Beyond recognition, in the name of salvation.

Just a thought. You know how the prevailing attitude about rape and women is that women are at fault if they "tempt" men and suffer the consequences? And that´s why women have to be careful and not do this and not do that? If we weren´t so blinded by our upbringing, we might take a second to pause and think it through, and see how illogical that is.

Let´s see. According to most people, the idea is that women do something, men can´t control themselves, they rape women, so women have to be more responsible and give up doing certain things. What? If that´s really their explanation,well, if men are doing the raping because men can´t control themselves, then it´s men´s freedom that should be limited.

We just never stop to see things in that light, socially speaking. One of the main reasons why, I think, is that monotheistic religious thought has really molded our point of view, and it brought inextricably with itself this misplacement of responsibility.

The three monotheistic religions affirm that there is 1 god, that he (yes, he, of course) is omnipotent and completely benevolent, that people are born to do his will, and that people who aren´t good servants to him will go to hell for their deeds. Okay, okay, so let me understand. That god could do anything, anything at all, but he lets horrible things happen because they are all a part of his ultimate, grand plan for the world, and he is absolutely wonderful no matter what, nothing is his fault? He is responsible for everything that happens, but in the end it´s people who have to pay, eternally, for horrible things upon which they didn´t have total control since it´s always god who has the last say in any matter?

So, there you have. Since the monotheistic god is completely benevolent and perfect, he cannot be blamed for anything that happens. People suffer the consequences of their limited responsibility, while god´s behaviour goes unchecked despite omnipotence and total responsibility.

That´s why monotheistic religions reproduce the same pattern of women-blaming, and cannot let go of it. Religious mindfuck and rape go hand in hand. Examining why would call too much attention to this warped idea of responsibility and probably lead to questioning their god and the authority of the churches that defined him so.

Not only does this mirror the subservient treatment of women because of men´s failures, it reflects all the "licking the master´s boots and blaming the victims for anything gone wrong" subset so prevalent in our societies that built themselves with a hierarchical, monopolistic church in the midst.
The poor supposedly choosing to be so, the LGBT people allegedly deciding to be inmoral and thus rightly bashed, and every other example in the same vein all stem from the cognitive dissonance that this impossible idea of god creates.

Some eye-patches gone unnoticed..

The Democratic primary in the USA always constitutes one of the few opportunities to stir a debate within the population about problems of vital importance that otherwise go silently in the books. And so with that in mind, I give you a non-American-centered view of the rhetorics on NAFTA.

The primaries in Ohio and Michigan brought NAFTA to the forefront of the campaign. Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama essentially gave statements (even if it could just be more of the usual "demagoguery as politics") that proclaimed the necessity to "sit down with Canada and Mexico" and renegotiate the treaty in favor of the USA, or else !

Well, there´s a newsflash for you: if you think the original negotiations regarding NAFTA consisted of Mexico´s or Canada´s governments imposing their terms to the USA government, you really haven´t payed attention to how the world really works. The USA government basically penned the whole deal, mindlessly listened to what the other parties had to say, made a few minor concessions, and voilà, North America was on its way to prosperity!

The obscenely rich (and mildly rich) people in the USA just got wealthier, you mean. Because as with the enormous majority of "free trade" deals negotiated by governments around the world, only the elites were allowed an input.

There´s another newsflash for you: speaking of Mexico, threatening with leaving the agreement doesn´t make people shake with fear. The elites, of course, are another matter. Their whole parasitic existence depends on the USA government beneplacite. But common, non-sycophantic people? Many, many, maaany would actually celebrate with cries of joy if the whole NAFTA deal ceased existing.

Let´s talk about Mexico, by the way. Talking about renegotiating the NAFTA deal by putting an emphasis on less complacence towards Mexico would be absurd if it wasn´t so damn tragic.
NAFTA made it a hundred times easier for American investments to land a gig in Mexico, profit a hundredfold, and return home with no long-term benefits whatsoever for Mexican people. If we´re talking about the industry, Mexico´s control on innovation just all but disappeared following NAFTA, many industries just began exporting cheap products towards the USA on a never-before seen level while Mexico continued to import almost every high-technological level products, and so on and so forth.
The workers´s conditions went south abysmally, the agriculture is just dead, buried and decomposed, and we could literally go on for hours about the ruin that is the Mexican economy since NAFTA.

