Feminism's Moral Failure : Cultural Relativism

"It's a miracle! Finally, the right wing cares about rape culture! And all it took was a good excuse to bash migrants and Muslims and tell feminists they don't know what's good for them ... "
"You know what has never yet prevented sexual violence? Unbridled racism."
"After Cologne, we can't let the bigots steal feminism."
Laurie Penny, British feminist writer

Police officers survey the area in front of the main train station and the Cathedral in Cologne, western Germany, on January 6, 2016, where dozens of apparently coordinated sexual assaults were perpetrated against women on New Year's Eve. AFP / dpa / Maja Hitij / Germany

"I was at the main station, alone after midnight, as I often am, happy to have had a lovely night watching fireworks at the Rhine. Imagine my surprise, six days later, to discover I had been within 100 metres of a roving gang of rapists without noticing that anything was amiss."
"Police are still working out whether there was an organized attack or not. It seems unlikely, if only because it was unnecessary. For thieves, pickings don’t get much easier than loads of drunk people in a confined space."
"What exactly happened on New Year’s Eve isn’t clear — investigations are still in the early stages. There may be even more to investigate on Saturday, after the Islamophobic group Pegida and the pro-refugee Köln gegen Rechts (Colgoners against the Right) protest simultaneously at the main station."
Marcia Adair, Canadian journalist living and working in Cologne, Germany

Markus Boehm / dpa / AP   In this Dec. 31, 2015 picture, persons gather at the Cologne, Germany, main station.

So it is not, after all, and all things considered, a good idea to focus on Muslim men victimizing women. It's their culture, after all. A patriarchal, religious, heritage, custom that informs men that women are inferior creatures however indispensable to the process of procreation. And it is their irreplaceable role in procreation for which they are valued, somewhat like ownership of a flock of sheep which must be fed and managed, and bred to increase the stock and hence the value of ownership.

Those women who are obedient to the male message of humble modesty where all the physical attributes of femininity are chastely kept out of sight, with the added provision that even such coverings are not adequate to demonstrate a woman's body as being out of bounds of casual touch leading to violent predation and are not to be seen in public, other than within the guided protection of a male family member; else they invite sexual violence.

Women who flout the rules and flaunt their femininity display their easy availability and have nothing to complain about molestation, for men simply respond to the signals that women transmit. They have set out to seduce men and in succeeding, perfidiously claim to have been misunderstood. And that's the message that Western feminists appear to have accepted since to do otherwise is to do a cultural injustice to another way of life.

Feminists are notoriously insensitive to the insults they hurl at men of their own culture and society, but feelingly sensitive and hugely empathetic to the men from other cultures whose behaviour toward women represents violently churlish misogyny. One might imagine that women charging ahead to ensure that human rights are equally granted both genders and those beyond gender, would insist on universal equality rights.

The World Economic Forum's 2014 ranking of the best and the worst countries to be a woman has Islamic countries representing 16 of the 20 worst nations where women are demeaned and have few rights and no means of legal defense. Syria rated fourth-last in the lineup. Women in the Middle East have the fewest rights of women anywhere on Earth when it comes to gender discrimination.

"At this time, we cannot recommend travel to any country in the Middle East", is the advice for women through the International Women's Travel Center's 2015 List of Safest Countries in the World for Women Travelers. And it is hugely unlikely that that advice will change in 2016, let alone for the foreseeable future. German women in Cologne discovered to their dismay that the Muslim world of inequality for women had dropped by their New Year's Eve celebrations.

They were surrounded, hounded, probed, assaulted, robbed, humiliated, tormented and terrorized. Over 600 women have come forward to launch a complaint over the sexual intimidation and violence they were subjected to in Cologne. And the backlash has indeed been to question the wisdom of Germany promising to absorb a million Muslim haven-seekers not only from Syria but from Eritrea, from Afghanistan and elsewhere in the misbegotten world of Medieval patriarchy.

Western feminists come to the aid of a culture that demeans women, in support of Muslim women's right to wear a niqab, a clear and obvious symbol of female disempowerment. One which, through tradition, many Muslim women effect, and through a misguided sense of acceding to Islamist demands younger women have taken to affectedly trussing themselves with. While other Muslim women write disgustedly of the phenomenon.

"[ . . . ] Well-intentioned Americans [who] in the name of Interfaith ... are getting duped by the agenda of Muslims who argue that a woman's honour lies in her 'chastity' and unwittingly pushing a platform to put a hijab on every woman."
Asra Q. Nomani, Hala Arafa, Washington Post