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Under international criminal law, apartheid only applies to discrimination based on race. A new open letter argues it should apply to gender discrimination, too.

In March of this year, a group of over 100 Iranian and Afghan women signatories published an open letter calling for the end of gender apartheid. The purpose of the letter was threefold: to raise awareness of what gender apartheid is, and how it's affecting women in Iran and Afghanistan; to encourage public statements and policy responses condemning these regimes; and to expand the definition of apartheid under international law. As the letter explains, currently, under international criminal law, use of the word apartheid is limited to race; but for years, activists around the world—and more specifically, in Iran and Afghanistan—have been using it to describe extreme, gender-based persecution, and the regimes that perpetrate it. The letter makes the case for why it's time we update the word's definition on the global stage.

Below, we spoke to one of the people behind the campaign, human rights lawyer Gissou Nia, on the letter's longterm goals, its challenges, and why language matters when it comes to gender persecution and apartheid.

How did the open letter come to be? How did you get involved?

The open letter came about with a core group of Iranian and Afghan women signatories. The genesis of this is that women's rights activists in Afghanistan and Iran have been using the term "gender apartheid" for years to describe, essentially, a system of subjugation and oppression that they are being repressed by. [But] when I spoke to some of these activists, not all of them had actually been aware that gender apartheid is not currently a crime under international law. Gender was not a part of that definition.

Apartheid, as defined under international criminal law—whether it’s a part of crimes against humanity or not—only applies to racial apartheid. So, [we] thought, why don’t we just change the definition? There have been incredible legal academics and jurors who have [already] been working on this, like Karima Bennoune, and what we wanted to achieve with the campaign is to supercharge [their] efforts. It’s an unbranded campaign—so there’s no one organization attached to it.

I’m curious what differentiates an apartheid regime from other forms of gender discrimination.

It’s a great question. One of the main things that people have asked is how is this distinct from gender persecution, let’s say. With gender persecution, which is a crime against humanity as defined under the ICC Rome Statute, that’s a more broadly defined crime. There may be some instances of something that you could charge as gender persecution that would amount to gender apartheid, but gender apartheid describes a certain type of treatment. It really focuses on the structures. The word “apartheid” comes from the word “apart” in Afrikaans, born out of the historical experience of South Africa—but it’s really about keeping one group separate from another. Here, you could say that [it’s] men subjugating and dominating women for purposes of entrenching power. I think that’s the distinguishing factor. Certainly, that would amount to a case of gender persecution, as well, and we’re not saying that it’s either/or—we think these are all complementary. In the case of race, we have both racial apartheid and racial persecution; so there’s no reason that we can’t have gender apartheid, as well.

I’d also say that gender apartheid, as opposed to gender discrimination, is much more extreme. Certainly misogyny and patriarchy exist everywhere. There are gender discriminatory laws in many different countries, including in the US. But a gender apartheid regime is something that’s quite distinct and different. It basically is saying that women are not worth a man. In the case of Iran, a woman’s value is worth half that of a man, legally. So they’re removed from public spaces. That’s why in Afghanistan, women and girls are not allowed to be educated, [why] they’ve been taken out of employment. The Taliban recently said that Afghan women cannot work for the UN in Afghanistan. So it’s essentially the removal of women from public spaces and from public life. And that’s enshrined in the law: You are formally not worth a man, and we are going to repress you, because that’s how we’re going to keep this regime in power.

When you say their value is less, how is that defined?

So, for example—I’m a lawyer, so this one for me is especially grating—if I was to give testimony in a court in Iran, my testimony would be worth half that of a man. I also wouldn’t be able to travel outside of Iran without the permission of my husband or my male guardian. I couldn’t ride a bike, I couldn’t go to sporting stadiums. I would be barred from certain types of higher education. Women do not have equal capacity, inheritance, divorce, marriage rights—anything that relates to the family, they’re unequal. And, of course, there’s the mandatory hijab laws, which we know sparked the outrage over Mahsa Amini’s murder.

For this particular campaign, why did you choose Iran and Afghanistan specifically? There are other countries where, arguably, [gender apartheid] would apply.

Because we were campaigning [and] were successful in removing the Islamic Republic from the UN Commission on the Status of Women. Obviously all of that came about because of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in Iran after Mahsa was killed at the hands of the Islamic Republic’s morality police. There were a lot of Afghan women activists that wrote me after that and were congratulating me. [But] Afghanistan was still on the UN Commission on the Status of Women. True, the Taliban is not formally recognized before the UN, so the representative is from the former government and basically doesn’t represent anybody. Nonetheless, they’re still there.

And it really struck me, that while we’re speaking about Woman, Life, Freedom in Iran, and while there’s been such a global outpouring of attention and action and policy engagement and energy, right across the border, our Afghan sisters are dealing with a horrendous situation, of which the globe is exhibiting some form of paralysis, and a lack of direction on how to improve their circumstances.

I think a lot of Iranian women who are championing women’s rights have been thinking about our Afghan sisters, who we’re tied to through shared borders, shared culture, and in some cases shared language. These issues are interlinked and they’re not separate, and so we’ve been keen to do some joint activism. It’s something a bit new in terms of campaigning, and certainly once the law is adopted or as discussions continue, there may be other women that choose to engage with it who feel that they’re living under gender apartheid regimes. This was a campaign that Iranian and Afghan women came together to launch, but it doesn’t preclude other groups of women wanting to [sign] or get involved with this advocacy or get behind this mission. Anybody can sign, and support. But the number of gender apartheid regimes in the world is actually pretty few.

How many people have signed it so far?

I haven’t checked lately to see what the tracker is, but it was something like 5000.

Can you talk me through the three chief demands the letter makes?

So basically, the [three demands] are the way that we envision [passing the law] would happen. I’ll just walk you through the timeline. In the immediate, first of all, there’s a lot of people who are not familiar with what the term apartheid is even, [especially] under the age of 35. However, most of the decision makers that we are seeking to engage with are above the age of 35, and they’re in government, and they have direct recollection of those events in the eighties [in South Africa] until the dismantling of the apartheid system in 1990. It has a real moral and resonant power for those decision makers, so part of this campaign is aimed around introducing the term gender apartheid, so people are familiar with what that actually means. What does apartheid refer to, what does it refer to in the context of Iran and Afghanistan, and why is this still going on.

The second thing is, we want parliaments around the world to issue resolutions condemning the apartheid in Afghanistan and Iran. That’s moving forward in Canada, in the UK, in New Zealand, and now we’re doing a lot of outreach to states in South America and Africa because we think that will be very important to have a global frame. This isn’t just a Western effort, and we want to make sure that is understood.

The ultimate goal is to have some of the legal frameworks that apply to apartheid amended or introduced to include gender apartheid. One of our main goals is to have gender apartheid included in the definition at the upcoming global convention on crimes against humanity. It should be adopted at the end of 2024, with any luck, and we want to be included.

Do you think the history of the term being so associated with race helps or hinders the movement?

Well, it’s not called racial apartheid. It’s just called apartheid. The reason that apartheid doesn’t include gender is because it was created in the 20^th century out of the South Africa experience. I [also] think a lot of international criminal law [has been] created by men in small rooms, and not necessarily with women’s input and that’s changing. We see that there is an increased focus on gendered crimes. There’s even a reevaluation of the crime of genocide to focus more on the gendered aspects of it. Historically, people have assumed that genocide has to be mass killing, not realizing that actually, it could also just be sterilization, and those forms of genocide are much more focused around women.

The point is a lot of crimes that we grapple with are really viewed through more of a male lens, and there’s been a concrete effort to apply a gender lens to that. I think this ties into the reason why apartheid didn’t focus on gender. It wasn’t because there weren’t gender apartheid regimes. It was just because of the kind of dialogue that was happening in the 70s and the 80s and the 90s.

Longer term, what happens if you succeed in changing international law? What happens if [gender apartheid] is criminalized?

The biggest thing is just that then it’ll be possible to be prosecuted, and there’ll be a lot of new pathways for accountability. It also ultimately will enforce prosecution of crimes like gender persecution, as well, because prosecutors will start to think more deeply about the gender aspects of crime. But while the end goal might be to have this legally enshrined, really, the goals are all along the way. Because what we want to do is raise awareness about what this crime is, but also drive policy actions.

I mean, with South Africa, the ask was really to financially isolate that regime and to get people—governments, companies—to stop doing business with them. With Iran and Afghanistan, they’re already very isolated, they’re already very sanctioned. It’s not about introducing new sanctions or dissuading companies from working with these states, because they already aren’t. It’s about reframing the discussion. Those sanctions are issued for nuclear proliferation, for WMDs, for ballistic missiles, for terrorism; they are not issued for human rights violations, and they’re definitely not issued for gender apartheid. So we want to start to reframe why it is that we’re saying that governments should not engage with these governments [so] they need to change their behavior. It makes it unacceptable.

The crime of apartheid as distinct to the crime of gender persecution, gender apartheid would introduce more of a question about third party actors. Because of the historical example of South Africa apartheid, there’s a question of liability. If governments and companies are complicit, or doing business with regimes that are perpetrating gender apartheid, are they willingly aiding and abetting this regime? It’s a bit more expansive than what’s currently on the books, in our view.

We’re not asking for increased sanctions as part of this campaign. What we’re asking for is that there clearly are demands that gender apartheid come to an end.

For more information, you can read the letter in its entirety, and join in signing it, at endgenderapartheid.today.

You Should Give a Sh*t About is an ongoing column highlighting local stories with a global impact. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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May 18, 2023August 28, 2024

You Should Give a Sh*t About: Gender Apartheid

by Anna Lind-Guzik

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After my daughter was born, I struggled to produce milk. Why did I feel like I had to keep trying?

When I was sixteen, I went to see my mother in a community theater production of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Though Mom performed a chilling death scene as Grandma Joad, it was the character at the center of the play, a young woman named Rose of Sharon, who ended up haunting me. In the third act, Rose has just given birth to a still born baby—a particularly cruel fate given what the Joad family had already endured on their journey West. But then, grieving and broken, the family encounters a young boy and his father, who is dying of starvation, in an abandoned barn. Rose of Sharon, with her milk having just come in, unbuttons her blouse and nurses the dying man back to health.

Even as a teenager, I sensed some great superpower, a gift that I couldn’t wait until it was my turn to receive.

A few years later at a coffee shop, I watched a young mother, dressed in a blue tube top with light brown hair hanging down to her waist, wrestle with her hungry baby. I stared transfixed as she casually pulled down her top and popped out a small, perfect breast. Her baby immediately latched on. The woman was sitting in the window, warm afternoon light flooding behind her, and for a moment, she seemed to occupy a holy air: her long hair curtaining them off as the baby nursed with a practiced ease, a profound sense of calm flowing outward from them.

In December 2021, a few days before Christmas, I gave birth for the first time. Immediately after cutting the umbilical cord, my daughter was put to my breast; I felt a little pull and suddenly she was working away. I gasped. We stayed like that for about an hour, completely still except for her suckling. Her cheeks and my breasts were both so large at that point it was hard to know where she ended and I began. It would be the last time that breastfeeding was easy for us.

Two days later, I was told by a nurse that my daughter's weight had dropped and that she probably wasn’t latching correctly. A lactation consultant kindly showed me a better angle to hold the baby while nursing. I adjusted. My daughter latched on. “Everyone thinks the cradle way is easiest,” she said. “But that’s because of what we see in the movies.” And in literature, and plays, and paintings, and in coffee shops, I thought.

I believed everything was going fine until around 3 AM the following morning, when I was awoken by another lactation consultant, this one much harsher than the last. Standing over my bed, she sported a neon fanny pack and a buzz cut on one half of her head, her vibe much closer to Nurse Ratched than Mother Theresa. I honestly can’t remember most of what she said, except for one phrase that she repeated over and over: “This is an emergency.” She told me that my milk hadn’t come in yet because I’d had a c-section and my body was prioritizing healing. Strike one against mama, the c-section. Strike two, bad nipples.

My husband and I were directed to feed the baby tiny bottles of formula while I was put on a pumping schedule of every two hours for fifteen minutes at a time. By the time I left the hospital, my nipples were cracked and bleeding, looking like a pair of skinned knees. According to Ratched, the clock began when I started the pump, not when I finished, which, after the obligatory clean up and sterilization of the pump’s various parts, meant that I was sleeping in bursts of an hour to an hour and a half. I started to lose my grip on reality from the sleep deprivation. All the while, nothing was coming out.

Once we got home, I became obsessed with solving the riddle of my broken breasts. I saw a total of six lactation consultants. According to these experts, I had already done so much wrong: taking Dayquil when I came home from the hospital with a cold, sleeping through a couple of my pumping alarms, not being hydrated enough, not eating enough calories, being too stressed for the oxytocin to release and help the milk flow. So I ate all the lactation cookies, drank all the teas they recommended, and even went to an acupuncturist. I created Excel spreadsheets to track my progress, which I made my husband and mother fill out in detail every time they fed the baby. I continued the relentless pumping schedule that had been prescribed to me.

To make matters worse, I was spending less and less time with my baby. I was still trying to nurse her, still trying to recreate every beautiful feeding scene I’d witnessed, but the reality was that until I started to produce milk, she still needed to eat, and the bottle kept her from being interested in the breast. I’d always heard that newborns were like breathing, dreaming appendages, attached so firmly for the first few months that they don’t feel like separate beings. But whenever I looked down, instead of seeing my baby, there was only a mess of wires, and a buzzing pump always alerting me that I was more machine than mother. Over the constant noise, I’d strain to hear her cooing and crying from the other room, where my husband and my own mother held her, and changed her, and fed her.

One morning, I woke up with a breast infection so painful it made me forget the intense abdominal surgery I’d just undergone to remove my daughter from my womb.

