by Dr. Ali Shehata
Women in Modern Day Secular Societies
In the current era, women's rights have truly made great gains when compared with the societies of ancient civilizations, though a number of basic similarities still remain. Western women have justly earned the rights to own property, to work for themselves and keep their own earnings, to go out freely and without permission, to choose their spouses, and the right to be involved in the political process. Challenges still remain though in the Western world especially in regards to equal pay for equal work, equal opportunity for job selection and job promotion, and dignity—most prominent in the recent #MeToo movement.( Smartt, Nicole. (2018). Sexual Harassment in the Workplace in A #MeToo World. Forbes.) It is in regards to this last point, the general dignity of the woman
that this discussion will now proceed.
As will be later presented in detail, one of the greatest criticisms leveled at Muslim women today is in regards to their dress code. In the minds of many people today, freedom—or women's liberation—somehow equates with a reduction in clothing; the more skin that a woman shows, or is allowed to show, is apparently an indicator of how “liberated” she is. Yet, the oppressed and lowest classes of women of ancient societies were often encouraged, if not outright coerced, to display their bodies in public, and to dress as provocatively as possible. This of course did not represent liberation or the attainment of any rights for them, but it represented only the actualization of the carnal desires of the men around them who sought to gaze lustfully at women's bodies in much the same way that they continue to do today. Author Laurie Shrage gathers several revealing historical perspectives on the general status, condition and early objectification of women, noting:
… [The historian Gerda Lerner] argues that to understand how prostitution evolved historically, we need to understand “its relationship to the sexual regulation of all women in archaic states and its relationship to the enslavement of females” (Lerner 1986, 124). Lerner writes,
“It is likely that commercial prostitution derived directly from the enslavement of women and the consolidation and formation of classes. Military conquest led, in the third millennium B.C., to the enslavement and sexual abuse of captive women. As slavery became an established institution, slave-owners rented out their female slaves as prostitutes, and some masters set up commercial brothels staffed by slaves” (Lerner 1986, 133).
Lerner suggests that prostitutes and concubines were used by rulers as symbols of wealth and power, and this practice was then emulated by other men of wealth and status (Lerner 1986, 133). Also, paupers were often forced to sell children, adding to the supply of labor for this purpose. Furthermore, “As the sexual regulation of women of the propertied class became more firmly entrenched, the virginity of respectable daughters became a financial asset for the family.”
Lerner's account connects modern forms of prostitution to oppressive social practices: the enslavement of women and the treatment of non-slave females as sexual property to be exchanged both in and out of marriage. By contrast, rather than attribute the rise of commercial prostitution to slavery and capitalist class formation, Gayle Rubin traces the origins of prostitution to kinship systems in which women are exchanged as gifts among families to cement social bonds (Rubin 1975, 175). Rubin writes,
If women are the gifts, then it is men who are the exchange partners. And it is the partners, not the presents, upon whom reciprocal exchange confers its quasi-mystical power of social linkage. The relations of such a system are such that women are in no position to realize the benefits of their own circulation. As long as the relations specify that men exchange women, it is men who are the beneficiaries of the product of such exchanges —social organization. (Rubin 1975, 174)
In other words, in the very creation of society, women were allegedly subordinated through ritual exchange in order to create bonds of kinship among men as the foundation of the social order … Rubin writes
The “exchange of women” is a seductive and powerful concept. It is attractive in that it places the oppression of women within social systems, rather than biology …. (Rubin 1975: 175)
On both Lerner's and Rubin's accounts, prostitution (women engaging in sexual activities for extrinsic rewards) and trafficking in women (control over women's sexual capacities by others) predates the commodification of things, and it is a transhistorical, transcultural phenomenon that takes on different forms in different contexts. (Shrage, Laurie. (2004). Feminist Perspectives on Sex Markets. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.), Retrieved from: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2016/entries/feminist-sex- markets)
So this “commodification” continues today where the sexual objectification of women has supposedly taken more subtle and socially acceptable forms like: scantily clad women in advertising and media (in many cases having nothing to do with the product itself—hamburger commercials, soft drinks, car sales, etc.), pornography, strip bars, certain chain restaurants requiring waitresses to dress in short and revealing “uniforms”, and most recently the great emphasis on cosmetic surgery— breast augmentation in specific. In short, too often for the women of today does their happiness in life hinge on their usefulness to men; that their worth as a person depends more on the size of their bra than the size of their intellect or character.
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