women

The issue of sexism and whether it hurt Hillary is an important question. There isn't yet equality for women in the USA, not to speak of elsewhere. There needs to be. But the argument is apparently still raging.

Albert R Hunt of Bloomberg news lays out an elaborate case about why Hillary's sex was not what hurt her.

The case is much simpler and can be definitely demonstrated. Hillary didn't win what was hers for the taking because of a political judgement. Had she voted against the Iraq war she would have been the candidate, long ago. She talked about her "experience", not least in her White House years. But these ensured that she and Bill knew how weak Saddam was militarily and that he didn't have weapons of mass destruction. They fully understood the politics of the decision. She also made her call knowing how unpopular it would be with the younger generation in the Democratic Party.

The point I'm making is this: if she had not backed Bush on Iraq, Obama's early, critical distinction would not have existed. She was in poll position to take the nomination, she lost it because she made a fundamental mistake of judgement. The media will go on about how she ran a flawed campaign, was "out-strategised" and so forth. It's nonsense - the media loves to talk about style, methods, techniques, appearances, perceptions, all of which feeds its narcissism. It was political judgement that lost if for her, just as it would have done had she been a man.

The attention of the international media to the Tibetan issue is set to continue for some time. But a part of the Chinese media and internet community has been sidetracked by a 21-year-old philosophy student in Hong Kong whom they have christened “Tibet Independence Girl”. Tibet Independence Girl (aka Christina Han Chau-man) was one of nine protestors arrested in China for wrapping a Tibetan flag around herself during the Olympic torch relay and has now sprung to internet fame – for all the wrong reasons.

In a searching piece in the left-of-centre weekly The Nation, Betsy Reed parses through the debate amongst feminists prompted by the ongoing contest between Clinton and Obama. Many "progressive feminists" reject out of hand the assumption - as posited by a number of their older brethren - that women should vote in terms of gender interests before racial ones. Clear fault-lines in American feminism are emerging as a result of the campaign.

In some sense, this is a clarifying moment as well as a wrenching one. For so many years, feminists have been engaged in a pushback against the right that has obscured some of the real and important differences among them. "Today you see things you might not have seen. It's clearer now about where the lines are between corporate feminism and more grassroots, global feminism," says [law professor Kimberlé] Crenshaw. Women who identify with the latter movement are saying, as she puts it, "'Wait a minute, that's not the banner we are marching under!'"

Feminist Obama supporters of all ages and hues, meanwhile, are hoping that he comes out of this bruising primary with his style of politics intact. While he calls it "a new kind of politics," Clinton and Obama are actually very similar in their records and agendas (which is perhaps why this contest has fixated so obsessively on their gender and race). But in his rhetoric and his stance toward the world outside our borders, Obama does appear to offer a way out of the testosterone-addled GOP framework. As he said after losing Pennsylvania, "We can be a party that thinks the only way to look tough on national security is to talk, and act, and vote like George Bush and John McCain. We can use fear as a tactic and the threat of terrorism to scare up votes. Or we can decide that real strength is asking the tough questions before we send our troops to fight."

 

 

As Afghan and foreign troops continue to battle the Taliban in the plains and hills of Afghanistan, another battle is being waged – and lost – in the country's legislature. The Taliban don't need to recapture Kabul for their puritan and parochial values to recapture the public stage. Afghan lawmakers – part and parcel of the new, democratic government installed since the toppling of the Taliban in 2001 – are edging towards reintroducing strict bans on supposedly un-Islamic cultural forms. After six years of uncertainty, corruption, carnage and waning confidence, Afghanistan may be sliding right back to where it didn't want to be.

"Magic bullets" is the name for several forms of action in the gender field which can come across as a magic band-aid that will fix everything. Two of them are micro-credits and women in politics, and according to many women at the conference, they need to be questionned.

Take micro-credits for example: it is now presented as a solution which enables women to single-handily solve all their issues by creating their own micro-businesses. In reality, this is not entirely true (see our related entry written by World Neighbours on the openSummit blog), as the power of decision is still held by those who loan women funds. Without a complete control over their capital, these small communities of women are not empowered, but reliant on micro-crediting.