important people blame the victims, action is reluctantly initiated against a few, which then peters out given that the system that is meant to hand out punishment finds itself in implicit cultural agreement with the perpetrators. While the fullest extent of legal consequences must be visited upon the perpetrators of these crimes, it is clear that while the law can punish those responsible for such actions, it cannot change the mindsets that breed these. More needs to be done to understand what lies behind such repeated acts of barbarity, given that things are getting worse and that there is clearly a deeper problem that exists.
Part of the reason lies perhaps in the fact that women have changed as much as they have. Across the country, and particularly in urban areas, there is a surge of self-confidence, enabled by education and emerging economic independence. For large sections of the Indian male, much of this change is deeply unsettling for it reconfigures a power equation that has been taken for granted for generations. For the first time, the woman is asking questions of the man, an experience that he finds quite threatening. The desire of what some have called Old India is to strike back, to keep the woman in her place, by reducing her to nothing but a sexual object and thereby retaining control over her.
But the belief that New India is creating a more liberal environment for women might be overstated. New India might well be complicit in providing newer and more exploitative ways of expressing older, more restrictive attitudes. The stutter of self-restraint of an earlier time has given way to the glib fluency of desire. Anything apparently on display carries with it the presumption of acquisition using the two currencies of the day, money and power. The eye has turned acquisitive; desire demands fulfilment.
At a time when going to a mall or a pub is sufficient proof of one's modern outlook, it is easy to mistake modification of outward behaviour for real change. By equating the idea of emancipation with the ability to buy things and drink freely, a new definition of freedom is being constructed. The freedom to drink is important but the primary sign of freedom is not the ability to drink. The vodka shots notion of freedom, where the only measure of liberty is how quickly it converts into pleasure, privileges desire above everything else. Ideals like freedom, self-expression, empowerment have been recruited by the world of advertising and marketing. Masked as a sign of individual freedom, the commodification of everything including women becomes a part of the liberal narrative of self-expression. The role models of the day too reflect this surface-inwards definition of the modern; after Kiran Bedi there has been no nationally acknowledged icon for a career woman, and arguably, the last television serial that placed a woman's career at the centre of her identity was Udaan, seen over two decades ago.
The implicit legitimacy of desire and an unwillingness to draw any boundaries is a sign of the times; it is instructive for instance that no one has asked what a 16 year old was doing in a pub in Guwahati for even to ask that question seems to put us on the side of those who blame the victim for what happened. But while the victim's age has nothing to do with what happened to her, it is relevant when we speak of a larger trend in society.
When viewed from the lens of how things should be, there is little room for debate; everyone surely has the right to act the way they want, regardless of social custom. But the truth is that social change does not follow automatically from legal right, and while any criminal infraction of law must attract due penalty, in reality change is absorbed only when there is some alignment with the larger context that it is amidst. And it is clear that this alignment does not exist; a large part of India is bewildered by the pace of change and lacks the cultural equipment to process it, something that there needs to be some empathy for.
A small part of India has moved rapidly away from the cultural mainland, and it needs to shoulder some of the responsibility of explaining itself. When the overall aura that surrounds this change is suffused with the idea of desire and its gratification, it is easy of those on the periphery of this change to mistake the appearance for the reality. Some conflict is unavoidable; when fundamental power shifts take place, the old order will fight back, often by recruiting the modes of the new. Part of the solution will lie in dealing with any infractions with the uncompromising application of the law, something easier said than done. But part of the solution lies in making this change more comprehensible and valuable to larger sections of society by presenting it more accurately. The truth is that the most meaningful change we have seen in the last few years has nothing to do with pubs and malls, or with the clothes we wear and the beverages we drink; the real change runs much deeper. The modern need not define itself only in terms of consumption; there are many better stories to tell.
The public execution of Najiba, a woman accused of adultery, is testament to the brutal customary laws of Taliban and Pashtun cultural practice in Afghanistan. Other examples of increasing recent violence against Afghan women include the rape and torture of 18-year-old Lal Bibi by Afghan Local Police and the assassination of Hanifa Safi, the provincial head of women's affairs in Laghman province.
In a nation where women are traded for animals, female literacy is 13 percent and medieval tribalism ensures male domination and domestic violence, it is not surprising that the West has come to associate Afghanistan with oppressed women.
Yet such a view denies the spirit and progress that Afghan women have made since the overthrow of the Taliban. Their rise, in large measure through assistance provided by the U.S. and NATO, has been extraordinary, especially in areas of the country where the Taliban insurgency has not overwhelmed the local population.
