Atena Farghadani is a 28 year old Iranian artist. She was just sentenced to 12 years
in prison for the crime of posting a feminist cartoon on Facebook. She is a genuine victim
of a repressive patriarchal society—yet you will hear little or nothing about her
from the American women’s movement. Why not? That is coming up next on the Factual Feminist
Atena Farghadani was arrested in August 2014. Twelve members of Iran’s Revolutionary
Guard came to her house, blindfolded her and took her to prison. What exactly was her crime?
She posted a satirical cartoon on Facebook to protest actions of the Iranian parliament.
The parliament was proposing to restrict access to birth control. She has been charged
with ‘spreading propaganda and “‘insulting members of parliament through paintings.’
Once in prison, she continued to paint and draw. She flattened paper cups and made drawings.
This was against prison rules. She was then denied paper cups. When she took some cups
from the bathroom into her cell, she was beaten and sexually assaulted.
Now Atena Farghadani is one of millions of women and
men whose basic rights have been ruthlessly violated. I have been to international women’s
conferences and met women’s rights activist from countries like Yemen, Iran, Egypt and
Cambodia. They are struggling for freedoms that most women in the west take for granted.
They are organizing against barbaric practices such as child marriage, forced veiling, honor
killings and acid burnings. Many of them are asking for moral, intellectual and material
support from American women’s groups. But American feminists are relatively silent about
these injustices—especially feminists on campus. During the 1980s, there were massive
demonstrations on American campuses against racial apartheid in South Africa. There is
no remotely comparable movement on today’s campuses against the gender apartheid prevalent
in large parts of the world. I think I know why. Too many young feminists are too preoccupied
with their own supposed victimhood to make common cause with women like Atena Farghadani.
If you look at texts used in gender studies classes, visit feminist blogs or websites—you
find alarm and outrage over the allegedly oppressed state of American women. Consider something like the Penguin
Atlas of Women in the World. This is typical of what one finds in gender studies 101. It ranks
the United States along with Uganda and Somalia in terms of women being “kept in their place.”
Why? Because apparently in both countries “patriarchal assumptions" operate in "potent
combination with fundamentalist religious interpretations." As the editor explains,
in parts of Uganda a man can claim an unmarried woman as his wife by raping her. As for the
United States, she notes that our state legislators have passed hundreds of anti-abortion measures.
But wait a minute-- the Ugandan practice is barbaric. The controversy over abortion in
the United States is a sign of a messy democracy working out its disagreements. This past year
I visited Yale, UCLA, University of California at San Luis Obispo, as well as Oberlin and
Georgetown. I found activist feminist students passionately absorbed in the cause of liberating
themselves from the grasp of the oppressive and violent patriarchal rape culture. Their
trigger warnings and safe spaces and micro-aggression watches are all about saving themselves from
the ravages of the male hegemony. It’s not that they don’t feel bad for women in places
like Iran, they feel that they share a similar fate. Except they don’t. They are free women.
They are the beneficiaries of two major waves of feminism. Their rights are fully protected
by law. Samantha Powers is the able U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and she is a prominent
champion of human rights. Well, she recently addressed the graduating class of Barnard
College. Instead of urging the graduates to support women struggling against oppression
in places like Afghanistan, she congratulated them for waging a similar struggle of their own.
She cited Emma Sulkowicz and her mattress as a symbol of women
coping with the struggle against oppression—and compared women in Afghanistan struggling
for gender justice with American college women. Nevermind the questionable basis of Sulkowitz’s public shaming campaign.
Sulkowicz lives in a country where laws, institutions, and customs protect her. The women of Afghanistan
do not. Afghan women are coping with the Taliban; Sulkowicz is coping with Columbia classmates.
The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations should be clear about that distinction.
American women, especially college women, are among the freest most self-determining people in the world.
Instead of retreating into safe spaces and focusing on their own imagined oppression, they should be reaching out to women like Atena Farghandani.
Oppressive patriarchies do exist—but the United States is not one of them. Millions of women are suffering.
There are few nobler causes than finding ways to help them.
Well do you agree that campus feminists should come out of their safe spaces and forge alliances
with women across the globe, struggling for basic rights?
Let me know what you think in the comment section, follow me on Twitter and Facebook
And thank you for watching the Factual Feminist.