Horrific news this morning, another woman killed for the sake of a myth called honor:

Criminal Prosecutor Amjad Kurdi on Saturday charged a 23-year-old man with the premeditated murder of his younger married sister for reasons related to family honour, official sources said.

Kurdi also charged the victim’s father, mother and sibling of complicity in premeditated murder in connection with the drowning of the 22-year-old at dawn on Saturday.

The 23-year-old suspect, an electrician who got engaged a week before the murder, then placed his sister’s body in the trunk of the car, drove back to Amman, headed to the Jabal Hussein Police Station and informed officers on duty that he murdered his sister to “cleanse his family’s honour”, the source added.

The victim, who was married almost two weeks before the incident, was returned to her family home on Friday by her husband, who questioned “her fidelity”.

The victim’s family interrogated her and she allegedly told them that “she knew a man but was not involved in an affair with him” so they beat her until she almost fainted, the source told The Jordan Times.

The victim tried to resist and informed her brother that she did nothing wrong, but “he did not listen and killed her,” the source added.

Read the full story here

This is the second woman to be slaughtered in cold blood by a male sibling this week, the 6th since the start of 2008. Nobody knows if the husband’s allegations were accurate, the family never bothered and killed the girl anyway, and now how can we ever be sure what went on?* The woman was married so she must have lost her virginity, and the husband decided to report her “infidelity” after two weeks of marriage. At the sound of the word “honor” the victim’s family was taken by some demonic myth and butchered their own daughter.

Will this killer also walk and be hailed a champion of honor?

*Please note that the woman’s being or not being in an affair of sorts should not have spelled out her death sentence. There is no excuse for murder, and least of all for murder in the name of honor. All justifications for that, real or fabricated, should be made illegal.

A new atrocity in the name of female genitalia honor was committed in Jordan two days ago. Al Ghad reports that a man killed his 20-something, married and pregnant, sister by shooting her repeatedly in the head. The man then handed himself in and claimed his motive was defending the family’s honor.

The story in Al Ghad does not clarify exactly what the situation was that led to the young woman’s, and her baby’s, death. But there is mention that her brother suspected she was having an affair with a relative. That begs the question: how come the man who’s engaged in an improper relationship with a woman is rarely, if ever, treated with the same cruelty that the woman is subjected to, i.e. death?

In another story, a 19-year old girl was sentenced to serve 15 years in prison (originally to hang to death but the verdict was reduced) for poisoning four members of her family. The story goes that the girl poisoned her parents and two brothers because they had accused her of stealing some money, and let her brother beat her up, in the week prior to the murders. The girl felt she needed to avenge herself and stated that she wanted to “harm them” only and not to kill them when she presented them with poisoned juice, but they died.

There is no excuse for murder that a rational person would hide behind. But, given the situation in our societies, women are extremely marginalized and at the same time there are many doors open to them to pursue education and careers. The resentment resulting from prejudice against them when they have achieved just as much, if not more, than their male counterparts is bound to take shape one way or the other. You can only repress someone for so long, and then they’ll explode in your face and you won’t like it.

If that girl’s family had prevented her brother from beating her up upon accusing her of theft, she would not have been so angry and frustrated with her situation. If that other young woman’s family had cared to check the murderous brother’s actions and attitudes, there would not have been a woman and an unborn baby dead today. A large part of the reason many women are angry is because when they speak up they are violently silenced, when they dare to ask a question they are ridiculed, and when they demand their rights they are robbed of what little privileges they already have.

I am saddened by this current state of affairs. It makes my heart bleed to see the brutality of the patriarchal system that sees women not as companions and equals, but as followers and subjects. This won’t last, though, because hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.

In today’s news, the Jordan Times reported the following:

Criminal Prosecutor Tareq Shoqerat on Sunday charged a 70-year-old man with the manslaughter of his daughter during a family brawl in Karak at dawn, official sources said.

The 30-year-old victim, who was not identified by officials, was shot twice in the face and head, allegedly by her father, while she was attempting to stop a fight between him and one of her siblings, one official source said. The victim died instantly, the source added.

It’s definitely a good thing that the man’s crime was treated seriously, seeing as the victim is not only female, but also his daughter. These two conditions usually render crimes committed by male relatives against female family members extremely insignificant and very often legally and socially condoned.