Afghan women reformers were able to insert gender-sensitive legislation into the new constitution to ensure women's education and employment, as well as participation in government and protection from violence and family bartering.
These reformers include women such as Sima Samar, "the Salman Rushdie of Afghanistan," who was short-listed for a Nobel Peace Prize.
Even under the Taliban, when education of girls was forbidden, teachers continued with underground classes, risking fatwas and death.
Girls on the way to classes were attacked by militants, who sprayed acid on their faces and burned down schools, but many girls expressed a fierce determination to continue their education.
Women who achieved prominence were at risk of their lives. Those assassinated included Lieutenant Colonel Malalai Kakar, who became head of Kandahar's department of crimes against women, Sitara Achakzai, a member of Kandahar's provincial council, and Safia Amajan, director of the Ministry of Women's Affairs in Kandahar.
Gender reforms continued despite executions, endemic gender discrimination, widespread corruption, a drug-financed religio-political insurgency and a matrix of opportunistic tribal and religious alliances. The latter was exemplified by the family laws that sanctioned marital rape, and were hurriedly passed for Afghanistan's Shiite minority three years ago in order to gain government support from Shiite leaders.
Afghanistan's women are major stakeholders in the political and military outcome, for violent Taliban-style Islamism is accompanied by oppression of women, and wherever such Islamism grows, radical extremists demand more control over females by implementing strict sharia law.
Conversely, the more freedoms for women, the less control by Islamists over present and future societies, because mothers who are free will not provide a role model of the submissive, fearful woman or be cowed into indoctrinating children.
The rebuilding of Afghanistan cannot take place without the advance of its women, who represent a major social, political and economic resource. Muslim reformers outside Afghanistan have voiced similar aspirations. In the U.N. Arab Human Development Report 2005, advocates for reform stated: "an Arab renaissance cannot be accomplished without the rise of women in Arab countries ... Directly and indirectly, it concerns the wellbeing of the entire Arab world."
It would be disgraceful to squander reformers' sacrifices and lose hard-won coalition gains in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, the future for Afghan women seems precarious, due to a weak, corrupt central government beholden to warlords and extremist religious pressure, as well as a tribal judicial system that trumps state laws, especially in rural districts.
Afghanistan suffers the predicament of a landlocked quagmire of sectarian bloodshed, and the competing interests of surrounding sovereign states, particularly Pakistan, Iran, India and China.
The main spoiler is Pakistan, where domestic violence, rape and honor killings are endemic. Pakistan also gives refuge and assistance to the Taliban and harbors their affiliate, the ruthless Haqqani Network.
As the U.S. exit from Afghanistan approaches, protection of Afghan women's rights requires courage and political will instead of tired rhetoric. However, in an election year, we are unlikely to see meaningful action from the U.S. President and his Secretary of State.
To be sure, the United States is caught in a bind, as cutting off aid could create a vacuum easily refilled by Islamists. In this context, the recent international donor's conference in Tokyo was a step in the right direction. Donors guaranteed $4 billion in annual aid over the next four years, subject to the Afghan government reducing widespread corruption. Although laudable, this aid should have been firmly linked to Afghan women's human rights as well.
Understandably, women fear the coalition pullout will be followed by rapid expansion of Taliban control, and many educated women have already emigrated. At the very least, the U.S. Administration could take the lead and call an urgent international conference to discuss and propose measures for safeguarding the progress of Afghan women to date. The outcome could determine the legacy of President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
Just cannot tell if this chick is a hotel maid or an air stewardess or a street hooker dressed up to look like a maid or a stewardess. But more than likely, she is earning some extra money in these photos from the guy with the camera. An air stewardess (flight attendant) moonlighting as a prostitute seems kinda hot. And its so cool when prostitutes allow cameras and even cooler when the johns share the photos online. I guess this set could also be from a regular couple enjoying a evening together at a hotel and dabbling in some role-playing. However ff she is in fact a real flight attendant I would love to know the name of the airline with that uniform. Anyway,
.
The annual report by Japan's health ministry said the expected lifespan for Japanese women slipped to 85.90 years in 2011 from 86.30 the year before, mainly due to disease and other natural causes of death. The life expectancy for men also declined slightly, from 79.55 to 79.44. The report said that the earthquake and tsunami, which killed nearly 20,000 people, contributed to pushing the statistics down. It noted that if deaths related to the disaster were not included, the life expectancies would be higher for both men, at 79.70 years, and women, at 86.24.
But the official life expectancy for women in Hong Kong – 86.70 years in 2011 – would still be longer than Japan's even without the disaster deaths, the report said.
It said suicides among Japanese women have been on the rise, and that was a contributing factor, although disease and other natural causes remained the most important issues.
