Feminist Collective

Fighting without violence

2009-06-09T07:59:00.000-07:00

Why, at every juncture, with such frequency, do I feel like being a woman is having to fight?

Whether it's against the bouncer in the bar, who tells me that he won't let my 3 male friends into a bar because they don’t want a “cock fest”. So I ask him if he would prefer a “tit fest”, and he says yes. I say that he’s being sexist, staring him straight in the eyes. He smiles; I don’t. He realises how serious I am, so he capitulates, “Yes, fine, your friends can come in. And by the way, I’m not sexist”, smiling again. Yeah, right.

Whether it's against a male acquaintance, a friend of a friend, who I have known for some years. He has always been fond of me, has manifested his attraction physically, and in a way that I have never been comfortable with, mostly because of the fact that for the vast majority of the time that I have known him, I have been in a long-term, stable relationship with another person. The friend is well, well aware of my boyfriend. So why does he still hit on me, does he still place his fingers on me invasively, does he profess to harbour a shallow love for me? Why does he not adhere to my articulated clear-cut boundaries of “friendship”? Sometimes, though, I am doubtful: where I am normally more forceful, in reaction to random guys who harass me in the street or bars, my rebuffs of him have always been mild. Yet, I thought, firm. They were not the venom that I reserve for random sleazes because he comes under the category “friend”. I suppose I was more tolerant of his advances, though undesired, because of a supposed friendship and respect. But the advances never stopped.

Whether it's against my own boyfriend, or “husband” as he is known to some (we feign marriage in order to legitimise our collocation in the eyes of the more conservative segments of society.) I told him that this guy, the supposed friend, who had been with us all night had been speaking to me and touching me in a way that made me uncomfortable, compromised. I told him this, not because I wanted to start trouble, not because I wanted to stoke tensions in our social group, but because I was disturbed. And I voiced my disturbance to the person I trust most: the man who I have spent the best part of five years with. Obviously my words, my vulnerability, did not resonate. My words spoke to him more about his own insecurities, his own pride, his own frustrations or regrets that sprung from not dealing with these repeated incidents coming from the same person, than my own well-being. I had sought comfort, while instead he sought to challenge those boundaries that had been crossed. He insisted that enough was enough, and he was going outside with the bloke “to talk about it”. I asked him not to, but perhaps was not forceful enough, as he did go out to “sort it out”. Five minutes later, he’s walking back into the bar with blood on his hands after having punched the guy in the face. Great, what a really mature, thoughtful, unselfish way of dealing with the situation, oh enlightened male partner of mine. I leave the bar overwhelmed in embarrassment, guilt and rage.

Whether it's against a faceless stranger who assaults me on a deserted flight of stairs as I try to escape all the stifling chauvinism that surrounded me that fateful Friday night. I see him descending the staircase behind me, him on the right and I on the left. About half-way down, out of the corner of my eye, I notice him moving in my direction. My immediate thought is that he is going into one of the entrances of the apartment buildings that line the staircase. But before I realise it, he is putting his arm around my head, his hand around my mouth, pressing his weight against me and pushing my body down towards the ground. Somewhere there is something sharp, maybe a key, and it scratches against my neck. His other hand yanks at my handbag. I scream with all my fucking might, scream. Screaming, over and over and over. As I scream, the thought flashes into my mind that I know, I know in all my time spent engaging in issues of violence against women, that screaming is the best way of deterring an aggressor. So I scream until it rips the back of my throat. And it works. I hear a window bang overhead, and he lets go of me and starts running back up the stairs, reaching the top just as a door at the side opens and a man steps out. I have stopped screaming, and I am caught between hysterical sobs and choked words of explanation. “Harami”, I manage to utter. “Thief”, as I enter the safety of a shard of light escaping from the open door.

Whether its against that very sleepy shop owner, that angel in disguise, without whose presence I dare not think what would have happened on that staircase. That kindly man who offers me water and tries to calm me down, but insists on saying “women should not walk alone at night.” But why? Why can't a woman effectuate a short 10-minute walk home in her own neighbourhood? Why are we made to be afraid?

All this occured, believe it or or not, within half and hour on a Friday night.

Now, the next day, I cannot wrap my head around the violence. The violence of prejudice, the violence of sexual objectification, the violence of uncontrolled jealousy and pride, the violence of harsh assault.

Why is there so much violence?

Why are women so often reduced to the sum of their physical parts?

Why are women used as an excuse for men to be violent towards one another?

Why do women have to be afraid to walk alone at night?

Why is there so, so much violence?

It is the fear of violence that oppresses us. Yet it is the anger about such violence that mobilises us.

Yes, I am left with a festering anger. I'm angry at the bouncer for his shameless exhibition and denial of sexism. I'm pissed off at my so-called “friend” for repeatedly groping me, disrespecting me. I'm angry at myself for not having been forceful enough. I'm furious at my boyfriend for his lack of self-control and punching someone in the face. I'm livid at the prowling assailant, whose footsteps and approaching silhouette will now haunt me when I walk alone in the dark.

The great challenge, I suppose, is to allow neither my anger nor my fear to push me to reproduce violence. The challenge, now, is for me to transform these negative, traumatic experiences, into a productive outlook, a proactive stance that will say: I will continue to fight. I will continue to express my dissatisfaction with sexism; I will continue to not let people touch me in a way that I am uncomfortable with; I will continue to combat violent solutions of problems; I will continue to scream when I am most threatened.

I will not let my fear, my anger, prevail. I will stuggle to not give into them, allow them to harness me, to inhibit me, to silence me. I will sum up all of my forces so that, at the end of it all, it is the anger and the fear that will give me strength to keep fighting. But to fight with my words, because I feel that is the only way to exhibit a strong, viable alternative to the violence that I have seen.

Congratulations on "Democratic" Elections?

2009-06-08T17:39:00.000-07:00

The results poured out late on Sunday and supporters of the March 14 coalition rushed to celebrate their victory of the majority of the 128 seats in the Lebanese Parliament. "Congratulations, Lebanon, on a peaceful, democratic elections," said every media outlet there is. Congratulations to whom? For what? Democracy? Liberalism? Secularism? What empty, hypocritical words used to describe our elections.

Congratulations, Lebanon, shining democracy of the Middle East. You have dropped from ranking 126 to 131 (out of 137) worldwide in the percentage of women in parliament. Today, we have 4 women out of 128. A few days ago we had 6. You thought that was bad? What we have now is 3.125%. Yes, that is among the lowest in the world. See the 2008 stats for yourself.

Among all the things I am fuming about right now - sectarianism being at the top of my list, I am fuming most about the amount of money spent on this elections. It was one of the most expensive elections per capita in history. Millions of dollars spent on plane tickets, leaflets, all that paper wasted, campaigns, ads, and the billboards. Yep. Who can forget the billboards? Maya Zankoul can remind you here. Sois belle et vote.. sois egale et vote.. almar2a oum wa oumma.. What a waste of the people's money, time, and intelligence.

And you know what's sarcastically funnier? The guys blame us. Yep. It's our fault we don't get engaged in politics. Why demand a quota? The floor is equally open to men and women. Women should run. And look! You got 4 women! So to run and win a seat in parliament, who cares what you want to do for women's rights. You have to ride the FPM ticket like Gilberte Zouein. You have to run for the dreams of your assassinated father like Nayla Tueni. You have to be the sister of an ex- (also assassinated) Prime Minister like Bahia Hariri. You have to be the wife of a popular party leader like Strida Geagea (only because he can't run himself).

Independently running Magda Braidy got 1966 votes in Zahle. Bravo, Magda. Good for you.

Here is the plain and simple argument for a women's quota in parliament. There are visible and invisible power dynamics that prevent women from running and even more from having a chance of winning. The overall sexism is an invisible example. Sure, you can't see it in a law or in the consitution, but it is there. Here's a simpler argument for you sectarianly-crazed Lebanese people. You love and uphold sectarian representation because - God forbid - a sect is not represented in parliament? Well, we need the same for gender representation.

Don't get me started on sectarianism right now - I am disgusted to the bone with how acceptable and important it is for Lebanese to refer to each other by their sects. It feels illegal to me. It feels like anyone who calls another person by her sect should be thrown in jail. That's how terribly it disgusts me.

Those poor lobbyists for the women's rights to nationality campaign. It’s been over 6 years of them screaming and shouting, and once again they ride the roller-coaster of empty promises. The domestic violence bill? We got excited about it for exactly 2 hours when we heard it was listed on the agenda of the Ministers’ meeting. And then it got bumped, just like that. Countless days of hard work gets thrown into the recycle bin by a mere few words from some guy in power.

And they had the nerve - both March 14ers and 8ers - to address women in their campaign and ask them to vote. And the women were ignorant enough - those hundreds of thousands of women - to volunteer countless hours for them, to go and vote for them. 3ala shou? What for? I am so disappointed in our social activists. Scratch the skin of most of them calling for women's rights and human rights and you will find a deep-rooted, subtle, malignant sectarianism and fear of the other. I am so disappointed.

This coming 4 years - just like the ones that have passed - we have to propose our plans for legal reform, for equality, for fair treatment, for all social justice to the same exact men in parliament. Either those or clones of them. And unless women get together somehow - beyond sectarian and partisan divisions - and demand (not request or ask for, but demand) equality in the true sense of the word - equality in all the visible and invisible manifestations of the word - we're not going anywhere with our rights.

So instead of wasting my time on anyone last Sunday, my friend and I drove around the polling locations in Beirut. We watched them in dismay. We got handed hundreds of little papers with candidates' names on them. We took pictures. One young woman wearing a "Je suis belle et je vote" t-shirt struck a proud pose for us in the middle of the street. It's true. She was beautiful and she had voted. And then we walked down the empty streets of Hamra and had coffee. And we drew a picture for what we thought was a truly democratic Lebanese election. And then we listed the 1million things we had to do over the next 4 years to make that a reality. And then we promised each other that we would devote every minute of our lives to fulfill that plan. And then we argued over the number of seats we wanted for women. She said 75, I said 50. We settled on 64 and then smiled at the issue we were arguing over. We have a long, corruption-infested road ahead of us.

And we'll see you in 2013.

Live blogging the sex workers' debate in the FC house

2009-05-28T09:13:00.001-07:00

the first issue is to understand the diversity of sex-work (paid intercourse, phone sex, internet sex...)

The second thing that is often overlooked is male sex-work and how a great majority is from non-white men, another great percentage is transgender individuals.

I had students that worked as escorts. From these conversations I realised that often sex is not involved. Sometimes escortship evolves into sex.

If we want to look at sex-work rights as labor rights, then we need to work on it in order to establish sex-workers unions in order to get rights. Because there is a lot of exploitation and exploitation needs to stop.

Why is there this so much exploitation, according to radical feminist theorists this is the nature of sex-work. According to Marxist feminism it's because there are very little rights, most of this work is done in the dark.

I don't know how this form of activism takes place on the ground, but I know one case study is from the UK where the unions worked to provide english language courses to the sex-workers, the language is one way to help them acquire the material they need to protect themselves (condoms and STDs for example). But also to push them to lobby.

Live-blogging the sex workers' debate in the feminist collective's house

2009-05-28T08:59:00.001-07:00

Our speaker is Sarah Bracke a gender studies background. next generation, a feminist network in europe, there were an issue with sex work.

At some point NG, first network that evolved in europe in the social forum.

The conflict started in the 2nd forum, in 2003, in paris. That social forum started with the women's day. The day became de-politicized, which was a problem for us. The 2 great issues were: the headscarf and the sex-work. There was a law-project against "passive soliciting. It was supported by many feminists in the forum. We had proposed a woman that worked a lot on trafficking for a panel. They wanted a young eastern european woman from a trafficking issue.

Then they asked about an abstract, so she was going to talk about how this problem is used for anti-immigration. SHe was excluded.

Then there was a workshop about gender-based violence. As we predicted there was a lot on sex-work (more than work).

We found it problematic that sex work is only discussed as a form of violence against women. So when one woman of our group that wanted to voice her opinion they cut the electricity from the mic.

There was a final report that was very miserable and negative, so a couple of us (in the mass of 3000) stood up and started shouting that they are not saying everything.

A group from barcelona, that had pink umbrellas (for another project) so those who couldn't shout they opened the umbrella... and then women with other umbrellas started opening theirs.

So they had to give us the mic, so I spoke and said that there is an official line before the debate. Then we started talking about the scarf and sex work.

So on the spot, we improvised a position and we refused to answer that, but they wouldn't listen and it degenerated into a "you take our husbands" kind of conversation.
After this we had to go home, over the years we tried to continue the conversation and to reflect on the issue.

Definition of trafficking:
There are different legal definition of traficking. It's usually when people are exploited because they are smuggled or helped by traffickers to come and lose their papers. This work can be anything, but it is usually associated with sex work.

We had a position about trafficking, since everyone has "policies and position" about it. The woman, (get her name) would explain to you, how these women that wish to migrate, they don't have access to routs of migration other than trafficking. They don't want to go home! These women keep on coming back, time after time.

For us it is clear to us, this "saving" project is a feminist political issue. So we decided to go and talk to them, to inform them if they don't know or expose their complicity with anti-migration policies.

There is a great problematic gendered view on trafficking.

It was clear for us that this position of "saving the poor other" holds a very sad history, colonialism and such.

But still we were not prepared to the prostitute debate. People concluded that we were the "prostitutes collective".

A dichotomy emerged for us: it's either you're a pro-prostitution or you're an abolition. For us this was not interesting. We said, wait maybe the problem is the way we see it. Sex work is an umbrella term for very different situations. So we voiced our interest in looking at it different.
In feminism it matters a great deal how you imagine the source of gender oppression. This is why there are so many feminisms.

This fear of economics and this fear of sexuality, are both represented as two separate things. This separation is something we could say really works against the feminist debate. hence the sex-work's difficulty.