I’d known about mastitis and blocked ducts, but this felt like broken glass inside my nipples, now shiny and hot as though they each had their own intense fever. One nurse told me she thought it could be thrush, a type of fungal infection, but another was suspicious since my baby didn’t have it in her mouth. A third said I just needed to “toughen my nipples up” and suggested dipping them in black tea. But the more I pumped and tried to nurse, the worse the pain became. I had stopped taking the powerful painkillers prescribed for my c-section recovery, but started taking them again to deal with this new agony. (Later, after I moved to formula feeding exclusively, the pain lessened but still took months to go away altogether.) It seemed to me that my body was saying something important, something it had long been trying to tell me but that I wouldn’t let myself hear. I walked around in a cloud of such sadness that I felt like my soul had the flu.

My pregnancy had been difficult. Almost immediately, I’d developed hyperemesis, which is like morning sickness on steroids. It had landed me in the emergency room twice with dehydration, and once at the dentist when a molar, weakened by copious amounts of stomach acid, disintegrated and fell out of my mouth. I had imagined myself as a pregnant glowing earth mama, all supple curves, completely in tune with nature and myself, but there were times the vomiting was so extreme that I just wanted to die. Then, I had a c-section, further cementing the idea that my body wasn’t meant to do this at all. That my breasts could not “correctly” produce milk was the final nail in the coffin.

The internet, unfortunately, agreed with me.

At the same time that I was struggling to produce milk, America experienced a terrifying formula shortage after a contaminated batch at an Abbott plant led to a widespread recall, revealing the fragility of the formula supply that so many families depend on. But for every woman who was vocal about how the shortage should be considered a national emergency, there was someone, usually a man, asking why women couldn’t “just breastfeed.”

Suddenly total strangers from around the world were chiming in to validate my inadequacy. But in the midst of this turmoil, my breasts still vibrating with mysterious pain, rather than feel rage or frustration, I felt a perverse relief. The world seemed to agree with that little nagging voice in the back of my head. I simply wasn’t meant to be a mother.

How much of the breastfeeding debate is really about the health of the child, and how much is about the control of women's bodies and, moreover, about the performance of successful womanhood?

I found myself thinking about this question a lot in my baby’s first months of life. The internet’s unsympathetic reaction to the formula shortage further demonstrated that many believe the difficulty of breastfeeding to be a modern predicament; that as women have gotten more agency, and more rights, they’ve abdicated more of their motherly duties. But breastfeeding has been complicated since the beginning of time. Women have always experienced issues like mastitis, which before the advent of penicillin was an often fatal infection. And babies have always experienced tongue ties, premature births, and trouble latching. Add to that centuries of malnutrition, as well as external traumas like giving birth in famines, war zones, or while enslaved, and the body’s ability to produce milk becomes less and less likely. We’ve always needed alternatives.

Before formula, parents searched far and wide for methods to replace breast milk. Author Carla Cevasco notes in The Atlantic that early options ranged from cow’s milk to bone broth and nut milk—some of which provided hydration but not necessarily nutrition, and could be deadly due to contamination and poor food preservation capabilities. Historically, the surest way to keep a baby fed was a wet nurse, another woman who had also recently given birth and could breastfeed. Wet nurses were commonly poor or enslaved women who were forced, either by poverty or slaveholders, to feed other’s babies as their own starved at home.

These women’s experiences should remind us that the history of formula feeding is not a stain against a woman’s ability to mother, but in fact quite the opposite: a testament to the incredible act of keeping one’s baby alive.

I knew all this, so why couldn’t I let myself believe it? I thought of every poster hanging in every doctor’s office, waiting room, and maternity ward that depicted mother and child in complete harmony with the tagline “breast is best”—a mantra made popular in the 1950s by a group of Catholic women who called themselves La Leche League and believed breastfeeding was “God’s plan.” And I couldn’t stop seeing that young mother in the coffee shop from my twenties, how she had no problem nursing her infant, the two of them a recreation of every painting I’d ever seen of Madonna and child come to life.

Even before getting pregnant, I had already internalized the cultural messages surrounding breastfeeding so deeply, it had become something much bigger than a simple act. It had bloomed into a dangerous omen.

During my maternity leave, my husband and I spent the late nights re-watching the entire seven seasons of Mad Men. In one episode, a pregnant Betty Draper, played by January Jones, gets asked by a nurse whether she intends to breastfeed. Betty answers with a bored “no” and the nurse nods in agreement. My husband was shocked. Here we were, struggling so intensely, and there was Betty, not even intending to try. What’s more, no one seemed to have a problem with it.

Where my husband saw a kind of permission for formula feeding, I saw something different: an inverse reflection of the very expectations I had failed to live up to, and that are placed on so many birthing parents, regardless of gender. In the 1960s, formula feeding became the norm, with, as historian Amy Bently writes, only 20-25 percent of babies starting their lives being fed breast milk. The primary reason for this shift was the urging of pediatricians who were intent on lowering the infant mortality rate, and saw formula feeding as a more consistent and regimented way to keep babies fed and alive. More women were also working outside the home and needed to be able to leave their infant with a caregiver as they went into the office.

Little of this was relevant to Betty, a wealthy housewife who didn’t work—and so her reasons for bottle feeding were probably similar to the reasons I wanted to breastfeed: It was a cultural marker of being a “good woman.”

After six excruciating weeks, the end of my breastfeeding journey was sudden, unexpected. Eventually, when calling the nurse for the umpteenth time to describe a new pain in my breast—a swelling lump that hurt to touch—I received the kindest advice I’d been given thus far. “Honey, just give up,” she said. “You don’t need to do this.” Her tone was frank but measured; her South Boston accent rough but comforting. I didn’t know how much I’d needed her permission to stop.

I was free—almost. For a couple more weeks, I still tried to nurse, but then during a blizzard that lasted the weekend, I gave up cold turkey. I made my husband run out into the storm to collect little baggies of snow that I would then sneak into my bra sandwiched between cabbage leaves, an old wives’ remedy for weaning. Lying on the couch, icing my swollen breasts, I thought about how on New Year’s Eve, just a few days after we’d returned from the hospital, my husband and I had waited for the clock to strike midnight, my baby in my arms. While giving her a bottle, I started to cry. “Why can’t I feed my child?” I asked him. “Look at you right now,” he replied. “You are literally feeding your child.”

I glanced down at my daughter, her eyes wide, slowly blinking, and saw her taking in all of me. The Christmas tree lights glimmered behind us, lighting us both up with a starry glow. How long had she been staring at me like that? I wondered. Her tiny hand wrapped around my finger, her skin pressed against my skin. I felt like I was seeing my baby for the first time, and noticed that I was, in fact, feeding her.

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May 12, 2023August 28, 2024

A Personal History of Breastfeeding

by Lacy Warner

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How social media influencers are challenging stereotypes both within and outside of Muslim communities—just by being themselves.

In this very digital age, I wouldn’t describe myself as much of a social media person. Despite my active Twitter presence, which I attribute to work, and the occasional procrastination scroll on Instagram, which always ends up longer than expected, I’ve just never really found much joy in it. Even back when most people dreamed of becoming bloggers, I never saw the appeal: I couldn’t relate to their desire to share their lives so publicly, and felt a disconnect with their content as a result.

Then, around January last year, I discovered With Love, Leena. The account follows the day to day life of Texas-based content creator Leena Snoubar, covering everything from fashion to parenting to all things lifestyle. In one video, she gives a tutorial on how she removes makeup stains from her hijabs. In another, she shares an intimate day out with her mother and sisters, where they grab brunch and go wedding dress shopping for her youngest sister. Scrolling through her account, I found myself feeling—for the first time—like I was actually getting something out of my Instagram experience: I’d never come across a Muslim influencer who was so visibly Muslim and yet didn’t feel the need to justify or be bound by their religion.

It was only when I came across Leena that I realized my feelings of disconnect on social media had less to do with the platforms themselves, and more to do with the kind of content I was seeing. Maybe it was the algorithm or just my lack of social media engagement, but I was almost exclusively served either general fashion and beauty content—which I assumed was because of my gender—or Islamic videos, with little in between. It made me feel alienated in terms of my other interests, and like I had to separate my religious identity from the rest of me, or else somehow justify their intermingling.

For a lot of young Muslims, being online as a visibly Muslim person creates a pressure to either always be preaching Islamic content or advocating for our religious identity. When I first started out as a journalist, I often felt a heavy responsibility to justify my identity, and to prove, somehow, that Muslim women were not limited to the stereotypes projected onto us. But constantly having to justify my identity also meant constant emotional labor, and as I quickly learned, this only ever led to burnout. It’s a pressure that content creator Maliha—who says she’s been an “internet girlie” since before influencers became popular—is very familiar with. “I started out with my YouTube channel, and then Instagram, and because a lot of my content was cosplay I became the ‘hijabi cosplayer,’” she says. “But I’m not very good with having a niche, and when I moved to TikTok, I started making content that I connected to more, mostly rants and healing—social justice-y stuff.” Despite pivoting directions with her content, though, she soon found that her audience hadn’t changed or expanded at all: Maliha says that even though her content wasn't Islamic, TikTok’s algorithm was almost exclusively showing her videos to other Muslim users.

This sort of systemic stereotyping, that comes from both outside and within Muslim communities, is exactly what some influencers like Leena and Maliha are challenging with their diverse content. Despite living continents apart, I immediately felt a connection to Maliha—one that came from so many shared experiences, not just as Muslims, but also as young women. She’s just an average twenty-something, sharing her everyday thoughts, laced with a little humor and, often, a lot of sarcasm. I’m not the only one who has felt a connection to her work, either: Maliha says that her role as a content creator has helped her make friends across the globe.

For 20-year-old Younis AlZubeiri, this sense of community has played a big role in his own content creating journey. “My overarching goal with my content was to also be that outlet for other Muslims on the internet that didn’t really have someone to look to online,” he says. “In the world of Andrew Tates and [other] horrible role models to young kids, especially Muslims, I tried to just be a source of good to them.” He first started creating content at 14, making videos about comics just for himself. But slowly, his focus started shifting. “When I had followers who looked like me tell me about my impact on them, there was a light that switched,” he shares. Now, he has over 100,000 followers on TikTok, where he shares videos exploring culture and entertainment and diversity within both.

Along with creating spaces of acceptance for Muslims from all walks of life, many of these influencers are also challenging what it means to be visibly Muslim in 2023. This means fighting stereotypes offline, too: Amira Rahmat, a food and travel blogger, often embarks on solo trips and says she’s always met with surprise when people see a young Muslim woman traveling alone. “When I post content on my page, a lot of the comments I see are, ‘Oh, you’re so brave to travel alone,’” Amira shares. But likewise, she says many of her commenters are inspired by her videos: For many Muslim women, who have to fight back stereotypes that Muslim women’s pardah or religious restrictions keep them confined to their homes, seeing women like Amira and being able to share in her experiences has become a crucial part of shaping their confidence and self reflection.

It may seem like these are just a bunch of random creators covering various topics, but that’s the point. In this age of growing Islamophobia, they’ve begun to play a very important role in humanizing all of us beyond our hijabs and beards and masjids. They’re creating their own spaces, where being Muslim doesn’t impact or influence all the other parts of themselves. This is just as pivotal within our community as it is outside of it: Muslims who find themself stuck between proving themselves to other Muslims and justifying themselves to non-Muslims seeing creators just being honest and unapologetic about whatever topic they’d like can give us a lot of strength on the days we most need it. “It’s such a fine line to be a Muslim artist in any capacity,” says Dubai based content creator Emad. Whether or not you talk about religion, he continues, you’ll be judged by Muslim and non-Muslim creators alike, and pigeonholed by both. “For someone like me, I wanted to get into Muslim content because it’s fun. [But] so many times it happens that you become a ‘Muslim creator’ and then you do a fun TikTok dance and suddenly you’re not a Muslim creator because you’ve apparently done something wrong.”

This isn’t always easy. But when the polarized opinions and criticism become too much, Younis says that humor helps—especially when met with harmful alt-right and other extremist narratives. “I can’t just post about being a leftist and expect them to change,” he says. “You have to go about it in another light and try to convey the point you’re trying to make through humor.” These are baby steps, he adds, but making viewers laugh can challenge pre-existing notions that all Muslims are the same and that they don’t exist outside of a one-dimensional identity.

These small steps go a long way, and are already making a difference for creators (and viewers) around the world. Pakistan-based food blogger Emon Malik says the content creator economy has been growing in her country, and credits that to the growing diversity of creators. And the number of Muslim content creators is only growing.

“With more [diverse] content creation, people are more informed,” Amira says. “It comes from personal experiences, not Google, and it’s more raw and authentic.” It’s also more relatable—and for me, inspiring. When I see content creators like Leena or Maliha or Amira, it gives me the push I need to be more unapologetically myself. As these content creators have shown me, I’m more than my religious identity, but I don’t have to hide it away, either.

[post_title] => The New Faces of Being Visibly Muslim Online [post_excerpt] => How influencers are challenging stereotypes both within and outside of Muslim communities—just by being themselves. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => muslim-tiktok-social-media-islam-representation-content-creators-influencers-advocacy [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:15:11 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:15:11 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=5838 [menu_order] => 84 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

May 3, 2023August 28, 2024

The New Faces of Being Visibly Muslim Online

by Anmol Irfan

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 5810 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2023-04-19 00:32:53 [post_date_gmt] => 2023-04-19 00:32:53 [post_content] =>

The first question we ask about complex chronic illnesses shouldn't be whether or not they're real.

Over the last few months, the question of whether long Covid is real has been the subject of lengthy examinations from publications across the political spectrum. These articles are often ambiguous in their conclusions, giving equal weight to the legitimacy of the condition while simultaneously attempting to debunk it.