The man was angry at his son, and shot his daughter (who stood between the two men) supposedly by accident. The criminal part of the affair is obvious, but how is this situation any different from a man shooting his daughter because he suspects she is damaging the family’s honor? In both cases the man is angry, the daughter is not proven guilty, and oftentimes is not at all guilty (think autopsy that proves she, and her honor/hymen, are intact). So how come legal authorities and society itself look the other way and let murderers out of prison after serving a modest 6 months when the word “honor” is mentioned by virtue of the infamous article 340:

Any man who kills or attacks his wife or any of his female relatives in the act of committing adultery or in an “unlawful bed” benefits from a reduction in penalty.

Is that not giving men a “license to kill” in the name of an imaginary term invented by men themselves? Any man can kill his sister in Jordan for reasons like taking over her finances or her share in inheritance, and he can simply cite honor as his motive, and it would not matter if this woman is not found “guilty” of adultery during her autopsy, and society would hail the murderer as an honorable man.

I am willing to bet that if that 70 year old man cited honor as his motive for killing his daughter, which might be his lawyer’s tactic in the near future — you never know, he would be allowed to walk free and celebrate his 71st birthday at home. The irony.

Apparently, in some parts of the world women can only grab attention when they strip naked.

Via BBC News:

A group of Liberian women refugees who have held naked protests by the roadside are to be deported from Ghana, a minister has told the BBC.

Hundreds of the women were arrested on Monday and taken away from a refugee camp in 10 buses, witnesses say.

They were protesting at plans to send them home with $100 - they demand $1,000 and to be resettled in the West.

“$100 is not anything you can start life with. We are all lost,” one woman said.

Stripping naked is a traditional form of protest amongst poor and powerless women in Africa.

The women reported being beaten by police. But hey, that’s not so bad. In my country, they get shot or stabbed to death for doing far less than protesting naked on the roadside.

I applaud these Liberian women for their courage. It seems a woman always has to invest in her body to survive in the world. A sad state of affairs.

Do you think it would be a positive or a negative thing if pharmaceutical companies came up with a medicine like Viagra for women? You might want to read this article before making up your mind:

A Dose of Desire

Where is the women’s version of Viagra?

The short answer: They’re still working on it. A bunch of companies have tried and failed to create “pink Viagra,” as it’s often called. Other companies have drugs in late stages of clinical testing, including a gel that recently began a make-or-break nationwide study with several thousand women. Give us five years, maybe less, say the most optimistic researchers and doctors. Though it’s unclear exactly how many women would ask for a prescription, no one doubts that the first company that gets to market a remedy for female sexual dysfunction, as it’s formally known, will earn a fortune.

A modest-size but fervent group of psychologists, academics and public health advocates contend that FSD isn’t an authentic medical condition, or at least not the sort of problem that should be treated with drugs. These aren’t the obtuse male physicians who for decades have been telling women distressed by their lack of libido that “it’s all in your head.” The anti-FSD crowd is mostly women, many of them self-described feminists. The most prominent is Leonore Tiefer, a psychotherapist and clinical associate professor at New York University, who has long decried what she calls “the medicalization of women’s sexuality.”

“Drug companies want to say to women, ‘You don’t need to know anything; you can have the satisfying sex life that you seek — people dancing on TV, the whole bit — without knowing anything. Just ask your doctor,’ ” she says. “I resent that, because there are specific harms that come from being ignorant and dependent in the world we live in. There may be lots of people who aren’t interested in sex, but is there a medical reason for that, and do we diagnose that?”

Arousal for women does not always lead to desire: Even Pfizer had a hard time grasping that concept. The company tested 3,000 women over the course of eight years before finally abandoning hope, in 2004, that Viagra itself could be the female Viagra.

“What we know is that very little of what’s going on with women and sex is below the waist,” says Anita Clayton, a professor at the University of Virginia’s Center for Psychiatric Clinical Research and co-author of “Satisfaction: Women, Sex and the Quest for Intimacy.” “Almost all of it is above the neck.”

I can’t help but smile at that remark; “above the waist.” I suppose for women to be more interested in having sex with their partners, a pill should be made to help them with juggling housework, raising kids, excelling at their jobs, being socially perfect, AND being content with their partners’ practical approaches to sex, if that is the case.

