We bring you news of a debate which promises to be a fascinating one for those interested in gender politics. It will be filmed for posterity. Zara Faris is a researcher and speaker for the Muslim Debate Initiative, while Julie Bindel needs no introduction. I look forward to being in the audience during the debate, and possibly asking a question in the Q&A session. Maybe Julie Bindel will give me the public apology she should have given me ten months ago, after she’d wrongly accused me of being a liar, during our debate at Durham University. I won’t hold my breath. She did at least apologize to me privately, which is more than any other prominent feminist has ever been prepared to do (Laura Bates and Caroline Criado-Perez spring inevitably to mind). My account of the Durham exchange is here.
We link to videos of Karen Straughan and Zara Faris on the J4MB ‘menu’, under the heading of Karen’s video title, ‘GirlWritesWhat: Were women historically oppressed? Are they now, in developing countries?’ The link is here.
These videos have attracted considerable interest, because they explore the often nuanced and complementary positions of women and men in the developing world in general, and in the Islamic world in particular, without looking at the positions through the toxic lens of feminist ‘patriarchy theory’, which considers that women are oppressed by men wherever, whenever, and however they interact – in all places, at all times, in all situations.
Believing this nonsense to be reality, it’s little wonder feminists are so relentlessly angry and miserable, is it? It’s also little wonder that angry and miserable women find a warm reception in feminist circles, where they’re taught that all their problems are attributable to men. Feminism turns women into perennial victims – whiny dysfunctional people stuck somewhere between childhood and adulthood, believing that feminism has the solutions to their problems. It’s tragic.
In Durham, after the debate, a number of feminists came up to me for a chat. Every one of them, unprompted, informed me they’d come from a broken home. Presumably the irony that the ideology they espouse is the biggest enemy of marriage and the nuclear family hadn’t occurred to them. Does feminism particularly appeal to women from broken homes, who are envious of the happiness of women lucky enough to have been brought up in loving families, with a father and a mother?
I hope you can join me in the audience. If so, and you’d like to meet up beforehand, please email me – [email protected] Tickets are a very reasonable £5.00, and can be purchased through this link. Be sure to order your ticket(s) soon, because they’re going to sell out fast.
