Western Women are Liberated?
Let me be careful here because I do not see myself as a misogynist. In fact, depite years of feeling terribly misanthropic towards humanity in general (and believe me, supporting evidence for hating people is not hard to find), I've found myself in the last few years making different choices about how I want to see people. Consequently, I realize that I actually love people, humanity, deeply and have a tremendous capacity to intuitively feel those ties that bind all of us on this planet together.
However, I continue to notice how many women that I know who react negatively to the treatment of women in other cutures, especially religiously conservative ones (muslims, orthodox jews, etc), which strikes me as sooooooo naive (at best) if not ignorant/unselfconscious [bear in mind, somewhere along the way self-conscious was twisted into something negative, which is bewildering; to be conscious of yourself, to be able to make choices and respond rather than react, is all that we have as humans. Everything else is pure reptilian brain...but I digress].
It's not that those women from other cultures are or are not oppressed. More so, it's how unaware western women seem to be 1) of the culturally-relative stance they are taking (I cannot tell you how many women in orthodox Jewish communities that I had this conversation with when I spent 6 months in Israel laughed about their own "oppression." It's silly to judge such things without respecting the fact that we are applying western values on something that is distinctly nonwestern; and 2) of how deeply and perniciously oppressed western women really are. It's just less overt.
Let's look at just ONE small example of what I mean: How many of you ladies out there worry about your weight? How many of you looked in the mirror today and felt fat (Or anything that relates body type to self-image) Who of you have ever had an eating disorder or knew someone who did?
To me, it's heart breaking. The world arround you tells you that you are so inadequate that you constantly have to feel guilt about eating or even worse starve yourself on purpose or eat and then vomit. What the fuck has society done to us that we have anorexia as a social disease? That women stuff their faces with a quart of ice cream, bury the carton in the garbage and either hate themselves or stick their fingers down their throats?
Of course, they have eating disorders in non-western countries, but it's called STARVATION. There's no anorexia in Indonesia or Sudan or Crown Heights for that matter.

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