So now you tell me, will Pink Viagra be good or bad?

Funny how people are willing to protest against certain sentences said in a TV show, but they won’t be moved by the blatant gender discrimination in Jordanian law and legal proceedings:

Woman handed death sentence for killing her husband

By Rana Husseini

AMMAN - The Criminal Court on Tuesday sentenced a 30-year-old woman to death after convicting her of stabbing her husband to death on April 20, 2007.

The tribunal declared the woman, a mother of four, guilty of the premeditated murder of her husband at their home in Irbid and handed her the maximum punishment.

Court papers said the defendant was involved in extramarital affairs and her husband of 11 years discovered them and threatened to tell her family.

Fearing a scandal, the defendant decided to kill her husband and secured a knife for this purpose, according to the court verdict.

On the day of the murder, the woman wore gloves and stabbed her husband several times in the neck while he slept, the court said, adding that she then called the police and her brother-in-law, claiming that a burglar killed her husband while attempting to rob their house.

The court did not mention how investigators determined she was the main suspect in the case.

A government autopsy indicated the victim was fatally stabbed three times in the neck and pathologists also detected defence marks on his arms, according to the court verdict.

Shortly after the murder was committed, officials had told The Jordan Times that the defendant told investigators she murdered her husband because she heard he was planning to take a second wife.

But on Tuesday, a judicial source told The Jordan Times that the woman “confessed in front of the criminal prosecutor under oath to murdering her husband to prevent him from exposing her illegitimate affairs”.

The tribunal comprised judges Omar Khleifat, Mohammad Abu Dalbouh and Hayel Amr.

The verdict will automatically be reviewed by the Court of Cassation within the next 30 days.

I say fine, if the woman is guilty then she should be punished accordingly. But I say it is NOT fine that the Jordanian law looks so superficially interested in achieving justice when the contradictions in its folds are so manifest. The men who kill their wives or female relatives when they SUSPECT them of having ‘inappropriate’ relationships are ALWAYS semi-pardoned to the extent of serving a meager three months in jail.

How many men in Jordan are involved in ‘inappropriate’ relationships? And do we really trust that the infamous article 98 will treat women killers of unfaithful men with the same leniency it treats the men? Like I argued before, it seems that Jordanians’ understanding of the word ‘honor’ is synonymous with a woman’s vagina, which is why a man does not have much honor to speak of, per se, unless he controls his female relatives ‘vaginal honors.’

Think about it. What would a woman who kills her husband upon catching him in an adulterous situation say in her self defense? ‘I killed him to protect my honor and my family’s honor’? The fact remains that the discrepancies between the theoretical and the practical in Jordan, both legally and socially, are so vast as to prevent justice from setting in this country.

Rania Kudsi started blogging recently. I read her blog when I get the chance because she often writes about women in Jordan and in the Arab region and makes a lot of sense. Today, she wrote the following:

Tomorrow you may get a working woman, but you should marry her with these facts as well.

Here is a girl, who is as much educated as you are;
Who is earning almost as much as you do;

One, who has dreams and aspirations just as
you have because she is as human as you are;

One, who has never entered the kitchen in her life just like you or your Sister haven’t, as she was busy in studies and competing in a system that gives no special concession to girls for their culinary achievements;

One, who has lived and loved her parents & brothers & sisters, almost as much as you do for 20-25 years of her life;

One, who has bravely agreed to leave behind all that, her home, people who love her, to adopt your home, your family, your ways and even your family name;

One, who is somehow expected to be a master-chef from day #1, while you sleep oblivious to her predicament in her new circumstances, environment and that kitchen;

One, who is expected to make the tea, first thing in the morning and cook food at the end of the day, even if she is as tired as you are, maybe more, and yet never ever expected to complain; to be a servant, a cook, a mother, a wife, even if she doesn’t want to; and is learning just like you are as to what you want from her; and is clumsy and sloppy at times and knows that you won’t like it if she is too demanding, or if she learns faster than you;

One, who has her own set of friends, and that includes boys and even men at her workplace too, those, who she knows from school days and yet is willing to put all that on the back-burners to avoid your irrational jealousy, unnecessary competition and your inherent insecurities;

Yes, she can drink and dance just as well as you can, but won’t, simply
Because you won’t like it, even though you say otherwise

One, who can be late from work once in a while when deadlines, just like yours, are to be met;

One, who is doing her level best and wants to make this most important, relationship in her entire life a grand success, if you just help her some and trust her;

One, who just wants one thing from you, as you are the only one she knows in your entire house - your unstilted support, your sensitivities and most importantly - your understanding, or love, if you may call it.