As anyone who has it will tell you, long Covid is very real, but if you’ve been reading these articles purporting to explore LC’s reality or unreality—questioning if society has it “wrong”—you might think that it is not, or that the people who have it (and illnesses like it) do not have a physical ailment at all, but instead a mental health one. While it’s not surprising that more right-leaning publications have engaged in long Covid denialism, the trend of left-leaning legacy publications like New York Magazine and the New Republic doing something similar is, to me, cause for concern. As a disabled, nonbinary feminist who has dedicated a large chunk of their career to exploring the tangled issues of gender, chronic pain/illness, and the society-wide disbelief of these illnesses, I think the insistence on showing “both sides” of long Covid is a slippery slope.

“Skepticism” of complex chronic illnesses is nothing new. I and many other chronically ill people have seen “skepticism” of our disabilities play out in media, amongst the general public, and in the medical field plenty of times before. Diseases such as multiple sclerosis (MS), rheumatoid arthritis, and ulcers were all thought to be psychosomatic at one time. In more modern times, chronic fatigue syndrome/myalgic encephalomyelitis (CFS/ME), fibromyalgia, Postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), and many other chronic illnesses and pain conditions have been explained away as mysterious, and therefore Maybe Not Real, too.

Yet time and time again, it’s been shown that they are. After a CFS/ME outbreak occurred in Incline Village, Nevada in the mid-1980s, proving that the illness was seriously impacting patients, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) pledged $12.9 million to research the condition, only to then quietly move the money they had earmarked to other departments. Meanwhile, CFS/ME remains just as pervasive today: Many long Covid patients have ended up with CFS/ME after battling acute Covid, in addition to experiencing a host of other debilitating, multi-systemic symptoms.

As a person who has had lifelong health problems of varying severity, when I first heard about CFS/ME as a high school student, my immediate thought was that it sounded awful. Being tired all of the time and having to deal with muscle pain, cognitive issues, poor sleep, and post-exertional malaise (symptoms getting worse after a patient exerts themselves) sounded like a version of Hell on Earth. It’s not that I didn’t think becoming chronically ill could happen to me—because if I’ve learned one thing as a person with multiple health problems, it’s that your health is not under your complete control, no matter how much willpower you think you have. Rather, even then, I understood that extending a crumb of empathy to people whose health conditions seem weird or mysterious or exaggerated to you is not fucking rocket science.

Just a few years later, however, I would learn not everyone feels the same. When I was a 19 year-old college student, I began experiencing extreme fatigue and muscle pain in my back, neck, legs, and shoulders for no apparent reason one day. It never went away, and I spent over a year trying to figure out what was happening to me. Shortly after my 21^st birthday in 2007, I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia by a rheumatologist. It would be another year before fibromyalgia had its media tipping point, but I became familiar with the stereotypes very quickly, mostly via internet comments and a few real-life unsolicited opinions. The people who get it (mostly women, as the gender ratio is very skewed), according to commentors online, tend to be middle-aged or older. They are fat and eat the wrong foods. They’re lazy. They just want prescription drugs. They are mentally ill. They aren’t utilizing positive thinking effectively enough to get better. They just need to exercise more. They are brainwashed by Big Pharma TV ads into thinking they are sick—this one courtesy of popular women’s website Jezebel.

Several of these stereotypes have been projected onto people of all genders with various disabilities, but there’s something about “mysterious” diseases with no single cause that tends to push ableism and sexism to the front—again, most likely because they disproportionately affect women. Unsurprisingly and likely because of this, fibromyalgia tends to be subjected to the “hysteria” argument, too: Per an (in)famous New York Times article titled “Drug approved. Is disease real?” about the fibromyalgia medication Lyrica, “The more these patients are around the medical establishment, the sicker they get.” I am left wondering how soon an “expert” will make a similar argument about long Covid.

Such both-sides claptrap when it comes to illnesses that medical science hasn’t “solved” yet is a thing that some media outlets like to do in the interest of “balance,” and it has been going on for a long time—longer than I have been alive, in some cases. But giving equal weight to opposing perspectives that are not, in fact, equal does not make sense. What, exactly, is the rationale for treating debilitating chronic illnesses, new and old, and those conditions’ reality for millions of people as a neat little thought experiment?

Because I’ve been writing about these issues—and living with them as a chronically ill person—for a long time, I suspect that the answer is multi-faceted. A lack of empathy is one facet; it does not escape my notice that most high-profile articles questioning the “realness” of complex, multi-system chronic illnesses are written by journalists who do not have these health conditions themselves. It also does not escape my notice that it has almost exclusively been chronically ill people, ME/CFS patients, and the journalists, writers, and medical professionals who work with ME/CFS and long Covid patients to call out NYMag, the New Republic, and other publications on bad journalism related to long Covid so far.

But another facet is the broader, ableist pattern of doubting chronically ill people in general, especially those debilitated by contested illnesses. It’s easier to not see ableism, or take it seriously as a mode of oppression, if you don’t deal with it every day. Much like it’s easier to say Well, if I had long Covid, I would just think more positively or If I had CFS/ME, I would at least TRY graded exercise therapy (GET) and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) to get better (even though both have been debunked) when you’re not actually going through it. Medical and everyday sexism, too, is another ingredient in this crappy metaphorical pie—doubting and dismissing women and other people who are not cis men who say that yes, they are in debilitating pain, that their fatigue crushes them 24/7, that they really are sick, has been a huge part of how chronic illness has been talked about in the U.S. for decades. Would you be surprised to learn that, like many of these illnesses, long Covid also has a gender discrepancy? Maybe I’m just cynical, but I was not.

Believing people of all genders when it comes to their experiences—of their own bodies—should be an obvious starting point when it comes to long Covid and other post-viral or “mysterious” chronic illnesses. Just because medical science hasn’t discovered the answers to long Covid, CFS/ME, fibromyalgia, and other chronic illnesses so far does not mean that there are not answers—nor does it definitively mean that these illnesses are psychosomatic. As we’ve seen, disbelieving people about their experiences of their own bodies is deeply entrenched in American culture—especially if those bodies are outside of the norm of cisgender, non-disabled, white, thin, young, and male. The long Covid coverage that’s been highly publicized in this current moment is only continuing this callous tradition of doubting, dismissing, and socially gaslighting chronically ill people as they are—yet again—shoved to the margins. It is time for the media, the government, other institutions, and the non-disabled public to do better.

[post_title] => Long Covid Skepticism is a Slippery Slope [post_excerpt] => The first question we ask about complex chronic illnesses shouldn't be whether or not they're real. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => long-covid-cfsme-fibromyalgia-skepticism-chronic-illness-media-both-sides [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:14:01 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:14:01 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=5810 [menu_order] => 85 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

April 19, 2023August 28, 2024

Long Covid Skepticism is a Slippery Slope

by Anna Hamilton

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 5764 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2023-04-07 20:35:25 [post_date_gmt] => 2023-04-07 20:35:25 [post_content] =>

It’s comforting to imagine that a conscious uncoupling would heal our country’s painful divisions. But it wouldn’t.

Since its inception, the United States has been divided along a number of overlapping fault lines, most saliently race, religion, geography, and politics. Yet for decades, pundits have been acting as if this were a new and terrifying development. What’s actually a number of divides is most often portrayed as one vast gulf between two, roughly equal “sides”: two sides that can’t agree on human rights, school curricula, the role of government, or even what our Constitution means—and would rather burn the whole country down than attempt to compromise for the greater good.

Ironically, in recent years, pundits on both sides of the aisle have united around a supposed solution to this divide: a national divorce. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican congresswoman from Georgia best known for suggesting that the 2018 California wildfires were ignited by a space laser controlled by a corporate cabal that included Jewish bankers, is the most recent and provocative proponent of this concept, but it’s been proposed a lot since 2016, and not just by far-right extremists. (See: The Case for Blue-State Secession, What Would a United Blue America Look Like?, and It’s Time for a Bluexit, to name a few.)

The appeal is obvious. Proponents across the political spectrum argue that we’d all be better off living in our particular version of a “free country”—for liberals, one where abortion is a right and kids are taught science and history; for conservatives, one where private gun ownership is not restricted and kids are not taught anything that deviates from their parents’ beliefs. It’s comforting to imagine that a conscious uncoupling would heal our country’s painful divisions. But it wouldn’t, because our real problem is not our differing beliefs—it's our broken democracy.

The largest and most profound gap in the United States today isn’t between the Right and the Left: It is between what Americans say they want—and in many cases vote for—and the laws and leaders we have. The clearest proof of this can be found in our electoral outcomes. Nearly twenty-three years ago, a conservative Supreme Court halted a recount in Florida, installing George W. Bush as president, despite his opponent Al Gore winning the popular vote by over half a million. Likewise, when Hillary Clinton became the first woman to win a majority of votes for president in 2016, the Electoral College again defied the will of the people, anointing Donald Trump instead. In the last 20 years, most Americans who vote have voted for the Democratic presidential candidate. Yet thanks to the Electoral College, since 2000, the candidate who won the most votes has twice lost the presidency. Why would someone who voted with a majority of their compatriots in multiple presidential elections, only to see the losing candidate installed in the White House, have faith in our system? Why would they bother showing up to vote the next time?

These elections have consequences that transcend the Oval Office. In 2022, a Court made rabidly right-wing by judges Trump appointed overruled a majority of Americans to strike down Roe v. Wade, extinguishing a nearly 50-year-old precedent which guaranteed limited abortion rights throughout the United States. Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 Supreme Court ruling that guaranteed marriage equality nationwide, is less than a decade old and could very well be next.

Behaving as if the United States is a pure democracy ruled by an enlightened majority is wishful thinking. It’s clearer every day that we are in fact ruled by a reactionary minority. And while it’s true that what the majority believes is not always right—a majority of Americans opposed interracial marriage until relatively recently, for example—consistently overruling the popular will carries its own risks, including widespread apathy and disillusionment.

Despite what he has claimed, Donald Trump has never had the support of a majority of Americans, or even half of them. He became president in 2016 thanks to the Electoral College, not the American people, nearly 3 million more of whom voted for Hillary Clinton. (Not even half of voters cast ballots for Trump, let alone half the country; neither Clinton nor Trump won more than 50 percent of votes cast in 2016—Clinton won 48 percent and Trump got 46.) Throughout his tenure, Trump attained an average approval rating of 41 percent—four points lower than that of any of his predecessors in Gallup's polling era. And voters have not hidden their disapproval: In 2020, more Americans showed up to vote than in any other presidential election in 120 years—and Trump lost by over 7 million votes.

Pundits tend to attribute this abstention to laziness, apathy, or privilege, despite the fact that non-voters are disproportionately non-white and lower-income. But it’s more often a result of hopelessness and despair: While there are many reasons Americans don’t vote, including significant structural barriers and deliberate voter suppression, not voting is also a rational response to mounting evidence that our votes don’t and can’t make a meaningful difference without major democratic reforms. Gun control, abortion rights, Medicare for All, paid family and medical leave, higher pay for child care workers, and government-subsidized child care all have clear majority support. Most Americans also believe the federal government should be doing more to reduce the impact of climate change. But the will of the people only means so much when there’s an Electoral College to overrule the popular vote, a millionaire-dominated Senate to halt popular legislation, and an unelected Supreme Court that can decide, 50 years later, to overturn Roe—itself a far-from-perfect judicial edict which ultimately failed to protect abortion rights.

Yet rather than working to abolish or reform entrenched anti-democratic institutions, pundits across the political spectrum cling to the fantasy of retreating to our separate corners. Right-wing arguments for secession mostly rest on conservatives’ antipathy to, in Rep. Greene’s memorable phrase, “sick and disgusting woke culture issues.” This might make slightly more sense if there actually were a corps of woke warriors in the United States intent on forcing kids to attend drag shows—but, spoiler alert: There’s not. Meanwhile, the liberal case for secession is slightly more reality-based, in that there really are people in power who want to charge women with murder and potentially execute them for having abortions—although such people do not represent half of the country, or even half of South Carolina.

Liberals also sometimes frame their pro-secession arguments as motivated by a desire to protect non-fascists in red states, but how exactly blue state secession would help vulnerable red staters remains a mystery. The argument rests partially on the delusion that blue states will become bastions of freedom, equality, and progressive public policy the moment they sever ties with Mississippi. That analysis conveniently ignores the persistent and ugly legacy of human rights abuses in blue states and requires faith that, as Nathan Newman wrote in “The Case for Blue-State Secession,” blue states newly freed of senators like Joe Manchin would “raise new revenue by increasing tax rates on the wealthy and corporations, and free up funds through lowered military spending”—and put all that new revenue to good and popular use.

A blue state nation might in theory be likelier to raise taxes on the rich, but anyone who has lived in ex-governor Andrew Cuomo’s New York knows blue states have powerful enemies of progress and Manchins of their own. It’s the American people who favor higher taxes on the wealthy, not political elites in any state—just like it’s the American people who want the government to tackle climate change and invest in infrastructure and subsidize child care. Many politicians are in office not to make progress but to block it. All of which is why the best solution is to strengthen our democracy, not divide our country into separate fiefdoms controlled by wealthy interests with different cultural values but a similar stake in avoiding direct democracy.

The United States is enormous, heterogeneous, and full of people with idiosyncratic and often self-contradictory views. It includes families whose members have radically different politics, some of whom live under the same roof. A 2020 report found that more LGBTQ Americans live in the South than in any other region in the country. A recent analysis of public opinion data found that Americans hold substantially more liberal attitudes on questions of gender, sexuality, race, and personal liberty than they did in the 1970s, though their views on issues like gun ownership, abortion, taxes, and law enforcement have changed little in the last 50 years. When Americans have voted directly on abortion policy via statewide ballot measures in the last year, they have—every time and in every state, red, blue, and purple—voted for fewer restrictions, not more.