The Mexican population has gained nothing, nothing, neither prosperity nor security nor education, because of the NAFTA trade. The only ones who took advantage were the businessmen and politicians, who became billionaires with their hands in their pockets and their mouths constantly yapping, surprise surprise.

The truth of the matter is that in Mexico, the unfathomably corrupt, incompetent authorities agree to everything the USA government wants and get rich in the process, while the people just lose and lose and lose. Hope, perspectives in their homeland, money, independence, you name it, NAFTA made common Mexicans worse off in every aspect.

And it´s not only a matter of earning 5 dollars a day in many jobs, or having to leave your beloved country (if you have ever met an expatriated Mexican, you know they only swear by all things Mexican) behind and risk your life to get in the USA. Supreme irony, isn´t it? Every single measure that makes Mexican people poorer drives more and more of them into the USA, something which everybody and their army of snails realize. NAFTA is at the head of this list of measures if you´re not busy sticking your head into the sand.

No, what´s more, the bold and perfect embodiment of neoliberalism and capitalism at its most ambitious best, the project that would bring Mexico out of poverty and in the glorious arms of a post-history 21st century, the one and only (we wish) NAFTA, its masters and its cronies have caused bloodshed and serial rape by policemen and ethnic cleansing.

At least. An explanation? Let´s start here. The emissary of the Carlyle Group in Mexico, a Luis Téllez, was named by US-backed Calderón as Secretary of Communications and Transports. Why not Energy, you´ll ask, since oil clearly is the biggest thing on the USA government´s mind since, well, forever. Simple, it so happens that Communications and Transports is the key place where you can implement the next Great idea, the next catastrophe, the Plan Puebla-Panama. And be barely noticed while doing so, since it´s not considered a mediatic secretary, always a big plus for the Carlyle group.

For instance, ever since former vende-patria in-chief Fox failed to get his Texcoco airport, the matter has been a thorn in the government´s side. So much so that on May 3d and 4th of 2006, at 6.15 AM, 5000 policemen entered the small town of San Salvador Atenco, the bastion of resistence against the airport for more than 4 years, and proceeded to drag sleeping people out of their beds, kill a 14 tears old boy and a 20 years old student, kick a man almost to death, torture more than 200 people, and rape more than 40 women for the 5 hours it took to drive people to jail.

And since this, you´ll ask...

Since Téllez was intronized as Communication tsar, the government has made quiet advances towards building the airport. Instead of trying to openly kick the Atenquenses out of their ancestral land, the government is now buying it. 8 dollars a square meter, which appears to be a lot to poor Mexicans, that the Mexican government would then sell for more than 3 000 dollars a square meter when beginning the construction of the airport. Justice, you say?

This is but one example of how the deals that make USA companies richer and the USA economy stronger bleed another country´s inhabitants. Look no further than Atenco; look no further than Montes Azules in Chiapas, where tzeltales and tzotziles indigenous people are being expulsed from their lands in the name of eco-tourism. Look no further than this place in northern Sonora where kids, kids no older than 12 are literally enslaved to pick tomatoes later exported to the USA by the G-mark company (scroll down till Wednesday 25th).

So Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, next time you open your mouth to talk about renegotiating NAFTA, keep the delusional US-centrist view of reality out of it. You want all Americans to benefit? That´s good. America isn´t only the USA, you know. Realize that Mexico and Canada are in fact sovereign nations, and that every single human being from Alaska to the Río Suchiate (and stretching it further, the Cape Horn) has the right to pursuit of happiness and utter dignity, not just being a USA lackey. Thank you.

Unseen and carved.

(This photo by Stephanie Sinclair won the Unicef prize for photo of the year in 2007. Newly-weds Mohammed, 40, and wife, Ghulam, 11.)

