Author Archives: Natalie Bennett

All religions degrade women…

No that isn’t me talking (although I agree with the statement), but the Anglican Bishop of Perth (Australia).

Roger Herft has compared Sydney diocese’s refusal to ordain women priests with some Islam thinking that repressed women and gave them status as second-class citizens.
His criticism stands to widen the rift in the Anglican Church over women’s leadership roles just one week after the Sydney synod invoked scriptural authority to effectively block a debate on women priests. Sydney is one of a handful of dioceses in Australia where women are ordained deacons, but not priests.

Carnival of Feminists No 26

Over on A Blog Without a Bicycle, a neophyte blogger, perhaps the newest to ever host the carnival, has done a spectacularly good job in collecting a huge Carnival of Feminists No 26.

There’s the topical – Halloween (can you have a feminist Halloween?), there’s the traditional (can you be a ‘hot feminist’) and much, much more.

But don’t waste time here – do go over there and check it out!!

And please help to spread the word…

The power of cultural mix

Over on Comment is Free I’ve a piece about the power of cultural mixing. It refers to the Polynesian exhibition at the British Museum, which I’ve more formally reviewed elsewhere.

Women in Afghanistan: no excuses

A report on the state of women’s lives in Afghanistan:

Between 60 and 80 per cent of all marriages in Afghanistan are forced. As many as 57 per cent of girls are married off below the age of 16, some as young as six. Because of the custom of paying a bride price, marriage is essentially a financial transaction, and girls a commodity.
The custom of baad, when girls and women are exchanged to settle debts and disputes, is still widely practised. The women are not treated as proper wives, but in effect are slave workers for their husbands.
…The Taliban were vilified for denying girls education, but even now only 19 per cent of Afghan schools are for girls and only 5 per cent of girls of secondary school age are enrolled.
And the West cannot blame the Taliban, as many of the abuses take place in the north and west, where the Taliban are not active.
In the north-east, where the Taliban never had control, a woman dies every 20 minutes in childbirth.

(By the NGO Womankind Worldwide).

Is this a mirror or a veil?

… to one of my earlier academic interests – which I still keep up, I’ve a review of a book on blogging, The Mirror and the Veil. As I say in the review:

Serfaty writes: “The screen … establishes a dialectical relationship between disclosure and secrecy, between transparency and opacity” (13). When I think of two of the “diary-type” blogs that I read regularly, Petite Anglaise and Personal Political, I see that as a potentially useful framework for thinking about their writing. In the first case, Petite apparently discloses all, yet she is very careful to screen her physical identity; in the second case, “Susoz” admits her difficulties in dealing with the separation of the two and makes this part of her online persona.

It was the attraction of the metaphor that took me to the book, but as you’ll see if you read the review I was otherwise disappointed. Maybe I was unduly harsh – the other three reviews there are more positive, although express some of the same reservations, but perhaps more tactfully – have a look and see what you think.

(The cynic in me notes the other three reviewers are academics…)

Irony

“The Last Chance to Save the World” headline in one of the London freesheets today, staring up at me from scores of discarded copies in Tube stations.