Opponents of a national divorce tend to focus on the considerable structural and economic obstacles to carving up the country along partisan lines. But the biggest and most urgent reason to oppose this type of schism is the protection of human rights. Avoiding direct democracy is essential to consolidating conservative power. Mitch McConnell is serving his seventh term in the U.S. Senate for many reasons, but popularity in his home state of Kentucky is not one of them—a 2021 poll found that 53 percent of Kentuckians disapproved of McConnell’s performance, and that’s just Kentuckians who are registered to vote. According to a 2020 report, the state of Georgia likely purged nearly 200,000 Georgians from the state’s voter rolls for wrongly concluding that they had moved. Alienation, structural obstacles to voting, voter suppression, and threat of prosecution are powerful barriers to full political participation.

The fact that many of our state governments are conservative does not necessarily reflect the will of the people in those states. Millions of people live in red states and a substantial proportion of them oppose or are unaware of the ugliest policies they purportedly endorse by living there. Even Trump voters do not deserve the policies they supposedly supported; people cast ballots for all kinds of reasons, some of them rational—people whose number one issue is banning abortion will naturally vote for GOP candidates who have promised to do just that—and some of them ill-informed and contradictory. People live where they live for a variety of reasons, most notably family ties and lack of money; not everyone wants or has the resources to move to states with “better” governments. Children and teenagers, who often suffer the most from retrograde state laws, don't choose where they are born or raised. They, too, have rights in need of protection.

Venting our anger by demonizing our neighbors may feel cathartic. It’s a lot easier to rail at red states and the people who live in them than it is to build enough support to achieve the democratic reforms we so desperately need. But officially dividing the country along partisan lines would not only fail to keep vulnerable people safe; it would actively trap them in harm’s way. True democracy, like the worthiest ideals of our original, diverse, and experimental nation, is worth defending. Divorce won’t save us, but a functioning government—one everyone is encouraged and equipped to participate in, and given ample reason to trust—could.

[post_title] => America Needs a Democracy, Not a Divorce [post_excerpt] => It’s comforting to imagine that a conscious uncoupling would heal our country’s painful divisions. But it wouldn’t. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => america-national-divorce-broken-democracy [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:11:28 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:11:28 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=5764 [menu_order] => 86 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

April 7, 2023August 28, 2024

America Needs a Democracy, Not a Divorce

by Raina Lipsitz

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 5760 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2023-04-06 06:27:58 [post_date_gmt] => 2023-04-06 06:27:58 [post_content] =>

Attacks against LGBTQ rights—largely targeting trans people—have been ramping up. It isn't hard to imagine what will happen next.

Since the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges legalized same-sex marriage nationwide in 2015, we have been living through an era of fierce fascist backlash against progressive politics and “wokeness” in general—much of it targeted against the LGBTQ community. With each passing year, Republican theocrats have pushed the envelope in state legislatures, paving the way for the eventual passage of severe restrictions on LGBTQ rights. Across the board, these attacks have disproportionately affected transgender people.

In this era of defunding and banning gender-affirming healthcare—and, most recently, a ban on drag in the state of Tennessee that will likely lead to police harassment of anyone deemed gender-nonconforming, if it survives its legal challenges—the bathroom bills of yesteryear seem almost quaint. The Right’s onslaught has progressed incrementally but quickly, with the state bans on trans girls participating in school sports that began to pass in 2020 effectively serving as “gateway” bills to make today’s terrifying state-level, anti-queer crackdown possible. And now, congressional Republicans are threatening to take state persecution of the LGBTQ community nationwide once more: H.R. 734, the first national anti-trans sports bill to advance in Congress beyond committee, is currently awaiting a floor vote in the House of Representatives. This bill comes just days after the House passed a new “parental rights” bill, more accurately described as a “don’t say gay” bill: legislation that would force schools to out queer children to their parents in order to receive federal funding, among other repressive measures.

Neither of these bills will pass the narrowly Democratic-controlled Senate, of course. But should Republicans regain both houses of Congress and the presidency in 2024, national bills attacking queer schoolchildren (and the parents who support them), gender-affirming healthcare for both minors and adults, and public expressions of gender-nonconformity are very likely to become federal law. With the precedent set by the recent overturning of Roe v. Wade as a key turning point, the Roberts Court will already have established the “constitutionality” of allowing such cruel, draconian laws. And they will be passed, of course, in the name of “protecting children,” even though queer children will be severely harmed by these policies—forced to remain closeted or subjected to outing and conversion “therapy,” and, in far too many cases, driven to suicide as a result.

Using children as pawns to push a radical Christian agenda is nothing new. To make their enemies seem truly monstrous, authoritarians need innocent “victims” to “rescue.” This is where “the children” come in, so long as the children are never permitted to speak for themselves. We’ve seen this playbook before. The Christian boys supposedly subjected to ritual murder by Jews, according to the medieval European blood libel. The fertilized eggs that anti-abortion extremists insist to us are “persons” whose “murders” must be prevented and/or punished. And now, the all-American schoolchildren who might observe happy, thriving queer adults, or read about queer people in school libraries, or hear a female teacher talk about her wife, and thus “decide” to be queer against the wishes of their good Christian parents.

Of course, if proponents of anti-trans legislation actually cared about children, they would rally behind, for example, sensible regulations to make sure that homeschooling isn’t being used by parents to abuse, neglect, or indoctrinate their children. They would support initiatives like those in the state of California that provide wellness centers in public schools, where any student can get mental health help and queer children can get safe and confidential guidance without fear of being outed to parents that it may not be safe to come out to. Instead, the people concerned with “saving kids” from “transgenderism” promote the opposite—including unregulated homeschooling and Christian schooling where possible, and attempting to control public schools where it’s not.

As John Stoehr of The Editorial Board aptly put it, “The rights of children—the right to grow, develop and change—is conspicuous for its absence in the debate over anti-trans laws, book bans and other oppressive forms of government control.” In the United States, children’s rights at the federal level are almost nonexistent. We are the only United Nations member state not to have ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. And if patriarchal, anti-pluralist, authoritarian Christians who treat their children like chattel want to keep things this way—and they do—fomenting a conspiratorial politics of moral panic is an effective means of doing so.

In recent years, a number of commentators have convincingly argued that the QAnon conspiracy theory is of a piece with the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and 1990s—essentially the resurgence of an American impulse toward Christian-inflected moral panic. Then as now, conspiracy theorists have conjured up a phantasmagoric enemy, projecting their fears, anxieties, and grievances both personal and social onto a monstrous “other” in the name of protecting “children” from cabals of ritual child abusers who happen to be populated by the out-groups conservative Christians most despise: “heretics” and nonbelievers, liberals and progressives (including progressive Christians), Jewish-coded “elites,” and members of the LGBTQ community.

Again, this is nothing new. In 1977, Anita Bryant named her Miami, Florida-based organization that fought, successfully, for anti-gay discrimination “Save Our Children.” Similarly, in the original Satanic Panic, the panicking populace in question rallied around “believing the children.” The irony is that the adults involved did not, in fact, believe the children—the supposed victims of the supposed satanic ritual abuse, of which no physical evidence has ever emerged. It was only under prompting from their paranoid parents, wildly irresponsible mental health practitioners pushing “recovered memory” therapy, and police and prosecutors at the height of the “tough on crime” era that the children were “believed” at all—after they at last broke down and told the adults what they wanted to hear, by regurgitating those adults’ absurd dark fantasies back to them. In recent years, some of these children, now able to speak for themselves as adults, have explained the ways in which they were manipulated into lying. Some have even gone to court to formally recant their childhood testimony in an effort to exonerate innocent people who were falsely convicted. Not coincidentally, many of those innocent people who were unjustly locked up for years as a result of the Satanic Panic were also queer.

This historical context has been on my mind as I consider the American Christian Right’s current moral panic, in which fixations on Hollywood, the Democratic Party, and the “deep state” coincide with the rebooting of baseless 1970s and 80s era conspiracy-mongering about queer people as supposed “groomers” and “pedos.” In fact, most child molesters identify as heterosexual. But as the website of the Zero Abuse Project, a nonprofit dedicated to preventing sexual abuse, puts it, “Abuse is about power and control and is not anchored by sexual orientation.”

Never mind the fact that 93% of child sex abusers are known to their victims, and 34% of child sex abuse victims are abused by members of their own families. Statistically, attending church on a regular basis is far more dangerous for children than attending an occasional family-friendly drag show in the company of their parents. Yet only the latter are regularly targeted by raving mobs of angry, mostly white, mostly male Christian fascists, carrying the Christian flag and shouting things like, “The fist of Christ will come down on you very soon!”

Abusers and authoritarians can’t handle ego threats, so instead of self-reflection on the real threats of violence within their own communities, they scapegoat members of vulnerable groups, casting them as “demonic” and connected to powerful, “evil” forces, thus allowing them to paint themselves as victims rather than victimizers. Rather than grapple with the ways in which their patriarchal ideology directly fosters abuse against women, children, and queer folks, they push actively harmful policies that purport to “help” them. Such are the contours of majoritarian grievance-mongering—and it’s the out-groups and the children the fascists claim to be so concerned about who suffer as a result.

Like other kinds of abuse, today’s right-wing American moral panic is about power and control—the power and control of the aggrieved, privileged population who fear they are losing their “right” to put the rest of us in our place. So far, the current moral panic isn’t generating an epidemic of false convictions for “indecency” or sexual misconduct involving minors, as happened during the Satanic Panic. But if we let them get away with it, today’s American fascists will simply criminalize queer existence, and then, you can be sure, the arrests will start in force.

Tennessee’s new drag ban, which would have gone into effect on April 1 before it was temporarily blocked by a court, stipulates that a second offense is a felony, punishable by up to six years in prison. And let’s be clear: While lower courts may still block laws like Tennessee’s from going into effect as they work their way through the court system, the illegitimately stacked, far-right Supreme Court can almost be counted on to stand on the wrong side of history. If the law does go into effect within the next year or two, how it is enforced may give us a hint of what lies in store for the rest of the nation if Republicans take full control of the federal government. We need to be aware of the stakes even as we continue to fight state-level battles, and we need to start pressuring blue states to commit not to enforce unjust laws targeting marginalized people, as dictated by an angry fascist minority who hold disproportionate power in our flawed American system. Fascists should not be allowed to frame the national discourse, and they have proven time and time again that they don’t truly care about the wellbeing of actual children, as opposed to the voiceless victims they’ve created in their heads. They only care about retaining power and control—and pitting scapegoated “demons” against objectified “children” is a means to that end.

[post_title] => Tennessee's Anti-Drag Bill Doesn't Exist in a Vacuum [post_excerpt] => Attacks against LGBTQ rights—largely targeting trans people—have been ramping up. It isn't hard to imagine what will happen next. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => anti-lgbtq-drag-policies-christian-attacks-rights-tennessee [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:11:28 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:11:28 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=5760 [menu_order] => 88 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

April 6, 2023August 28, 2024

Tennessee’s Anti-Drag Bill Doesn’t Exist in a Vacuum

by Chrissy Stroop

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 5695 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2023-03-27 17:00:00 [post_date_gmt] => 2023-03-27 17:00:00 [post_content] =>

Their stories, in their own words—and why you should be paying attention.

Rode Wanimbo’s aunties welcomed her back to her ancestral village in the usual way—with a song of lament. This, in her Lani tribe’s language, is known as leendawi, somewhere between singing and crying. And whenever she visits for a vacation, or when a family member passes away, her aunties greet her with it.

On this occasion as always, Rode followed her aunties into a traditional honai, a roundhouse built with natural materials, and sat to hear their stories, told through song. Her village has witnessed an unspeakable horror. In 1977, a year before Rode was born, the Indonesian military swept into West Papua in a hostile takeover, killing swathes of villagers. Rode’s family fled to the town of Wamena, her mother pregnant with Rode and already caring for an infant son. Others were forced to flee on foot, either seeking refuge in neighboring Papua New Guinea or becoming internally displaced people (IDPs) and clutching at survival in the forest. On her last trip home, Rode’s aunties sang tales of these atrocities. They spoke of how they were raped by the Indonesian army, of witnessing loved ones die, and how others crossed the border to live as refugees.

As Rode recounts this, her voice begins to tremble, as it does for much of the interview. The first time she heard the leendawi, she was 11 years old.

“That’s the way they express what they have been going through. I think that in our culture, that’s the only way they try to pass a message to me, through that leendawi,” she says. Women are not allowed to speak in front of men, Rode adds, making it hard for them to express their feelings. Yet across West Papua, thousands of Indigenous women are dealing with trauma after trauma after being displaced from their homes, with no outlet to speak on it.

“We thought about how to create a safe space for women, so women can talk,” Rode says.

As part of her role as the coordinator of the women’s department for the Evangelical Church of Indonesia, she’s done just that. Alongside her team, Rode has created what she calls “storytelling circles,” where women can openly share their experiences and emotions with each other. Currently, Rode runs a handful of sessions a year, taking long journeys across tricky terrains to reach different communities.

At these sessions, around 20 women come together. They start with body mapping, where each woman lies on a large sheet of paper, as her body is outlined on the page by a partner. Using this silhouette as a guide, the pair asks each other which parts are sick or need attention. Sometimes the women, forced to walk for hours each day to collect food and water, share how it impacts their bodies. Other times, the women share what they’ve survived.

In another session, the participants use time periods as a way into their stories, the steady concept of dates and seasons opening a door to the traumas they’ve never spoken aloud. The women share their experiences, first with a partner and then the group, revealing how the military and police burned down their villages. They talk about their homes and gardens being destroyed, yet how they still long to go back. How they want to be in a place where they belong, the place of their ancestors.

