sad focus
Here’s why Ebert’s statement was out and out harmful and hurtful:
- It singles out ‘Middle East attitudes toward women’ at the exclusion of all other regions and all other people.
- It promotes a generality about ’Middle East attitudes toward women’ that is unverifiable, but one that easily plays in to orientalist, bigoted and racist attitudes toward Middle Easterners, Arabs and Muslims.
- It makes the indignities that women suffer, from unsolicited groping to catcalls to group sexual assault into a cultural issue rather than a grave and global obstacle to gender harmony.
- It wrongly limits the scope of sexist attitudes to the Middle East. This is ethnic exceptionalism.
- In the face of all these generalizations it obscures rape culture: ‘Rape culture is rape being used as a weapon, a tool of war and genocide and oppression. Rape culture is rape being used as a corrective to “cure” queer women. Rape culture is a militarized culture and “the natural product of all wars, everywhere, at all times, in all forms.”‘
- In the past decade of the Global War on Terror, brown bodies have been attacked on the basis of such justifications. If women in the Middle East are mistreated and subjected to derogatory attitudes and beliefs, then Western ‘civilized’ nations are justified to ‘liberate’ Middle Eastern women from their men.