But not many guys understand this……

Please appreciate “HER”

Amen, Rania. Read Rania Kudsi’s blog, it’s that good.

I came across an article in The Washington Post, written by a woman called Charlotte Allen, titled We Scream, We Swoon. How Dumb Can We Get?. The article is basically a misinformed and a misspresented pseudo-scientific misogynist interpretation of popular culture to prove that women are dumb. Part of what Allen says in the article:

So I don’t understand why more women don’t relax, enjoy the innate abilities most of us possess (as well as the ones fewer of us possess) and revel in the things most important to life at which nearly all of us excel: tenderness toward children and men and the weak and the ability to make a house a home. (Even I, who inherited my interior-decorating skills from my Bronx Irish paternal grandmother, whose idea of upgrading the living-room sofa was to throw a blanket over it, can make a house a home.) Then we could shriek and swoon and gossip and read chick lit to our hearts’ content and not mind the fact that way down deep, we are . . . kind of dim.

But another woman wrote a brilliant response debunking the myths that Allen treated as universal truths about women, and politely bitchslapped her for thinking so little of her own sex. Bitchslapping can be good, let’s hope it wakes Allen up and stops her likes from giving a feminine voice to misogyny. The great response came from Katha Pollitt, also in the Washington Post, titled Dumb and Dumber: An Essay and Its Editors:

The upshot: we ladies should focus on what we’re really good at — interior decoration and taking care of men and children.

Oh, gag me with a spoon. Sure, girly culture can be silly — but what does that prove? It’s not as though men spend their evenings leafing through the plays of Moliere. Susie whips up doggy treats, Mike surfs porn sites; she curls up with the Friday Night Knitting Club, he watches football. Or maybe the two of them watch “Grey’s Anatomy” together — surprise, surprise, about half the show’s audience is male. If you go by cultural preferences, actually, you could just as well claim that women are obviously smarter than men — look around you at the museum, the theater, the opera house, the ballet, the concert hall. Women read more than men, too, especially fiction, which men tend to avoid. (A story about things that didn’t happen? How does that work?) Women even read fiction by men and about men, further evidence of their imaginative powers — while men, if they do pick up a novel, make sure it’s estrogen-free. Who’s really the dim bulb, the woman who doesn’t see the beauty of “Grand Theft Auto,” or the man who thinks Tom Clancy is a great writer?

For Allen, it’s definitely the woman: her brain is just too puny. She cannot mentally rotate three-dimensional objects in space — and that, as we all know, is the very definition of smarts. Funny how that definition keeps changing, as women conquer field after field that was supposed to be beyond them. In the 19th century, physicians insisted women couldn’t cope with college: studying would send rushing to their brains the blood that was needed for the womb. Back then, nobody credited women with the superior verbal abilities and memories Allen says scientists now find women to possess.

True to form, she dismisses these as minor talents that only helped her “coast” through school and life. But back when the experts were explaining why women couldn’t be lawyers or professors or poets (at least not very good poets), nobody said verbal skills and memory were trivial; they only became trivial when women were found to excel at them. Now the sexists diss women as inferior mental-object-rotators. I have no idea whether this is true, and whether if so it’s unchangeable, but you have to admit this is a very narrow scrap of turf on which to plant the flag of manly superiority.

The two articles are too long for me to post here, but please take the time to read them both before leaving me any comments that have sweeping generalizations or irrelevancies.

I am entirely glad that someone like Pollitt wrote back and spoke up for the millions and millions of women that Allen pretends to represent but in fact fights against. This is exactly what I mean by women pulling women down, some are so infected with myths about women’s inferiority that they dare not believe in themselves as capable of anything comparable to men’s achievements. Allen clearly stated she can’t do much beyond add 2+2 together, called her brain Cream Wheat, and explicitly said that women are ‘dim.’ What’s outrageous is that she used the pronoun ‘we’ as if she was the spokesperson of half of the population of earth.

Wake up! Wake up! Wake up! Make the world a better place for everyone.