Meat on a stick
A commercial like any other, you might think. Not really.
It featured in an article of one of our quality magazines about women’s rights, and it stayed with me. A few years ago this image was used in an Egyptian internet campaign urging women to dress more respectably. The lollypop with the wrapper on is left undisturbed, the one without a wrapper is a fly magnet. Tagline: ‘You cannot stop them. But you can protect yourself. Your creator knows what is good for you.’
Many women’s first reaction reading this is probably disgust. How many decades have we battled for the point that women’s bodies might indeed be attractive (thank you, Mother Nature), but that this does not make us public sweets stalls, and that men unable keep their hands in their pockets should take a good look at themselves rather than avert responsibility for their behaviour to (lack of) veils, length of skirts and degrees of cleavage?
The second reaction is probably an ethno-culturally colored one, something about discrimination of women in the Muslim world. Perhaps not entirely incorrect, but way too stereotypical and way too easy all the same. The lollypop campaign was not government-funded, and stirred angry protests in Egypt itself. In 2008 the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights published inquiry results that showed veiled women were cat-called and harassed as well — and sometimes even more than women who were not veiled. It is a sobering fact we out here in the West find hard to believe. The reasons given by the men who were interviewed ranged from ‘I was bored’ to ‘if she covers herself completely, she must have something really beautiful to hide’. The simplified math of covered=respected and safe doesn’t add up, any more than Arabic/Muslim=mysoginist and oppressive. We should not be tempted into errors of stereotype.
The broader truth is even more sad. Every day and all over the globe, women are treated as possessions, tradable goods and sexual cattle by men of their own culture and nationality. This happens all too often in the Western world as well, regardless of the feminist emancipation movement’s impressive list of successes. That Europe can boast ‘milder’ forms and lesser total numbers of rapes and assaults than let’s say India doesn’t mean that we are in the clear. Every woman who has ever been groped, assaulted or raped can testify we are not. The old undercurrents of misogyny and machismo are everything but gone, but the Western sexist practices — from wage gap to physical obstinacy or worse — are typically shrugged off as ‘blown out of proportion’ or ‘harmless’.
Invisible
This is a topic that has mattered to me for decades. I have met them, the young stallions who didn’t take ‘no’ for an answer, the older men who decided nice buttocks were theirs to pinch or flat-out slap, the women in my close circle who were victims of assault or rape. I have no intention whatsoever to brush this off or to minimalize. I would be wronging myself and half the world’s population if I did.
But I am going to — and you might call that daring– share a bit of wayward writing, and drag some old skeletons out of their closets. For violence aimed at women might look the picture-perfect case of machos in heat launching themselves at innocent women, or like the prelude of a war between the free West and the barbaric East, but the complete picture is never that simple. This is but one aspect of a much deeper and broader problem. And it does not only make female victims. So yes, I want to be men’s advocate too, in a way.
Back to that horrible commercial. Looking at it a little longer, this campaign is actually even more insulting to men than it is to women — if that was even possible. Let’s see, what would you prefer to be? The attractive lollypop, or the brainless vermin? Tough decision? We can laugh about it, but in fact this image reveals a lot. Fear of sexuality, for instance. Freud was right about sexual desire being a primal urge, intense and frightening. And the harder you suppress something, the more it takes hold of you. In the course of history this fear of sexuality was all too often projected onto women, and they became the symbol of this often frightening desire. Here as well we find the origin of the utterly despicable victim-blaming.
The Arab culture can claim no monopoly for this sort of thinking. Europa has suffered from the same affliction for centuries, and we haven’t gotten rid of it yet. And last year in Asia convicted rapists were given a platform in the media to voice their opinion on how the only good kind of girl was one that made sure she was pure and invisible, and every woman who would not bow to this idea was sending the world an open invitation to violently assault her. I will never forget the fear in Anna’s eyes (not her real name), the foreign non-profit worker who was stationed in Brussels for a year and spent a weekend Couchsurfing with us. She told us how after a night out with friends in the capital she was surrounded by a group of men who wouldn’t let her go. She was pregnant, alone, and a clear ‘no’ wasn’t enough. She escaped by the skin of her teeth, and trembled at the recollection. These men were acting like the flies on the campaign poster. In her own words: ‘I was meat on a stick.’
Don’t take it so seriously
Women like myself were born and raised in a region of the world that grants us all imaginable chances and rights. We are incredibly privileged. But Anna voices the true reason for our insecurity: our education and our rights will not protect us when it really matters. Not from Arab men, not from Caucasian, Asian or African men. If we have the bad luck to come across a guy who feels — for whatever reason at all — that we are asking for it, we are physically incapable of keeping ourselves safe.
Your rights are only worth as much as your possibility to enforce them. In the case of violently raped women that means: nothing.
When the ‘We are not exaggerating’ storm hit Belgium, giving a voice to women’s experiences with all kinds of sexually unwanted behaviour, all colors of the debate spectrum were on display in our media, even the least pretty ones. And perhaps there will have been a few overly sensitive girls, but a large number of stories were heart-piercing. Indeed, they were not exaggerating. And yet, a much-heard comment was: ‘Oh, you shouldn’t take it so seriously. They don’t really mean harm. Men are just like that.’
