Iranian women posing nude in video and "the viel" discussion

 

In class this past week, we were to read over half of “The Complete Persepolis”. This graphic novel brought up a major discussion in class concerning the veil that Iranian women were supposed to wear and what Satrapi was forced to wear as a young girl. Almost everyone in class had something to say on the topic, so I thought this article would be a great conversation started for our Blog. These women are fighting against the oppression that they experience everyday through their country, religion, and society by posing nude in a video to help promote liberation and freedom for the females in their culture. I think it is interesting because Satrapi made it seem like wearing a veil was sort of a choice and that there were fair arguments on both sides.

This article reaffirms Satrapi’s viewpoint in her graphic novel. For the majority, the stereotypes of women having to be conservative in dress and action, no having a say in anything, dependent on the man of the household, to not be political or economic leaders, go through abuse by their husbands or fathers. But there is also another side that the media so rarely portrays and that’s why I think that it is so important that people read this article. Satrapi’s viewpoint is dead on. There are some that accept and even praise the veil. There are also some who fight with everything that they have against the veil.

There is a little bit of warning that goes along with this video. There are pictures of nude women, given that their body parts are blurred over, but just in case some find it offensive, now is your chance not to click on the link. Here is a link to the article from March of 2012: Exiled Iranian women pose nude in video protest against sexual oppression on International Women's Day | Mail Online. The video is in a foreign language that I do not understand (I’m going to guess Arabic). But the messages of the women are in subtitles below and are very bold statements for them to make along with saying them in the nude. These women are not asking to be put on a pedestal. They are simply asking to be equal with men. One statement even goes to be so bold as to say “In place of those who want to…but can’t”. I’m personally proud of these women for putting themselves in harm’s way to make their important voice heard not only to the men of the country but also the women.

Why Are We Not Surprised?

Over the past few weeks the class has covered many topics that have to do with women being abused and constantly put down in our society. One article that stuck out to me was the “Why Aren’t We Shocked” article. In the article the author shows many examples of how women are seen as an object, in today’s society, rather than an actual human being. His examples were very good and definitely opened my eyes to many of the problems that are truly going on in our society.

Bob talks about social media being a big outlet for the objectivism of women, he showed examples of the Clinique commercial simulating a climatic shot of a porno, the stories we see on the news of women being separated and killed in a school shooting, and plenty of other examples of woman being dehumanized. While I was reading those examples I was astonished, I didn’t know if it was really true or not, so now I went through the internet to see if I could find more examples of women being dehumanized, and the results were endless. I came across many articles, but this article was the most mind-blowing one for me: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/04/to-be-a-woman-in-pakistan-six-stories-of-abuse-shame-and-survival/255585/.
The article showed that Pakistan was the third most dangerous country for women in the world, and gave some facts about how it was so dangerous for women. The article said that 90% of Pakistani women suffered from domestic abuse and more than 1,000 women and girls are killed in “honor killings” yearly. That is an extremely high rate of domestic abuse! I then wondered how so many women could be in this terrible situation, and as I read on I found out. The article went on to say that the women’s literacy rate in Pakistan is 36%, so many women don’t even have the ability to know their rights or even do anything about the abusive relationships, so they just deal with it. Just like Taina Bien-Aime said in the “Why Aren’t We Shocked” article “Once you dehumanize somebody, everything is possible”. From what I understand, Part of being a human being is having rights, but if you don’t know you’re rights how can you defend you’re self? This is one of the conclusions I came to for the cause of the objectivism against women and this has helped me better understand why NGO’s (Non-governmental organizations) are so important to the betterment of our earth.