MissRepresentation

Miss Representation 8 min. Trailer 8/23/11 from Miss Representation on Vimeo.

Felt the need to spread the word!

India's disturbing "girl" problem

This morning, my BFF sent me this link:  Despite rapid growth, India lets its girls die.

She knows that nothing wakes me up like a little righteous indignation with my morning coffee.

I'm not sure when the knowledge of just how little the vast majority of the world thinks of women will stop shocking and infuriating me.  I mean, we're only half of the population......the gender responsible for carrying, nurturing, and delivering the entire population.....we're only your mothers, sisters, daughters. 

By all means, India (and I'm sure several other countries not named in this article), let's starve girls to death after the government tells you you can't abort them.  Preserve your archaic, illogical, and cruel culture at any cost.  Coming together to eliminate the unjust dowry system and other illogical societal norms so that your daughters can live and your sons can benefit from everything women have to offer is just a nonsensical idea posited by evil, liberal feminazis bent on destroying your way of life. 

/snark

And is outlawing informing the expectant parents of the sex of their unborn child really the way to go here??  If these people are willing to starve their daughter to death in lieu of getting the abortion they'd prefer, dear god, let them get the fucking abortion!!!  Saving that poor child from the pain and suffering of starvation is much more humane.

Indian government, while your busy outlawing stuff.....how about outlawing the dowry's?  And actually enforcing the laws.  That would go much further than trying to force your people to have daughters in a system that punishes them for the bad luck of having a faster swimming x chromosome.  I would think that it would be worth the cost of a special task force specifically to shut down these practices so that you don't end up like China.  (See: Chinese Bias for Baby Boys Creates a Gap of 32 Million)

One last thing India, when you kill enough of your girls, your beloved culture is going to come to a screeching halt.  If you don't produce enough girls to marry into your system, you won't be able to sustain it.  The majority of other cultures are not going to pay your sons to marry their daughters. 

So what I'm saying is,,,.sexually, I can see it...as a lifestyle, not so much.

I’m in the process of reading a trilogy of fanfics about a Dominant/submissive relationship.  They are really well done, and I am enjoying them immensely (so much so that I’m actually reading three books at a time right now, because I can’t choose which one I like best).  I walk a fine line with enjoying these types of stories.  My favorite books are the Kushiel’s Legacy series by Jacqueline Carey.  The heroine in the first three books (Phedre no Delauney de Montreve) is a masochist. 

I am decidedly not.

But Phedre is far different from the submissives in all the other stories I’ve read/watched.  Anne Rice wrote a retelling of the Sleeping Beauty story (under the pseudonym A.N. Roquelaure) called The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty that I literally couldn’t force myself to finish.  It disgusted me.  I was telling someone about my reaction to that book and they asked me how I could love and re-read 1000x the Kushiel’s Series, when a lot of the same actions were taking place in both books.  The difference is most definitely choice.   

Phedre, like the submissives in other stories that I enjoy, choose to take part in their lifestyle because it brings them sexual pleasure.  No one decided it for them.  They don’t submit in every aspect of their lives.  They had selected periods of time where their Doms lord over them and when those times are over, they shed their submissiveness and take back control of their lives and actions.  

In the stories that I can’t stomach, like The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, the women are forced into these roles.  And usually, they learn to love their place under the heel of their oppressor.  It really just smacks of patriarchy and misogyny.  I have definite knee-jerk reactions to these themes that I will get into later….but suffice it to say, I don’t find these types of books entertaining.  They actually kind of infuriate me.  I think they tend to normalize these types of abusive relationships whether they mean too or not.  We need look no further than the patriarchal religious ideals of “Husband as the Head” and the wife submitting to the husband as the church submits to Christ to see just how easy it is to convince someone that they can and should be happy in their own oppression.  But that’s a subject for another day (oh, but I will get to it, rest assured).  

So I’m enjoying this trilogy, but it once again reaffirms that I will probably never really understand these relationships. 

 (That is not to say that my lack of understanding equates into judgment on my part…your gig is your gig, and I don’t understand a lot of things.)

(Or rather, I should say if you’re choosing this for yourself, I’m not judging you.  If it’s being dictated to you, and you submit because you feel you have to for religious or safety purposes, I pity you.  If you are simultaneously trying to push your oppression onto me through religious dictates or by changing societal mores….I am probably judging you and pitying you at the same time.) 

I'm so thankful that I've finally found a use for my massive random picture collection.

  

PS.  I watched The Tourist last night.  I don’t know what all criticism was about; it was great!