listen to the 'liberated' women- in the free world

The silence of our politicians on women’s security in public spaces is in striking contrast to their tremendous responsiveness to the sight of brown men insulting white women. The real problem is that in western society women’s equality and women’s pornographization have gone hand-in-hand.


One of the great ironies of our age is that women’s formal legal equality has arrived to coincide with women’s public pornographization. Becoming full legal subjects has not meant an erosion of women’s objectification, but an explosion of it. Women’s public sexiness is said to demonstrate their emancipation from repression and inequality. Even as sexy women are the oil that lubricates planetary consumption. Capital without women has no legs to stand on. Or to open. Yet no woman wants to be a whore.

At the same time and secondly, even as the film in the final section shows the images of women that saturate our public spaces, what it neglects to show are the images of young brown men that just as profusely pepper our public domain. Images of politicians shouting with fury that they are street-terrorists who must be ruthlessly hunted down, punished or ejected from society. 


When we consider the responses of journalists and politicians to Sofie’s film, it is striking how few if any comment on these elements of the film. The vast majority home in on the very first section and its images of brown men harassing a white woman. The much more radical elements of the film – its conscious emphasis on dialogue across lines of difference and its implication of western culture in the sexism Sofie experiences – these are neglected. In this way, the media and political response essentially repeats the patriarchal standpoint of the young men interviewed in the film: Sofie’s own explicit concerns are once again irrelevant.
The implication of this is clear: as societies, we are much more concerned with disciplining brown men in the name of women than we are in actually listening to what women have to say.


http://www.opendemocracy.net/markha-valenta/pornography-of-equality

We are Women Against Rape but we do not want Julian Assange extradited

For decades we have campaigned to get rapists caught, charged and convicted. But the pursuit of Assange is political

In 1998 Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was arrested in London following an extradition request from Spain. His responsibility for the murder and disappearance of at least 3,000 people, and the torture of 30,000 people, including the rape and sexual abuse of more than 3,000 women often with the use of dogs, was never in doubt. Despite a lengthy legal action and a daily picket outside parliament called by Chilean refugees, including women who had been tortured under Pinochet, the British government reneged on its obligation to Spain's criminal justice system and Pinochet was allowed to return to Chile. Assange has not even been charged; yet the determination to have him extradited is much greater than ever it was with Pinochet

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/23/women-against-rape-julian-assange