Oh, The Silencing

[I've talked about the Noisy Group in the previous post. I'm calling them the Noisy Group because they don't like being called "those people" and I don't like to link to them because they've silenced me before by piling on -- something they excel at -- (even though my silencing is not really silencing because I removed my own posts -- Hi, Ren! -- but the Beloved of the Noisy Group, by voluntarily taking down her blog, has been silenced). I'm not a masochist, so no links. This is unfortunately a very blog-insider kind of post so if you haven't been following the atrocities in the feminist blogosphere recently, you won't get most of it.]

One member of the Noisy Group is a Muslim woman called Aaminah Hernandez. She said this on her blog recently:

“So much is crystalizing in my mind about the concepts of media reform and media justice. So much that I want to say a corrupt system cannot be reformed. Yeah, I know I’ve talked about my opinion about corrupt systems before (and about how you can’t “reform” Islam because there’s nothing wrong with it to begin with).”

And so, with one sentence dripping with sanctimonious privilege, she “erased” (a word they love) erased, I say, my entire life before age 20, the loss of my community and family and childhood friends, the loss of my country and culture.

She also erased Muslim women reformists like Asra Nomani and Irshad Manji — one an unwed mother and the other a lesbian, neither accepted by their communities, both getting death threats every day of their brave lives — who are trying hard to make their religion a safe place for the “whores” and “unnatural sluts” they are.

She also erased the millions and millions of Muslim women who live under the world’s most currently dominant and widespread patriarchal religion, which oppresses women in their daily lives even as we soak in our privilege and are able to deny there are any problems with Islam that might need fixing. Will she get called on it? Don’t hold your breath. We believe in this alternative universe on calling people on their shit only when their names happen to be Jessica Valenti and Amanda Marcotte (or if they happen to be a struggling feminist press, for god’s sake).

Because you see, if a convert Muslim tells you so, then the holy book — the eternally true holy book authored by an almighty God — that prescribes and sanctions domestic violence for disobedient wives (in so many words) does not stand in need of reform and reinterpretation.

Because you see, if a convert Muslim tells you so — never having lived under a theocracy herself — you can swallow your “lived experience” (another term they love). Pretend it never happened. There must have been something wrong with you, because Islam is perfect exactly as it is. And if you suggest otherwise, you’re probably a racist (yes, I’ve been called a racist by a “black Muslimah” for criticizing her adopted religion which happens to be my birth religion).

The weirdest thing about this Noisy Group is, it’s composed of an unholy and discombobulating alliance between radical “sex-positives” and a bunch of people who value “community” (often sexist community) above individuality and who think Islam should be shielded from feminist criticism.

It leads to dissonance of this sort:

The brown voices in the Noisy Group silence all the brown voices that don’t agree with them much in the way the sex-positives complain the ‘radfems’ try to silence them. Yet the sex-positives line up and cheer when a brown woman is lynched by the Noisy Group.

It is dehumanizing to call illegal aliens “illegals” and leads to crimes against them because they are not seen as human. (The sex-positive contingent rises and cheers).

BUT

It is NOT dehumanizing to call women “cumwhores” and other porn-type names and there is absolutely no connection between women’s rapes and violent porn, because… well, I don’t know exactly why. Free speech? Anyway.

And nobody sees the contradiction. Note, I’m not taking a position on whether or not “illegals” is dehumanizing. Just pointing out an amusing contradiction.

By the way, was this the first time that a feminist had made the connections between dehumanizing language leading to rape and abuse of the dehumanized group? Was this the first time a feminist had pointed out that unchecked power in the hands of unscrupulous assholes leads to the rape and abuse of vulnerable people who are at their mercy? Did the whole feminist movement pass you by, folks, that this brilliantly original idea couldn’t possibly have occurred to anyone other than the Beloved of the Noisy Group?

The darker community-lovin parts of the Noisy Group have been observed by me often, often, speaking sneeringly of abortion. Yeah, who cares about abortion, right?

