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Look at what Pervez Musharraf's been doing in Pakistan:
Getting the rape laws out of the hands of the mullahs.
There's a long ways to go yet, but this law says that rape is now a regular crime, which can be prosecuted on the basis of regular forensic evidence and no longer needs four adult Muslim men to attest to it, and which can no longer get a woman arrested for adultery. Yes, formerly, if a woman was raped and did not have four adult Muslim men to witness to it, she would be charged with adultery, which is still a crime in Pakistan which can result in a five year prison sentence or a fine. Also, the age of consent has been moved from "puberty" to sixteen for girls (I don't know about boys).
Some people I admire greatly see age of consent laws as being generally about controlling and oppressing youth, but I disagree: they are two-sided things, and are sometimes about keeping young people from being used by the adults in their lives, when there are insufficient other inhibitions. In a society where adult men have so much power over women, it's a good thing to say "Yeah, but you may not have sex with them or force them to marry when they are twelve years old." Not much of a thing, but a good one.
Back to Musharraf and Pakistan. So, to begin with, he's a dictator, and that's no good. And he's willing to have a war by proxy with India which allows thousands of Kashmiris, and other folks too, to be killed in bombings and riots. And he's willing to tolerate a whole soup of reactionary schools and camps on his border, so long as their activities are primarily focussed on Afghanistan. And he does what dictators do to stay in power. And he cut a deal with the US to not get bombed to rubble, which involved helping bomb Afghanistan to rubble. And so on.
But here he is, triumphant that he's pushed the emancipation of Pakistani women that one bit farther.
On another front, I'm going to yet another memorial for my father tonight. The good thing is that he's sharing it with another anthropologist who died this year and it's at the American Anthropological Association meeting tonight. On the other hand, it's organized by our friend Tressa, who is overly dramatic and I fear long-windedness and I expect to cry a lot. The day before yesterday was his birthday.
Complicated.
Getting the rape laws out of the hands of the mullahs.
There's a long ways to go yet, but this law says that rape is now a regular crime, which can be prosecuted on the basis of regular forensic evidence and no longer needs four adult Muslim men to attest to it, and which can no longer get a woman arrested for adultery. Yes, formerly, if a woman was raped and did not have four adult Muslim men to witness to it, she would be charged with adultery, which is still a crime in Pakistan which can result in a five year prison sentence or a fine. Also, the age of consent has been moved from "puberty" to sixteen for girls (I don't know about boys).
Some people I admire greatly see age of consent laws as being generally about controlling and oppressing youth, but I disagree: they are two-sided things, and are sometimes about keeping young people from being used by the adults in their lives, when there are insufficient other inhibitions. In a society where adult men have so much power over women, it's a good thing to say "Yeah, but you may not have sex with them or force them to marry when they are twelve years old." Not much of a thing, but a good one.
Back to Musharraf and Pakistan. So, to begin with, he's a dictator, and that's no good. And he's willing to have a war by proxy with India which allows thousands of Kashmiris, and other folks too, to be killed in bombings and riots. And he's willing to tolerate a whole soup of reactionary schools and camps on his border, so long as their activities are primarily focussed on Afghanistan. And he does what dictators do to stay in power. And he cut a deal with the US to not get bombed to rubble, which involved helping bomb Afghanistan to rubble. And so on.
But here he is, triumphant that he's pushed the emancipation of Pakistani women that one bit farther.
On another front, I'm going to yet another memorial for my father tonight. The good thing is that he's sharing it with another anthropologist who died this year and it's at the American Anthropological Association meeting tonight. On the other hand, it's organized by our friend Tressa, who is overly dramatic and I fear long-windedness and I expect to cry a lot. The day before yesterday was his birthday.
Complicated.
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