Patriarchal societies

Triumph for the FGM campainers!

Fahma Mohamed, with the support of The Guardian, set up a petition to exhort the Government to engage with schools and try to stop this horrific practice. Having got the requisite amount of signatures, she has met with Michael Gove who is going to write to all schools before summer – known as The Cutting Season (as young girls are often taken abroad and mutilated as this gives them the summer holidays to “recover”), and warn them of the signs and to inform all staff and pupils that it is illegal. A long time coming I might add. It has been illegal in this country for over 25 years and NO ONE HAS EVER BEEN PROSECUTED – yet about 6,500 girls a year are in danger of being mutilated.

This is surely a flagrant result of our Patriarchal Society/World. I bet if young boys were having their penises so mutilated ( I know circumcision is a form of mutilation but men can still enjoy sex, pain free as a consequence), that many died or were rendered infertile or died giving birth and all NEVER had any sexual pleasure, the politicians would have enforced the 1985 law by now and ended the practice.

But it is about women, girls, the suffering sex. I have had arguments with so called intelligent, educated women in this country about it, and their response has been ” it’s a cultural issue, none of our business”. It’s Abuse, Child Abuse. Just as with slavery, people do not really engage with it – slavery went on for about 300 years before people campained to end it – and women were among the first campaigners for its abolishment.

FGM is almost 98% in countries like the Sudan. Imagine it – an entire demographic of virtually “castrated” maimed women. A total travesty of human rights… The whole idea is that a woman is “pure” for marriage. And marriage is the only way forward for women. Again – where are Human Rights? And the most frightening thing is that women do it to each other for fear no man will marry an unmutilated woman.

Marriage is the sum of their ambition and expectations. All they are allowed to achieve.

Marriage is an institution that more than often incarcerates women and enables men. Men who are not married die sooner than married men. Women who are unmarried live longer. Says it all really. And somehow men have manipulated marriage, enslaved women within it. Oh how I could go on. And yes I am married ( but no I didn’t change my name), because in this country there are good financial reasons to be married.

I think I shall draw up a manifesto for Woman Kind. A guide to negotiation in a Patriarchal World. How to recognise the levels of conditioning which are so apparent now, no matter what people say. Just look at the news. Devilishly ugly middle aged men read it out – not a woman over 45! But are we women marching in the streets or boycotting the BBC?

Women need to be beautiful, young and sexy. That is their use in the public domain. Oh and everything else in the home, office and factory.

Women are most essential to life. The world would end tomorrow if every woman died – but you could wipe out the entire male population and enough women would still be pregnant with boys to continue the human race…

I have done some pieces to convey my horror of FGM.

The Patriarchal vortex that sucks women down, the bloody evisceration and the emptying of all sexual feeling – the lost bloody spiral of sexuality.

The splattered pools of blood the victims describe.

There are 3 elements I am working with:

the goddess who has been displaced; vanquished female power

church/religion, the blood these institutions have on their hands and their deep, deep misogyny

primogeniture and the importance of the first born son which has effectively enslaved women and, with selective abortion, now skews male : female ratios in countries like China and India and in similar ethnic groups in this country

So, how to show these in a print?

I wanted certain elements to recede and others – like blood, to be prominent on the paper. So, I worked with layers beginning with the goddess and using tissue paper for its light and translucent qualities.

First I chine colled the pink element and drew the goddess – based very closely on the Venus of Willendorf.

Next I added a blue layer and the baby boy for Primogeniture – which is written within the coils of the umbilical cord .

Finally the Bishop’s hat, hand and cross of Christianity. The final layers represent the richness of the pomp and ceremony of religion ( gold and texture) and the last layer is the splattering of blood.

More wars have been fought over religious differences and more people have died in and for its name than for any other male created institution… And with the advent of each of these institutions, we have moved away from the power of the goddess, the power of creation, Gaia.

Men have tried and succeeded in controlling creation. Women are now in some countries, merely vessels .

We talk of Mother Earth and she has been violated, plundered . Through disrespect and in an attempt to control her resources, mankind has altered a fine balance. We are all in the ditch now.

The Louise Bourgeois exhibition in Edinburgh “A Woman Without Secrets” was wonderful. However, I would say she was a woman WITH secrets. I mean we know only what she chose to work on – her marriage and her children were mostly unmentioned. She guarded closely certain privacies and secrets.

The exhibition was beautifully presented in a series of rooms at the Scottish Gallery of Modern Art. Only a few items are in each room so the space and light around them works well. In one room there were three suspended pieces : Fillette, Janus and Spiral woman.

The lighting cast interesting shadows which also filled the space. Fillette had two shadows. In real life I was surprised how small it/she was. Perhaps because in the Iconic Maplethorpe Photograph where Bourgeois carries it under her arm, in proportion to her it does appear large. But of course, she herself was very petite. Janus Fleuri was suspended at eye level and the contrast between the rounded (male) parts and fleshy vulval parts was striking – more so because it is in bronze yet the “softer” parts are convincingly soft and fleshy. I loved Spiral Woman and wanted to touch her , but only managed a surreptitious photograph instead. Again this piece is small – how wonderful if it were as big as Maman, but then again, the point would be lost. Spiral Woman IS small, her vortex is small like her and personal, not universal and not permanent.

In one of the rooms was one of the Spider – Maman series. Immediately on entering the room I saw a relationship with the metal of the spider inside and the scaffolding outside the window. It was uncanny.

in the same way with Poids, my eyes were drawn to the glass droplets which seemed so delicate, against the spikey twig like pieces of metal. Outside the raindrops hung on the trees’ branches in a similar fashion.

Bourgeois’s sculptures have a wonderful organic, tactile quality. They resonnate with their surroundings; they are of their surroundings.

Poids had an exqisite delicacy, and an exquisitely subtle balance to it. Remove any small component and the structure falls over. The Balance of Life – the interdependency of the heavy and the light. The completeness of all the components.

In one of the last rooms was Bourgeois’s final work – A l’Infini – towards the infinite , towards the end and the begining… This piece consisted of 16 drawings/etchings on A0 paper spanning the room. The themes of her life are there – birth, love, abandonment, the rivers, the arterial flow of blood in the veins, the beginnings and the ends.

She made these in 2008-2009 (she died in 2010), knowing her end was near, and in the last drawing the roads/arteries are white = empty, ready to begin again in the endless flow and beat of life.

I felt enormously moved and inspired.