Global Gender Gap Report IV: Let Us Tell You How To Live
There was a time when liberal sages pretended to be sensitive to what the late Edward Said called "Cultural Imperialism." Said, being Palestinian, informed us that European countries and their progeny like the United States, have for 500 years or so, done more than simply assert military and economic power over nations and continents occupied by darker-skinned, non-Christian peoples.
They've also asserted cultural power over them as part of the usual military and economic hegemony. Often this took the form of pronouncing as "heathens" those who worshipped gods deemed false by Christian traditions, but it took many other forms as well. Clothing, language, schooling, laws, architecture and countless other things were considered fair game by agents of imperial domination.
The fine movie "The Last Emperor" catches the cultural imperialism of the West very neatly in one brief scene. Peter O'Toole plays an English tutor who has been hired to instruct the youthful emperor. To that end, the Englishman seeks to give him an examination to find out what he knows. But the very concept of a commoner's questioning the emperor is anathema to Chinese tradition. So the emperor says archly "You cannot examine an emperor." To which the Englishman replies "Well, that'll have to change." A couple of thousand years of Chinese tradition is waved away like a house fly.
Said's point is not only that cultural imperialism exists, but that it is perhaps more deeply resented by subject peoples than even military and economic domination. Defeat our armies, exploit our resources, and our lives will go on, so the thinking goes. But take away our traditions, our gods, our languages, our way of life and you take away our very being.
Even as I write this, a modern myth persists among the peasantry of southern Mexico and Guatemala. It holds that American doctors kidnap indigenous children, eviscerate them and use their internal organs in transplant opertions in the United States. The myth is completely false, but it powerfully reflects the deeply-felt resentment of the injuries done by El Norte to the indian cultures of Meso-America. We rip the guts out of them for out own benefit. Edward Said would understand completely.
As I said, sometimes liberals pretend to understand and care about the deep resentments western imperialism engengers in peoples whose cultures are vastly different from ours. And sometimes they don't. A U.S. invasion of a country like Iraq or Afghanistan is always accompanied by much (to my mind justified) liberal hand wringing about our inability to understand the culture.
So it's interesting that the same liberals who bewail U.S. military interventions cheerfully spearhead attacks on cultures that, in their opinion, insufficiently conform to our notion of women's rights. The Global Gender Gap Report is properly viewed as a small front in that attack, and various people around the world are certain to see it just that way (WE Forum, 2009). It's message is unmistakable - our newly-acquired respect for women's equality is just our most recent tool to reveal your moral inferiority. Five-hundred years ago it was the Bible; now it's The Feminine Mystique. We call this progress.
So, if not enough of a country's girls go to school, if not enough women are elected to office, if not enough are lawyers or doctors, we will assign a grade to that country that reflects its moral debasement in our eyes. While we're at it, we'll conveniently forget the fact that we just got this religion of gender equality 40 years ago or so.
And we have decreed that those nations must change, sometimes at the point of a gun. It was only a few months ago that our "paper of record," The New York Times, editorialized that one reason for the U.S. Army's presence in Afghanistan was to ensure that girls there can attend school. The imperialist implications of that opinion may be lost on liberals here, but in Afghanistan, they understand it just fine.
Me? I'm all for women's equality, but then I would be. The cultural and educational tradition I've lived with all my life would hardly permit anything else. I think it's outrageous that, in many parts of the world, girls can't go to school and that women can't vote or hold certain jobs or have a genuine existence outside that of their husbands, fathers, brothers, etc. That's my heritage, but it's certainly not that of, for example, the people of remote tribal areas of Afghanistan.
I also don't mind opening a magazine and seeing a nearly-naked woman in an advertisement; I rather like it actually. But many Muslims, male and female alike, don't like it one little bit. It offends them deeply, and when we demand that their cultures treat women the way we do, they understandably balk. If women in Saudi Arabia want equality, they need to stand up and fight for it. If they do, it will be appropriate for the West to support those movements. Until they do, it won't be.
So Western cultural sorties like the Global Gender Gap Report are not only radically anti-male; they're yet another attack on the cultures of other countries. We're fervent in our beliefs, but of course we always have been. The people of those countries have seen this before, time and again, and know it for what it is - the liberal face of European imperialism.
If he were alive, Edward Said could tell us.
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