What If Women Were People?

100 million women are missing. Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn would like you to do something about it. Females are killed as babies, raped as girls and abandoned as women. They ask why, in a world where racial apartheid has been denounced, gender apartheid is simply a fact of life. Johann Hari reviewed the book, and discussed the issues surrounding it.

Today, now, more than 100 million women are missing. They have vanished. In normal circumstances, women live longer than men—but China has 107 males for every 100 females in its overall population, India has 108, and Pakistan has 111. Where have these women gone? They have been killed or allowed to die.

Half the Sky focuses on the heroines who defy their circumstances to make life better for those around them. One woman who was raped (for a crime her brother allegedly committed) called the police and raised a stink about it. She used the $8,300 in compensation that Pakistani dictator Pervez Musharraf sent her on building a school for girls.

Or how about the enslavement of women in brothels, which is now far larger than the trans-Atlantic slave trade at its height? Some 3.5 million women are being jailed, drugged, and raped for cash today. This brutalization of women doesn’t have to happen any more than the enslavement of Africans did in the 18^th century. As the authors write: “The tools to crush modern slavery exist, but the political will is lacking. That must be the starting point of any abolitionist movement.” International pressure—set in motion by the acts of ordinary citizens—works.

I would recommend giving the review a read, as Johann Hari is as passionate about the subject as the original authors. He also takes them to task for the rather large blind spots in their argument. While they are willing to bring attention to fistulas in Africa, the lack of female education in Pakistan, and the trafficking of women into the sex trade, they shy away from crimes committed by American allies.

One of the worst places in the world to be a woman is Saudi Arabia, where you can be imprisoned for trying to drive a car and lashed for being raped. Perhaps the very worst is Afghanistan, where—outside the Potemkin village of Kabul—women are almost invariably imprisoned in their homes and used as property-cattle in private fiefdoms run by warlords.

Yet woman-lashing Saudi Arabia is the closest U.S. ally in the region (along with Israel), and woman-crushing Afghanistan is actually occupied by the United States. The rights of women are being casually sold out in exchange for oil, military expediency, and hard geopolitics. U.S. citizens have the most responsibility for this, because it’s your government doing it—but Kristof and WuDunn choose not to focus on these places, skimming over them briskly.

What about respect for different cultures? What makes the West the all-knowing poobah of what women need? Well, nothing. But the women themselves probably have an inkling.

This argument collapses even further into The Chasm of Lousy Excuses for Inaction when you speak to the women themselves. It wasn’t Shahnaz’s culture to have her face burned off or Mukhtar’s to be gang raped. No—it was the culture of their oppressors. Slaves do not love their chains; women do not love to be subordinated. There is a conflict within these cultures—and we must now pick a side or sit out the great civil rights battle of our time.

If you have the time, find a quiet corner and ruminate on this.