I am a deeply sexual woman and I didn’t have sex until I was 20 because I was terrified of getting pregnant. It would have meant the end of my life. I wasn’t on birth control (because I couldn’t get it) when I got raped and my first fear was not AIDS (and this in a third world country) — it was pregnancy.

Go on, sneer. Only white women care about abortion, right? And the “sex-positives” line up right next to this crowd to jeer at Planned Parenthood. Them — these supporters of a religion that drops brick walls on homosexuals, that openly executes them, that stones women to death for exercising their sexual autonomy.

The darker community-lovin parts of the Noisy Group have been observed by me often, often, speaking sneeringly of “white” feminists’ coverage of sexism. Yeah, who cares about sexism, right? It’s not like the feminist movement should care about discrimination and abuse against women, right? Well, not unless they’re brown anyway. Only brown women get raped and abused and then it only matters if they’re “undocumented” immigrants. And by the way, the feminist movement never cared about immigrant women getting raped, right? Not until the Beloved of the Noisy Group rose up and declared immigration to be a feminist issue - where I disagree. Women getting abused is a feminist issue. Immigration is a whole ‘nother kettle of fish.

You know, when I was struggling against patriarchy in my loving community which was destroying my soul and slowly squeezing the life out of me — to the point where I went on day-long fasts because I had lost the will to live — I didn’t need a feminist movement that told me Islam was okay. I didn’t need a feminist movement that said patriarchy — and the patriarchal religions used to prop it up — were good or perhaps beyond criticism because someone might suspect the critics of racism. I didn’t need judgment about my sexuality. I didn’t need to be told that solutions like abortion that had the potential to save my life were not important issues. Instead, these people say, let’s focus on my fucking community, the community that was sucking the life out of me.

I have always found in western feminists my source of strength. They held me up when I made the incredibly painful decision to leave my family, knowing there would be no going back. They reaffirmed what I knew about my sexuality — it was okay to be the way I was. They supported me, the individual, against the community that would assimilate me and destroy me. And you have to remember: my parents have always been loving and have never raised a hand against my person. Yet I feared my father would kill me if I left. Such is the power of this religion that does not need reform.

The uncompromising stance the second-wavers took on patriarchal religions and soul-destroying “communities,” women’s bodily autonomy and sexual freedom, is why I am a feminist.

Now we’re being asked to dilute that powerful feminism — which stood for women, individual women — by letting in religion and “community” at the back door.

I wonder why exactly the Noisy Group claims to be so frickin’ oppressed. They’re pretty prominent bloggers, all of them. Why do they need Feministing or Amanda Marcotte to link to them at all? They’re prominent voices in their own right. Why bully the white girls? I suspect, because they can. This is not about some outrageous injustice unleashed upon these “famous” bloggers — it’s about enforcing dominance.

I try to link to all the apostates from Islam I can find online. There are very few and even those few stop blogging soon after they start. There is no “community of apostates” online. Apostates from Islam are mostly silent, because they mostly aren’t in a place where they feel safe enough from their governments to speak out. And I get called a racist by American Muslim Black Converts for criticizing a religion that damn near destroyed my life — which I still feel actually did destroy my life because I will never get over losing my family. But of course there’s no silencing going on over here (silencing only happens when the Noisy Group says it has happened). Those who make it a habit of piling on liberal non-racist white feminists doing good work, pride themselves on calling out (in nasty vicious ways) what they think of as the white people’s blind spots. Yet their own blind spots are invisible to them and of course, since no one is lower on the victim totem pole than they, nobody can point out to them that maybe, just maybe, shielding Islam is not the most enlightened way to advertise your awareness of the suffering of other people. Maybe, just maybe, other oppressed groups — like apostates of Islam — find you trampling all over their “safe spaces” (yet another term they love) screaming about white privilege, rather… well, rude and disrespectful.

Just sayin’.