If you combine these fears, we start looking at other things, like marriage where economics and sexuality come together. So sex-work is not just this marginalized groups, it's maybe marriage.
And when you start looking at it this way, you start seeing it differently.

Marxist feminism also looks at reproductive rights. And this idea that all the affection and care, that are seen as unpaid work, and it is very much gendered.

What we also see in europe, as women start entering the working field, where the traditional women is replaced by another "type" of women, that are economically and ethnically inferior!

We start seeing things differently, we look back at marital love is not so just affection, economics come into the picture too... and sex-work is not that isolated from marriage after all.

Women and elections

2009-05-22T14:32:00.001-07:00

After the "Sois-belle et vote" turmoil, adnkronos an Iranian presidential candidate, Mohsen Rezaie, also targets women. But Mohsen on the other hand is not just stating that pretty women should vote [for him], he is pledging to pay house-wives for being housewives.

Women are often an ignored minority in most society, and even more in the Middle East. In our patriarchal systems, it is the man's eyes that see the world, therefore a virtuous man would have virtuous eyes that don't give women indecent attention. Which often leads to women getting no attention at all.
But in fact we are there, in societies like Lebanon and Iran, women have almost equal chances of education and unsurprisingly they are eager to get an education. So we fill up universities, in Lebanon I can't really find statistics (if someone has information about this issue it would be greatly apreciated), but if we were to believe adnkronos, then about 70% of annual graduates in Iran are women.
These female graduates are not translated into the money generating sector. Why? Stupid tradition, gender-based underpayment, sexual harassment, lack of social support for family units... The list is long, too long even. But the truth on the ground is that women often end up as housewife (aka overworked, underrespected, unpaid individuals for the great majority).
This is exactly what Rezaie is talking about and/or exploiting. Women are educated and they are housewives, if he can draw their attention and convince them to vote for him then he is winning the votes of a a very big target group.
Resaie is not the first one to see this potential in women. The issue is how to convince the women to vote for him. And that is one of the three interesting points about this statement.
Resaie wants to pay women for being housewives, is he trying to appeal to women? Is he trying to improve women's status? That is not certain, in the end, upperclass society doesn't care if women make money or not. It is the working class that would care the most. So in fact, Resaie is appealing more to the more deprived layers of the iranian society rather than women per se.
And the million dollar question is: Hypothetically speaking, if Resaie wins the presidency and implements this plan, will that improve women's situation in Iran?
The answer is unfortunately no. Women's will not have a better life if their work at home is validated more. The problem is not that women's work is not legally rewarded (afterall, Islam does valorize women's labor and imposes on her man to pay her). The real issue is that women are just housewives. Framing housewiness into a money-generating business will reinforce that idea, women will be even more forced into becoming housewives and sexists will have an additional argument to convince women they should stay at home.
Hm, this is even trickier than I initially thought :)

Sex work. What’s feminism got to do with it? - Discussion

2009-05-20T11:37:00.000-07:00

We don't usually promote events or discussions on the blog, but this discussion is different. This is one of the most controversial issues that we are supposed to deal with as the feminist collective per se, or as feminists in general.
Please find below the invitation to the discussion.

Sex work often puts feminists in difficult positions. On the one hand, many feminists consider that ‘selling one’s body’ cannot be understood outside of patriarchal mechanisms that keep women, and gender non-conform persons, oppressed. That it amounts to violence against women. On the other hand, many feminists know that self-organizing and claiming one’s rights is the way to transform the world. And that this by no means differs for sex workers. “Only rights can stop the wrongs,” says the slogan of sex workers groups all over the world. This talk tells the story of how within a transnational European queer feminist and anti-racist network, called NextGenderation, we came to wrap our heads and hearts around sex work, when we were confronted with the strong refusal of a mainstream women’s movement to acknowledge the complexities and the issues at stake in sex work. We’d like to share our trajectory until now, in order to continue the discussion together.

I am not my hair - pseudo-review

2009-05-15T15:08:00.000-07:00

As I was running around the Internet and youtube, I stumbled upon a song for a certain India.Arie, the song is "I am not my hair" I had never heard of either the song or the singer.

The message is clear, she is not her hair, she is the person behind the appearances.
In theory we all agree that we are not our hair, we are not our appearances we are the humans within. A human being is a human being regardless of the color of the sink, the fair, the shape of the head, the waste and anything else related to appearances.
But what is interesting about this song (and the message behind it) is not the simple statement, it should be common knowledge. I agree that it's sadly not true when it comes to the actual life, but in theory everyone agrees we should be seen according to who we are not to the way we look.
But anyway, put that aside, what is interesting about this song, is the way the message is formulated. The singer is not arguing with the gossipy-gossip girls gossiping about the way she looks and the way her hair is done... No she is saying who she is!
So thumbs-up for Arie, you are not your hair, you are the person behind those appearances and judging from this first encounter, it's an awesome person behind.
Interesting fact #2: in the third paragraph, India mentions women struggling with cancer. And not surprisingly, this song became a symbol for women's struggle against cancer. With this paragraph Adrie certainly hits the right cord. A woman is so used to putting so much importance into appearances that when she loses a fundamental component to that beauty (such as a woman's crown aka her hair) she loses a lot, though she is fighting for her life she finds herself attacked with either disgust or pity, because she "lost her hair" when did hair become more important than life?

If you google the song you might find dedication made by women to women fighting cancer and those who have lost their hair if not their lives in this battle. India wrote this passage as a dedication to Melissa Etheridge (Female rock star, Lesbian activist, Environmentalist, survivor of cancer in 2007, mother of 4, blond... you pick the identity you want to label her with) inspired by the latter's triumphant performance during the Grammy awards where she appeared bald and alive.

Her performance brought tears to my eyes," Arie says. "At that moment in time, her performance was a juxtaposition of pain and beauty. It symbolized the beauty of strength

Interesting fact #3: check out the lyrics of "I am not my hair"... there's an adsense bar at the bottom of the page, I would bet you anything that it is an ad for cosmetics, non? You see, even if the singer is literally attacking shallowness and attachment to appearances, a robot like google ads would assume that the people reading this article would also be interesting in reading about products that help them cheat to improve the appearances.

Just thought like sharing :)

Event Review: Taste of Culture

2009-05-11T02:12:00.000-07:00

On May 2nd, the “Taste of Culture” festival was held in Souk el Tayeb to honour the labour of migrant domestic workers in Lebanon, followed by panel discussions in the evening in Masrah al Madina, a photography exhibition, and a hip hop/reggae concert to end the long day with.

FC members, Zainab and deema, sat down and talked about the event.

deema: So how did the taste culture festival at souk al Tayeb go?

Zainab: It was good. Good food, good music. Simba Rousseau, who was responsible for organizing the event, said that she was very satisfied. Basically, it was Saturday, it was Souk Al Tayeb, and there were many people there, from Lebanon and other countries; they weren’t there for that particular event per se, but people seemed interested in approaching the people who were offering the food, asking about the dishes and then buying. And those who were selling the food—cultural dishes from six different countries, seemed to be enjoying their time selling what they had prepared. I tasted the Sri Lankan food, chilli chicken with rice—very delicious!

deema: The event was held to honour migrant domestic workers on Labour Day. Were there many migrant workers there?

Zainab: No, not so much, which is understandable, because many workers are not free to leave the houses they work at, or to attend events. And how about the panels at Masrah Al Madina. There were two panels there, right? What were the topics discussed?

deema: Yeah, there were two panels. The first one was a “Lebanese panel,” of “experts” giving an overview of the situation of migrant workers, presenting a gendered look at how racism and sexism of the Lebanese society is working against migrant workers, and talking about the efforts caritas is doing to help.

The other panel, which was by far the more interesting, and the more important panel, had the leaders of the migrant communities in Lebanon to speak about their situation. The first speaker, from Madagascar, told about her work with migrant women, how she listens to them and offers them affection. As she told us, these women have sad stories to tell, not just about their lives in Lebanon, but back in their home countries as well.

The second speaker, a woman from Sudan, also went over the particularities of the Sudanese migrants’ case, where they willingly flee their country and come to Lebanon with their families, but their visas expire and for political reasons, don’t get extended. And so they become unregistered. Sudanese migrants may not live in their employers’ houses, but they face similar attacks of racism from society: from harassment on the streets, to bad treatment and underpayment where they work, with their children also experiencing racism at their schools.

The speaker from the Philippines added her perspective, telling us that the minute migrant workers step off the plane, the bad treatment begins. Employers expect her to work all day, she said, from the moment she opens her eyes till they decide to go to sleep. And she has not yet found the family that treats her as a human.

Zainab: Could you talk a bit about what went wrong? Cos some of us, and not just from the FC, expressed dissatisfaction during the panels.

Yeah, what went wrong was that we seem to think that the migrants can’t speak for themselves. That we need “experts” to introduce the issue and to give us an overview. But those women know their own situation pretty well, they know about the law that doesn’t protect them, that throws them in prisons under the worst conditions and forgets about them there. So that first panel—the “Lebanese panel” was not really necessary. It lasted too long, and we didn’t really learn much from it. It should’ve been all by migrant women. So that’s a lesson for us for our next event!

Dirty Hands

2009-04-29T11:22:00.000-07:00

By Amani:
Yesterday was just another day for me. I woke up got dressed in my favorite sweatpants and t-shirt and headed out to open my store. I was going to be working alone without employees, so I wasn`t really looking forward to it. I got there and the day was quite slow. However, at around 5, the door opens and this guy comes in. He needed help in choosing an outfit for his girlfriend, something short and sexy, something that shows lots and lots of cleavage. That’s when he got his first black point from me, but I smiled and remembered that this is business and I had to put all my feminist feelings aside for the moment. Something kept bugging me about the guy though and I kept thinking maybe it’s just the outfit that he wanted for his gf. So I shook off all those feelings and kept helping. Finally he decides on 2 dresses and tells me to please put them on me so that he can see if they are good. Naturally I refused and turned around to tidy up. And then just when I’m not paying attention he pulls me to him hardly and grabs my breasts. I yelled out so loud and my neighbor came in running and pulled him off me and they hit him.

I sat and cried not just because I felt invaded because some creep forced himself on me. I cried because I felt that what I was experiencing was a drop in the sea of the experience of rape victims. I cried for every woman that was ever harassed by a look, a touch, or a grope. But mostly I cried for women that were the victim of rape, women that did nothing wrong to deserve such a punishment. Women that were raped just because some asshole long ago made it a general case that women were the weaker sex and thus made every slime on the face of earth think he can manhandle a woman.

Now I’m not crying anymore, and I’m not ashamed of what happened to me. I want everyone to know because this can happen to anyone of us anywhere and anytime. This did not break me, it just made me stronger. At first I felt I was dirty, but now I see the light at the end of the tunnel. Dirty hands touched me, and when they did they made me a hell of a lot stronger. Before yesterday I had a brain that thought about women and said they were not treated as humans. Now my blood runs with feminism and my brain calculates how best to use my bad experiences with men to empower women. DIRTY HANDS TOUCHED ME AND MADE ME STRONGER. DIRTY HANDS TOUCHED ME AND FUELED MY BLOOD WITH THE FEMINIST REVOLUTION.

Makhfar

2009-04-29T05:13:00.000-07:00

April 24th was the commemoration of the Armenian genocide on the hands of the Ottoman empire. April 24th also marked 94 years of denial by the Turkish government that such a thing ever happened… and they called them casualties of war…

I go to work like any regular Tuesday. I log on Gmail and my friend, Lynn, gives me the link to an article in the press praising the Turkish cultural week. I do not understand, because two days ago was one of the harshest days in the year for me; two days ago, I was wallowing in transgenerational trauma and reading William Saroyan. I got angry and confused and after talking it over with my friends, I realized that Martyr’s day is in a week and it all made sense… How perfect to put a cultural event in the between these two events and diverge the minds and thoughts of everybody from Turkey’s past and its ongoing denials.

So Lynn tells me, let’s do something, let’s hold up a banner, peacefully. I agree with the idea; we tell our friend to create a page on facebook and we start calling up our friends and acquaintances.
At 7.30, we are around 17 people, we go to UNESCO , we walk in under the banner that says something along the way of Turkey, nation of peace. I laugh. Lynn had brought a camera, I take it. We start dispersing. Our friends, Ali and Sara, take the stairs and the rest follow and they drop the banner and my friends start going : “Hey up here!” So everyone looks up and I start taking photos, hysterically, because we know that the photos will mean the most, along with the banner.

A T.V. cameraman turned his lens upwards, I hear the security guy say : "check which T.V. that is and stop them.” A moukhabarat guy goes up and rips the banner, he starts yelling at Ali and Sara, tries to calm things down; they take us outside. In the meantime, we manage to give the camera to our friend and tell her to just leave with the photos, just in case they take it from us inside, she does.

We stick together and are eventually led to the Makhfar ( police station ). All 15 of us.
The faces of the officers were priceless, I guess seeing 14 girls and a guy in their twenties walking into the makhfar was not so regular, or was it?
Inside the Makhfar, they asked us for our IDs and some had left them in the car and had to call our friends to get them for us. To be very honest, what they ended up charging us with was walking around without identification which is quite hilarious and very George Orwell fiction-like.

Anyhow, they took those without IDs to another room, a room with a small television hanging in the corner. The officers were watching football. We sat there and a bit later, the channel was switched and names in Turkish alphabet started popping on the screen, we just looked at each other and smiled.

They thought we were all Armenian. We were, in some metaphorical way. I should have reminded them of the day Hrant Dink was murdered in Istanbul and the Turkish crowd gathered in the streets shouting : "We are all Armenians”. However, on paper, of the 15 people arrested, only 4 were Armenians. The officers didn’t like this much, they didn’t really understand why a bunch of our friends were with the cause. They kept asking us : "enno, you hate the turks, is that it?” We do not hate the turks, I do not hate turks, I hate any government or the power that denies others the right to live and oppresses them; I hate any government or power that chokes ideas and freedom ( Orhan Pamuk and Hrant Dink anyone? ), I hate any government of power whose basic value is denial of the pain and anguish it inflicted, I hate any government or power whose morals are to spread their culture by erasing other’s ( no need to let you know what is happening to the historical Armenian landmarks in eastern Anatolia ). I have nothing against the brainwashed masses, they are brainwashed, lobotomized and ashamed, one can only try to speak out and break the silence and the walls.