Officials said it was the first time since 1985 that Japan's women had ranked second.
The ministry's report, which uses statistics supplied by other countries or the U.N. for its comparisons, noted that international statistics are hard to compare because of differences in calculation methods.
As if the last few weeks never not horrific enough in terms of the number of barbaric atrocities committed against women, the so-called moral police has done its bit in Mangalore. In the latest instance, as in some others, there is little moral about the people involved; it seems like a clear cut case of opportunistic hooliganism enabled by political muscle. In the wake of such incidents, a familiar pattern has emerged- outrage erupts, some important people blame the victims, action is reluctantly initiated against a few, which then peters out given that the system that is meant to hand out punishment finds itself in implicit cultural agreement with the perpetrators. While the fullest extent of legal consequences must be visited upon the perpetrators of these crimes, it is clear that while the law can punish those responsible for such actions, it cannot change the mindsets that breed these. More needs to be done to understand what lies behind such repeated acts of barbarity, given that things are getting worse and that there is clearly a deeper problem that exists.
Part of the reason lies perhaps in the fact that women have changed as much as they have. Across the country, and particularly in urban areas, there is a surge of self-confidence, enabled by education and emerging economic independence. For large sections of the Indian male, much of this change is deeply unsettling for it reconfigures a power equation that has been taken for granted for generations. For the first time, the woman is asking questions of the man, an experience that he finds quite threatening. The desire of what some have called Old India is to strike back, to keep the woman in her place, by reducing her to nothing but a sexual object and thereby retaining control over her.
But the belief that New India is creating a more liberal environment for women might be overstated. New India might well be complicit in providing newer and more exploitative ways of expressing older, more restrictive attitudes. The stutter of self-restraint of an earlier time has given way to the glib fluency of desire. Anything apparently on display carries with it the presumption of acquisition using the two currencies of the day, money and power. The eye has turned acquisitive; desire demands fulfilment.
At a time when going to a mall or a pub is sufficient proof of one's modern outlook, it is easy to mistake modification of outward behaviour for real change. By equating the idea of emancipation with the ability to buy things and drink freely, a new definition of freedom is being constructed. The freedom to drink is important but the primary sign of freedom is not the ability to drink. The vodka shots notion of freedom, where the only measure of liberty is how quickly it converts into pleasure, privileges desire above everything else. Ideals like freedom, self-expression, empowerment have been recruited by the world of advertising and marketing. Masked as a sign of individual freedom, the commodification of everything including women becomes a part of the liberal narrative of self-expression. The role models of the day too reflect this surface-inwards definition of the modern; after Kiran Bedi there has been no nationally acknowledged icon for a career woman, and arguably, the last television serial that placed a woman's career at the centre of her identity was Udaan, seen over two decades ago.
The implicit legitimacy of desire and an unwillingness to draw any boundaries is a sign of the times; it is instructive for instance that no one has asked what a 16 year old was doing in a pub in Guwahati for even to ask that question seems to put us on the side of those who blame the victim for what happened. But while the victim's age has nothing to do with what happened to her, it is relevant when we speak of a larger trend in society.
When viewed from the lens of how things should be, there is little room for debate; everyone surely has the right to act the way they want, regardless of social custom. But the truth is that social change does not follow automatically from legal right, and while any criminal infraction of law must attract due penalty, in reality change is absorbed only when there is some alignment with the larger context that it is amidst. And it is clear that this alignment does not exist; a large part of India is bewildered by the pace of change and lacks the cultural equipment to process it, something that there needs to be some empathy for.
A small part of India has moved rapidly away from the cultural mainland, and it needs to shoulder some of the responsibility of explaining itself. When the overall aura that surrounds this change is suffused with the idea of desire and its gratification, it is easy of those on the periphery of this change to mistake the appearance for the reality. Some conflict is unavoidable; when fundamental power shifts take place, the old order will fight back, often by recruiting the modes of the new. Part of the solution will lie in dealing with any infractions with the uncompromising application of the law, something easier said than done. But part of the solution lies in making this change more comprehensible and valuable to larger sections of society by presenting it more accurately. The truth is that the most meaningful change we have seen in the last few years has nothing to do with pubs and malls, or with the clothes we wear and the beverages we drink; the real change runs much deeper. The modern need not define itself only in terms of consumption; there are many better stories to tell.
The public execution of Najiba, a woman accused of adultery, is testament to the brutal customary laws of Taliban and Pashtun cultural practice in Afghanistan. Other examples of increasing recent violence against Afghan women include the rape and torture of 18-year-old Lal Bibi by Afghan Local Police and the assassination of Hanifa Safi, the provincial head of women's affairs in Laghman province.
