Female ninjas bring to mind empowerment, strength, ferocity everything that is thought of as repressed in Iranian women. Wearing a hijab is still required for women, and exposing anything but the hands and face is still punishable by lashing or jail time. Women’s rights still are a far cry from justice. Despite this, some Iranian ...
Dubai has employed its first female train driver. In fact, Mariam Al Safar is the first woman to be employed as a train driver in the whole of the Middle East. Ms. Al Safar is in charge of the whole train – she has the skills to drive the train but because the system is ...
Anis Hidayah is an Indonesian lawyer fighting for the rights of Asian immigrant workers who are often treated as slaves and forced to endure physical and sexual abuse around the world. She first got involved in this when she was a young law student and learned about a woman being raped by her employer in ...
Saudi Arabia’s 88-year-old king gave women the right to vote and to run in municipal elections on Sunday. This is a big step towards equality, although women will have more power in theory rather than in practice. They won’t be able to vote until 2015 and will be barred from next week’s elections. It’s disappointing ...
Women are becoming increasingly proactive in their fight against domestic violence and sexual harassment. Led by Rebecca Chiao, a group of Cairo women are using “new media and old-fashioned community action” to take a proactive stance on sex crimes in Egypt. Assisted by Canada’s International Development Research Centre, HarassMap “lets women report incidents that might ...
As Saudi women fight for the right to drive so they can move independently, Qatar seems to be going the opposite direction in terms of its opinion of women’s status. On Thursday, the first women only cinema in the Middle East will open in Doha, in the Aspire Zone Foundation Ladies Club, a government-backed sports ...
Saudi Arabian women’s freedom is limited more than in any other country. They cannot vote, they cannot leave the country, and most of them are not part of the workforce. Perhaps one of the most limiting restrictions Saudi women face is that they are not allowed to drive. Today, hundreds of Saudi women will protest ...
As with most teenagers rearing for wheels, I remember how excited I was to get my learner’s permit when I turned 16. Most of us take being able to drive for granted, but Saudi women are still fighting for their right. Women2Drive has been campaigning to teach Saudi women how to drive, and the issue ...
Nine “honour killings” occurred in the West Bank last year, along with 20 in Jordan. Women are murdered to save the honour of their family, while the idea of treating men the same way is unthinkable. Palestinian college student Aya Baradiya was murdered last month by her uncle and two other men. Her uncle admitted ...
Kathleen Parker is pissed off that foreign policy takes women completely out of the equation. It’s not just the government that think this way, working as a journalist in the Middle East I was constantly told that stories about women were just not important enough to make the paper (presumably on the assumption that it ...
The latest film in the American Pie series, American Reunion, contains a shocking scene – male full-frontal nudity including...
Dear Madame X, I have just started seeing this girl. She seems great, but she recently told me she...
Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved arrived in my hands via a public library, when I was a broke teenager with...
My attention was drawn this week to an article about the reaction at a Canadian university to proposals to...
Airport security. Bloody nuisance. Also a conspiracy designed to subjugate women. Allow me to elaborate. Despite flying quite a...
The Cannes film festival has kicked off this week with controversy over the lack of films made by women...
Dear Madame X, I seem to be only attracted to men who are macho assholes. I like them at...
When A Clockwork Orange was published in 1962, the term sexualized violence wasn’t in use. The distinction between sexualized...