The head of UNESCO came to tell us how hurt he was, I snickered and Sarag, my friend told him, well my people have been hurting for 94 years and this is what you care about? A diplomatic affair? Before your fellow citizens?. We shamed them, they said. I wonder if he realized how much he shamed me as a citizen when he disrespected my culture, our dead, our memory.
We sat there waiting for the event to end so they’d release us. A phone call told us that people outside had gathered, around 200 of them, from parties and universities. They were not related to us, but knowing they were outside made us all the more proud and we felt strong. We called our friends to let them know we are inside, we changed facebook statuses. Nadine managed to update hers from within the police office. There was just something so powerful to be inside a room, with friends and colleagues and people who were there to support a cause you always deemed yours and that had suddenly become theirs as well.

They released us at around 11.40 p.m. we walked out from the same place we had walked in, in front of all the officers and the UNESCO main entrance. Some diplomats were still leaving. I was smiling.

We gathered at a friend’s house, got some beer, it was very emotional to say the least. My friend, Sarag , came up to me before leaving, she automatically realized what I was thinking about. We had discussed our identity so many times before. At the risk of sounding sappy, we hugged, we couldn't help but cry. It all made sense, made real sense. The banner, the arrest, our friends supporting our cause, the feminists supporting a human issue, it all made perfect sense.

The next morning my mom called to ask me if I heard about the protest, I said yeah, she told me : " your dad wished he was there." I replied, "mom I was there, it was our idea." She was shocked. She finally asked: "were you arrested? " I said yes. She laughed and told me she was proud. I thought of the police officer that kept nagging and wanting to be right about all of us being Armenian and IANs and I felt like saying, my mom isn't and what makes her special is that she gets it. She gets the cause, our cause, and like my friends, she views it as something beyond a specific race and ethnicity, as something fundamentally righteous, fundamentally human.

Shant

This article also appears in Menassat: http://community-en.menassat.com/profiles/blogs/personal-account-protesting

UNESCO ACTION.

2009-04-29T04:32:00.000-07:00

(To chant and sarag)

I could feel the heartbeats of a 15 feminist among the crowds gathered to celebrate the Turkish Cultural week. I heard 15 heartbeats rushing together forming one symphony and taking over the noise produced by the hundred or so persons gathered in the fancy hall of UNESCO. Diplomats, politicians were amongst the crowd, sipping wine and eating refined appetizers, and I could not help myself but wonder if they enjoyed the taste of blood lingering at the mouths after each bite and after each sip.

Most of us rushed to the upper level of the hall, and held a simple handmade banner: "Recognize the Armenian Genocide." The banner, during the first couple of seconds of its appearance made no sense to them, and slowly the noise started to fade. Few shouts from our side to confirm that yes, your worst nightmare is here, yes, inside your very intimate gathering, breaking through your revised history and shameful celebrations only 4 days after the Armenian genocide commemoration.

In the lapse of one minute everything changed. In one minute, and it seemed so much longer, everything made sense, why we were here, and why we were taking these actions, and why we will not stop from taking action again. Everything made sense. This is how people create their own revolutions. Upstairs, and before the Turkish secret service came to rescue turkey from this public shame, I felt I was one body, but with 15 heads working, thinking and acting in one organized harmony. I felt unbreakable.

In the hours that followed, we survived everything, the tactics of breaking us apart, by choosing the only male and asking him to walk with them to the police station, and it didn’t work. Some of us had IDs and some of us didn't. Still, each and every one of us refused to leave until each and every one of us was out. We sat in the gray room, we added colors to it. We sat and experienced anxiety, content, and anger.

The Darak defiantly got perplexed; a bunch of girls and one boy, the majority of whom are not Armenian, are all together for an action for Armenians.

Our action was successful, our point was made and it reached that Turkish ambassador and his ambassador friends celebrating with him. It is not in Beirut that you will be able to rejoice, and not in our cultural centers and not in our name. We made a point to the Lebanese people as well, that every time they will allow a circus of culture to happen, we will be there, smiling, looking as fabulous and as feminist as they imagine.

Now, that we are all out, safe, stronger and powerful, we need to thank our Armenian friends who inspired us to go. We, and now that we are all out, should believe that we are all Armenians from now on, we are all Palestinians, we are all working class people looking for inspiration, we are women eager to make the change that will set us all free.

Our Feminist Activists Are Out!

2009-04-28T14:44:00.000-07:00

Inside the UNESCO Palace, during the celebration of the cultural ties between turkey and Lebanon, our feminist activists dropped the banners that called for the recognition of the Armenian Genocide. For that, fifteen feminists were detained, and their ID’s were taken.

Finally, three hours later, when the “celebrations” ended, they were released and their ID’s were returned. They're all fine and in great spirits.

More details later!

Cultural Ties, Genocide and Democracy

2009-04-28T12:33:00.001-07:00

Posted by Jay:

Tuesday April 28, 2009: Today morning, I got to work, and I logged onto Gmail, as usual. A while later, I saw my friend Shant’s chat status voicing rage towards the Lebanese government. Intrigued, I asked her what was going on. She pasted the below excerpt from the Daily Star for me:

“BEIRUT: Turkish Cultural Week opened Monday evening with a lavish meal organized by the Turkish Embassy in Beirut. The week's events aim to strengthen cultural ties between the two countries, with a wide range of activities taking place in Beirut and in the northern city of Tripoli, with the goal of embracing the cultural richness of the two Mediterranean countries.”

Naturally, I understood her frustration; I was more than irritated myself. To launch a “cultural tie strengthening” event with a nation responsible for mass genocide a mere THREE days after the Armenian Genocide’s 94th year unrecognised is more than disrespectful - it’s downright disgusting. Slowly, it flared up, and resulted in a decision to protest the Cultural Week at the turkish traditional and contemporary music concert that was to take place at the UNESCO Palace later in the evening.

We spread the word throughout the day using our available means (namely Facebook) – and the number of people to confirm attendance steadily rose during the day. At 19.30, armed with nothing but banners stating “Recognise the Armenian Genocide”, 15 young women and men set out to Corniche el Mazraa, to the UNESCO Palace, and revealed the banner there.
Around an hour into the sit-in I wasn’t able to attend, I sulkily texted Shant and asked her how it went. Her response? “We are in the makhfar (police station).”

...That is democracy for you, ladies and gentlemen. A few minutes into their having displayed the banner, the police showed up and took “their measures”. Currently, the 15 feminists are being indefinitely detained in the Ramleh el Bayda Police Station. Everything is under control, however, the activists are calm and composed, and we are working on solving the issue.

About Us, And Them.

2009-04-26T05:52:00.000-07:00

I remember— back in ‘06, when a bunch of us were helping CRTDA gather signatures at AUB, in support of their Nationality campaign. A boy signed his name on the petition, then he asked me: would this mean that a woman would be able to give her Lebanese nationality to Syrians? And I said: yeah.

So he just scratched his name from that petition and walked away.

Strange how that ability, that power of women to determine who to give their nationality to, scares people. Like we have the power to change the entire demographics of this country. Like we can turn this country into a Palestinian state, into a sub-Syrian state.

Strange how racism works with sexism and with classism. Swayable, easily seducible, women can sleep with the “enemy.” Poor women, women of certain regions/sects, have lots and lots of babies, tipping the sectarian balance to “their” favour. Them. The Syrian workers. The Palestinian refugees. And then there are the migrant domestic workers. The women. The women of da7hyi and the South. The sexually active women. They’re all equally threatening. To the nation. To the middle class. To the family.

Sometimes I think that some men (particularly the very sexist ones) are more aware of our capabilities and potentials than we are ourselves. I don’t mean our abilities to change the distribution of the population in that racist/sectarian way, like that AUB boy was afraid of. I mean our ability to change things for the better. To introduce new ways of understanding things.

And that’s why we’re here. Because we see things differently, because we can see how things are wrong, from the little things that we have grown numb to, like the pressure on women to conform to impossible beauty standards, like street harassment, to more blunt things like how migrant workers are treated, how women can’t give their nationalities to their husbands and kids, how there are no laws against domestic violence and marital rape. And because we know we can/must change that.

That’s why we’re here.

Top 12 Reasons Why the Billboard Campaign: “Sois Belle et Vote” Is Offensive to Women

2009-04-23T03:53:00.000-07:00

Feel free to add yours.

Oh, so now you’ve noticed that women are important? When you want their votes?
You’re using a play on the saying “sois belle et tais-toi” (shut up and look pretty)? Really? So you think you’ve done it justice by changing it to “vote and look pretty?”
Are you implying that women are too stupid to engage in real-life politics? That the only way you can appeal to their voting power is by reminding them to look pretty?
What does being “pretty” have anything to do with the democratic process of electing a parliament that represents our voices?
How many Lebanese girls look like that model in the picture? Better yet, how many Lebanese girls put their bodies through pain and confinement and self-loathing to try and look like that model in the picture?
Isn’t your ad really saying: “Hey, men! Look at us! We have hot women! Vote for us!”
If you care so much about women, where’s the 50% women’s quota in parliament? Or do you just want women to vote for men who care nothing about their rights?
Where are the women in your candidacy lists? Not a single woman?! So you want women to vote but you don’t want them nominated?
Wouldn’t it be better if you sought to change the Lebanese elections system so that candidates are forced to represent issues and not religions? Wouldn’t that make more sense for women voters?
Where are women’s rights in the 19 elaborate points of your political platform? Hmm?
How about instead of spending thousands of dollars on those useless billboards, you put up a campaign that promises things women really need like protection from family violence, the right to nationality, and protection from sexual harassment among hundreds of other things?
So you want to settle for looking cosmetically progressive? How about some real political feminism?

Give me a break! All of you parties are useless. I’m going up to Baabda in June to exercise my right to vote in these elections because I can think, because it’s one of the only rights I have as a woman in Lebanon. But none of you will get my vote until someone presents a progressive gender equality platform. Till then, I’m voting blank.

What is Feminism?

2009-04-21T22:49:00.000-07:00

So what happens when you give a Chantal a camera and permission to harass feminists with a simple question:

What is feminism?

Enjoy :)

The Feminist Collective Song Contest

2009-04-21T22:34:00.000-07:00

The Feminist Collective is organizing a song contest. The purpose of it is to come up with a Feminist Anthem while promoting and encouraging the art of songwriting and composing. Our primary focus is to have a great song, written by one of you great people, to become the voice of our collective.

I-Applicants:

The contest is open to all Womyn and feminists in / from Lebanon.
Only one entry is allowed per person for the contest, and any multiple entries will be deleted. Your initial entry will still be valid.
Participants can submit a song to be performed as the Feminist Collective Anthem.
Participants can submit their songs on C.D. to the Collective’s headquarters or by email : Info@feministcollective.com

The information sheet at the bottom of this document should be attached to your track.

II-The Contest:

Upon completion and submission of the C.D. or by mailing in an entry, eligible contstants will be entered into the Contest for a chance to win our Prize.
The Application Deadline is July 16, 2009
The winners will be declared end of July 2009

III-The Jury:

Once all tracks received, they will be compiled and all members have the eligibility to vote for their favorite song to determine the winner.

IV- The Prize:
There will 500$ awarded as a prize to the winner.

To attach to your track :

Applicant’s name/nickname :
E-mail:
Phone Number:
Track/ Song Title:
Duration :
Genre:
A few words about you:

So what was going on since we last posted here?

2009-04-20T06:34:00.000-07:00

Actually a lot has been going on. And that is probably why we haven't updated the blog much. Anyway, to make my life easier, i will be posting separate updates throughout the day.

First things first, the results from the International Women's Day are finally out (Sarag had shared them with us more than a week ago so the actual publishing delay is my fault entirely). If anyone wishes to receive these results as PDF please do contact me and I would be pleased to send them to you by email

What is interesting is that the results are more consistent than what I thought they would be. Apparently, women are in general annoyed and frustrated by gender inequality in Lebanon. And that is in all of the areas that we interviewed women in.

Thanks to everyone who has helped us in this adventure :) !

Honor suicides

2009-04-07T05:37:00.000-07:00

Source:Women told: 'You have dishonoured your family, please kill yourself' by Ramita Navai for The Independent.

This is one of the saddest truths that we have to think about when we use international pressure as our tool for social change. Yes, women's groups have achieved victory when they imposed mandatory life sentence to honor crimes... but since not enough has been done to change mentalities, parts of the populations have simply moved from killing the woman (according to this same articles there were more than 200 crimes per year) to suiciding the woman.

And sadly, this is even worse, there is virtually no way of proving it. So instead of having the killer going to jail for a limited amount of time, he doesn't go to jail at all!

Now I am not saying that the Turkish groups didn't do enough, or that we should never use international pressure. No, they did a great job and Turkey is a really big country with various problems and a heterogeneous population. Sometimes even the best intentions are not enough, this just means they still have a lot of work to do.

First (woman) judge in Dubai

2009-04-07T04:07:00.000-07:00

Source: Dubai appoints 27-year-old as first woman judge By Bassam Za'za' on Gulf News.

Apparently Dubai appoints a woman judge, I can't really say I saw that coming. it's a pleasant surprise of course. But then again, how much do we know about this lady? From this article we can only know that she is 27, has a masters (with distinction from the police academy) and an experience in education. The four other (men) judges that were appointed apparently have only bachelor degrees in law (or law and sharia).

Interesting, non?

Residues of March

2009-04-03T06:44:00.000-07:00

It’s April already. But March has been long and eventful, and there are things that happened this past month that I just can’t get over so easily. Things like:

Some women on the streets during our IWD event. When we asked them what they thought of women’s rights in Lebanon. They replied, “the issue does not concern me,” On the other hand, we did encounter some amazing ladies out there.