In a nation where women are traded for animals, female literacy is 13 percent and medieval tribalism ensures male domination and domestic violence, it is not surprising that the West has come to associate Afghanistan with oppressed women.
Yet such a view denies the spirit and progress that Afghan women have made since the overthrow of the Taliban. Their rise, in large measure through assistance provided by the U.S. and NATO, has been extraordinary, especially in areas of the country where the Taliban insurgency has not overwhelmed the local population.
Afghan women reformers were able to insert gender-sensitive legislation into the new constitution to ensure women's education and employment, as well as participation in government and protection from violence and family bartering.
These reformers include women such as Sima Samar, "the Salman Rushdie of Afghanistan," who was short-listed for a Nobel Peace Prize.
Even under the Taliban, when education of girls was forbidden, teachers continued with underground classes, risking fatwas and death.
Girls on the way to classes were attacked by militants, who sprayed acid on their faces and burned down schools, but many girls expressed a fierce determination to continue their education.
Women who achieved prominence were at risk of their lives. Those assassinated included Lieutenant Colonel Malalai Kakar, who became head of Kandahar's department of crimes against women, Sitara Achakzai, a member of Kandahar's provincial council, and Safia Amajan, director of the Ministry of Women's Affairs in Kandahar.
Gender reforms continued despite executions, endemic gender discrimination, widespread corruption, a drug-financed religio-political insurgency and a matrix of opportunistic tribal and religious alliances. The latter was exemplified by the family laws that sanctioned marital rape, and were hurriedly passed for Afghanistan's Shiite minority three years ago in order to gain government support from Shiite leaders.
Afghanistan's women are major stakeholders in the political and military outcome, for violent Taliban-style Islamism is accompanied by oppression of women, and wherever such Islamism grows, radical extremists demand more control over females by implementing strict sharia law.
Conversely, the more freedoms for women, the less control by Islamists over present and future societies, because mothers who are free will not provide a role model of the submissive, fearful woman or be cowed into indoctrinating children.
The rebuilding of Afghanistan cannot take place without the advance of its women, who represent a major social, political and economic resource. Muslim reformers outside Afghanistan have voiced similar aspirations. In the U.N. Arab Human Development Report 2005, advocates for reform stated: "an Arab renaissance cannot be accomplished without the rise of women in Arab countries ... Directly and indirectly, it concerns the wellbeing of the entire Arab world."
It would be disgraceful to squander reformers' sacrifices and lose hard-won coalition gains in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, the future for Afghan women seems precarious, due to a weak, corrupt central government beholden to warlords and extremist religious pressure, as well as a tribal judicial system that trumps state laws, especially in rural districts.
Afghanistan suffers the predicament of a landlocked quagmire of sectarian bloodshed, and the competing interests of surrounding sovereign states, particularly Pakistan, Iran, India and China.
The main spoiler is Pakistan, where domestic violence, rape and honor killings are endemic. Pakistan also gives refuge and assistance to the Taliban and harbors their affiliate, the ruthless Haqqani Network.
As the U.S. exit from Afghanistan approaches, protection of Afghan women's rights requires courage and political will instead of tired rhetoric. However, in an election year, we are unlikely to see meaningful action from the U.S. President and his Secretary of State.
To be sure, the United States is caught in a bind, as cutting off aid could create a vacuum easily refilled by Islamists. In this context, the recent international donor's conference in Tokyo was a step in the right direction. Donors guaranteed $4 billion in annual aid over the next four years, subject to the Afghan government reducing widespread corruption. Although laudable, this aid should have been firmly linked to Afghan women's human rights as well.
Understandably, women fear the coalition pullout will be followed by rapid expansion of Taliban control, and many educated women have already emigrated. At the very least, the U.S. Administration could take the lead and call an urgent international conference to discuss and propose measures for safeguarding the progress of Afghan women to date. The outcome could determine the legacy of President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
Just cannot tell if this chick is a hotel maid or an air stewardess or a street hooker dressed up to look like a maid or a stewardess. But more than likely, she is earning some extra money in these photos from the guy with the camera. An air stewardess (flight attendant) moonlighting as a prostitute seems kinda hot. And its so cool when prostitutes allow cameras and even cooler when the johns share the photos online. I guess this set could also be from a regular couple enjoying a evening together at a hotel and dabbling in some role-playing. However ff she is in fact a real flight attendant I would love to know the name of the airline with that uniform. Anyway,
Source: http://www.GutterUncensored.com
.
No comments:
Post a Comment