New York Times, Orientalism, are you kidding me?

I'll be honest, Mr. Kristof, I didn't read all of your article The Women's Crusade, so maybe I don't have the right to criticize it. The thing is, I got so disgusted with its new-fangled orientalism, that I couldn't do more than skim most of the piece. I don't mean this to mean precisely what Edward Said meant by the term Orientalism, but effectively what he meant by it: the West portrays the East as an inferior Other, the Orient embodying all the awful that the Occident is not, creating a "system is not that it is a misrepresentation of some Oriental essence... but that it operates as representations usually do, for a purpose, according to a tendency, in a specific historical, intellectual, and even economic setting" (Said, Orientalism). The "purpose" being another reason for the U.S. and "the West" to continue its paternal push for cultural, political, and economic hegemony. Kristof does, after all, ultimately argue that the U.S. should throw money at women in developing countries to give them a boost, help them become part of the global economy. Remember how Jane Eyre decided not to go to India to help the Hindustanis? Remember how she had her own patriarchy to contend with? Yeah, exactly.

The article opens with the above photo of some dejected-looking Pakistani females. It goes on to explain how the woman was abused by her dead-beat husband until she got a microloan and made a ton of money embroidering. Now she "She exudes self-confidence... doesn’t even pretend to be subordinate to her husband." Then why the photo of her looking so godawfulmiserable? Because a vieled brown woman looking hopeless better serves your purposes? In a similar was as does describing an Indian girl as having "chocolate skin" and the African woman as having a "high forehead and tight cornrows". None of the American women in the really great article on women in the military are described with such painstaking physicality. There are photographs of the two women alongside the article and yet their exotic, swarthy physiques preceed their acheivement and ambitions.

What got me first and gets me most about the article, however, is that in their description of "a large slice of the world" where "girls are uneducated and women marginalized", any chunk of the United States where this occurs is not remotely mentioned. Of course, with me not being a complete idiot, I know that the United States wouldn't be in the scope of an article aiming to promote the spending American foriegn aid dollars on women and girls. That said, as an avid reader of the New York Times, I also know that doesn't often focus on the plight, the oppression, and oft-miserable situation of American women and girls. For example, a sidebar in this article declares that "there are 5 thousand honor killings a year, the majority in the Muslim world." Ignoring the fact that "the Muslim world" is a ridiculous notion (I'm Muslim; Paris has a ton of Muslims; India has a TON of Muslims and isn't remotely a Muslim country; etc); ignoring the fact that non-Muslim women die from honor killings (but it's implied that honor-killings are Muslim); I have yet to see the Nytimes mention that over 1100 women (about three each day, according the the National Organization of Women) in the United States are killed by abusive spouses or boyfriends. Considering that the vague notion of "the Muslim World" has a significantly larger population than the United States, I'd say it's ridiculous to harp on one (and oh, American news loves harping on honor killings, which are regionally and culturally defined) and not much mention the other. And speaking of political and legal systems that work against women (which of course exist sooo much in the Third World), just read this article, When Domestic Violence Laws Don't Work from O Magazine, and you'll see that we have one of them.

All of this is not to say, of course, that a lot of the awful sexist stuff that goes down in Third World countries isn't a bunch of bullshit that we should just let happen. It is just astounding to me how much awful sexist stuff goes down here that we just let happen. Why the constant outrage over honor killings and so little against domestic violence? Why so much focus on educating poor women around the world, and so little on making sure my female students feel empowered enough to make sound sexual decisions and become effective heads-of-household in the future (they're more likely to end up young, high school dropouts, unmarried with children)? For goodness' sake, the books girls eat up in this country, the Twilight series, are about a girl who choses marriage and a violent vampire pregnancy over college. Let's not even bring up the trafficking of women and girls being so epidemic around the world, when Shelbyville, Kentucky had its very own brothel of sex-slaves from Latin America. And we want to help other countries with gender egalitarism and female empowerment?

Again, this is not to say that Kristof or the New York Times are misrepresenting or wrong about the women they seek to help. I have no doubt I am significantly better off with my family in the United States as a woman than I would have been with my family in India. But had I been raised in India, with most any middle or upper class family, I'd be likely be better off, socially, academically, and economically, than if I'd been born into a coal-mining family in Appalachia. But I don't think these things warrant such comparisons because that's a slippery slope to racist, regionalist, classist, untestable generalizations. Well actually I'm already down that slope, but whatever.

Kristof writes, "Traditionally, the status of women was seen as a “soft” issue — worthy but marginal. We initially reflected that view ourselves in our work as journalists. We preferred to focus instead on the “serious” international issues, like trade disputes or arms proliferation." I think it's awesome the women's issues make front-page news. But not when it's only about the horrible conditions brown and black women live in around the world. Not at the expense of the man women lurking in our own attics. Again, it is orientalist that this happens--the portrayal of "Eastern" women as needing our help, as being ruled over by tyrants hasn't changed in centuries. It's an unreasonable and unwarranted focus, but its one that distracts us from our own problems.

I'm losing steam. It just makes me so mad.