Alongside these safe spaces, Rode—who has also sent joint submissions to the UN on the issue of IDPs in West Papua—is collecting an oral record of these women’s testimonies. She shared some of their stories with The Conversationalist, originally spoken in local languages and written down from memory. The stories here have been collected by Rode, and the names have been changed.

At this time, international journalists are not allowed into West Papua.

The women of Nduga

When Yohana and her family were forced from their home in Nduga, Yohana’s husband walked with her as far as the region’s border. He parted with sobering words.

“He said, ‘If you find a man who is able to make a garden and make sure you and our children have a meal every day at the shelter, I give you permission to marry him as if I was dead, for I will go back to join the National Liberation Army to protect our homeland,’” Yohana told the storytelling circle. She has been living in an IDP center in Wamena for around four years, and has survived by gardening on land borrowed from the local community.

Yohana was forced to flee her home after an incident that displaced hundreds of people in her community. It occurred in 2018, during a celebration of what many Indigenous Papuans consider their independence day: when their elders declared their freedom from Dutch Colonial rule on December 1, 1961, before Indonesia took over in 1969. According to Rode, as members of the West Papua National Liberation Army (a rebel civilian organization) celebrated this day in Nduga, some construction workers took a photograph. The liberation army believed the workers to be police informants, and violence broke out. Some of the workers—reportedly up to 31—were killed. According to those displaced, army and police raids followed in retaliation: They burned down houses, churches, and schools, and dropped explosives from helicopters.

An eyewitness to an aerial attack in West Papua shares recovered ordnance. (Photographer anonymous by request.)

Life before the conflict, according to some of Rode’s friends, was peaceful and centered around community, family, and gardening. Now, this particular community in Wamena is host to around 200 women and children displaced from Nduga. There are eight other such communities in the region. Most of the men have either gone to the jungle to join armed rebel groups or have stayed behind to look after their villages, leaving them behind. There is no clean water nearby, no electricity, no hospital access, and no school. When babies are born, it is often in the IDP centers themselves.

“Some [women] spend sleepless nights because they don’t know the situation of their children,” Rode says, many of whom were separated from their mothers during the military attacks. There is no internet connection to trace them.

Displaced in Ilaga

At around 7 a.m. one morning, Irene and her husband were in front of a village office in Ilaga when she heard the fatal gunshot. She didn’t see who had fired it—only that it had come from the direction of the trees, and that it had killed her husband. She did not cry.

“My children are living with trauma as I did, but I pretend to be strong in front of them,” she told Rode. The violence has only continued: One night during her stay in Ilaga, Rode heard gunfire at the Indigenous settlement. She claims the source was the Indonesian security forces. She lay awake all night, thinking of her own two children.

The day-to-day life for these women is no easier. For many of the women in Ilaga, hours every day are spent walking to gardens and rivers, hours away, just to collect sweet potatoes and clean water. Along the way, soldiers stop them at regular army posts, where they have to report on the purpose of their travel. According to Rode, the reason for these checkpoints comes down to the army being suspicious of the IDPs—they believe they might be providing information and food to armed separatist groups. The women told Rode that they know it is dangerous to travel these distances, but that they have no choice. To stay still is to starve.

Beyond tensions around independence movements, there is another driver of conflict in the region. The island of New Guinea is home to the world’s third largest area of rainforest, and its natural resources are highly sought after. Indigenous communities, the guardians of this environment, have been further displaced from their homes as companies seek gold, minerals, or space for palm oil monocultures. Freeport’s Grasberg Mine—one of the world’s largest gold mines—has been the most famous example. But there have also been plans to build a mine in the gold-filled mountains of the Wabu Block, which have been met with huge concern from groups like Amnesty International.

In Ilaga, one mother told Rode, with anger in her eyes, “If the Indonesians want to have our gold from our mountains, they could just take it. Why did they treat us like animals? They came into our homes without permission and uprooted us from our ancestral land.”

For Indigenous communities, Rode explains, this removal feels especially painful, because of their spiritual and cultural connection with the mountains, rivers, and land. To remove the people is to destroy their identity.

“We view mountains as our mother who nurtured the plants, which become food for the animals, and we get the milk from the animals,” she says. “When our mountains are being exploited, it’s like a rape to our mother. We have to protect our mother.”

A view of the Papuan highlands near Kiwi. (Photographer anonymous by request.)

The root of West Papua’s problems

West Papua’s problems go back to 1898, when it was colonized by The Netherlands, along with the other islands that now form Indonesia. When the country became independent in 1949, however, it was without West Papua, which stayed in the control of the Dutch. Instead, West Papua prepared for its own independence throughout the 1950s, and by 1961, that moment had arrived: A congress of people declared independence and raised their new Morning Star flag for the first time in what is now called Jayapura. The Indonesian government, however, was not happy with this arrangement, and soon invaded. In a bid to end the conflict between Indonesia, the Netherlands, and Indigenous Papuans, the US government encouraged the Dutch to hand control of West Papua to Indonesia. The New York Agreement gave control of West Papua to first the United Nations, and then, by 1963, to Indonesia, which became the temporary administrator of the country, with the stipulation that West Papuans would have the right to self determination.

But a promised independence referendum in 1969, as part of the transition after the end of Dutch rule, was not a democratic event. Instead, 1,000 people were given a vote by the Indonesian army, and told to make a very specific choice under threat of being shot. Yet this vote was still approved by the UN—cementing West Papua’s place under Indonesian rule.

“The Papuans were just outside the room, while the rest of the world decided their future,” says Naomi Sosa, founder of Papua Partners, an organization that supports training and global links in the country. “The root goes down to the political contestation. They were supposed to have a vote for self determination, but it was controlled by Indonesia.”

Eventually, in 2000, West Papua was given special autonomy, with their own government looking after their affairs, but without independence. In reality, Naomi says this special autonomy wasn’t implemented properly, with all the powers being taken back to Jakarta. Today, there is a movement demanding self determination, where West Papuans could determine their own future through a referendum. But in stark contrast to this desire, the Indonesian government is focusing on the decentralization of provinces. Under Indonesian president Joko Widodo, known as Jokowi, things have become more difficult for West Papuans, with UN experts saying that since violence escalated in 2018, there are now 100,000 displaced people and humanitarian aid is being blocked. Naomi says Indigenous communities, particularly those in the highlands, are under severe threat. Any form of protest is met with brutal force. Now, the government wants to make further divisions, which Naomi says makes it harder for the 250 tribes to unite and weakens the independence movement.

More districts also means more military posts—which makes many IDPs uneasy. Rode says when displaced women in particular are encouraged to go back home, they feel they have no guarantees of their safety because of the increased military presence.

“Please tell them to leave our homeland so we can go back home,” they tell her.

Still, Rode has not given up hope, and neither have the thousands of people displaced throughout the country, whether they are part of independence movements or staying strong to keep their families alive in IDP camps. As the final call with her ends, Rode makes a plea: West Papuans need solidarity from the international community. They are experiencing settler colonialism, and it cannot be separated from global politics. Papuans do not want to be forgotten.

“We are powerless,” Rode says. “We really need help.”

[post_title] => The Forgotten Women of West Papua [post_excerpt] => Their stories, in their own words—and why you should be paying attention. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => west-papua-indigenous-women-idps-crisis-indonesia [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:15:11 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:15:11 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=5695 [menu_order] => 89 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

March 27, 2023August 28, 2024

The Forgotten Women of West Papua

by Katie Dancey-Downs

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 5693 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2023-03-20 17:53:11 [post_date_gmt] => 2023-03-20 17:53:11 [post_content] =>

How my culture's food brought me closer to myself.

“That’s the whitest pronunciation I’ve ever heard before.” My friend, Kian, stood to my left, joking or maybe humiliated, while a smiling Persian kid spooned a scoop of faloodeh and a scoop of pink rose ice cream into a cup, passing it to me over the register at Saffron & Rose.

“Fuh-LOO-duh,” Kian mimicked.

“You know I don’t speak Farsi,” I laughed, joking but actually humiliated. The kid handed a cup of Saffron Pistachio, described as a “love potion of Middle Eastern flavor,” to Kian. As we walked out, it occurred to me that while everyone in the shop had been Iranian, myself included, I had still been the other. I couldn’t even pronounce what was allegedly the first frozen dessert in the history of mankind, a delicious ancestral treat of paper-thin rice noodles and chilled rosewater sorbet. But I could learn, right? It was in my blood.

“Ok… so, how do you pronounce it?” I asked.

“FAH-loo-deh.”

FAH-loo-deh. Got it. I practiced a few times — and fucked up a few times — as I inhaled my pink rose ice cream and FAH-loo-deh. Being cultureless is so embarrassing sometimes. I promised myself the next time I ordered it, I’d be able to pronounce it, too.

I’m convinced I’m on this earth to eat. While adulthood has insurmountably jaded me, food is the one thing I still have child-like adulation for. I spend nearly a third of my waking life debating what to cook next, the ingredients I’ll experiment with, and which new restaurant I’ll make a sweaty, 40-minute, gridlocked-Los-Angeles-traffic drive for. I’m a proud member of probably 30 recipe subreddits. On TikTok, I’ve strategically lassoed my algorithm into serving me solely food-related content where I watch people cook with pride and eat with joy, just like I do. All Day Long I Dream About Food.

But as a half-Iranian raised by two white parents, I grew up more on hot dogs, steamed veggies, and the occasional Pennsylvania Dutch indulgence—like apple dumplings, or pork chops with sauerkraut—than anything with even a remote nod toward my Middle Eastern heritage. For a long time, I honestly didn’t even know what Middle Eastern food was.

Growing up, I never wanted to disappoint the people who raised me with excitement for something they weren’t or couldn’t understand. But naturally, I never felt my parents understood me, either. I was an insecure, unibrowed, deeply tan, and raccoon-eyed kid supremely confused about her identity. I’d stare at maps and wonder what it meant to be from “I-Ran,” as my folks and other Pennsylvanians pronounced it. Was I Asian? I wasn’t fully white. Was I Arab? Kids at school told me I was. Was any of this the reason why my hair was so thick and my eyebrows so nauseatingly connected? I liked to think I looked like Princess Jasmine with a plait down my back, but her legs weren’t nearly as hairy as mine were at eight years old. I couldn’t ask my parents questions, either, so if someone said “what are you?” and then looked at me funny when I replied “Iranian,” I’d quickly correct myself and say that actually, I was German. It was technically true, on my mom’s side. And the Pennsylvania Dutch are, after all, also German. So for me to be singularly German was easier for everybody.

While it took me much less time to admit I was also definitively Iranian, it took me nearly 30 years to explore Persian food. In a way, I was scared of what I’d find, or how much I’d enjoy it. I’d always wondered what I’d been fed during the months I’d spent in Iran as a baby. If I tried those foods again, would some small part of my soul recognize the flavor; the texture; the feeling it invoked? Would it trigger something inexplicable in me, good or bad? Would it just make sense? Would I finally become Persian?

When I first sought it out, I found Iranians are happy to share their culture of food with you, and through it, their love. They’ll also readily accept you as their brother or sister even when you know nothing about it. If you’re Persian—even half, like me—you’re unequivocally part of the tribe, fused by some ancestral chemistry and recognition I can’t quite explain. It’s like we’re all aware of the possibility we’ve known each other in previous lives and in previous, ancient lands. There within lies some familial bond.

“I don’t really know much about Iranian food,” I told my friend Nilu, who was visiting from London, over a lunch of raw onions, Persian naan, beef koobideh, and chicken kabob at Glendale’s Shamshiri Grill. It was still early in my cultural food odyssey, and we were celebrating Nowruz, the Persian New Year, which marks the beginning of spring equinox and the start of Farvardin, the first month of the ancient Solar Hijri calendar. Despite knowing nothing about it at the time, I’d already been kindly greeted with “Norooz pirooz!” and “Nowruz Mobarak!” (both roughly translate to “Happy New Year”) by several Persian friends that morning, simply for existing and being Iranian. I did not feel like I deserved it.

“Doesn’t matter. You’re Persian, and it’s Persian New Year. That’s why we’re here!” Nilu said, having admonished me just moments ago for not knowing Iranians eat plain, raw white onions the way some people might bite into an orange. “NOW TRY MY CHICKEN!” She’d ordered chicken marinated in saffron and yogurt over saffron rice with green veggies. I eyed it suspiciously.

I knew to “become Persian” I’d have to get over my immense dislike for chicken. My mom, god bless her, fed me and my family boneless, lightly seasoned, baked chicken breasts with steamed veggies several nights a week, though in my memory, it felt like every night. Pair that with a nightmare I had in college where I bit down on a chicken nugget filled with human teeth, and you’ll find chicken and I don’t have the best relationship.

I begrudgingly forked the chicken up with some rice and bit into it like a child taking a bite of asparagus. Hm, I thought, chicken’s not half bad when it’s seasoned properly. Maybe the onions would grow on me, too.

The next step in my journey was cooking a fully Iranian meal. Even though I cooked all the time, this was uncharted territory; and while I could do it myself, I knew who to call to help. My friend Jasmine (Yasi) had lived in Tehran until she was seven, and, unbeknownst to her, had given me the kindest gift a few years prior: She’d taken me to my first ever Iranian restaurant, Café Glacé, a Persian pizza spot in Westwood. There, I’d eaten a popular Iranian street food for the first time: pizza with thick bread, minced meat, loads of cheese, and no tomato sauce. Delicious. Chef’s kiss. Five stars. The stomach ache I had afterward was worth it.

Yasi had also recently given me a handful of Persian fruit leather and candies from Tehran that I think may have caused my entire awakening. So when it came time to actually try cooking something, I asked her if she wanted to make her favorite childhood meal with me, her mom’s Iranian macaroni, or spaghetti tahdig, an upside-down cake of thick noodles with tomato sauce and ground beef, seasoned with traditional Persian spices like turmeric, cumin, and cinnamon. I knew Yasi had the recipe because her mom had recorded a video of herself making it for her at the beginning of the pandemic.

