MRAs regularly accuse feminists of promoting the idea that all women are “perfect princesses” who can do no wrong. Which is a rather silly accusation, as every feminist I’ve ever met is well aware that women, like men, are capable of vast evil. Jiang Qing, also known as Madame Mao, was one of the ringleaders behind China’s bloody Cultural Revolution. Madame Delphine Lalaurie was a 19th century New Orleans socialite who tortured her slaves and performed bizarre medical experiments on them. And then there were Ilse Koch, the “Witch of Buchenwald,” and her counterpart Irma Grese, the “Bitch of Belsen,” sadistic Nazis who tormented the prisoners under their charge and kept grisly “souveniers.” (For more on them and other truly evil women see here and here.)
But today I’m going to talk about some women who aren’t so much evil as retrograde and wrong: the 800 women who have reportedly joined the newly formed Obedient Wives Club in Malaysia, an offshoot of a fundamentalist Islamic organization called Global Ikhwan, previously known for its Polygamy Club.
If you set aside the whole fundamentalist Islam thing — MRAs by and large don’t seem terribly fond of Islam — these Obedient Wives would pretty much represent the ideal women for manosphere misogynists; much of what they profess sounds like it came straight from discussions on The Spearhead or one of the popular MGTOW forums.
According to the Obedient Wives, for example, “disobedient wives are the cause for upheaval in this world” — including social ills like domestic abuse. As one spokeswoman for the group sees it, “domestic abuse happens because wives don’t obey their husband.” Asked by the newspaper The Star if this meant that a wife was at fault if she was abused, the spokeswoman replied with a “yes,” because “most probably … she didn’t listen to her husband.”
But it’s the group’s pronouncements about sex that have caused the most controversy in Malaysia. Apparently Obedient Wives need to be sexual dynamos as well as submissive helpmeets, eager and willing to “obey, serve and entertain” their husbands “better than a first-class prostitute” can. As one of the group’s founders put it at the event heralding the formation of the Obedient Wives,
Sex is a taboo in Asian society. We have ignored it in our marriages but it’s all down to sex. A good wife is a good sex worker to her husband. What is wrong with being a whore … to your husband?
Several days later, another Obedient Wives Club spokeswoman attempted to “clarify” these remarks in an interview with the Malay Mail:
I believe we have been misunderstood and misinterpreted. When we said that husbands should treat their wives like first-class prostitutes, we were not putting wives on the same level with prostitutes. We are talking about first-class elite types, not street hooker types.
So that’s … good, I guess? Although we should point out that actual prostitutes in Malaysia – even those working at “high end” clubs — are treated like shit.
Before all the “American-Women-Suck” dudes reading this convert to Islam and buy one-way plane tickets to Malaysia, I would like to note that there are feminists in Malaysia who think these women (and the men Involved in starting the group) are full of it. Islamic feminists, even.
Mary I ordered the execution of Lady Jane Gray. Elizabeth I narrowly missed her own head being lobbed off because of the same concerns.
“If you read the writings of the time, you will find that these rulers were not killing “for the greater good”; they were killing to stay in power. Elizabeth I, for example, was reluctantly talked into killing Lady Jane Grey because she was used by her relatives to try and claim the throne. Same deal with Mary, Queen of Scots. If you are going to stay king, or queen, of anywhere for very long, you need to be willing to kill pretenders. When you don’t, or won’t, you end up with civil war.”
I think people at that time had a somewhat different conception of what “for the greater good” meant. We today perceive the greater good as best being served by a liberal and secular democracy. In Elizabeth’s time, however, staying in power was often seen as serving the greater good, and I think you touched on that at the very end.
If I were married, and my husband said he wanted me to act like a high-class prostitute, I’d put a tip jar by the bed straightaway, with a $500/hr minimum sign on it.
My only point in spawning this derail was that if Elizabeth and Mary are evil, then most rulers throughout history are evil–which is likely true. Still, we don’t single out, say, Henry VII as being especially evil, even though he had quite a few political enemies put to death (after all, he essentially usurped the throne through force of arms from Richard III, who generally is, rightly or wrongly singled out as being evil). History is indeed written by the winners, as the article’s author stated, which is why Mary is “Bloody Mary” but Elizabeth is “Good Queen Bess.”
tl; dr: context matters, and I don’t think either Mary or Elizabeth was exceptionally evil in context–just plain, ordinary everyday evil, like most rulers throughout history.
Why does no one ever argue that if as many people are happy as possible, it would be a better world?
**sigh**
Why does no one ever argue that if as many people are happy as possible, it would be a better world?
In the MRA world, women don’t count as people.
Too many people think that happiness and equality are zero-sum propositions.
Because there are too many people who can’t be happy so long as other people they don’t agree with are happy.
See also, Puritans.
Because there are too many people who can’t be happy so long as other people they don’t agree with are happy.
the “pissing in someone’s cornflakes” axiom.
“It is not enough for me to be successful. It is also necessary for my friends to fail.”
@Captain Bathrobe:
I’m gonna point this out because I see it a lot and it bothers me. You don’t need to get defensive about evil women rulers being “singled out” here, because that just happens to be the topic of conversation. Talking about one side without mentioning the other does not equal thinking the other side doesn’t exist. I think you know this, though..