It´s one of those pictures that haunt you deeply, even if the reason is not so simple to pinpoint. I don´t know exactly what this little girl is thinking, and I don´t think anyone can. The lost look in those eyes can mean so many different things. But I´ll tell you one thing, it sure isn´t the look of somebody who just entered a lifelong partnership (which marriage is, even if you don´t think of it as a based-on-love-endeavour) fervently hoping for the best.

And you know what tugs at my heartstrings? I can´t fathom what that little girl is going through, but it absolutely kills me to know, just know that there are some people, many men in particular, who won´t see this as a big deal, who truly won´t bleed in the inside, whose first and last reaction will be to try to rationalize the fear of this little girl. The fact that her wedding night will essentially be legalized rape will slip by them with nary a thought (and yes, rape it is if she doesn´t have the freedom to independently decide and give the final say in the matter, rape it is if she doesn´t actively pursue it). Oh, maybe they´ll feel a little bit indignant about her age, and consider the marriage between an 11 years old girl and a 40 years old man another one of those barbarian customs Afghans maintain. Xenophobia here we come !

But for all those who consider marriage and heterosexism destiny for a woman, no matter what society they come from, it´s just seen as the inevitable thing that came to pass too soon. On some deep, internalized level, many societies on Earth have completely accepted, to speak in crude but nonetheless true terms, that a woman has value only insofar as she abides by some set of rules that determines what penis will be shoved into her. Which is why a machist view of rape centers on the notion of stolen property; in the end, it inherently repels the notion that a woman can NOT enjoy being penetrated by a man, any man. It´s not only about consistently telling a lesbian that a real man will make her enjoy it; in the same fashion, it´s feeling that marital rape is at best a little silly and at worst offendingly absurd. And yes, it´s also about declaring that pedophilia is perverted stuff, because if you just waited a few years, you could have it for free.

Many fundamentally sexist world views have an obsession and general horror towards the sexual activities of gay men and women in general. No wonder; in a phallocentrist vision of sex, the value of an individual hangs only on the use that is given to their body orifices. Be it oral or anal sex, a sexist perspective defines homosexual sex between men by the penetrating part. You know how the introduction in Law and Order: Special Victims Unit states that sexual crimes are considered among the worst and most heinous crimes? That´s because in a gender-essentialist society, sex is essentially a way to establish and assert a hierarchy of power (it´s no surprise so many confluate homosexuality and pedophilia, they see both acts as the same in terms of power).

In the case of women, it is understood that they will perform their role of sex partners for men, and so sex is seen as inseparable from "the woman condition". But it is only as sex objects; the one setting the tone is invariably the man, and so the fact that a woman could pursue sex on her own terms is unthinkable, unacceptable and repulsive. Look at how despised women who seek sex as they choose are in our society, and at the same time how the conservative, traditional representations of sex demean women. From porn to the jokes about how a husband has to barter with his wife for her to accept to have sex with him, from the countless sex scenes where only the man acts and the woman just whimpers, to the special uproar reserved at women who cheat, it is clear how in a conservative culture, sex should be done to a woman by the one man or the many entitled to it, and she should take everything that man dishes at her and make him feel good about it.

For sexist, phallocentric, gender-essentialist bigots (and there are tendrils of that worldview in all of us), being penetrated is being subjected by somebody with superior power. It makes women mere outlets for men´s desires, and gay men women-like and thus objects of scorn.
But that´s the difference in the gender-essentialist view of homosexual men and women: by failing to perform their "natural" role, the former choose to lower themselves, while women´s entire existence is defined by their vagina. They are born "lowered".

Some men like to pontificate about how "all women have rape fantaisies". For all people who were born women or in a woman´s body and as such considered women, from the moment of their birth it has been instilled in them that they have something which men want and are entitled to. That in the end they are something which men want and are entitled to. Rape is the materialization of something announced to you since you had the use of reason, a nightmare always feared that you have no right to be surprised by.

You can rationalize away everything you want, in the end, it comes down to feeling another´s pain as your own, recognize them as equal in essence, and also recognize the same oppression; maybe that´s why for so many people, Afghan or not, western or not, women or not, this little girl´s eyes won´t go away...