Sawt al Niswa | صوت النسوة - discrimination

Diary of a feminist: 18/05/2010r

Lamia Moghnie — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 09:07:00 +0000

For Sawtalniswa by Sara AG

Rania Ignatios

My coworker is a sexist guy. He thinks that women can’t drive because they can’t focus. “It’s in their genes” he explained to me. He later told me about his “scientific” theory that explains what it is in women’s vision that doesn’t allow them to focus on the road ahead. He also said that when we go back to the basics men are stronger- that’s just the way it is- and this is why men are superior. He finally explained how all fetuses in the first three months of pregnancy are girls, and then some of them develop to become boys.

This is the guy I go to work with everyday. This is a consultant working in my office, a guy who understands the complex theories of mathematics and finance but doesn’t get the simple notion of sexism. On the first day, I didn’t talk to him. On the second day, I had a debate with him. On the third day, I ignored him. I cannot work with such a guy. I refuse to sit next to him. I refuse to talk to him. But I don’t really have a choice; all I can do is avoid discussing anything that relates to women with him. Sexism is all around me, and I am tired.

I am tired. I do not want to create change for others. I want them to rot in their sexist, hypocritical, homophobic, and racist society. I want to leave to a place where people get it and where I don’t have to lie to myself in order to stay in this country and work toward change. I do not want to compromise anymore. I do not want to lead a life of disgust, and anger towards all the sexist people around me. Gandhi said: “First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.” But it feels like the road to success is long; people have so much to understand and I do not want to be laughed at, ignored or fought in the meantime. Gandhi also said: “Everything you do in life will probably be insignificant, but it’s very important that you do it”. How important and why? I guess Gandhi never lived in the Lebanese society. No seriously–I do not want to spend my whole life fighting to create an insignificant change. It would be so much easier to just move somewhere where people get it. Wouldn’t it?

I love my feminism, I believe in it, live for and by it. But honestly, I wish I could go to a place where I don’t have to ever use this word again, a place where it doesn’t make sense. What’s so hard to understand people? How hard is it to get that gender stereotypes and roles put us in boxes and oppress us? I am not talking philosophy or very complicated anthropological theories, I’m just saying that you can’t tell me what I can and cannot do just because I’m a woman, you cannot decide for me on how I want to look, act, or live my life. You can’t pretend to know anything about me just because I’m a woman. For example:

- I decide if I dream of getting married or not, of having kids or not, of staying at home or not. And no, if I decide not to have these things, it’s not because my husband’s paycheck doesn’t cover the bills, but because I choose to do it just like he can choose to stay at home.

- You will not decide how well I can drive, fix my car, or clean the house, unless you see me do it.

- You cannot decide what fields I can make it in. And no, being a teacher is not the best job for me since it allows me to earn money and still be able to put food on the table and raise my family in the afternoon. I have other criteria as well.

- You will not decide what I need to wear in order to look beautiful or how I’m supposed to fix my hair in order to look feminine.

- I decide whether a car or a job suits me. You cannot talk about “women” in general. We are not all one woman, we are different women, who like and prefer different things.

- You cannot tell me what I’m supposed to do in life or what the role I’m BORN to fill is. I don’t even know what it is, and I will figure it out along the way.

How difficult are these concepts to understand? These are simple facts that all of us should agree on. I am tired of having those primitive debates with people. Today, I don’t feel like being positive about social change. Today, I am just disappointed. I am tired.

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Reflections on the logic of things, Lebanese style.

Lamia Moghnie — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 08:45:00 +0000

Claudine Farah/ كلودين فرح

I always wonder how it was decided that women were lesser citizens than men. Did men think that women were doing most of the job in procreation so they decided to be part of the process by making the child their own, legally and socially, as a way to create more balance? And how were women convinced by it? And what about this conflicting idea that sex is taboo and sexual drive is a vulgar instinct but everything in human society is basically decided based on sex, procreation and gender, even things that have nothing to do with genitalia? The good thing about this is that most of the world seems to have noticed that the laws were too misogynistic, and attempted to change them, at least the laws that blatantly deprive women of their basic human rights.

Unfortunately, that’s not the case in Lebanon. Adding insult to injury is the fact that women themselves don’t see anything wrong with our laws! To them, “It’s the law” or “It is how it is” are far more logical replies than my crazy, illogical “Why do I have my father’s name? Why do I have to give up my roots to get married? Why do I hardly have any rights over my own children?” So, it’s more logical that whenever a woman gets married, she has to be deleted from her family’s records and be registered with her husband’s family, in a place she might have never heard of, has never belonged to…

Why is it more complicated to keep her original family records unchanged? Why is it more confusing if the child was registered in either or both his/her parents’ name? Why is it more difficult to give the child either or both of his/her parents’ nationalities?

As for the ridiculous reply of “It’s the law of nature,” or “God’s will,” am I biologically more my father’s than my mother’s? How is that calculated? If it was God’s design to give women less rights over their offspring, then why do they do most of the job, physically and socially, during pregnancy and throughout the child’s life?

How can a married Lebanese woman consider herself free and independent if the laws stipulate that she give up all her history and past and follow her husband’s?

What frustrates me even more is how women can study those outrageous misogynistic laws and still have any respect for themselves. Simply put, it’s beyond me how we have women lawyers and judges in Lebanon. How did they succeed academically and how did they advance in their careers, knowing full well that the laws they accept, abide by and apply consider them a lesser species, just because they were born with vaginas and not for any other reason whatsoever?!

Of all the Lebanese self-loathing women, I despise these self-proclaimed free, career women; those lawyers, judges, politicians who never even saw anything wrong with those outdated, defunct laws which are still applied in this day and age. I despise all those “independent, strong” women who claim to have gained freedom because they now get to be “productive” by working outside the house on top of their usual household slavery and they pride themselves on managing to strike a balance between being a good housewife and a successful businesswoman. Did family men ever have to strike any such balance?