OT: Grah, this stuff is pretty bad, and people have already mentioned what I want to say. You can’t get good at sex by wishing for it, its something that comes with practice and enjoying what you do. Saying that women are to blame for any and all abuse not only blame the victim, but make men out to be inhuman, unable to keep their penis in their pants when so much as a square centimeter of flesh shows up on a woman, or absolutely unable to restrain their violent tendancies. Keep men human! Hold them accountable for their actions!
The Quiverfull wives would be so pleased…*gag*
I urge anyone who was intrigued by those lists to do some research of their own. Like a lot of those “lists” sites, they take SIGNIFICANT liberties with the facts. In particular, while she was certainly an abusive sadist, the Delphine LaLaurie details seem to be mostly made up to serve the “ghost tour” biz in NO.
The “feminists never think women do anything wrong!” argument is such a catch-22, since if you answer it by giving examples of women who did things wrong, you’re just reinforcing their other argument, “all women are evil!”
Pretty much…………this is depressing.
As much as this movement is getting lots of attention, it really isn’t that far removed from stateside fundamentalist Christian groups who feel that women who are unhappy in their marriages just aren’t TRYING hard enough, and that domestic violence is just the same – such as the Saddleback church. And these are women espousing these opinions and teaching the next generation of their large families, although I don’t see too many of them with husbands fighting for them to be equal and they just refuse.
@Tenya: Absolutely true, hence my Quiverfull comment earlier. I’ve researched the Quiverfull movement pretty thoroughly and I grew up in fundamentalist Christianity, and it is accurate to state that the onus is generally placed on the woman. You’ll hear about the role of men, and their importance of leaders, but you hear much more about the role of women. It’s quite an industry, actually.
There is this expectation in this community that women must be sexually available at all times to their husbands. I’ve read blogs by Quiverfull women that actually stated that a woman does not have the right to refuse her husband sex. That is not a unanimous opinion, of course, but it exists within the community. And it’s not hard to see why.
No Longer Quivering is an excellent blog that looks at Quiverfull and other fundamentalist religions/movements from the perspective of women who have left the lifestyle. I’ve been reading for a while so just wanted to plug them since others were talking about Quiverfull.
No Longer Quivering is awesome! They posted a really encouraging comment on my guest post for Feministing on the intersection of religion and feminism, and that convinced me I must have written something at least halfway decent on the subject 🙂 I admire their bravery so much.
The most that can be said in defense of the emphasis on “the role of women” in complementarian circles and the relative de-emphasis on the role of men is this:
Saying a lot about what women are supposed to do is probably just an attempt to balance out the obvious amount of stuff women aren’t allowed to do by making it look like there’s a bunch of stuff that they can do. It’s not necessarily intended as a burden.
With fewer and fewer modern women marrying at all, and having their child(ren) out of wedlock, with all of the insoluble and appalling problems that creates in the coming generation, and fewer and fewer men finding it worthwhile to marry women who value ANYTHING more than their husbands–their goofy girlfriends, their “careers”, their political causes, their looks, pocketbooks, and petty egos, or even their unmanagable, spoiled, and loathsome brats (of both sexes)–Is it up to US to say that fundamentalist Muslims have things the wrong way?
I would agree that some of this–especially if polygamy is included–may be “over-the-top”, creating more problems than it solves.. Polygamy can inflict its own problems on a community, as spouseless, restless, and violence-prone young men can’t be economically or sexually integrated into the larger society, but even then, it is no worse than the matriarchal urban ghetto –or white” trailer trash”- culture(???) polluting Western, including American, society that has less and less constructive place for men, masculinity and patriarchy!
“Obedient Wives Club”–for American Jews and Christians– Sounds good to me! I’ll take this as a peace offering from Moslems anytime! We can always learn from others!
PEACE AND FREEDOM!
David K. Meller
PS- And you ‘politically correct’ feministas probably thought that we Men’s Rights advocates were all noisy, gun-totin’, anti-Muslim bigots and militarists who always voted for the GOP, didn’t you? Wrong again! DKM
@Katz: Yes and no. From what I’ve read, and my own experience growing up in fundamentalism, yes, submission is portrayed as a blessing. A gift, even. But there’s also the concept of servanthood, and if you check Ladies Against Feminism’s page, you’ll see quite a few articles on the subject. It’s portrayed as a burden, too. Even as a punishment, given to women as a result of Eve’s disobedience. It’s a very conflicting message: “Your role is to be a servant for the rest of your days! Aren’t you the lucky one???!!”
And @David K. Meller: Please look up a list of logical fallacies. You’ll find generalizations on the list.
“Saying a lot about what women are supposed to do is probably just an attempt to balance out the obvious amount of stuff women aren’t allowed to do by making it look like there’s a bunch of stuff that they can do.”
Well-put!
There has been some thought objecting to the habit of some of the wives offering themselves to their husbands as role-playing high priced call girls. What people do behind closed doors is their own business, but even at its worst, I still think that it is less harmful to the larger society than modern women pretending–through affirmative action laws, hostile-workplace legislaion, mandatory hiring and promotion quotas and so on–to be police detectives, Senior partners in Law firms, Corporate CEO’s, University department heads or college Presidents, long-haul truckers, journalists, or (Lord help us) Servicemen in the Armed Forces! Little ladies could no longer PRETEND to infest MEN’s work outside the nome, and no harm done!
I say “pretend” deliberately, since if these blatantly egalitarian laws and court rulings were repealed, women would disappear almost overnight from those occupations and professions, and normal gender balance would return very quickly!
Care to try it?
PEACE AND FREEDOM