A woman telling me on that same day, “I don’t care what my daughter grows up to be. I want her to do what she wants. If she gets an education, that’s fine. If she doesn’t get an education, kamein mni7. Whatever she wants to do, I’ll support her.” Sweet really. Although I don’t know if not getting an education would get her where she wants in today’s world. And I’m going to give her the benefit of the doubt that if this little girl, a good few years from now, happens to come to her saying, “I’m not going to marry, I’m going to move in with my boyfriend,” or if she tells her, “Mom, meet my partner, Leila,” I’m hoping the mom will say, “ya binti, I love you and support everything you do.”

IWSAW celebrating women’s day by paying tribute to the women soldiers in the Lebanese Army. On the one hand, I understand that the army is sometimes the only “respectable” place for many working class young people, mainly from rural areas, to turn to, but at the same time, why must we honour an institution that is built on machismo and violence—that is a basic facet of the nationalistic patriarchal world we live in. While I always respect individual women who are getting themselves into male-dominated spaces, I think, as far as women’s rights groups go at least, we could focus our efforts more on creating a world free from militarism instead, even if people call us crazy and utopian now; I think it’ll be worth it on the long run.

My friend and I getting harassed on Hamra. I wanted to kill those guys. Ok, I understand that violence may not be the best way to counter street harassment, but damn, the idea of it felt good. Good but still made me angrier and angrier every time I thought about it, about these idiots who think that they own the streets, who think they can disrespect women like that.

Discovering Winona LaDuke. Reading her All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life. Awesome woman, awesome book.

Disabling people out of habit - Marvelous world of Sexual Harassment

2009-04-01T03:20:00.000-07:00

Again, I need to vent! A couple of days ago I finished reading one of the very few studies in the Middle East about sexual harassment. Not surprisingly, the study comes from the Egypt, one of the very few countries that have finally broken the wall of silence around street harassment. I expected it to be bad. I expected to find an outrageously high percentage of women that have been subject to street harassment (83% for Egyptian female citizens), I expected them to blame the woman’s outfit (62.5% assumed that a woman is more likely to get harassed if she is wearing a provocative outfit) only to contradict themselves a few seconds later (31% of the women who had confirmed being the victims of street harassment also confirmed that they are usually veiled and decently dressed when harassment takes place).
In my mind, I expected all that, but what I did not expect is how men willingly admitted that they had often harassed women on the street (62.4%), shamelessly as if they were doing nothing wrong going as far as pointing/hinting at or exposing bodyparts (4.3%) and a decent percentage even admitted they don’t even feel anything when they do these crimes, they just do them out of habit (19.3%).
Now that shocked me! What does this mean? What does it say about our society? I just think we live in a very sick society where degrading and humiliating women just because they are women have become the norm. When you know that 83% of women are fully aware of the fact that they are harassed, their humanity is aggressed. They are aware of how damaging this is but no one does anything about it. We don’t even want to talk about it.
This has reached a point where men don’t even see anything wrong with what they do, they admit that they harass women as if they are just stating that they like football. Women are afraid to go down to the street and avoid doing so, they have nightmares and depressions, their academic and professional productivity are reduced. Why? What for? Whereas some men enjoy it, others feel nothing at all, they just do it as a habit… Just a habit… For a retarded, stupid habit, women are deprived of the street that should be theirs just as it is anyone else’s.
Men often brag about how they are better drivers, how they are more productive at work, more successful in everything, more confident. And I have a question that anyone is kindly asked to answer: if you had to go through a debilitating experience, such as walking on the street when you are a woman; If your space is either limited to the safety of your home; if every excursion is a terrifying experience… would you be able to compete, excel and perform?
Most men adopting this oppressive patriarchal system are more vulnerable and weak than any other creature, but they are protected by patriarchy, by the fact that they can let out any anger or feeling of weakness on women, yes women, Women on the street, family members at home, or female colleagues. That is the sad truth of this great value that we defend so fiercely, our values in this beautiful Middle East have been degraded to humiliating women just because they are women who breathe.

The study is written in Arabic and I would recommend you read it: غيوم في سماء مصر

Attending Lade’s workshop:

2009-03-31T11:34:00.000-07:00

So I was attending this workshop today, it was organized by LADE or the Lebanese Association for Democratic Elections. But I will not go through the details of the workshop, there is only one detail that made me smile (but not in a so positive way). You see at a certain point, there was some chaos which is understandable it was the after lunch session and everyone was a bit tired.

But what I found typical and unacceptable, was that one of the opinions was expressed by a young, intelligent woman. She was repeatedly interrupted by an older man who just happens to be a professor in some university. I wouldn’t have given it that much importance if it would have happened like twice or three times and if it wasn’t so evident. Nermine (the young woman) would start her sentence, after so much effort to get the attention that should not be so difficult to get in this ultra-civilized and ultra-cultivated environment, only to be interrupted before she would finish. Not by someone (who is the great male professor) who is making a point opposing hers, no she would get interrupted because the guy just had a point that he was making minutes ago and didn’t deem he should wait for Nermine to finish hers. No why would he.

And if that wasn’t so compelling, then another professor named Toni, started interrupting little Nermine just the same way.

Ok so maybe it was a Nermine thing. You may say that maybe Nermine just didn’t know how to impose her own authority. But then again something slightly similar happened with another young girl. Who was expressing a very simple concept which says that regardless of whether or not media coverage for one electoral candidate was positive it is a positive thing for the candidate because it is media attention none the less. But some guy that was sitting next to her did not agree, and he insisted on his point of view without giving any substantial evidence or even thinking about what that young lady was saying.

But if you still don’t believe me then you should have been there and you would have noticed that for example women were present but did not have much to say, as participants. The most persistent commentators were men. Nermine and her friend were almost the only females that talked.

I am not saying that the organizers or facilitators were sexism or misogynists. No, they were not. And I am not saying that the professors were consciously interrupting or silencing the women. No they were not aware of it. But in our minds (all of us) respect is always more due to older, men with degrees than it is to younger women. And again if you do not believe all you have to do, is google professor, and tell me at which page will you find the first woman?

if kids can do it then so can we - مؤازرة

2009-03-27T02:09:00.000-07:00

بإختصار القصة وما فيا، كان في رجّال عم بيجرّب يخطف بنت زغيرة (سبع سنين) من مدرستا. فواحد من رفقاتا (ثمان سنين) بيهجم عليه وبيضل يلبّطو توقع المجرم

هيدا اللي لازم يعملوا النسوان! لازم نوقف سوا ونلبّط. يمكن الرا لوحدا ما بتقدر تربح مشكل مع رجّال (أنا بقول مبلى، بس إنو سلّمنا جدلاً إنو لأ) بس إذا إبن ثمان سنين وقّف عملية خطف فا أكيد أيّة مرا كمان قادرة توقّف ايّة جريمة. النسوان بهل مجتمع لازم يفهموا إنو كل مرة أنا بشوف مرا عم تنهان أو تتعنّف واجباتي إتصرّف. وإلا أنا بكون أنا كمان مشاركة بالجريمة

Sexual Harassment - The Frustration

2009-03-24T02:52:00.000-07:00

I always knew I would end up working on street harassment, I just knew it. At times I felt it's too much work to do, that it's too big for me or even for civil society all together to work, at times I thought that the world is just waiting for my signal and that I will change the WORLD.
So I finally got my act together and started writing this plan, how to eradicate street harassment... right? And in my head it seemed like such a cool plan.
Now I after spending a very long weekend writing and fixing the plan I was only done with 50% of the first draft of the plan and then more time passed and I worked even more. I still had like 20% but I was stuck. So I thought I'd research what others have done and now I am not sure how to quantify that I have over with.
There were and there are lots of people working on street harassment, it's an agonizing job. The more I work the more I realize my work is so far from being complete. I never understood how can writing a plan take so much time, but now I understand. It's like the more you do the more you find out you need to do more.
I am not sure if I am supposed to be thrilled about that or frustrated. On one hand, harassment is very personal, very intimate, very complicated and each survivor has to go deep inside her/his being to find answers to harassment, its motives and its mechanisms. But at the same time, the woman's body has always been the battlefield of the most political/public war ever (and no, the use of "ever" is not exaggerated).
Society has to change, women have to change, men have to change, you have to change, I have to change, you and me have to change.
That's a lot of "changes" that need to take place, don't you think? And all this to stop sexually frustrated and blind mobs from scaring the shit of every penis-deprived person on earth.
Back to the plan I guess.

Sexism is a Sin!

2009-03-19T06:45:00.000-07:00

As we all already know, March is Women's month, and among the causes women fight for around the world, is a cause I have believed in since I was very young; Women's Ordination. For those of you who don't know what that means, it consists of women's right to become priests, deacons, and bishops in the Catholic Church.

While preparing for our international women's day activities last week, a friend of mine asked me how I can be a feminist and still be religious. I answered back with a question: how can you be a feminist and still live in Lebanon? Lebanon is a country where women are extremely oppressed. Lebanese society does not acknowledge women as full human beings, and, still, we're here instead of moving to another country where women have full equality. We stay here and fight for our rights because we love our country, because we believe in it, and because we believe things can change.

The Roman Catholic church has a patriarchal structure that oppresses women today, and a lot of people who don’t want to give up on their religion and their church work on changing this situation to "return the church they love back to the example of Jesus, to be a radical table community where all are invited and included." The Women's Ordination Conference (WOC) is an organization that fights for women's equality in church, and celebrates diversity of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, language and symbol in the church community. Among their causes are:

1. Work for women's equality and justice in all dimensions of life and ministry in the church

2. Eliminate all forms of domination, discrimination and oppression against women in the church

3. Advocate for inclusive, democratic and transparent church structures

4. Promote feminist, womanist, mujerista, and other liberating spiritualities

5. Change the word ‘man’ to ‘person’ in Canon 1024

So, the reason I am posting this today is because next week, on March 25, they celebrate the World Day of Prayer in Support for Women's Ordination. Among their very cool slogans are:

“Sexism is a Sin!"

"Jesus included women. When will you?”

" You can't preach justice unless you practice justice."

"Equal RITES for women,"

and my personal favorite: "God is not a boy's name."

Rania Ig.

Lebanese Writer May Menasa Calls on Lebanese Women to Unite

2009-03-18T13:50:00.000-07:00

بمبة سيليكون - Review

2009-03-12T02:07:00.000-07:00

On my way to see the play “بمبة سيليكون” in LAU I was telling my friend Amie why in Lebanon we have sense humor that u don’t find in any other country in the Arab world (according to her). We are funny, yes we make fun of everything, we laugh and joke about our wars, our politicians, our pain.

We have it our blood we are funny people that make fun of everything without realizing the amount of pain behind it, we make fun of politicians and people laugh and people from out side this country do they realize how much pain and hard living these politicians are causing us.

بمبة سيليكون a play that’s being shown for free on the occasion of International Womyn’s Day directed by a feminist as I heard, so I was very interested to see what it is, I walked into the theater a woman sleeping on the floor in a living room that sounded very much from our reality.

The stage was divided in two spaces, the first was where the caller’s bedroom and it occupied most of the stage and the second was the office of the operator which was above the rest of the stage and restricted to the left side only. In the background Majida El Roumi music and the sound of the TV indicating that the story took place during the 2006 war.

The play starts with a woman screaming and calling the doctor’s clinic, at that moment u would think that she was having a baby. After calling the clinic 4 times the secretary walks in and answers the phone and then the woman stands from behind the coach and you would notice D33 size boobs.

My silicon exploded because of the pressure of war planes and bombing, said the panicking woman.
Well the doctor ran away with his family and I can’t really do anything for you, answers the secretary in the office.

These two sentences started the dialogue which was the backbone of the whole play.

And then after something exploding in Beirut they both freak out and start screaming one of them is scared for her life while the other is scared of the silicon is in her blood which she fears might kill her. The secretary makes it clear that it won’t happen.
Both characters go through a lot of emotional stages, at some point they are crying and then they would be gossiping about their lives and they would forget the war outside.
That explains exactly the reality of a lot of women in our society and shallowness of their lives.

It was a funny play and I couldn’t help myself from laughing although I see it as a sad play.

The audience laughed all through the play especially when the actresses were making a fool out themselves; talking about bra sizes, marriage and sex-positions that will make you pregnant.

It was not funny at all and I know for a fact that the woman who wrote the play wanted people to see the sad reality behind this humor, but the question is how many people really saw that and understood it.

We make fun of things, we laugh at our own misery and people laugh with us, without paying attention to the suffering behind every joke. And that is our main problem while working on any issue in this country. We are too busy laughing that will always create boundaries that will prevent us from addressing our issues and changing mentalities.

Zainab Nasser

IWD - a round-up of resources

2009-03-11T04:37:00.000-07:00

Today is Wednesday the 11th of March 2009. Three days after the memorable IWD 2009. The community is still very buzzed about it. Everytime two FC members meet they still talk about either the event itself or the reactions to it.

The staff and participants did a great job putting up resources (pictures, videos and articles). If you want to check pictures please check:

the FC website: Women's Day Sit-In

But also the facebook pictures page. And if you have a facebook page take this chance to join the FC facebook page ;)

In the last two days our resident filmmaker Chantal edited a lot of short movies that she uploaded to the YouTube Channel that she created also. For now, we have four interesting videos:

Solidarity with Migrant Workers' sit in:

A man's opinion about women's rights:

A compilation of the different teams' work in Beirut and beyond:

And finally the Sit-in, which is not exactly IWD but the FC had participated in it also:

Sit in against discrimination Sodeco Square Lebanon
Uploaded by spookyprods

Now as for Press Coverage, the FC has been mentioned, so far, in:

March 11, Daily Star: Sit-ins look to highlight gender discrimination

March 8, Al-Safir: المجموعة النسوية تسأل وامرأة تجاوب

March 8, Al-Mustakbal: النسوية تتابع حملة يوم المرأة: لسنا ضد الرجال بل ضد الذكورية

March 8, Now Lebanon: A Woman's place?