To be honest, I also despise any woman who actually gets married under these current Lebanese laws. However, I can understand, up to a point, how people can sometimes be blinded by their society’s normalization of abnormal situations, not know their rights, and not understand what they’re getting themselves into. What I can’t accept and respect are those submissive, spineless women in power who know full well what the Lebanese laws say and not only do they accept them and apply them, they keep reinforcing them!

When I read the ruling in Samira Soueidan’s case, I felt as if my own hopes in Lebanon were shattered. I can only imagine how that persistent, strong woman must have felt after all that effort and pain just to demand a very simple, logical human right that she shouldn’t be struggling for in the first place!

When I read that the ruling judge was a woman, I thought it was a joke. How was a woman capable of pronouncing such a verdict? I wonder what she was thinking delivering it. I can’t give her any excuse whatsoever.

If she said, “It’s the law, there’s nothing I can do about it,” I’d have said: “Bull! Either change it or resign – that would be more decent, actually, and far more effective.” If she was one of those women who believe the ridiculous sectarian argument, which is brandished whenever they have no logical explanation to their absurd restrictions and rules, then I wonder how she became a judge in the first place.

So, a woman giving her Lebanese nationality to her kids from a foreign husband would disrupt the “impeccable” balance between the different religious sects. But a Lebanese man giving his Lebanese nationality to his kids from a foreign wife is OK? Why wouldn’t he cause imbalance? Who’s to say that I’d follow or believe in my father’s religion or sect anyway? And what does religion have to do with women’s equality, with a mother’s basic rights? Who’s the mathematical genius who made all those calculations to decide that Lebanese women marry more men from the X unwanted sect while Lebanese men marry more women of the Y wanted sect? What imbalance are women creating but not men and based on what scientific proof or study?

The truly logical step would be for both men and women to have the legal capacity to decide which religion, family and nationality their children would inherit. Nobody should be forcibly uprooted from their family’s registry and nobody should have to struggle to give their children what ought to be theirs legally. But then again, if this very simple logic were applied, that sectarian delusion would be completely exposed as the bizarre Lebanese oddity that it is, one which makes no sense at all. It would probably be the end of the world as we know it. God forbid Lebanon becomes a secular State, where the legal system guarantees equal human rights for all its citizens of whatever gender, color, religion, sect, orientation…

It’s such an ideal dream to many, but one which would upset the tribal, sectarian, patriarchal “harmony,” thanks to which the Lebanese people have been basking in a “heavenly peace” and “stability” ever since the country’s independence.

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How Do You Say “Hello Women” in Filipino?

Lamia Moghnie — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 22:00:00 +0000

Sara Emiline AbuGhazal

I have no idea. And yet I went down to Dawra and Bourj Hammoud on Sunday with a few of my feminist friends to talk to migrant women in Lebanon about the problems they face. It was the second day of “Hello Women,” a project we devised for International Women’s Day, where we stationed ourselves on the streets of 15 Lebanese cities and villages to ask women what they thought of women’s rights. In Dawra and Bourj Hammoud on Sundays, hundreds of migrant women go out shopping – the small percentage of them who actually get a day off on Sunday and can leave the houses where they work. And so we decided we needed to talk to them about their issues, primarily so that we, as Lebanese feminists, learn more from their experiences, and so that they, as migrant women, can learn about our different initiatives that support them.

From the beginning of the idea, some of us felt an unease towards the endeavor. Why, we were not entirely sure. But there was something about the dynamic of us going to meet the migrants, to talk to them in English and Arabic, to ask them about their problems, that made us a little hesitant. We already knew that dozens of them were dying from suicide or murders every year and we knew that almost all of them faced severe racism and abuse every day. We knew that many of the women would refuse to talk to us about their problems. We were, after all, Lebanese, and nothing about that warranted their trust. And we had little to offer except free language and computer classes and embarrassment for our racist people.

But we went down anyway. And little did we know that one particular woman would explain to us exactly why we were feeling so uncomfortable.

The markets were very crowded. More women stopped to talk to us than we had expected and every one of them had plenty to say about discrimination. I spoke to around 50 women from all sorts of nationalities. They shared the same problems but their stories were unique. Two women told me it was the first time they had left the houses where they worked in months. A group of four Filipino women said they could not fly home for holidays because of the travel ban. One Sri Lankan woman told me her niece has been jailed in Lebanon for over a month because her employer refuses to finish her paperwork and let her leave.

But none of these encounters prepared us for the intensity of meeting Nana, a middle-aged Sri Lankan woman who has been working in Lebanon for over 25 years and spoke better Arabic than me. I introduced myself to her and asked her what she thought were the challenges facing migrant women. She looked at me skeptically, asked if I was Lebanese, said something to her friend, looked at me again silently for a few seconds, and then said: “Ok, I will tell you about problems.”

Nana had brought her daughter to Lebanon a few years ago to find work. Her daughter was recruited to work in the house of a family in Sin el Fil. Immediately, the abuse started from her employers. Less than one month after she had started work, she jumped from the balcony in an attempt to escape. She broke her legs, her front teeth, and suffered a bad head injury. The family refused to shoulder any responsibility or even allow her to receive proper medical care. Nana had to fight them fiercely on her own to sign the papers to allow her daughter to return to Sri Lanka to recover. “She is your maid,” she screamed at the Madame, “but she is my daughter. That is my daughter.” Her daughter eventually returned to Colombo in a wheelchair and till today suffers mental illness as a result of her trauma in Lebanon.

Nana finished her story and looked at me for another few seconds. “Are these ‘problems’ to you?” she asked, mocking my initial question. “Are these problems good enough for you?”