“Duh,” she replied.

We dumped a can of Carbone pasta sauce into a Dutch oven already simmering with diced onions and minced garlic. After adding spices, we broke up a pound of ground beef into the sauce and let it simmer for 45 minutes, boiling bucatini in a pot for the last 15. We then filled the empty Carbone jar with boiling pasta water and dumped it into our sauce. I felt like a kid watching Yasi prepare our dinner. She was Mother at that moment, telling me how to break up the ground beef or stir the bucatini, and how much seasoning to add into the sauce. More turmeric, less cinnamon. Okay, even more turmeric.

I stirred both the sauce and the noodles individually, and watched the water evaporate along with many of my cultural anxieties. I am Iranian. It wasn’t my choice to grow up without any of the culture, and it’s fine that I was just now learning about it. I was done feeling embarrassed at my lack of knowledge. It’s not like the Persians in my life hadn’t been patient, kind, and generous with theirs.

After seasoning the sauce generously with cinnamon one more time and draining the pasta, it was time to form it into a traditional tahdig, which literally translates to “bottom of the pot” in Farsi. The point is to create a hard shell of pasta on the bottom that becomes a crispy crown once you turn it over and onto a plate. Yasi drizzled some olive oil on the bottom of the saucepan and started layering the bucatini as I heaped spoonfuls of our sauce over it. Once the pasta crisped up, we awkwardly placed a plate over the saucepan and used all four of our hands to topple it over. We ate it on her back porch with olives. She snapped a photo for her parents and I snapped one for myself.

My appreciation for this food is now indelible. Saffron has become a pantry staple and rosewater pistachio ice cream can always be found in my freezer. I intend to try a new Persian meal each month until the words, flavor combinations, and textures become second nature — this month, it was Albaloo polo: rice and sour cherries. Maybe by next year I’ll have developed an affinity for raw onions. Or maybe just a tolerance.

I live in Los Angeles, cheekily dubbed Tehrangeles, as it actually has the largest Iranian population outside of Iran. I’m in no better place to “become” Persian, because I’m in no better place to eat my way there. The beauty of food being at the center of culture is that food is a language everybody understands and, thus, can bring everybody together. When you’re breaking bread, you don’t have to speak. You all know what you’re tasting. And — outside of the idiom — I don’t need to “become” Persian. I am as Persian as my Safavid era ancestors who cut pomegranates from their trees and scooped sweet-and-sour stews up with their hands. But you can only be so close to a culture without knowing its food. Food is the dock in a harbor that guides your boat in and grounds it back to the earth. It’s a holy connector. It unifies and reunifies and is one of the only things everyone needs and enjoys. It’s home.

Now that I’ve learned them, Iranian flavors feel almost inherent to my palate. Some, in fact, taste so familiar I wonder if, as a tot, I’d ever been given a spoonful of ghormeh sabzi, Iran’s national dish of meat and kidney bean stew loaded with herbs and dried limes, or a spoonful of rosewater ice cream, which has been one of my favorites since I tried it for the first time as a teenager. Maybe I’d even had a taste of FUH-loo-deh as a baby. I know someday my children will. And I know I’ll be able to pronounce it then, too.

[post_title] => Becoming Persian [post_excerpt] => How my culture's food brought me closer to myself. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => persian-iranian-food-culture-identity [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:14:01 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:14:01 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=5693 [menu_order] => 90 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

March 20, 2023August 28, 2024

Becoming Persian

by Helen Donahue

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 5633 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2023-03-03 12:01:00 [post_date_gmt] => 2023-03-03 12:01:00 [post_content] =>

Last year, all eyes were on the Kurdish exile turned Swedish MP. Now that she's left parliament, here's what she plans to do with the attention.

Amineh Kakabaveh is stumbling over her words as she lists the things representatives of the regime in Iran and their families can still do, despite local authorities’ brutal crackdown on the nationwide protests for democracy that started in September. “They can still put their money in foreign banks, their children can still study abroad, they can still travel,” she says. Sure, she is glad that Iran was thrown out of the UN Committee for Women’s Rights last December. But, Kakabaveh says, it’s far from enough—and it won’t be, as long as they remain a connected member of the international community.

What adds a painful layer to her anger is the fact that she hasn’t seen her own family in Iran in years, and can’t even freely talk on the phone with them out of fear of retaliation by the regime. “Can you imagine I haven’t seen my father for 23 years?,” she says. “My mom told me on the phone she feels for the mothers. That’s all she can say without getting in trouble.”

Kakabaveh, 48, is a Kurdish-Swedish woman who was only 13 years old when she ran away from suppression and threats by Iran’s then still fairly new Islamic regime to join the armed Kurdish opposition group, the Komala Party. After six years in the mountains of Kurdistan in both Iran and Iraq, she crossed the border into Turkey at 19. From there, she was re-settled to Sweden, where she started getting a formal education for the first time in her life. She made it to university, studying both sociology and philosophy, before entering the Swedish parliament for the Green Party at the age of 35.

Through it all, her resistance against the regime has never faded. But while she has always been rather well-known in Sweden for her political work, the outside world only got to know her last year, when she was suddenly in the eye of a geopolitical storm. Sweden had applied for NATO membership to protect itself against Russian threat after the invasion of Ukraine, but met objections from NATO member Turkey, which wouldn’t give permission for Sweden’s acceptance if it kept supporting Kurdish “terrorists.” They even have one in their parliament, Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan fulminated, referring to Kakabaveh.

She had irritated him, to say the least. After years as an MP for the Green Party, she had become an independent MP in 2019, and as such had power to make or break any government plans: Her one vote defined whether it would get a majority or not. She used that power to force the Swedish government to express its support for the Kurds in Syria, who have been building an autonomous region in the country’s northeast since 2012. There have even been pictures of Swedish officials with what Turkey considers “terrorists” as a result of her work, not to mention the Swedish government’s decision to stop selling arms to Turkey because of the country’s invasion into Syria in 2019. (The embargo has since been lifted.) In retaliation, Erdoğan pledged that Sweden would never become a NATO member until it stopped this support.

The power play between states continues. And while the attention has shifted away from Kakabaveh, who is no longer a member of parliament since the elections in September last year, her attention hasn’t shifted away from politics. Today, she travels throughout Europe, speaking in parliaments from Belgium and Spain to Greece and France, drawing attention to the plight of the Iranian people in general, and that of the Kurds specifically.

Kakabaveh grew up in Seqiz, a town in Kurdistan in northwest Iran—the same town Jina Mahsa Amini was from, the girl who was murdered by Iran’s “morality police” for not properly wearing her hijab when she visited the country’s capital city of Tehran last September, sparking protests around the world. Kakabaveh’s family was so poor that having any kind of childhood was impossible for her. In her memoir, “No bigger than a Kalashnikov”: A Peshmerga in Parliament, she shared how she started working at age six to contribute to the family income. She spun wool, she wove and embroidered, and she did seasonal work in fields and orchards, for which she was paid in fruit and beans. Then, on the radio, a very young Kakabaveh heard about the armed communist opposition group, Komala—and decided that one day, she would join. “An uncle of mine had joined them when I was very small,” she says. “I dreamed about that. I knew that Komala had female peshmerga, too,” referring to the Kurdish fighters whose name literally means “those who face death.”

While Kurdish groups initially supported the revolution in 1979, the new government hadn’t lived up to its promises to them: Kurds didn’t get more rights, or even autonomy. A Kurdish uprising was brutally put down. Amineh was 7 years old when it happened. Soon, the regime started targeting her family after several of its members joined the resistance. Repression increased. “In some media I have been described as a child soldier,” Kakabaveh says, “because I joined the peshmerga when I was 13. But that term doesn’t do justice to reality and to our traumas. The regime abused me, they wanted to lock me up and rape me, they tortured and humiliated my father. They suppress Kurdish culture and rob us of our dignity.” Kakabaveh adds that, while formally, members must be 18 to join Komala, she felt the group “tried to create a place that was as safe as possible for their young members.”

Initially, Komala was based inside Iranian borders, but when that became too dangerous, it retreated to Kurdistan in Iraq. The group is still based there. Although the current demonstrations in Iran are not organized by Komala or other Iranian-Kurdish groups, they are still targeted by the mullahs: Since the protests started in September, their camps and villages have been shelled several times, leading to dozens of deaths, including civilians.

Kakabaveh’s life as a 13-year old peshmerga in the mountains of Kurdistan seems to be light years away from her life as an academically educated former MP in Sweden. But she says her experiences as a young girl in Iran and later as a Komala guerrilla fighter define what she fights for now as a politician and activist. “My mother was forced to marry my father, and that was the same for all the girls,” she says. “All Kurds are suppressed by the regime, but women are also suppressed by the patriarchy. Especially when the Swedish minority government needed my support to govern, I have been able to do a lot to put the Kurdish struggle and the women’s resistance on the international agenda.”

She isn’t sad, she says, that she no longer has a place in the country’s most important meeting hall. In her many years of parliamentary work, she built an enormous international network, which she uses now to draw attention to the situation in Iran from across the world.

In direct contact with her family, though, she still must be extremely careful. “I have talked to my mother only twice since the protests started, very shortly via the phone of one of her neighbors,” she says. “That she said that she is sorry for the mothers tells me a lot. The regime takes children away, takes them to prison, rapes them, tortures them, and sentences them to death.”

What angers her is that the international community doesn’t act decisively enough against the regime in Tehran. That is her most important message now: If she could stand up to it at 13, if people everywhere in Iran continue to pour into the streets in protest despite the suppression, the torture, and the death penalty—why aren’t they getting more support? Canada and Australia have issued sanctions, but that’s about it, she says. “Freeze their money, stop giving visas to them and their families, make them pariahs.”

The protests have been going on for almost six months now. Initially, international media reported on them extensively, but that has been fading away. Are the demonstrations fading away, too? “Not at all,” Kakabaveh says in a fierce voice. She mentions Kurdistan as one of the centers of the demonstrations in the northwest, but another region, Baluchistan, in the southeast, too. “Every Friday after prayers thousands of people protest in Zahedan, the biggest city in Baluchistan,” she says. “Also in Kurdistan the protests are ongoing. Kurdistan and Balochistan are the light and the eyes of Iran. But the militarization is intensifying. There are more Pasdaran [Revolutionary Guards] outside schools than students.”

Describing these two communities, the Kurds and the Baluchs, as “the light and the eyes” of Iran explains the depth of the current wave of demonstrations. According to reports by human rights organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, it’s the minority groups who suffer the most, and in multiple ways. Both Kurds and Baluchs are not only ethnic minorities, but also predominantly Sunni Muslim, while the regime is Shia. All Iranians suffer under the dictatorship, but communities who don’t fit the default identity of Persian Shia Muslim suffer more. It was not a coincidence that the protests started with the death of a Kurdish girl, whose funeral marked the first big outpouring of grief and anger over the regime’s brutality. That’s why it’s important to name her as Jina Mahsa Amini: Jina is her Kurdish name, which only her family used, because Kurdish names are not officially accepted. It is written on her gravestone.

This dynamic was one of the topics addressed during a recent panel in the Flemish parliament, in which Kakabaveh spoke alongside two other Iranian women in exile. Kakabaveh stressed that ethnic and religious minorities would still be suppressed if the current regime was to be replaced by a secular but still nationalist one. After all, the current regime is not the first to suppress Kurds, a group that resisted the previous regime, as well. “You know, I am 48 years old and in my lifetime I have never seen democracy in Iran,” she said. “So what can we expect? For example, one of the things the women are protesting against, is the forced wearing of the hijab, but do they know the fundamental freedoms underlying this demand? That remains to be seen.”

But in her speech, Kakabaveh drew hope from her past experiences as well. She reflected on her discussions with her male comrades when she was still a peshmerga in the mountains, and how they treated her differently without realizing it. “They accepted women as peshmerga fighters, but their mentality was still male-focused and the leading positions were taken by men,” she said. “I criticized them for it. They said they supported women’s rights but had to learn. And they have learned a lot since.”

Now that what she calls a “revolution” has broken out in Iran, Kakabaveh says she is actually glad that she is no longer an MP. As an activist with a network, with a story to tell and a vision to share, she has all the freedom to travel and speak however she pleases, reaching both loyal and new audiences. In the coming months, she’ll be returning to Greece, as well as France and Germany. And while to the outside world, it may seem as if the protests don’t really have leadership, Kakabaveh believes otherwise. “The people themselves, the women who are fighting for their rights so bravely, are the leaders of this revolution,” she says. She is just hoping to help serve them.

[post_title] => What Will Amineh Kakabaveh Do Next? [post_excerpt] => Last year, all eyes were on the Kurdish exile turned Swedish MP. Now that she's left parliament, here's what she plans to do with the attention. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => amineh-kakabaveh-profile-kurdistan-iran-sweden-government [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:11:28 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:11:28 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=5633 [menu_order] => 91 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

March 3, 2023August 28, 2024

What Will Amineh Kakabaveh Do Next?

by Fréderike Geerdink

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In praise of a Valentine who never ghosts, and what our crushes tell us about ourselves.

I have a type and always have.

It’s a broad one, but it’s terribly specific: my knees go weak for a charismatic creep. Romeos come and go, but I’ll crawl on broken glass through hell for a Mercutio. Leading men leave me cold. It’s not merely the wrong guy, it’s the one whose entire personality is built upon being the wrong guy. He’s often the life of the party, mostly a pain in the ass, and always, always, always the kind of trouble that takes my goddamn breath away. Which is why, if St. Valentine has set aside a day each year for us to pander to our sweethearts and confess our affections, I’ll do my turn: I have a crush on Death.

In Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 masterpiece, The Seventh Seal, Death is famously portrayed as a white-faced man who has a meet-cute moment with a crusading knight on a desolate beach during the Black Plague. To me, the movie is basically a rom com. There is chainmail, there is chess. And there is Death, played by (long-dead) Swedish actor Bengt Ekerot, smooth as hell—and come to sweep me away.

Can you see it? A strong cleft chin beneath gallows’ black-brown eyes, liquid eyes all the better to drown you as you lunge at the receding spark therein. His style is arresting, heart-stopping, even: the tailored hood, the cape, the leather! Gloves that send shivers down your spine. Gloves that make your throat seize. Oh, and Google tells me Ekerot’s birthday was February 8, which means Death is also an Aquarius. To be sure, he’s no Matthew McConaughey. But guess what? I’m no Kate Hudson, either.

Of course, I blame my parents. Warm-hearted snobs and Criterion Collection aficionados, Nancy and Lou made a fatal lapse in judgment when they forbade Beverly Hills 90210 in our home, but allowed me to watch Sex, Lies, & Videotape and Goodfellas when they were released. I was in the second grade. Instead of nursing a normal crush on Luke Perry or Jason Priestley, I fell hard for James Spader and Ray Liotta. I’ve been a lost cause ever since. By the time I watched The Seventh Seal in middle school, I knew I had arrived at the bad boy reductio ad absurdum: Death.

Valentine’s Day offers a rich opportunity to think about how we are conditioned to crush and to whom these feelings are assigned. What do our crushes tell us about ourselves and what we yearn for? Whom do we chase and what qualities do we crave? How do we see ourselves as incomplete? What kind of attachment style do our romantic fantasies portend? As we suffer so much discourse around the making and breaking of patterns, it is important to dissect the evolution of what we want.

While I readily accept that I first fell for Death as an insufferable pre-teen aching to have a movie crush just a bit edgier than Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic, as I have matured, I can now see my crush on Death is actually quite healthy. I recommend it. First of all, as an American, I hail from a notoriously death-avoidant culture. Secondly, as a woman, I have been raised around ideas of Hollywood romance and romantic expectations that are arguably more dangerous than Hollywood violence. My crush shields me from these pitfalls—and he excels in the ever after.

How does he do it? What’s his trick? Well, I hope it doesn’t take Esther Perel to explain: He shows up. Let us return to the rom com’s most fertile stomping ground, the beach—here, of course, emptied by Bubonic Plague. The beach, as a liminal space, is an ideal metaphorical home for romance. Beneath the horizon, we have the waxing and waning of tides upon the shore, the ephemeral shapes in the sand. Death, the master of liminality himself, strides on in. And yes, he does play games—don’t they all?—but it’s a game, and it’s chess, which is, like, so sophisticated (and honestly fucking annoying but I’ll drop it because no one is perfect).

Still, Death is not like the others, and I’ll tell you why: He’s reliable. There are countless ways to get a hold of him. And, when all the other men have let you down—all the other ones whose faults you have compromised yourself by entertaining—he will be there, waiting for you. There are few things more humiliating in life than being attracted to straight men, but waiting for Death will never make you play the fool. Death will never ghost you. And, though typically associated with the long game, he’s full of surprises: He might pop in anytime at all. He’s always got the time for you, his girl, or his guy, or, really, his anyone. (New love is such a jealous thing, but not with my crush! Death, be not toxic.)

Death is the crush who crushes all the competition. He makes your heart skip far more than a beat. What’s more, Death doesn’t care about diet culture and he isn’t on Instagram or any of the apps. He will take you as you are. He will swipe right with that scythe—in real life. After all, when we are bullied into believing our single shot at happiness hinges (pun intended) on how we’ve lit, sequenced, and captioned half a dozen selfies, what’s wrong with lusting after the eternal? What’s wrong with wanting something real? And what’s realer than Death?

Our digital dating culture is predicated almost entirely on shallow snap judgments. The Seventh Seal, on the other hand, is about the silence of God in the moments before The Last Judgment. The movie opens with the following quote from the Book of Revelations: “And when the Lamb had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour," referring to what is surely the greatest 30-minute cliffhanger in all of history—film, human, cosmic, spiritual. Ingmar Bergman portrays God as silent before human suffering, deaf to the torments of faith. The question then, regardless of belief or perhaps even in spite of it, is how do we fill that silence? The film is absolute in its suggestion: not fear, not awe, but love. Love is the only way to lend meaning to the void. And spoiler alert: The cute acrobat family are the ones who make it out alive. They elude Death because they believe in and trust one another.

This, to me, is a tall order.

Besides, some of us are not trying to escape Death. Some of us are actively combing all the beaches, certain that meet-cute moment is out there somewhere. Knowing, without a doubt, it will happen someday. Someday, I can be certain, my Dark Prince will come, with a strong jawline and a black cape and all the time in the world for me.

…Now, who says romance is dead?

[post_title] => I Have a Crush on Death [post_excerpt] => In praise of a Valentine who never ghosts, and what our crushes tell us about ourselves. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => crush-death-seventh-seal-bengt-ekerot-valentines-day [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:15:11 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:15:11 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=5593 [menu_order] => 92 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

February 14, 2023August 28, 2024

I Have a Crush on Death

by Cara Marsh Sheffler

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Over 20 years after the first "Princess Diaries," the writer is still sticking up for romance.

In the opening scene of 1999's cinematic classic 10 Things I Hate About You, guidance counselor Ms. Perky (Allison Janney) sits pert in her cardigan and pearls, tip-tapping away at her computer. "I'll be right with you," she tells a student, turning back to her PowerPC…on which she is crafting a magnum opus of a romance novel. In the film, Ms. Perky’s novel is played for laughs—a running joke, with key words like “pulsating” and “bratwurst” used to portray the luridity of her side hustle. But around that same time, in real life, an administrator at a New York University dormitory was living out a similar scene: tucked away in her office, tapping away at romance novels in between wrangling angsty students. Only this time, she was the main character.

Her name was Meg Cabot.

"It was exactly like that," Cabot told The Conversationalist shortly before Thanksgiving. Over Zoom from her longtime home in Key West, Florida, she talked a mile a minute, the charming, real-life embodiment of the chatty early-aughts heroine she's most known for: The Princess Diaries’ Mia Thermopolis. "All the kids in the dorm knew that was exactly what I was doing. I'd be on my computer when they would come in and they'd be like, 'I don't want to interrupt you, but there's a fire.'"

Cabot would put out the fires, of course. It was from that desk, though, in her tiny corner of NYU, that she'd write her first "ten or eleven" novels. At the age of 31, she’d begin publishing steamy, “pulsating” adult historical romance, before breaking into the public consciousness in 2000 with the back-to-back publication of her first young adult novels, The Princess Diaries and The Mediator: Shadowland. The rest is history. Following Disney’s smash hit movie adaptation of The Princess Diaries, Cabot's name fast became synonymous with the fun, romantic "chick lit" of the time. You an Anne Hathaway fan? You also have Meg Cabot to thank for her breakthrough role.

More than twenty years (and over 80 published novels) later, and with another Princess Diaries book and movie on the way, Cabot remains a powerhouse. That's not just because she's more prolific than Stephen King, who's published a comparatively paltry 65 novels in more than twice the amount of time. And it’s not just because The Princess Diaries still makes headlines. It’s because she created something that made waves for an entire generation. For those who came of age during the early 2000s, Cabot helped redefine what books for girls and women could look like: She wrote them funny, messy—and so horny they're still getting soft-banned all over the country.

To get there, though, Cabot had to push past the judgment that's long hovered like a cloud over women's literature. At Indiana University in the 1980s, while working towards her degree in studio art, Cabot started taking creative writing classes, where professors and peers alike passed judgment on the topics she was interested in writing about. "People really looked down on romance," Cabot said. "I was writing commercial genre fiction and [my classmates] were writing literary fiction. Theirs had a lot of suicide and mine had lots of going to the mall and meeting boys." Now, she jokes that those who once mocked her choice of genre were just jealous: The kind of books she'd been working on forever turned out to be lucrative. But at the time, their response was frustrating.

The reaction, though, was nothing new. For as long as there's been literature marketed towards women, there've been people looking down on it. Because of this, Cabot kept her work to herself for years. Her first published novel, a steamy adult romance called Where Roses Grow Wild, came out in 1998 under a pen name: Patricia Cabot. She’d go on to write seven more under the same name. "I was worried about the smut factor and my grandma finding out," she remembers. From the start, Cabot proved expert in writing women and girls who were not just strong, but varied and complex; which was precisely what drew her to the genre in the first place. "Romance novels have really strong female characters, and that was hard to find [for a long time],” she said. But her entry into life as a romance author proved revelatory. Unlike those college classmates, romance readers and writers welcomed her with open arms. "It was really fun, such a supportive community," Cabot said. "That was where I belonged."

Her grandmother did eventually find out about her secret second career, too, but the smut didn't bother her. "She loved it," Cabot recalled.

For a long while, Cabot kept her day job at NYU. It was stable, and offered health insurance. She made great friends, many of whom she's still tight with to this day. Then, right as the century turned, The Princess Diaries changed everything: When Disney came knocking, Cabot knew it was her chance to jump full-time into life as an author. She took it.

"There still weren't a whole lot of funny books for girls," Cabot said about the late '90s, when she first started writing for teens. She name-checked exceptions, like Judy Blume, and Cabot's contemporary Louise Rennison, whose hilarious Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging came out in '99. But at the time, she says that most of the genre “was very message-y”: "There really wasn't this idea that YA could just be for entertainment and be fun." Cabot saw an opportunity to help shift that. Her characters weren't without morality: Cabot's books contained messages, in that they had characters with a point of view. At the same time, though, those characters got to be awkward, swoony, and feminist as fuck, too. Her characters felt real.

Cabot's adult work is well worth exploring—sharp, comedic, with a deep love of banter—but it’s her first works in YA where she really found her stride. It's also where she's had the most impact, acting as millions of millennial readers' introduction to romantic comedy, many of them through Mia Thermopolis. In The Princess Diaries series, Mia is a teen outcast who finds out she's heir to the throne of a small country called Genovia. The character went mainstream in 2001, when the Disney adaptation introduced the world to Anne Hathaway’s portrayal of her as a dorky and sweet girl just trying to survive high school. But while the movie version of the character is rightfully beloved, it's worth remembering how Cabot originally crafted her. In the books, Mia is a sunny bleeding heart, who only agrees to undergo "princess lessons" after the monarchal side of her family agrees to donate $36,500 a year to Greenpeace. The Mia of the books is progressive, a kid with a massive political streak, whose big desire—aside from kissing Michael Moscovitz—is how badly she wants to help push the world into a better place.

But while Mia had staunch political values, The Princess Diaries was never about them. Mia was just a girl flailing her way into adulthood. Just like her readers, she was deeply insecure. She was also chaotic, and yearny, and horny as hell—a wonderful throughline for many of Cabot's most memorable characters. There’s ballsy psychic Jessica Mastriani, who works with hot, motorcycle-riding bad boy Rob to track down missing children in 1-800-WHERE-R-U. In Cabot’s popular The Mediator series, we’re introduced to tough, leather-clad Suze Simon as she solves murders while flirting with the 19th Century ghost haunting her bedroom. There's also Katie Ellison in Pants On Fire, so-titled because its heroine 1) can't stop lying, and 2) can't stop cheating on her boyfriend to make out with new boys.

Cabot’s most sexually liberated YA novel, though, is Ready Or Not, the sequel to All-American Girl, in which a teen girl named Sam Madison saves the president from an attempted assassination. She falls for the president's son, and in the sequel, they decide to have sex. The book follows Sam on her path to readiness—including securing contraceptives and learning to masturbate with the bathtub faucet.

"Still to this day, All-American Girl and Ready Or Not are my most-banned books, because they deal with sex very frankly," Cabot said. "It's surprising to me, because my mom was a Planned Parenthood volunteer. In my house it was very open." Sexuality, after all, is part of every coming of age in one way or another. And who in this world is juggling those thoughts more than a teenager?

Of course, the now-56-year-old wasn't the first in YA to portray horny teen girls. "If you read Judy Blume, you know that's been going on for years and years," she said. But Judy Blume’s books also weren’t adapted into blockbuster movies by Disney, and part of the backlash for Cabot may have come from how ubiquitous she was for romance-loving teens of the early 2000s. The Princess Diaries adaptation became an instant classic, funneling an eager audience towards her books.

"People started buying the books expecting them to be G-rated like the movie," Cabot recalls. They were not—and some parents didn't love that the book version of The Princess Diaries' first scene involved kissing.

Still, for plenty of young girls, Cabot's work was (and continues to be) vital and illuminating. Her novels are chatty and personable, her characters flawed, and her stories casually sex-positive. Even when her young characters weren't actually having sex, the acknowledgement of desire affirmed something bigger, something deep inside. A feeling that her readers, like her characters, were still exploring. And if those readers were so inclined, Cabot's adult novels were right there, full of the "smut" she once feared would disappoint her grandmother—but also so much more.

Romance is often written off as empty-headed porn for women, a stereotype Cabot wholeheartedly rejects: What the form's critics ignore is everything that surrounds the lust. Romance is about yearning, sure. About sex. Cabot's books, though, are also about dynamic friendships. About history—she's written plenty of historical fiction—and mystery. About the way women and girls are seen by their society, and the effects that has on them. Ultimately, all of Cabot's novels are also about the inner lives of interesting young women navigating challenging times in their lives.

This is something Cabot knows intimately. Though her family home growing up was frank about sex, in other aspects, her childhood was "very dark." Her father was an alcoholic, and to escape, she buried herself in books. "There were many times I felt there was no hope," Cabot recalled. "Romance was always where I could turn to. Those books, where there was an empowered woman who got what she wanted in the end, guaranteed."