March 7, Al-Mustakbal: النسوية تخترق شوارع بيروت في يوم المرأة: لا للتمييز والعنف والقوانين الجائرة

March 6, Daily Star: Feminists Take Aim at Male-Centered Politics

March 5, Al-Akhbar: في يوم المرأة هيّا إلى الشارع

Solidarity With Domestic Migrant Workers in Lebanon - International Women's Day

2009-03-10T06:43:00.000-07:00

Sunday was a day to remember, as we all walked proudly with our shirts, made especially for this occasion, in Hamra street and then on Corniche el Manara. People couldn't help but look at us since we were walking in groups of twos and threes, because maybe for some, we looked like a football team.

Yesterday was beyond amazing. At first, we had a sit-in for Foreign Workers in Lebanon and to me the cause was something that matters more than I show because these people don’t have any other resort in a country that is not theirs and they don’t have anyone to fall back on.

At 2:00 pm, all the Feminist Collective members headed towards Hamra, Al-Madina theater and it was overwhelming for all of us. I got there with couple friends of mine at exactly 2:30, got a banner from my friend and stood with every one.

Then I started looking around and I asked myself: where are the foreign workers? Where are the girls to whome this issue matters the most? I know it matters to us but this is the biggest cause in their lives.

The more I looked, the more I realized that this was like the upper class protesting for the lower class, or white people for people of color. I’m not saying there is something wrong with that but in a way it always looks like the upper society is feeling sorry for the lower, poor and unfortunate people and I never liked that.

30 minutes later, the foreign workers came and they seemed very shy and reluctant to come and be a part of it. Can you blame them? Really. Afterwards, everyone started to encourage them to come into the middle which was the right thing to do-- they should be the middle of the sit-in. But it was obvious how uncomfortable it was for them.

And when they finally felt a bit encouraged, the cameraman from a tv station started to harass them to get more footage and after they refused to stand more he reacted very violently; he took his camera, said to his assistance in the meanest tone ever: “ emshe ya 3ame sho mana netrajehon” and they took off…

After that it was time for us to leave for our own sit-in.

We live in a country where people criticize the West for being racist and abusive to non white people, and we live in a country where the color of the skin does not seem to be an issue because we don’t have black and white but we do have non-Lebanese people... We don’t really see that when it comes to racism we are still where the west was 50 years ago.

Lebanese people tend to think they’re better than anyone who is not Lebanese, European or American. They don’t see it and don’t notice it but it's out there, and I think it will take a lot of time for this to change.

Zainab Nasser

The Day Has Come

2009-03-09T07:21:00.000-07:00

If you were given a penny for every woman being beaten up at home, you’d be rich. And this home we are talking about, where she comes every day to sleep, to cook, to do her second full time job, which is a mum or a wife, this home would be built on her economical and emotional contribution.

Women on Sunday the 8th of march would be celebrating IWD "International women’s day" and while some women in far some place are celebrating this day, others are being beaten up until they bleed at home, being raped in dark alleys. Posters and billboards objectifying women’s bodies are all over the roads from Jounieh to Beirut to somewhere else in Beirut, to Tripoli, to Saida, to Sour, everywhere in Lebanon.

To fathers that make there daughters get married to their rapists, for Honor, in what world is that fair? And what honor is that if I may ask? What is honor? Define it for me, and what definition allows another human to kill for it. Honor, honor was made for humans, what is honor next to death? Next to losing a daughter, a sister or a wife.

I still remember when I first discovered this awful fact, and I couldn’t believe it, by logic, if a guy shoots your daughter and stabbed her, would you make him marry her, to hide the shame. And what is shame really next to a lifetime scar and billions and trillions of psychological problems. So now let me get it right, why can’t every man who wants a woman and she didn’t say yes, rape her simply, and yah take her sister too, it’s a garage sale, rape one get one free.

Am not so fond of statistics but by logic I can say that our economy and it’s a new trend, is based on Botox and beauty products, loans for plastic surgery, little girls buying barbies, and tell me why barbies can’t stand on their feet? I’ll tell you why, because it’s a subconscious message for a little girl since she is 1 that she can’t stand up alone, she always needs a man to help her up,
but look at me, look at us, women, we go to a fulltime job, we come back home to the other full time job, we raise kids, we do stand up while we carry babies inside us, and we stand up for 9 month. We are actually standing up, ON OUR OWN. Fairytales are over, no prince charming anymore, there are women in the world and women can manage homes, and can run this freaking world, get over it.

Yesterday was the 8th of March 2009. A lot of women went down to the streets to ask other women what they think of woman’s rights, a lot said: “in my surrounding there is no violence. I am not concerned”. If you saw some of these women, please a message from me, tell her, wake up, not for you, not for me but for my nieces, for your daughters, for your sisters, and even your own mothers.

After Sunday the 8th of March 2009, for every woman I mentioned above, we went down to the streets to rebel, with signs and voices that cannot be shut down anymore. God know I’ve been waiting for this day, and the one after it, and after it. That day HAS come.

Maya

Migrant Domestic Workers Rights sit-in - What an FC had to say

2009-03-08T23:26:00.000-07:00

It was 2:10 pm as me and Layal were approaching Masra7 Al Madina in my car and the big shock was the humongous number of people who were there. We were surprised to see all these people we didn't even know standing there while holding very colorful and meaningful posters in their hands and raising them up.

We stood with them and we started realizing that they weren't people we knew, they weren't from the feminist collective, yet we didn't feel lost since all of them were there for this specific cause which is defending the rights of foreign workers in Lebanon. I was amazed by the different nationalities and gender of people attending the event.

As more feminists came and joined us, we felt more excited and more enthusiastic about defending our rights as women. Personally, I was thrilled to participate! I got goose bumps as one foreign worker started talking to one television station about her suffering and about her boss treating her like she was a slave!

It's about time we open our eyes and truly see what is happening in our society, no matter what gender we are, no matter what nationality we have, no matter what religion we believe in, we are all humans and we will continue fighting for our rights as humans.

We're not gonna take it, we're not gonna take it, we're not gonna take it anymore! Today was the launching of our cause, we will not give up and we won't stop until every woman in Lebanon has all her rights, no matter how long it's going to take, we will fight for it because we simply are feminists!

Farah Jaafar

at the corniche, we celebrated that something has tried to kill us and has certainly failed.

2009-03-08T17:19:00.000-07:00

As long as I remembered the Corniche, it was the space to hang out with friends to chitchat about some vital personal issues; also, it was always the space that required certain attire, something that would make me the least visible.

At the corniche, the notion of womanhood should meet the constructed idea of what a female in a public space should be. Nevertheless, women do break this pre-assembled idea by exercising within that space. The image is quite powerful for such a context, a woman who might be for example jogging, while wearing her tight sportswear, is certainly breaking the social codes, that is of course male constructed, yet it remains acceptable since these kinds of women are immediately labeled as rich or bourgeois. This labeling doesn’t mean that they are exempt from sexual harassment that might occur, but it fits within the idea of who comes to the corniche and the things they can do there. Women's liberty to practice a certain action is dependent on the economical class she belongs to.
Today's action at the corniche was both intimidating and exhilarating at once. The idea of using a public space that is fully functional on traditional dynamics and behaviors of men and women in public spaces combined too many layers. Before arriving to the space, the Corniche was as usual occupied by those who are familiar with its rules. It was the Corniche where people are enjoying their sunny afternoon. When we, the Feminist Collective appeared with our banners, attitudes and "looks," the space was immediately interrupted; an event was happening (whether we had planned to actually have a sit-in at 5 pm or chosen to simply walk) regardless of what we wanted to do there.
The interruption of the "mechanics" of this space influenced the already constructed idea of women being at the Corniche. It has done so by transforming the idea of a female, on one hand being in a state of proving constant decency and seeking invisibility, and on the other, to being one that is standing, fully co-owning the space and using it to her sole and complete benefit, one that does not comply with any of the already made tags for women within that particular space (such as " walking the kid, walking with male/family friend/ jogging, etc" but completely doing a different form of action that was clearly sending a very strong message " I'm not afraid to be seen"). This was all very intense, and perhaps very offending to the male pedestrians, which have made it very clear to us that we were not welcome. Yet, a question lingers in my head: "What about the women? Did their feelings/experience of the corniche change due to our presence?"

Our presence that corniche also created a spectacle, in which specifically, the "male viewer," was intrigued to watch, yet he was constantly offended by the message that "our" spectacle was delivering. Simply, the messages that we sent revolved about a new presentation of the notion of womanhood, where "he" specifically as a male had no role in that at all; and moreover, there we were, in his face, and completely out of his "control."

The intimidating experience of all of this creates a certain territorial relationship for us as women in Beirut. Some territories are friendlier to women than others. In addition to the amount of hostility that the women demonstrating had to endure, I personally felt that we endured as a collective and not as individuals an amount of hostility that might discourage some of us to continue or would create a certain preference to work only in certain areas. We need to understand that everything is changeable, and the few hours that we spent at the corniche is a vivid example, all we have to do is to gather around each others, regardless of where we live, what history we had and what do we know about life.

Today at the corniche, we celebrated that something has tried to kill us and has certainly failed.

The end of the Second day

2009-03-08T10:50:00.000-07:00

Ain el Mreisse. Yes the Feminists went to Ain el Mreisse! A spot reputed for the harassment taking place so intensively. But the feminists did one hell of a great job!

3an jad bravo everyone.

What funny/sad was that the girls got harassed exactly as they were talking about... harassment. Sara actually had to listen to some misogynist comments and sexist slurs as she was reading the Feminist Collective values.

Some random guy selling coffee on the street came specifically to us to tell us that women only fit in the kitchen, cooking riz bla7m, w tabboule w, w... And then he goes on to enumerate all the great meals that women can cook. And then at the end he also mentions the fact that they can also raise kids. Thank you Mister sexist! Thank you for telling me about all the terrific meals that we can cook.

Another random woman totally tricked us, she came to the sit-in saying this is very interesting and seemed very pro-women's rights. Then as soon as she has the flier in her hand starts wondering "what's the big deal?" then she goes on and on about how her life is awesome and that there is nothing to complain about. I mean of course, if she has her rights then I bet others don't matter do they? Another piece of wisdom that she kindly shared with us was the fact that if a woman is harassed verbally on the streets then she must've given that guy a queue, said something, winked at him... anything to allow him or invite him to harass her, then she turns to some random guy, that had been annoying all the girls and asks him: "if you didn't feel the girl wanted it would you "tlattesh 3laya"". And I don't really need to tell you what he said, we all know sex-predators' mentality, right?

Another interesting form of discrimination was one of gender expression, as a bunch of young men started harassing one of our members because she didn't really look like a "girl"... Interesting, non?

Now you may ask why we chose Corniche for the sit-in, why not some easier region? where people would just agree with us?

The answer is simple, Corniche is OUR Corniche. This was the perfect location, the girls were scared a bit, frustrated at times, but still they stood out for what is theirs, the street are ours and no one has the right to scare us, and we will not be intimidated.

And if you think that we just wasted our energy, then you are greatly mistaken. You just should have been there, as the Feminist Collective values were being said, some predators were just saying sexist stuff behind her, but behind the girls there were women GRINNING! These were not the women that came to us and told us about their stories, they were people who just didn't interact with us, they just sat in their corner but they listened to us and they were smiling. That was priceless!

In addition, there were a lot of women and men that came to us with a lot of positivity, some talked about custody rights, a lot about nationality rights, and so many others too.

We even recruited one tiny feminist into the group, her name is Rahaf and she is nine, as soon as the feminists spoke to her she got all excited and saying that she wants to defend women's rights, women don't have rights and she wants to change that! She sat with us, wanted a feminist shirt, held a Banner, she was just all over the place... Just ask yourself, how does she know she has no rights? Behind every baby-feminist there is certainly a feminist parent an overwhelmingly oppressive society.

Then when all was over and we had to go to the center, all the feminist got into someone cars and we headed to the house where we shared our thoughts, and now as I am writing this the girls are arguing... about villagers and wolves!

P.S.: Villagers and Wolves is actually a party game, so don't worry the Feminist Collective is not really arguing ;)

صبرا وشاتيلا : اهلا بكم الى عالم الفقر

2009-03-08T04:58:00.000-07:00

صبرا

مشيت في شارع صبرا، رفيقاتي معي، كانت الرحلة التي قمنا بها الى صبرا وبعدها الى سوق الاحد ضرورية، فسوق صبرا التجاري من اكثر الاسواق شعبية واكتظاظا في بيروت. فهو السوق الذي يحبه ابناء الطبقة الفقيرة والمتوسطة في لبنان، بفئات نقدية قليلة تشتري ما يكفي. في الصبرا، تشعرين انك في فضاء اخر، فالمشاهد التي تنظرين اليها والاصوات التي تسمعينها قوية، نساء يشترين ويتحادثن ويتجادلن مع البائعين، الاطفال التي تبكي وتضحك، اصوات السيارات والموسيقى التي تأتي الى اذنيك من الجهات كلها، تضعك في مزاج اخر " اهلا بك في عالم الفقر."

النساء تمر من امامنا وقربنا ولكهن سرعان ما يهربن عندما نتطلب منهن لحظة للتكلم معهن، ربما في صبرا النساء لا يملكن اللحظة هذه، فالبيت ينتظرهن والطبخة يجب ان تكون جاهزة قبل ان يأتي الزوج والاطفال، في صبرا تتردد النساء عن البوح برأيهن وتتفاجأ بالاسئلة، فنحن لا نبيع شيئا ونطلب شيئا، نريد فقط ان تسألهن ان " شو رأيك ب وضع المرأة؟". في صبرا ان النساء لا يملكن امتياز الرأي، الفقر لا يأتي بأمتيازات.