It was mostly men writing this, and the tone was always condescending. Poor little girl, thinking every man is a big bad wolf… Well, a guy just likes to look at a nice piece of meat.
Once again the Egyptian commercial seemed to get it right.
But we should try to turn this around for once. If you’re a man, try to imagine that a person who is physically bigger and stronger than you — man or woman, it doesn’t even matter — walks up to you, perhaps menacingly, perhaps with a smile, and goes straight for your groin. Bystanders don’t intervene. Perhaps some of them are even whistling, cheering. When you talk about this humiliating experience later, people shrug or brush it aside. Are you then, like women, supposed to content yourself with ‘take it as a compliment’ or ‘don’t be such a wimp’? I don’t think so.
Acts like these corrode an individual’s physical integrity, and degrade a person to an object in the hands of a physically stronger opponent. It doesn’t matter whether the victim is a man or a woman. You are not supposed to be meat on a stick with the single purpose of satisfying someone else’s appetite.
Double signals and sophisticated games of power
This is a topic that has more tenterhooks than straight lines, and writing this long-read feels like maneuvering through a social and emotional minefield. But on we go.
So let’s be honest: human being are experts in sending double signals. We have officially embraced the equality of men and women (or: ‘all people’) and their rights for quite some time now, in an official treaty moreover, but we still don’t know how to handle healthy and open sexuality. Like borderliners we are bouncing back and forth between prudishness and porn. When it comes to commercials, ethics seem to have taken up residence somewhere far beyond the horizon. In the West we crossed the line of the acceptable a long time ago.
And too bad, but women and men aren’t that clear to ‘read’ either, whatever we like to assume. I have never fallen for the old feminist cry that all men are pigs and suppressors, for several reasons.
First of all: there are always two parties. The historical suppression of women, continuing up until today, is a collective process in which men are definitely playing an active role, but in which women have been (too) silent or compliant for just as long.
Secondly, we terribly underestimate the subconscious power that women have ever held and still hold over men, ranging from the temple priestess who bestowed her blessings at will on a supplicant with his offerings to the wife claiming access to her husbands’ credit cards. From dominatrix to domestic slave, the roles of women cover a very wide range, and it’s not always the guy who’s on top.
There is a reason why the Oedipus myth is so well-known. The bond young men have with their mothers is complex and very influential, and this relationship will shape their later approach to women far more than we sometimes dare to admit. Electra scenarios (girls glorifying their father) are much rarer. Women, despite all physical and economic discrimination that have been their share, sometimes seem to be in some kind of superior position.
In the course of history women have often had to use their seductive virtuosity (a quality that today would have made them great tactical political thinkers) purely as survival strategies in a world dominated by men. The Marquise de Merteuil comes to mind, the amoral character from Choderlos de Laclos’ brilliant Liaisons dangereuses. Women like her will expose even the most ruthless and accomplished macho as a child. This is a very sophisticated game of power, but — let’s be fair — one born from a context of material and political inequality. Tactically De Merteuil is, beyond the shadow of a doubt, superior to Valmont, because she is willing to show less heart and more calculation, but inevitable she, too, is held accountable by society and cast out because of her blemished ‘honor’.
It has a distinct Catch-22 quality, this way in which women would run the show behind the scenes for centuries, while all at the same time men were holding them in a financial and physical position of submission. Of course this is not the only possible scenario. De Laclos’ novel of letters reads like a fine study of archetypes: from the silly wallflower to the ruthless rapist, and all possible shades in between, in variations for both sexes.
On top or not — or neither
We can choose to hide women under veils, under entire carpets even, to ‘protect’ them from the savages we claim men to be. Enter the lollypop and the flies. We can also choose to give women the power to take all decisions regarding sexuality and call this respect.
In fact these are just two sides of the same coin that holds to be true the cynical biological theory that human beings are predators and that human relationship obey the law of the jungle: eat or be eaten. You are either on top, or you are not. You have the power (to take or to refuse) or you are the victim (who is taken and has no power to refuse). This is the limited vision from which, up until today, we ‘protect’ women by stripping them from their freedom, or we ‘make men take responsibility for their actions’ by denying the immense influence women can wield over them.
Both lines of reasoning fail. This is an emancipation process that has to come from both sides. Violence from some men towards women can never be minimalized. But if we truly want to make equality and mutual respect happen, we cannot have an omerta on the power some women hold over men. We undermine our own credibility if we do that.
I am sincerely convinced we need the voices of both men and women, who stand their ground to defend their rights — and each other’s — respectfully. Who make the effort to explain what is important to them, and why. The right to integrity and the possibility to make decisions about your own body should not be the luxury of the privileged. But sexual urges are no detail to be unlearned at will, especially in a cultural context of sweltering denial and suppression like in many Muslim countries today.
This is not an or/or story, it is an and/and story. Men and women should be able to meet in respect, in love and understanding for the entire spectrum of needs and forms of expression that define them, as gender and individual alike.
Suppressing the other in order to be on top yourself can never be the only scenario. No one, man or woman, should be reduced to vermin or meat on a stick.