"That's what pulled me out of despair," she continued. "Knowing I can put that out there for someone else is the greatest thing." To Cabot, writing is the skill she has that she can share with people. “I'm not going to be a brain surgeon,” she joked.

But even if her books were just a horny escape, wouldn't that be OK, too? "It's just misogyny," Cabot exclaimed when asked about naysayers of her genre. "People look down on anything that women like, and anything involving women."

For her younger readers, Cabot's work was an education—not just in sex, but in how rewarding it can be for readers when an author is skilled at seamlessly blending genre. Wrapped in a shiny "chick lit" package—books more recently known as "beach reads" because, well, the former had been so dragged through the sexist mud that it needed a rebrand—Cabot’s work is multi-faceted and wide-ranging. She’s written epistolary novels, murder mysteries, sci-fi, fantasy, middle-grade, YA, adult, historical fiction, and more. Fittingly, she has no patience for those who try to one-dimensionalize her corner of women's fiction. She often hears from readers afraid to be seen reading "chick lit" in the office because coworkers make fun of them. "I tell them to tell their coworkers to go fuck themselves," Cabot said. "Those people have clearly never read it."

These days, Cabot and fellow children's and young adult author Rachel Vail challenge each other to write five pages a day. The stakes of failure keep them going: If they don't hit their page count, they're forced to donate $5 to Donald Trump. "It's very motivating," Cabot said. Like her most famous character, Cabot is disturbed by the current state of the world. She’s even contemplating leaving Key West, where she's resided with her husband and cats for almost twenty years. She loves her town, and often blogs about her life there, but has been turned off by Florida’s ongoing political turmoil.

It’s there, too, that Cabot's born witness to a new wave of challenges levied against authors and readers alike: angry right-wing parents for whom the problems don't stop at french kissing. “It's a very small percentage of the population, but they're very loud,” she said. It's a nation-wide issue: The New York Times reported in January that parents hell-bent on banning books have become "more organized, well-funded" and "effective" in recent years. The Guardian characterized the efforts as "moral militancy."

"They don't want any reference to sex, race, gender fluidity…," Cabot said of recent attempts to pull books from the library system. "It might challenge the very Christian, neofascist way they want to raise their children.”

Pushback to the kind of books that have defined her career hasn't stopped Cabot in the slightest, though. Most recently, Cabot has published the Little Bridge Island series, an adult series set in her community of Key West, and next up is a new, COVID-set Princess Diaries book, as well as a lot more children's and middle-grade fiction. (Proceeds for The Quarantine Princess Diaries will go to VOW For Girls, a charity aimed at ending child marriage.)

And thank goodness for Meg Cabot. Her naysayers—whether politically lecherous or simply snobby—have no real way to stop the flow of stories from Cabot's brain to readers' hands. Cabot doesn’t take her role lightly. A cornerstone of young adult fiction, she’s no stranger to the pressures of shaping young minds. It's impossible to calculate, in 2023, just how many authors coming up today have been influenced by her work. It’s even more impossible to calculate how many women and girls have become voracious writers and readers as a result of her work. And twenty-five years on from her debut novel, both Cabot and her books remain chatty and cheerful, effervescent and gutsy—an escape from a hellish world, just as she intended. Given all that's happened in the interim, that's certainly a crowning achievement.

[post_title] => Thank Goodness for Meg Cabot [post_excerpt] => Over 20 years after the first "Princess Diaries," the writer is still sticking up for romance. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => profile-meg-cabot-princess-diaries-romance-ya-books-interview [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:15:11 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-08-28 21:15:11 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=5603 [menu_order] => 93 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

February 14, 2023August 28, 2024

Thank Goodness for Meg Cabot

by Alanna Bennett

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And why do so many people support them?

Listen to this article on The Conversationalist Podcast. | 17:50 min

On January 4, in Enoch, Utah, 42-year-old Michael Haight shot and killed his wife, five children, and mother-in-law, before turning the gun on himself, a form of murder-suicide known as "family annihilation." Tausha Haight, his wife of twenty years, had filed for divorce a couple weeks prior. Abusers always lose it when you leave.

It's since been reported, first by the Associated Press, that Haight was investigated in 2020 for potential child abuse after someone outside the family reported it to the police. Utah's child protective services got involved. At the time, Haight’s eldest daughter Macie said the abuse had begun years earlier, in 2017. She described a time her father grabbed her by the shoulders and threw her into furniture, along with another incident in which he had strangled her. She said she’d been afraid that he would kill her. Michael blamed the then-14-year-old for his violence, saying she was "mouthy." During the same police investigation, Macie also said that her father regularly belittled her mother, and Michael admitted to surveilling his wife’s communications. No charges were filed.

Nearly three years later, Michael’s obituary in the local paper would read that he "made it a point to spend quality time with each and every one of his children," and that they were a "cherished miracle." One commenter spoke of his “Christlike love and service.” Neither the obituary nor the commenters mentioned the murders, and it was only taken down after Shannon Watts, gun reform advocate and founder of Moms Demand, tweeted it out.

Haight’s story isn’t so uncommon. In the United States alone, a man has annihilated his family every 3.5 weeks for the last two decades, a likely miniscule portion of the estimated family annihilations worldwide. Men who strangle their partners are ten times more likely to become men who kill them. And having a gun in the home increases the risk of murder in a domestic violence incident by 500%.

So why do we continue to treat what happened to the Haight family like an isolated tragedy—a “personal” matter—as opposed to exactly what it was: a domestic tyrant who felt entitled, by virtue of being a man, to enforce his will, crush dissent, and destroy his family as soon as they tried to flee?

When a head of state insists on their natural or divine right to monitor your private communications, stalk your movements, imprison you at home, and beat or kill you for wearing certain clothes, meeting friends, or maintaining a separate bank account, we rightly call them authoritarian. We are loud in our disapproval: When Iranian women took to the streets in protest over the arrest and murder of Mahsa Amini by morality police for not properly wearing hijab, the support abroad was strong, the brutality obvious. But when it's the head of a household terrorizing you, the euphemisms (and excuses) surface: family difficulties over a private matter, better dealt with behind closed doors; it’s best not to get involved, it’s none of our business. All support evaporates, because father still knows best — and if father wants to blow everything up just because he can, who's going to stop him?

Studies on familicide say in almost every case, the man claims his family as property, with the right to end their lives. Murder, after all, is the ultimate form of control. But the impulse to control or destroy isn't limited to physical violence: The easiest way to break people is to break what's precious to them. Look at Elon Musk, who had to lose 200 billion dollars before people finally stopped calling him a genius. Within months of his taking over Twitter, 80% of the company’s workforce had quit or been fired, especially anyone found criticizing him. In a recent New York Magazine piece about Musk's takeover, they describe how Twitter employees flocked to the company Slack during these mass layoffs, all anxiously waiting for the ax: "One person posted a meme of Thanos from Avengers: Infinity War, the supervillain who exterminates half the living beings in the universe with a snap.”

Advertisers fled Musk’s "extremely hardcore" site as he rolled out a disastrous verification process, threatened people who linked out to other social networks, reinstated Nazis, and ranted about eugenics, all while overseeing a radical uptick in harassment and slurs. With no clear plan to make Twitter profitable, and engineers rolling their eyes at his technical expertise, it's no wonder Twitter and Tesla's value has since plummeted. Not that he's taken any accountability for the losses or the lives he's upended. He's been too busy impregnating his employee, lashing out at mouthy critics, and, most recently, firing a Twitter engineer for informing him the reason his engagement was down wasn’t due to a bug—but because people weren’t as interested in him as they used to be.

Whether they're the head of a family, company, or state, everyone suffers so long as masculinity is wrapped up in an ability to dominate. Impunity and entitlement breed ignorance and nihilism. Patriarchy is ancient, authoritarian, incompatible with equality and democracy, and bad for everyone involved. And it’s as relevant to how Musk acquired and destroyed Twitter as it is to the protests in Iran as it is to what happened to the Haight family.

Human rights also don't disappear at your doorstep. According to the UN, 47,000 women and girls were killed by their partners or other family in 2020. On average, that means one murder every 11 minutes. But freeing women and children from violence won't happen so long as it's still taboo to speak about it. We’d rightfully consider it outrageous if someone called reports of mass rapes and murders in Ukraine by Russian soldiers "airing dirty laundry.” Yet we don’t extend the same support to women abused and murdered by partners or relatives, which happens in every community, and is far more likely than “stranger danger.” (And on the rare occasion victims do get attention, they’re usually blonde, white, and already dead.)

Meanwhile, it's the same self-destructive, patriarchal entitlement that motivates domestic violence that motivates atrocities like the Russian invasion of Ukraine – if I can't have you, nobody can – with the same results. Putin first became aggressive in 2014 after Ukraine turned down a trade agreement with Russia in favor of one with the European Union. (Again, it's most dangerous when you try to leave.) Absent consequences, including for past wars in Syria, Georgia, and Chechnya, Putin has continuously escalated the bloodshed, and will do anything short of giving up power to punish Ukrainians for daring to be free, including letting Russia crumble. In that sense, he's just like Michael Haight: Insult the sovereign, or threaten his control, and watch him burn the building down with everyone trapped inside. Whatever it takes to teach them a lesson.

Our bodies don't differentiate between state-sponsored or home-bound torture. What does your killer's institutional affiliation matter when you're dead? The lines are blurred in any case, considering the number of men who abuse in private who also abuse the public. It's not a coincidence that police abuse their families at high rates, or that two-thirds of mass shootings are either an incident of domestic violence or are perpetrated by someone with a record of it. Yet time and time again, on both a personal and policy level, we treat domestic violence as a completely separate matter – anything to avoid the reality that some homes are conflict zones, too.

Even the preeminent global treaty on women’s rights, the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), does not contain the word "violence" once. In 1980, when CEDAW was passed, gender-based violence was considered outside its scope, a private matter that this public treaty wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole. Men's rights, especially in war, were already covered as human rights, a courtesy not extended to everyone else. It wasn't until 1992 that the CEDAW Committee issued General Recommendation 19, which interpreted the treaty to include gender violence. (Full disclosure, I'm on the board of an organization, Every Woman, calling for a new global treaty to close this atrocious gap in international law.) Like the Refugee Treaty, which advocates fought tooth and nail to have courts interpret to include gender persecution as a "particular social group," half the world's population suffering the most pervasive human rights violation was considered niche.

When feminism states that the personal is political, it speaks to the ways the private sphere continues to oppress women. There can be no equality in public so long as violence at home is ignored. To be part of the public, you first need to make it outside. Patriarchy cuts across every divide, but its effects are worsened by poverty, racism, and other forms of oppression. When 72-year-old Huu Can Tran shot and killed 11 people at the Star Ballroom Dance Studio in Monterey Park, California during a Lunar New Year celebration, people speculated whether this was yet another anti-Asian hate crime, a misogynist escalation, or possibly both. No motive has been found so far, or connection to any of the victims, but the shooting sparked a discussion online about domestic violence in the Asian American community. The Asian Pacific Institute on Gender Based Violence released a statement of mourning, and a plea to make the connection between femicide and mass shootings. They estimate that between 21-55% of API women in the US have experienced intimate physical or sexual violence.

In the United States, women of color are disproportionately affected by gender violence. The CDC reports that Black women are three times more likely than white women to be killed in a domestic dispute. More than half of Indigenous women in the US have experienced sexual or intimate partner violence. On a global scale, 1 in 3 women have experienced sexual assault or domestic violence.

Authoritarians know that subordinating women helps them stay in power, and systematically encourage and enact patriarchal violence to keep people in line. They claim that masculinity is under threat, and loosen laws that protect women and gender nonconforming people. Reactionary autocrats worldwide are attacking women's rights as a means of entrenching their control and weakening political participation in democratic mass movements. In Russia, Putin rolled back criminal consequences for domestic violence. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan withdrew Turkey from the Istanbul Convention, the European treaty on domestic violence. Poland keeps threatening to do the same, while Hungary never signed it in the first place. (In a move to distance itself from its neighbors, Ukraine finally ratified the Istanbul Convention last year.) Before he was voted out and supporters staged a failed coup on his behalf, Jair Bolsonaro cut 90% of funding for domestic violence prevention in Brazil. The Taliban once again won’t even let women go to school.

Autocrats in the U.S. use the same playbook. Trump assaulting women was part of his appeal, an envied display of power, like his bragging about getting away with hypothetical murder. The party he arguably still leads is no better. America’s homegrown extremists think abortion is murder, but shooting your spouse and kids for wanting a divorce is “Christlike love.” Revoking Roe v. Wade and putting women's reproductive rights in the hands of state legislators is a human rights disaster with global ripple effects. The loss of access to abortion and reproductive healthcare radically strengthens abusers' control over women's bodies, in many cases trapping women for life with children. As if that's not bad enough, this past week the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down a federal law which removed guns from people under restraining orders from their partner or child. Even prior to the ruling, programs to surrender firearms were rarely enforced. In 2021, 127 women were murdered by a male intimate partner with a firearm in Texas, the state where the legal challenge began.

So long as authoritarian violence is acceptable, even encouraged, on the micro level within families, it will be impossible to defeat on a macro level. There is no democracy, no value for human rights, without the participation and inclusion of women and children. And that participation depends on feeling safe at home first. All life, and livelihoods, are devalued when we devalue vulnerable people. And for what? An ancient status quo built on brute strength. Marriage and the nuclear family still provide the basic unit for our tax code. We're incentivized by the government to create a private jurisdiction where men overarchingly rule. The patriarchs are not okay, and it's doubtful they ever have been. Their benevolent dictatorship kills, and it’s time to let the toxic institution go.

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February 10, 2023January 15, 2026

Why Do So Many Men Destroy What They Can’t Control?