شاتيلا

في شاتيلا، أنظرالى ازقة المخيم. انا من فلسطين واهل شاتيلا من فلسطين ، يبدو لي وكأنهم من فلسطين اخرى! ماذا عن النساء في المخيم، ما رأيهن في " وضع المرأة؟". لم نلتقي بنساء يميشن في الازقة، التقينا بإمرأة كبيرة السن ولدت في فلسطين، كانت تقف تنتظر شيئا ما، سألنها عن احوالها، اصرت ان الزمن الماضي كان اجمل، واحد وستون سنة من إنتظار العودة قد يجعلون المرء متشائما! احسست اني من فلسطين اخرى، لأنني ارفض ان ارى الفقر والتعتير والكارثة التي يعيشها الفلسطينيون في لبنان وبالتحديد النساء، فهم سجينات هذا المخيّم.

كونكلوجين:

يجب علينا كنسويات ان نعير اهتماما خاصا للنساء القاطنات في الامكان الشعبية والامكان التي ما زالت تعتقد ان النساء "ناقصات عقل ودين".

يجب ان نتطور لغة وادوات للوصول اليهن دون ان تقوم بتدمير حياتهن.

يجب علينا ان تضع كل ما نعرفه عن النسوية على جنب، ونذهب الى الشارع والى البيوت ونسمع حكايات النساء على الصمود وعن الحيّل التي يطورن للحصول على مساحة خاصة بهم، ان نتعلم منهم عن حياتهم، فنحن اذا اعتبرنا اننا في معركة، يجب ان نعتبر ان النساء الفقيرات هم في الصفصوف الامامية من جبهتنا المفترضة، فأكثر الضحايا والاصابات التي تقع، تقع في صفوفهن.

في رحلة صبرا وشاتيلا تعلمت شيئا واحدا اساسيا، ان الفقر هو اقسى انواع العنف، انه سواء كنا فلسطنيات ام لبنانيات او اثيوبيات اننا واحد في الجوهر. اننا في توحدنا نعيد انتاج علاقات سليمة في مجتمعنا. فلا فرق بين مرأة ومرأة الا بدرجة نوع القمع.

Celebrating Women's Day in Manchester

2009-03-08T04:41:00.000-07:00

Ahoy from Manchester,

Happy Women's day to all you WOMEN and FEMINISTS.

I hope all is going well on the streets.

Over here in Manchester, I decided to celebrate IWD my own way.

Yesterday, I went to the Impertial War Museum to see an exhibition called

Women's War Art, which focuses on the experiences of women war artists from the First World War to the FIrst Gulf War. BEAUTIFUL stuff!

After I finished that, me and my friends went to check out the central exhibition in the museum which showcases pieces reflecting on how war shapes our lives. In one of the corners, there was an action station which invites visitors to reflect on symbols seeing how important they have become in our lives and how different ones represent different things to different many people. They had tiles for visitors to make their own symbol. This is what I made.

Again, happy women's day to you all! See you in a couple days.

Joelle

IWD - final street update of the day

2009-03-07T06:23:00.000-08:00

So now that everyone spent the whole day talking to women and people on the street, everyone is literally exhausted!

Of this day we have a lot of great memories and a lot of papers, on them written the opinions and thoughts of hundreds upon hundreds of women. Some had a lot to stay, some had very few words to say, but all of them expressed the society that we live in. A society that's sometimes in denial, sometimes schizophrenic but most of the time broken, oppressed and frustrated.

As a conclusion, I leave you with two answers to the question: what do you think of the situation of women in Lebanon:

صانعة وماشية

ما إلها كلمة

And two answers to the question: What are the problems that a woman faces in Lebanon?

لازم ننتفض
الرجّال بدو تربية

And so we end our broadcasting for today, we'll see you all tomorrow at Corniche el Manara, Ain el Mreisse.

P.S.: tonight on the program we have an article that is being processed right now. Written by a cool feminist. Make sure you read it!

IWD - So the feminists are sweating they are tired but they are still excited

2009-03-07T03:25:00.000-08:00

So again, another round-up. Apparently, the more interesting specimens are on the street now, the feminist are starting to get a real taste of what awaits us in the future.

The Bliss team had to deal with people that were totally convinced that women's situation is "great" others were complaining that women are about to take over and rule men" and misk l khitem: "inno 3ade l tiltish".

The Hamra team had to listen to people telling her that "our situation in Lebanon is still better than in other places" and when the team asked about violence someone had the guts to say: "well women and men have to compromise"... ah yes violence is now part of compromise!

In Mar Elias some women had the courage to talk and they talked a lot! Others didn't escape censorship, or sometimes just the urge to go shopping!

The Sessine team is facing resistance, mainly men insisting that women in fact DO have all their rights... what other rights do they want anyway?

In Chiyah, some people are talking, some have very interesting things to say (I don't have the details right now but I'll keep you updated) others are reluctant to talk, but it's going smoothly.

An interesting incident took place in Zalka where the team approached an Ethiopian woman to talk to her so her boss allowed himself to answer on her behalf: "We are too busy" and walked away.

The Sabra video team stopped by before they went to Sou2 l A7ad... They have a lot of interesting stories to tell, but I won't ruin the surprise you'll all have to wait till the movie is out.

See you all in a bit

IWD - It's getting spicy

2009-03-07T02:57:00.000-08:00

Ok, so now I had less time to ask people what the women were saying but we did get an interesting overview.

Apparently the Mar Sabra team is now in place and they made an "interesting interview" with one man. What is that supposed to mean? I don't know Mohammad didn't give me anymore details, we'll have to wait till Chantal edits everything.

Another interesting phenomenon is the amount of men that are "deciding" for women. When the feminists are asking the woman for her opinion the guy with her would just answer with a rude "No" and walk away. We will always wonder what these women had to say.

The Hamra team reported that some people actually consider the woman's situation in Lebanon to be "ok" (I wonder what Lebanon they are living in?). Another interested reaction was someone saying that he doesn't "believe in women's rights". I'm sure that was very interesting conversation.

The Bliss team seems to be still having a good time, a lot of people are interested in tomorrow's gathering. And apparently all teams are running out of fliers... oops I guess it's because our fliers rock!

The Kaslik team has just finished Kaslik and moved to Zalka. The Chiyah team just arrived to Beirut Mall and is looking for people to interact with.

So appologies for being 25min late in reporting, but what can I say... It's boiling in Lebanon! Meet you in a less than 60min this time ;)

12:00am IWD - So what's up with the Feminists in Lebanon this year?

2009-03-07T01:01:00.000-08:00

Ok the heat is building up as people are heading to their work, or favorite caffee/restaurant, or going shopping. Different people are saying different things and here's a quick preview of some of the ideas expressed:

The Man has to remain slightly dominant, because he is the man and because the woman has femininity
Bliss

Inno l enoon ça va, mish 3atel
ma fi 2weneen ti7me l mara, l wad3 bil marra
Sessine

Lezem l mara t7afez 3ala ounousita
Kaslik

@#$#@@ l 2enoon! (yes we censored the curse words ;)
but young people were just too busy running for their routine (or maybe they were just too shy to talk)
Hamra

L wade3 #@%$#
But our team in Mar Elias felt a bit disappointed that out of every 10 people they approach only one would be interested to talk about an issue that is so important.
Mar Elias

What is also interesting is that the Hamra Team was approached by the MFS who seemed quite interested in our perspective.

And the Camera people are also taking as much footage as possible, the editing corner is ready and waiting for all those rushes to arrive. Nadine and Chantal are running around like busy bees, Nadine's phone is always busy with people and newspapers asking her: So what's up with the feminists this year?

In our next nashra we will have more areas, as the Sabra team will be in place as well as the Burj Hammoud team.

So stay tuned, we'll be reporting again in exactly 60min.

IWD - everyone is in their locations

2009-03-07T00:35:00.000-08:00

So the feminists have a long day today. They all woke up in the early morning, even though it is Saturday and everyone waits for the weekend to rest. But they are women on a mission... and some men on a mission too.

Though some found it difficult to wake up in the early morning (don't you just love evening people?) everyone is excited.

Bliss, Hamra, Sassine, Furn el Chebbek, Kaslik teams are already in position, stopping women to talk to them about women and feminism.

The feminists are asking all the women simple, basic questions: What do you think about women's situation in Lebanon? What do you think of YOUR situation as a woman?

An interesting answer from several women on Sessine for example was: Ti3teer!

It kind of pushes you to think, non?

Tomorrow the streets!

2009-03-06T14:28:00.001-08:00

So the girls (and boys) were all here, with less than 12h left before the start of the street take-over, the Feminist Collective is in the office, the girls (and boys) are painting banners, some are trying their brand new feminist shirts, some were trying to stencil on their shirts, others were discussing and debating what should be said and what should not be said, a lot of new faces showed up.
To make a long story short... it was great. The best part I guess was when we brainstorming about slogans to write on our banners.
And just to tease all those who just weren't here, here are some more pictures:

And stay tuned tomorrow we will be live blogging and updating you on how the girls are going and what the women are saying.

The International Women's Day is just around the corner!

2009-03-03T01:27:00.000-08:00

The Feminist Collective Lebanon-International Women's Day
Uploaded by spookyprods

If you want to participate or help out just contact Nadine Moawad: n.moawad@gmail.com or 03487051
Be there

On Women Responding to Sex

2009-03-03T01:09:00.000-08:00

It is amazing how Mainstream media never ceases to amaze me! Alot has been said about women, men and how different their reaction to sexual stimulus is. Please take a look at this piece: أي الاعلانات "الجنسية" ترضي النساء ؟
Now for one minute forget the fact that this article lacks the very least requirements of professional journalism (or at least passable journalism):

I cannot easily find the author of this masterpiece

it is impossible or at least, very difficult to trace back the original article in UBE that the author quotes and bases his whole article upon. Because needless to say that when you enter the query "women+sex" then regardless of what you are looking for and regardless of what you add to it, you will most probably find porn sites and porn links. A woman does not have a sex life outside the context of porn.

the author did not have a coherent idea of what he is talking about. I mean first of all, he is saying that a woman is more receptive to sex oriented ads or material if it is formulated in a "committed relationship" context (aka women use sex for love). They use sex to lur men into their traps of marriage, children, social burden, forced care... no really, just read this passage:
يبدو الآن أنهن يشعرن باستياء أقل عند رؤيتهن صورا جنسية ضمن سياق عاطفي وطبيعي

Now of course the author formulated it in a slightly different manor where he says that a woman is less disturbed by sexual images if they are formulated in a natural, emotional context. As if women are either disturbed or less disturbed about sex... Women can never be confortable about sexual images.
But wait don't start arguing or thinking just now, the worst is yet to come. To prove his point, the author gives an example:
وذكر موقع لايف ساينس أن الباحثين عرضوا على مشاركات في الدراسة صورة لساعة يد مثيرة للاهتمام وأخرى للساعة ذاتها يلتف حولها شريط ملون ألصقت عليها عبارة «هذه الساعة هدية من رجل إلى امرأة لها مكانة خاصة في حياته» حيث تبين أن النساء فضلن الصورة الثانية. وبينت الدراسة أن النساء يستجبن بشكل أفضل لصور الإعلانات التي تصور الرجل على أنه شريك يحترم التزاماته حيالهن، في حين أن الرجال يهمهم في المقام الاول أن يكون العنصر الجنسي متوافراً في الاعلان دون أي شيء آخر.

The first thing that struck me was the fact that now the author is quoting the another magazine: Life Science. How he jumped from one article to another, and why, is still a mystery for me. But anyway, the idea is that women prefer the image of an interesting watch with a ribbon that says: "this watch is a present from a man to a woman that means a lot to him"...

I am left baffled by this lack of coherence, what was the author trying to say? Why is this watch example relevant? How does it prove that women prefer sex in an emotional context?

Now let us, for a moment forget all these formalities and think about the following question: What does this article say about women and sexual fantasies?

First of all, this article was filed under miscellaneous (whatever that is supposed to say about how the authors, editors and readers of this online magazine view women and their sexuality).

Second observation, all these weirdly connected absurd conclusions emanate from total misconception about and ignorance to women's sexuality, presumptions and prejudice about women that try very hard to prove that women and men live in two different worlds and can only connect through the translation of the female language to the male language through MONEY.

And I insist that the translation is to the male language, the author of this article is a man,
expressing a man's incomprehension of the woman's body and desires, a man's media expressing a male dominated society in which women are odd beings, informations about women are first falsified then filed under miscellaneous news, news that don't belong anywhere else and cannot be classified in any serious section.

Yes I am outraged, I am outraged because I know men, the ones I call real men. Men that are willing to think and reflect, interact and communicate with other beings (some of which happen to be women). And the author of this article is just not one of those communicating men. He is just someone who has assimilated the mainstream culture and regurgitated it blindly.

In the end, I would just like to say that this article, not as an individual publication but as a school of thought, is an insult and a blatant promotion of a dangerous ideology that ignores a woman's pure sexual desire, banning them from exploring what they want or wish for. At the same time it keeps men under pressure to keep on getting more MONEY because, as these great studies show, this is what will get the woman feel less disgusted of sex.

You think not? prove me wrong

Just in case you didn't know:

2009-02-28T01:46:00.000-08:00

First of all, if you have not visited the feminist collective's website I strongly urge you to do so. The International Women's day is approaching and the collective is working hard for this event, the idea is quite interesting, on the 7th and the 8th of March the feminists will invade the streets of Beirut, talking to women and whoever would be interested to listen, about women, their rights and their day.
So if you are interested, please do visit the website and here is the link to the event details in Arabic and in English.
Now the second thing I wanted to talk to you about was the cool archive that Deems has been sustaining for a while about Arab Media dealing or discussing issues relative to one or more of our core values or issues. The Blog is called Feminist Archiving of Arab Media and it is still under construction.

Constructing Victimhood

2009-02-27T06:55:00.000-08:00

Part of the work I see the Feminist Collective doing is creating a space for self-refection and critique of women’s and feminist politics in Lebanon – and the Arab world more broadly. I would like to offer up one such critique to the women’s movement: We need to stop fetishizing our own victimhood.

