I have recently been working on my three themes: the displaced goddess, religion and primogeniture. The three ways women have lost power in society. Women are oviously better off in Europe than they are in middle eastern countries . In Saudi women can’t drive – it could be bad for their ovaries, so the males say – yet they practice FGM in parts of Saudi which is known to cause death or reoccurring infections, trouble in childbirth, still birth and infertility. A bit more of an issue than driving “might” cause… And driving doesn’t seem to effect womens’ ovaries elsewhere in the world, interestingly.
Someone asked me why all these things seem so important to me.
It got me thinking and I suppose I have always seen women as equals and achievers – I had a determined mother, whose own mother had been widowed with 6 children and yet coped and was definitely a matriarch. I didn’t have a brother and I went to an all girls’ school where I saw women in charge and girls achieving. Unfortunately this school was also a boarding school and i have a real issue with boarding schools. They are unnatural. Children need to grow up not exclusively with their peer group but with all ages; learning to negotiate the itty gritty of daily life – leaving the bathroom tidy, emptying the dishwasher, taking in Granny’s logs etc. At boarding school they are isolated from these realities. Perhaps for girls, boarding schools are less damaging as girls are more nuturing by nature and absorbing a vision of women as achievers may not a bad thing. But for young boys – sent away at age 7 in some cases – I think boarding schools are detrimental. Just look at our terrible immature male MPs, many of whom went to all male boarding schools. Boarding schools are very much a British Establishment and yes, this explains an awful lot about our society and its misogynistic views. At single sex boarding schools (Eton) boys don’t ever see women as equals.
So what average woman wants to go into politics and confront this group of emotionally stunted, sexist, bigotted and immature idiots? Perhaps this is why the Conservatives now have so few women in their ranks whereas Labour has many articulate ones?
Another subject I feel deeply about is FGM. I remember being horrified about it in 1983 and then feeling, naively, as history has proved, relieved when it was made illegal in this country in 1985. Despite this, not one person has been prosecuted in 29 years and countless young girls have been mutiliated every year since. This is appalling. In France it is illegal and they are stamping it out – but some families take their daughters to London because they know they can do it there. The French authorities regularly police the Eurostar to London. Why are we so cruelly negligent in this country?
We need to change a whole global perception of the right to abuse women. Castrating women does keep them docile obviously but what a mockery of human rights. What have our MPs been doing for 29 years? If young boys were having their dicks cut off for “cultural” reasons i bet they would all have been standing on their seats shouting out loudly about the cruelty of it.
And it would have been stamped out.
Anyway, i need to get back to my examination of women in a patriarchal world and the images I am going to use…
