The feminist viewpoint that rape and violence against women are statements of power and hatred rather than lust has a lot of merit.
This was proved yet again last fortnight when a British feminist, Caroline Criado-Perez, co-founder of the Web site, The Women’s Room, attracted intensive abuse and threats on Twitter for her campaign to get female historical faces on the British currency.
When it was announced that the picture of social reformer Elizabeth Fry on the £5 banknote would be replaced by that of Winston Churchill, British women were understandably upset.
At the time, the Bank of England’s governor, Mervyn A. King, argued that the face of the Queen of England was on every British note and coin. But the central bank’s new governor, James Carney, delighted British women by his announcement last month that soon, the eminent British writer, Jane Austen, would grace the £10 note.
Incidentally, Carney is a Canadian and first non-Briton to head the 319-year-old bank.
Men of the Bank!
Through an effective campaign, Criado-Perez had hand-delivered a petition with over 35,000 signatures to the “men of the bank” (apparently there isn’t a single woman on the nine-member committee that decides UK’s interest rates) to remind them that public institutions should be sensitive to gender equity and the British currency was a good place to begin.
Carney’s announcement about Jane Austen was made on July 24; Criado-Perez responded: “A brilliant day for women.”
But this campaigner’s moment of triumph instantaneously attracted numerous threats on the social media, particularly Twitter. The trickle soon became a deluge and she was threatened with both rape and murder. Many of the threats came from trolls — anonymous Internet users. The New York Times , in an article brilliantly-headlined ‘The bid to honour Austen is not universally acknowledged’, reported that the rape and death threats against her came at the rate of nearly one a minute.
“Several other women, from members of the public to members of Parliament, have also been the targets of Twitter attacks. Three female journalists received bomb threats.”
“I’m going to pistol whip you over and over until you lose consciousness,” one Twitter user warned Criado-Perez, threatening to “then burn ur flesh”.
Another tweet warned Stella Creasy, a Labour Party legislator: “I will rape you tomorrow at 9 pm. Shall we meet near your house?”
Since then, two men have been arrested and Twitter has faced immense pressure from users around the world to have a more active and aggressive policy to punish those indulging in abusive and criminal behaviour. While many women, and men supporting them, boycotted Twitter temporarily or exited from it, Tony Wang of Twitter’s British operations had to apologise to the women abused on Twitter. He promised to act swiftly to protect them.
Mindboggling ferocity
But what is more troubling than the abuse and threats on Twitter is the ferocious response to something as innocuous as the desire to see eminent British women honoured on their currency.
Isn’t this an eye-opener on how a section of men look at women’s success or progress? With reluctance, if not outrage, at sharing public space with women? Mind you, this behaviour is not from some orthodox Islamic country where women are pushed behind the veil, or a “third world” country where traditionally the girl child does not get as many opportunities as the male child. That is, if she is not slaughtered in the womb, as happens with such impunity in our own “motherland”. This extreme reaction is from an advanced and developed nation such as Britain.
Let’s look at an interesting study published by the Harvard Business Review titled ‘Great leaders who make the mix work”, based on interactions with 40 global CEOs known for encouraging diversity — gender, race and region — and inclusiveness at their workplace and succeeding because of it.
Carlos Ghosn of Nissan Motor Company recalled how his mother, the most brilliant of eight children, could not become a doctor as the limited money available went to educating her brothers.
He had vowed he wouldn’t do anything to hurt someone based on segregation and to Ghosn, gender bias was “a personal affront. When I see that women do not have the same opportunities as men, it touches me in a personal way”. So at Nissan in Japan, where women tend to have even fewer management positions, he has introduced quotas for women at the hiring stage, the article said.
Overall, for women failing to make it to top positions, the usual clichéd excuses were back — women were not assertive in seeking the limelight; they were not as good as men in networking; they faced geographical and other challenges pertaining to intensive travel and hurdles pertaining to childbearing and child rearing.
Small wonder then that barely 4 per cent women were found to be leading companies in the 2013 Fortune 500 list.
But the good news is that despite all the obstacles and discriminations that come their way — a recent blog on Guardian talked about the glass ceiling being even lower in Western countries for Muslim women wearing the hijab — courageous women are charting new trails. Free speech is one area where women refuse to hold back. Alice Walker, winner of the Pulitzer prize for her book, The Color Purple, is one of them.
Recently her invitation to address the Centre for Education of Women at the University of Michigan on its 50th anniversary was withdrawn because the donors who funded the Centre didn’t care for her views on Israel!
Economic freedom
Following this she wrote on her blog that “bone weary of travel” after doing it over 50 years, she didn’t exactly “regret not getting on another plane and being x-rayed, and occasionally being patted down as if I’m hiding something under my blouse”. Well, women travelling through London’s Heathrow airport now will have to put up with a lot more of such patting as there are threats of potential women bombers carrying deadly ammunition in breast implants. But the proponent of free speech did have two regrets; she’d miss “this joyful sounding gathering of women (and men)”.
Her other regret and the bigger point she made was that such incidents taught women “our weakness, which should eventually show us our strength: women must be in control of our own finances. Not just in the family, but in the schools, work force, and everywhere else. Until we control this part of our lives, our very choices, in any and every area, can be denied us”.
Amen, to that.