In every feminist discussion I’ve ever encountered on “honor” crimes, the outrage at the phenomenon is almost invariably followed by a disclaimer that points to the fact that an inordinate number of women are posthumously found to be “innocent” (read: virginal). The underlying assumption is that the crime would somehow seem less heinous, or at least more defensible, had the woman in question actually been “guilty” of having sex, the act which supposedly led to her murder. Honor crimes are made all the more tragic by the apparent sexual innocence of the victims.

There is a sort of twisted logic to this. To further the cause, it becomes politically necessary to strip agency from the victims. To gain people’s sympathy and to allay fears that by challenging the legitimacy of these killings we’re encouraging promiscuity or allowing women to get away with having illicit sex, the victims must be presented as pure and innocent. How else can we get people to identify with victims when they seem to have committed such unspeakable crimes? Soiled women don’t make good poster children for the cause, after all. By playing into this on strategic grounds we are vindicating the logic of the very system that allows for these sorts of crimes to happen with impunity.

This is not only a problem of practice, but it also points to the larger problem of how human rights, as a normative legal system, represents certain events and reconstructs people as victims of a particular human rights violation. This conception creates a set of disempowering and counterproductive social categories: firstly, that all victims should be innocent, and secondly, that all victims are in a perpetual state of need, denying them subjectivity and agency. When working on issues related to sexuality, this becomes acutely apparent. In advocating for the repeal of anti-sodomy laws for example, gay activists constantly find themselves having to downplay the actual act of gay sex itself. To sell the cause, we must create sex-less beings, we must transform them from criminals to victims, innocent and act-less in order for the issue to be palatable to a conservative social order. Instead of focusing on the illegitimacy of criminalization as such, we look for other issues to push the point: police brutality, invasion of privacy, torture, etc. Although this is strategically sound for our purposes, we nevertheless inadvertently end up selling ourselves short: Disembodied beings, we look up wide-eyed in supplication and ask for the world’s sympathy, insisting on our sexless innocence. It’s almost like applying a band-aid over a malignant tumor.

Still, this strategy doesn’t work for everyone, particularly not for the less “popular” victims of human rights violations such as sex workers, who suffer from systematic state persecution, situations of legal limbo (particularly if they are migrants), violence, denial of health care, and a host of other abuses. Discussions on the rights of sex workers in the human rights community are almost solely centered around their right to be free of sex work, and the possibility of some sort of agency or will in the decision to engage in sex work effectively becomes null and void. The solution becomes to reconstitute sex workers into victims of trafficking, forced into the sex trade against their will – which is firstly not necessarily true, and secondly often leads to the adoption of policies that further marginalize and criminalize.

As feminists, we really need to start critically interrogating this idea of innocence. We need to move beyond the dominant human rights model of innocent victim vs. evil perpetrator. Once we dig a little deeper and start looking at systems of social control and oppression rather than individual violators/victims, the question of accountability becomes murkier. We need to restore a model where people are active subjects of human rights rather than passive recipients, able to frame their stories and lives with autonomy and on their own terms.

إنو معليش

2009-02-27T06:38:00.000-08:00

من فترة كنت عم بقرا مقالة من السفير، عنوانها: إمرأة نصف عارية مجرد «شيء» لدى الرجل

هلق طولوا بالكن وسمعوني شوي، تعوا لنحلل المكتوب بالسفير والمكتوب بالدايلي تلغراف (المصدر)... أول شي، السفير بتأكد إنو "الرجال" بيشوفو النساء النصف عاريات على إنن أشياء. بالوقت اللي ريتشارد ألاين أكد نقلاً عن سوزان فسك إنو الرجال المعروفين على إنن عنصريين ضد المرأة بيتفاعلوا مع صور النساء النصف عاريات متل ما بيتفاعلوا مع صور أشياء
ما بعرف أنا بحس في فرق... مجتمعنا اللبناني بيمتاز بالذكورية والإجحاف بس إنو نقول إنو الجال بيشوفو النسوان النص عاريات على إنن أشياء... سمكن فيا شويّة ظلم بحق الرجال كلن
واللي مش مصدقني يقرا المقالين ويصلّحلي

why the internet

2009-02-27T05:49:00.000-08:00

As I am back from the infoactivism camp, I am looking back at all the tools that I have been informed about during the last 6days. And I find myself wondering, why? why would it be so important for us as feminists, to work along side with geeks? I mean no matter how cool my website is for example, using online technology ultimately means that I am excluding a big chunk of people who simply do not have internet access, right?
That's absolutely true. But if you ask me, in order to get to our audience we will have to use the internet, along with other things. Plus, keep in mind, that most of the work that we want to be done is based on public opinion, convincing people and promoting certain ideas, this work can only be initiated by us, if the people don't pick up feminist values and argue about them, then we will just keep on preaching ourselves, whether we use the internet, books, tvs, radios, newspapers, or even podiums and public speeches.

The greatest lesson that I have learnt over and over again is that we have no control over the revolutions that we push for. we can just say the first word, it is the people/others that will take the values that we thought are ours and will adapt and alter them to what they believe is right... And as they are doing so, our job is to keep on talking/typing/reading so that diversity is expressed.

So open those browsers, pickup those pens, turn on that tv, grab that newspaper and start thinking, acting and reacting... show me the world that you want to live in. It isn't just the internet that I want to see the world using

The Women's Declaration from the World Social Forum 2009

2009-02-20T05:17:00.000-08:00

The coolest declaration I've ever read!

WORLD SOCIAL FORUM 2009 - Belém do Para, Brazil

WOMEN'S ASSEMBLY DECLARATION

In the year in which the WSF joins with the population of the Pan-Amazon, we, women from different parts of the world gathered in Belém, reaffirm the contribution of indigenous women and women from all forest peoples as political subjects that enriches feminism in the framework of the cultural diversity of our societies and strengthens the feminist struggle against the patriarchal capitalist global system.

The world is currently experiencing various crises that demonstrate that this system is not viable. Financial, food, climate and energetic crises are not isolated phenomena, but represent a crisis of the model itself, driven by the super exploitation of work and the environment, and financial speculation of the economy.

We are not interested in palliative answers based on market logic in response to these crises; this can only lead to perpetuation of the same system. We need to advance in the construction of alternatives. We are against the use of agro-fuels and carbon credit markets as 'solutions' to the climate and energy crises. We, feminist women, demand a change in the production and consumption model.

In relation to the food crisis, we affirm that transgenic foodstuffs do not represent a solution. Our alternatives are food sovereignty and the development of agro-ecological production.

With respect to the financial and economic crisis, we are against the withdrawal of millions from public funds to rescue banks and businesses. We, feminist women, demand employment protection and the right to a decent income.

We cannot accept that attempts to maintain this system are made at the expense of women. The mass layoffs, cuts in public spending in social fields, and reaffirmation of this production model increase the work involved in reproduction and sustainability of life, and thus directly affect our lives as women.

To impose its domain worldwide, the system resorts to militarization and arms; genocidal confrontations are fabricated that reduce women to spoils of war and use sexual violence as a weapon of war in armed conflict. Entire populations are forcibly displaced, forcing them to live as political refugees. Violence against women, feminicide and other crimes against humanity are committed on a daily basis in armed conflicts, while perpetrators enjoy total impunity.

We, feminist women, propose radical and profound changes in relations among human beings and with the environment, the end of lesbophobia, of hetero-normative and racist patriarchy.

We demand the end of control over our bodies and sexuality. We claim the right to make free decisions in relation to our lives and the territories we inhabit. We are against the reproduction of society through the super-exploitation of women.

We express our solidarity with women in regions of armed conflict and war. We add our voices to those of our sisters in Haiti and reject the violence perpetrated by the military occupation forces. We support the Colombian, Congolese and countless other women who resist – on a daily basis – the violence of military and militia groups in conflict in their countries. We stand together with Iraqi women facing the violence of the US military occupation.

At this current time, we express our particular solidarity with Palestinian women in the Gaza Strip under military attack from Israel, and we join the struggles for the end of war in the Middle East.

In peace, as in war, we support the victims of patriarchal and racist violence against black and youth women.

Equally, we express our support and solidarity to all sisters in their resistance struggles against hydroelectric dams, timber and mining companies and mega-projects in the Amazon and around the world, as well as those who are persecuted as a result of their legitimate opposition to this
exploitation. We unite with those struggling for the right to water.

We stand with all women criminalized for the practice of abortion and defend this right. We strengthen our commitment and join together in actions to resist fundamentalist and conservative attacks, in order to guarantee that all those women who need to, are entitled to safe and legal abortion.

We support the struggle for accessibility for disabled women and for the right of migrant women to freely "come and go".

On behalf of all these women, and of ourselves, we continue committed to the construction of the feminist movement as a counter-hegemonic political force and an instrument for women to achieve the transformation of their lives and our societies, by supporting and strengthening the self-organisation of women, dialogue, and networking between social movements' struggles.

On 8th March and during the Global Week of Action 2010, as women around the world we will unite in our confrontation of the capitalist and patriarchal system that oppresses and exploits us. In the streets and in our homes, in forests and the countryside, in our struggles and the in the spaces of our daily lives, we will maintain our rebellion and mobilisation.

Belém, 1st February 2009

Apple

2009-02-18T02:52:00.000-08:00

The first time I came out to my parents, I came out to them as a pagan, I was thirteen. Being from a catholic background, outing myself as a pagan was just as bad as outing myself as Queer.

There was always something in spirituality that attracted me but during our religious studies at school, nothing made sense. I had questions and so many and instead of having them answered I would just get kicked out of class under the pretext that I was causing discomfort and opposing the teacher.

It never made sense to me, the sudden birth of an Adam and Eve, it didn't make sense to me that all the prophets were men and wisdom and spirituality was accessible through their words only, it didn't make sense to me, that I, who was supposed to be the image of God, as taught in my religion, found him white bearded and old in our religious study books.

I came across Gaia, mother earth, I came across all her elements and bit by bit, in my teenage head the world around me made sense. I was the image of a god, but this god was not defined by gender, this god was a one and this "One" combined all genders. This "One" combined all my facets, all the elements. Fire was in the energy of rubbing your hands against each other, air was in every breath, water made up most of my mortal flesh and this flesh was to return to dust, to earth… and all this sheltered a spirit. It made sense to be part of the One, a small particle of something big. With this I understood that we are all similar particles, that there was no hierarchy in defining human existence, that there shouldn't be.

I don't understand why my questions caused such a riot in my catholic school, had they looked deep enough beyond dogma they would have realized that these are the basic founding teachings that they were supposed to transmit.

As I dwelled deeper into my pagan readings, I came across feminism and matriarchal societies, I came across woman deities and strong female mythology figures. None of this was taught at our school. No one had told me the role Ishtar played, no one had explained to me the evolution of Adonis into a certain prophet centuries later, no one had given me the option to make up my own path. No one had told me that women could be warriors instead of just child baring beings, they had not explained the sanctity of a yoni (the vagina). A woman belonged to the "Father" and from the father, passed to the husband and Lillit was nowhere to be found, she had rebelled, copulated with the devil, unworthy to go down in history. So they created Eve, but Eve could not possibly be an example for mankind, let us not make her so, let us burden her with the original sin which we shall burry between her legs and breasts. And so it was decided, what an evolution!

I grew up hiding my breasts, I grew up crossing my legs, I grew up choking my words, my thoughts, swallowing the apple over and over and over again as whole, having it stuck in my throat blocking every potential thought that dared to try to escape. They fed me that apple and St. Paul asked me to shut up and "not speak, for the Man is speaking" and I hid my breasts and cursed my period and got disgusted by my own blood and choked all of me…

The apple has rotted, it has fallen to pieces swallowed and released. I have found the One within and this is what they fear, for you to find that your hand can move energies that your breath can do miracles and that , as it was once, your body is indeed a holly pathway.

Pomegranate

On Idols and Islam

2009-02-16T04:10:00.000-08:00

As an Islamic/Arab child, I was raised on Islamic beliefs and how Mohammad came and told people about God, saving humanity through the Koran. We heard all the stories about how he marched to the Ka3be, and destroyed all the stone idols, throwing them away and ending the adoration of idols in his time.

Personally, I was always fascinated by the way people told these stories. And I used to agree: we "should" only worship a one and only God.

After hanging out with way too many radical feminists, I started hearing about goddesses. And these immortal figures where each god and goddess represented something different. All of my life I've heard about how islam fought against idols. And now I was shocked to hear about goddesses and deities. And there was this contradiction in my head…

Now I realize that the stone idols were representations of these goddesses… people didn't worship stone! They worshiped the gods! And they created a symbol to represent them… just as we have the sword of Ali, or the Cross in Christianity.

And then I started researching these goddesses online. And I couldn't find anything written positively about lilith. Although from what I heard and understood: she represented the women who refused to obey the first man Adam. She rebelled.

During my research, I found out that she is said to be evil. She disobeyed god. She ran away from heaven, and then god sent her two guys to tell her that she had to submit and come back to heaven. She refused. They told her that as a punishment, she was no longer able to give birth! To revenge against her cruel sterilization, she said that from now on she was going to kill other mothers' babies. At the same time feminist describe her as a woman who wanted to be on top.

And then in the islamic world, lilith is said to have slept with devil and that was how jinn were born

I was intrigued because…in islam, jinn came before adam! Wtf?!

And then there is a resemblance between the devil and lilith because they both refused to submit to adam and they were both kicked out of heaven. And they made a promise to god that they would have a way to come back at god.

And so, after what I just learned through my research, and what I have learned all my life , I know that I wanna be a believer of the one and only God and his prophet, but also of the goddesses that represent something that I did not find in religion.

Zainab

When harrassment meets racism at prejudice boulevard

2009-02-13T01:02:00.000-08:00

This story has been lingering in my mind for while now. Last week, I don't remember which day I was going home a bit late. Nothing extraordinary about it, I knew that there would be predators on the road and all. But luckily for me there was a certain distraction, there was another woman on board, which is rare to say the truth, I'm usually the only female at that time taking a bus.
So to describe that woman, she had very well done hair, tight cloth and all the accessories and make-up. And no I am not saying it was excessive, it was just more than me, but she was quite conforming to the social norm, if I may say.
But apparently, the predators thought otherwise. Now at first when we were at dawra, in the bus, waiting for it to move, this guy gets closer to the window and leans over it. The girl who had an open window tried to ease her way out of the situation with minimum friction and scandal. But the guy doesn't seem to care, he just leans over from the window and starts inviting the girl to drink from his redbull!
Now I had been in bad situations where I get harassed and I had been in situations when I see racism taking place and I had made myself a promise not to let such behavior go on, like to do something, anything, at least give these predators an evil look. It usually doesn't work.
This time, when I heard him, I turned back (because this was all happening in the seat behind me) and I gave the guy a look, a very obvious what the fuck kind of look. But still the guy didn't care, he didn't even turn to me or anything, he just didn't notice my presence. But then when he was done (and she didn't drink his redbull) the girl looked at me and I just said: "He's an asshole"
Then the bus leaves, but of course the driver had to turn back and ask the girl where she was going... There were no reason for him to do that but he wanted to talk to the girl. Then he tries to initiate an aggressive annoying and abusive conversation but she just puts an end to the conversation, so the driver turns and laughs with his gang of obnoxious men.
Then the girl smokes a cigarette! Big mistake if you are not in a safe environment, a female-smoker is a free of charge prostitute in the minds of abusive people.
Then the final punch was right after the girl left the bus, the guys kept staring till she disappeared and then the driver launched his chef d'oeuvre:
حدا يعطيا سيف العبد
Someone give her Seef l 3abed
and if you don't know what seef l 3abd is then it's this label of cleaning equipment and it's one of the most racist things ever, do you remember the famous nigger heads thingy?:
yeah the seef l 3abd is pretty much the same and you can guess what the obnoxious driver was implying to.
Yes the girl was brown, ironically, she was not african, she did not have the facial traits of one but she had a darker skin.
Now you would understand why this girl attracted so much harassment, she just happens to be darker than the average Lebanese... or should I say normal Lebanese.

أبناء الجزائريات جزائريون

2009-02-10T03:34:00.000-08:00

Today I was refered to this article in Assafir Online magazine: أبناء الجزائريات جزائريون

Now the article quotes the Associated Press but provides no link. So with the intention to write about this in this lovely blog I started searching for the Associated Press article that reported this major improvement in Women's rights in Algeria.

Now you do the experiment, google "algeria citizenship rights for women Associated Press". The result is mind blowing if you think of it:

The first 4 results talk about Lebanese women's struggle
for citizenship rights.
In the first page only 3 out of the 9 results also spoke of the
Lebanese women's struggle for citizenship rights.

Halla2 first of all, I would like to give a HUGE hug to feminists and
women's rights activists in Algeria, you have achieved a great
milestone. Now I have not yet worked on that issue, I haven't even
cooperated with the CRTD on this issue. But I know how difficult it
can be and how resistant patriarchies are to giving anything to
women.

On the other hand, I think of the Lebanese Activists that have been
struggling so hard and for so long for this very basic right. No this
is not right, it is not really my problem if anyone worries about the
demographic balance in this country. I will not pay my rights as a
citizen for peace in this country. Not because I am not into peace,
but simply because, this system failed to preserve peace with
or without giving woment their citizenship rights. I don't see how
depriving women (and so many other minorities) of their rights
has helped prevent any of the wars that took place in my beautiful
country. So give me a break for once, try it my way, try giving
people their individual rights for a change and let's see if we will
have peace or not.

Bench for Feminism

2009-02-06T03:13:00.000-08:00

Last night, a good friend of mine told me a story that is all too familiar to my little feminist ears. She was running late on her way to pick up a friend of hers from Jisr El Moushet at the junction of Dawra and Zalka. When she arrives at the meeting point, she reaches for her cell phone from her bag to find a bunch of missed calls from her friend. Frantic, her friend rushes into the car and tells her that she was just assaulted by a man on the pedestrian bridge. "He followed me and wouldn't go away, no matter how much I ignored him or shouted at him to go away," she said. "Then he grabbed me and tried to kiss me, so I screamed and ran away. He kept following me till I reached the gas station where a bunch of people were standing waiting for buses." Her story was covered up with tears and sobs and my friend got super angry and went back home to get her brother-in-law and his friend to come find the guy. They all arrived back on the spot and looked everywhere for the man but they couldn't find him. "I wanted us to beat him up and then give him to the police," my friend explained.

How do we begin to tackle this problem? Do we start with:

· The lack of safety of our public streets?

· The "I will get away with it" mentality of some men?

· What women should or shouldn't do in these situations?

· How these cases should be reported?

I was thinking about these questions on my way back from Jounieh last night when I passed the pedestrian bridge. How many hundreds of cases like this happen every month? How many women get raped or harassed or assaulted in this very spot? What am I going to do about it? What I imagine the girl and her friends or family did about it was say: "Don't go out after dark alone anymore!" or "Don't go walking on that bridge anymore!" But how much is that really going to solve?

So I started to wonder about strategies to take back the night: empowering women to be less afraid, creating an emergency response unit for these cases, raising awareness among people about guarding their community. holding night walks or vigils. Traditional sorta stuff. And then I thought: if she was strong enough or ready enough, she would have fought him off and pulled out his eyes. Predators fuel up on fear. If she were less afraid and more confident in her physical strength, he would fuck off or lose a piece of his flesh. By that time, I was passing under the Nabaa bridge of Bourj Hammoud and to my right I saw a sign for a gym. Oh, I thought: a feminist gym! We should have a women's gym that's not about losing weight or looking good, but about looking darn nasty and building some muscle. Put in all the un-girly sports: boxing, kicking, iron-pumping, wrestling, mortal combating!

Ok, so maybe a feminist gym won't solve all our problems with public sexual harassment. Maybe it's a symbol of what we women need. Strength. Some biceps wouldn't hurt.

من... فعلاً من؟

2009-02-05T01:18:00.000-08:00

من اختار اسمها؟

من أخبرها أنها فتاة وأنّ عليها الالتزام بدفتر تعليمات يولد مع الفتيات في العالم العربي؟

من رسم لها طريق مستقبلها منذ كانت في عامها الأوّل... قل في يومها الأوّل؟

من منعها من ممارسة مهنةٍ صنّفت بقاموس المجتمع مهنةً للرجال؟

من أقنعها بأنها لا تستطيع مقاومة الاحتلال في الميدان وفي ساحة المعركة وأن تحمل السلاح دون منّةٍ من أحد؟

من وضعها في إطار خشبي ولمّعه وزيّنه وعلّقه على الحائط أو في المطبخ؟

من حصر اهتماماتها بالفنّ والجمال والموضة والأولاد؟

من قمع رغباتها وألبسها قميص العفّة غصباً عنها فنمت العُقد والأمراض في جسدها وعقلها؟

من علّمها الخوف من جسدها والخجل به؟

من حلّل قتلها حفاظاً على «الشرف»؟

من ربط تحرّرها وحريتها بالابتذال والملابس الفاضحة والـ«بوتوكس»؟

من علّمها أنّ الرجل هو من يحميها وأنّ رضاه مقدّس؟

من سمح للدين بأن يتدخّل في شؤونها ليحلّل ويحرّم تبعاً لمزاج «رجل» دين؟

من أرعبها من الحبّ ومن السعادة؟

من قسّم مجتمعها إلى «بنت منيحة» و«بنت عاطلة»؟

من قال لها إن اللون الأبيض هو الأنسب لفستان الزفاف... ما المشكلة بالأزرق أو الأحمر أو الأخضر؟

من عمّم عبارة «عريس بالبيت ولا شهادة عالحيط» (أنا لا أمزح العبارة فعلاً متداولة وبكثرة)؟

من جعل اللون الزهري القبيح لوناً بنّاتياً؟

من كوّن وعيها الثقافي انطلاقاً من روايات دانيال ستيل وبربرا كارتلند؟

من عوّدها الابتسام أو حتى الضحك في كل مرة تسمع فيها نكتة أو تقرأ رسالة إلكترونية تختصر المرأة بصدرها وأردافها ومؤخرتها؟

من خاف من تمرّدها فحجب عنها تاريخ ليلى خالد وجميلة بو حيرد وروايات نوال السعداوي وأحلام مستغانمي؟

ليال حداد - جريدة الأخبار - مصدر

Attending two poverty reports

2009-02-04T22:49:00.000-08:00

So, on I went this morning to the launching ceremony of two reports issued by the Ministry of Social Affairs and UNDP. With titles like "The Mapping of Human Poverty& Living Conditions in Lebanon, in 2004"and "Poverty, Growth, & Income Distribution in Lebanon," I knew these were two reports that I didn't want to miss.

The ceremony itself was a classical Lebanese event. It was a bit late, first of all. Many of the people present seemed to know each other, which made me feel like that, in many ways, this was a social get-together for the usual crowd. Mostly older people. Though there were the younger women there as well. Then the event officially started with a national anthem, where people had to stand up and women and men alike had to boast how our country is a "manbitun lil rijal."Anyway... the whole thing was an interesting presentation of 2 important reports (at least because it's good to have that data available to us), though I do wonder why the publication of reports about poverty does not seem to invite low-income individuals. Because such presence would definitely create a different dynamic than having all of us middle class people looking at these statistics and treating them as charts and figures.

Thankfully, there were plenty of handouts for me to take home, as well as the reports themselves. Because there was a lot to process in those two hours. Some things stuck, however. Like, how female headed households represent only 14% of families in Lebanon, but 44% of them live in poverty—mostly those whose heads are women widows. How a change in the health conditions or physical ability of the breadwinner is one factor of sinking into poverty. How many low-income families are actually older couples, or families with many children to support. How there may not be a large number of people living in extreme poverty, but there is a large percentage of people who are living below the poverty line. And, very importantly, how there should be policies that are biased to low-income people and families.

Ya3ni, to make a long story short, these reports are good to have out there, and you usually do get to learn one or two things from attending the launching of them; but mostly, as many of the attendees there noted, it's about what we do with the reports that matters: how we use them to come up with viable initiatives and policies; making sure that all these resources that went into making these reports will ultimately become a good investment into improving the lives of low-income individuals and families and dealing with the socio-economic and cultural problems that locks them into poverty in the first place.

Deems

Tu es Gentil

2009-02-03T04:58:00.000-08:00

Last week on Friday, the Feminist Collective had gathered to discuss the issue of rape and sexual harassment. There is a lot to say about this subject, a lot of stories to tell, a lot of incidents to talk about. What was ironic is that less than 12 hours later I would face a form of harassment that I have never been in contact with before. Listen to my story.

It is Saturday morning, and I am having a bad morning, no a seriously bad morning! But my attitude in these situations is to take the bad bi sadrin ra7eb :), there is a quota of good luck and bad luck if you have all the bad luck at a certain point you will have an equally good luck later. Plus the negative attitude will only add to your bad luck a bad mood. So I get over myself, my broken shoe, my aching feet and my lack of sleep and get to a peaceful point, I am sitting at Columbiano Cafe Achrafieh, Beirut. Minding my own business and drinking my coffee and my water, recharging my phone... And then I see an old man coming into the coffee shop. He's one of those cute old men that you would see in this area, the kind that is above sixty but that still insists to wear his jacket and his suit and his shiny shoes and his cute old fashion hat. I watch him as he painfully climbs up the stairs of the coffee shop. I like these old men that are still living life as if they were in the 60s.

Then the old man comes down and looks at me. The first thing that crosses my mind is that I am sitting in his favorite spot, so I ask him: "Am I sitting in your place?"

The old man apparently has hearing problems and he comes closer to me to hear what I was saying. When I repeated what I siad, he answered with the sweetest voice ever: "Non, non, tu es gentil assieds toi, ana bi23od hon"

And hon in his dictionnary meant on the seat in front of me. Then he starts talking to me, asking me about my name, my last name, what I do in life etc. And I was not bothered by his behaviour at all, I was starting to get impatient but I figured maybe he was bored and wanted someone to talk to.

Then rapidly I was harshly informed of his intentions... Because out of no where he asks me about my mobile number, so I give him a wrong number and I start to panick. And the old man did nothing to make me feel any better. He asks me if I am single. When I answered that I am engaged he was clearly dispointed (he didn't care to hide it) but he went on to ask me what does my boyfriend work in... at that point khalas ana sakkar rase w I gave the first answer that came into my mind: "byishtighil bi qatar". Don't ask me why! And all of a sudden he actually felt happy and he offered to be my fiance for the time being in Lebanon.

And to add to my misery he insisted on taking my hand, when I gave up and gave him my hand he rubbed it on his cheek. By this time I had realized that this person is not balanced so he won't get my hints when I put him to his limits. So I drink my coffee as fast as possible and then excused myself to leave. Before I even stand up, I was getting all my stuff, the guy wants to catch up and win my affection, what does he do? He takes out a small kitkat (regular length but with only two fingers not four) and he throws it on the table, I still remember what it looked like, and it even had the price tag still on it: 495LL.

I just smile and stand up. So the guy just blocks my way and starts begging me to stay:

"s'il te plait, reste un peu, khallike b2i2teyn bas, lesh bta3mle fiyye heyk? lesh bit7ibbe t3azbine? Tu es gentil!"

I excuse myself again and walk away, the rest isn't that important, the point is that I pay for my coffee and get the fuck out of Columbiano.

Al je suis gentil al!

Sometimes I just don't want to be gentil

Introduction

2009-01-20T08:21:00.000-08:00

With this post, the Feminist Collective officially starts. Nshalla this will be a space for all ideas expressions of feminism, women's rights and anything in between.

Enjoy :)