So, How many Women here...

[Laba-X]

Originally posted by naden:

Follow through with the previous lame response or shut up.

WOMEN!

[Naden]

WOMEN!

 

Double-nut Freak!

 

 

(this is fun)

[makalajabti]

Originally posted by BOB:

I would like to believe our mothers were feminists in their own way by not only being the fundamental and the backbone of the family but also the pillar of strength for our fathers yet we never heard or saw them challenging their husbands…[/QB]

A nostalgic for Dark ages!

 

Bob, everyone needs to be challenged, Husbands are not God just clueless faarax who need guidance on EVERYTHING. Our mother didn't have the financial independance to criticise and say what they think about our fathers. At that time, a somali man could easily divorce and re-marry, that's why our mothers kept their mouth shut because they knew they would be social pariahs if divorce. It was no respect but the fear of uncertain future!

[Castro]

LX, weren't you the one who, in response to Ahura, wrote the nonsense below?

 

...Aduunya-geddoon! Dumar baa maanta inoo hanjabaya! [smile]

Saaxib, to say the least, there's a disturbing pattern in your words when it comes to women.

[juba]

What are women supposed to do on Womens Day? is there a special celebration or something?? If not, no wonder no one knew about it!

[Jacpher]

Originally posted by makalajabti:

Bob, everyone needs to be challenged, Husbands are not God just clueless faarax who need guidance on EVERYTHING. Our mother didn't have the financial independance to criticise and say what they think about our fathers. At that time, a somali man could easily divorce and re-marry, that's why our mothers kept their mouth shut because they knew they would be social pariahs if divorce. It was no respect but the fear of uncertain future!

Very simplistic view of Somali husband/wife relationship. Was your daddy a clueless Faarax & your mother insecure wife? or were they excluded from the list? Women needed financial independence to criticize their husbands? No respect but in fear of divorce?? Divorced Somali woman being social pariahs?? What part of Somali are you referring to I wonder.

 

Does gadaal ka gaar goob dumis come to mind? This must be your enlightened feminism view of Somali woman. When is Monkey hanky panky Day?

[Blessed]

You gabdhos, remind me of the songHablaha Geeska Africa. Somali women are reknowned for their feistiness

[makalajabti]

Originally posted by Ducaqabe:

quote:

Women needed financial independence to criticize their husbands? No respect but in fear of divorce?? Divorced Somali woman being social pariahs?? What part of Somali are you referring to I wonder.

Fact 1:In general, everywhere in the World, people don't take shit from others if they are financially independent.

Question : You are right for one thing, we don't come from the same part of Somalia because in my little corner, in the past (not nowadays cos Halimo' are superwomen now), divorce was bad, and parents wouldn't want to feed their daughters's children because she managed to anger her husband.

[Ibtisam]

^But then again; no mother wants to see her daughter stuck in some God forsaken marriage; besides Men don't do Jack Shiid in Somalia, what financial dependence is there to speak of?

In fact divorce in Somalia has always been easier in comparison to other cultures (e.g. Asian and Arabs)

[Valenteenah.]

Originally posted by Laba_Xiniinyood:

...Dumarku iyagaa is dhigay maanta meeshay yaalaan. If you want honour and respect - you've gotta

earn

them! After all, nowadays it seems like they are only here to be used as mere commodities and/or to fulfil men's lustful desires!

LoL. If I want respect and honour, I will earn them. But the catch is: Who's respect and honour do I actually want to earn? See, the respect and honour of a random man or the average chauvinistic oaf means nothing to me personally. It wouldn't raise my self-esteem or confidence any more than being liked by my next door neighbour's pet would. Mida kale, it doesn't actually take that much to earn these clearly critical feelings. A passive, soft-spoken, quiet xaliimo like me gets it as her due ( ). I would rather spend my energy earning the respect and honour of those that make me work for it, and once earned, those that bestow it without expecting anything back in return. That is, other women. It's so much more difficult and, therefore, satisfying to earn respect and honour from people who don't merely want to sleep with you. Don't you think?

 

But I digress. This isn't about me. It's not about any of us individually. It's about women, in their entirety.

 

So, I want to ask you [the chest-inflated men, who believe dumarku inay is dhigeen meeshay joogaan maanta and who seem to imply that all they need to make their lives better is to earn your respect and honour] some questions:

 

 

Please tell me what earning your respect and honour could possibly do for the millions of East European women who are abducted and sold into sex slavery every year? How would it help them?

 

How about the thousands of women who end up in the Acid-Units of hospitals in South Asian cities every week for rejecting the advances of men? Did they put themselves in those positions? And what could your respect and honour do for them?

 

What about all the prepubescent child prostitutes of East Asian countries? Do you think they choose to 'fulfil men's lustful desires' of their own free will? Again, what would earning your respect and honour do for them? Would it take away the abject poverty that forces their parents to sell them to brothels? Could it get them out of the business? Would it protect them from venereal diseases and HIV?

 

How about the African women who break their backs tending other people's lands and producing crops, and yet who earn less than nothing? Same question again: Tell me what your respect and honour could possibly do for them?

 

Perhaps your all-important respect and honour could assist the hundreds of thousands of women who face extreme danger every time they undertake something as natural as giving birth? Could it provide them with the basic medical attention they so desperately need?

 

 

I beg you, please, tell me what earning your respect and honour is going to do for these women? Is it going to feed them? Maybe it would educate them to use their God-given human rights? Perhaps it would free them from the shackles of poverty and slavery? Could it change the law for them? Protect them from the predators feasting on them?

 

NO? I didn't think so. In the big scheme of things walaalo, your respect and honour mean absolutely Jackshyte.

 

It doesn't hurt to open your eyes and take a good look around once in a while. If only to save the rest of us from reading truly pathetic comments like the one you made above.

 

 

STOIC:

Men are not conscienceless pigs....... Inoo tartiibi huunoo

I know and I'm sorry. I didn't mean for my words to be indiscriminate.

 

 

S-B:

 

Ahura gives off an air of stonehearted, meanspirited viragos. Sorta like those sadistically cruel nuns popularly epitomized in Hollywood movies. Perhaps a stones throw away from a full-fledged dominatrix.

Sticks and stones, dear, sticks and stones.

[Pucca]

i wore heels...on the day before women's day that is.

 

quite the celebration if i do say so myself...

[Castro]

Black like us

 

Establishing their identity in a male-dominated world is a particular challenge for women of colour

 

 

At 10 years old, Naima Ahmad had already decided she wanted to be circumcised. A child of professional parents who lived in a an upper-middle-class neighbourhood in Somalia's capital Mogadishu, she couldn't understand why her mother said no, when all her friends were getting ready to line up for the big day that would usher them into womanhood.

 

"It was almost like a status thing — now your chastity has been protected," Ahmad recalls.

 

Today, she is 26, living in Toronto with two daughters of her own and grateful for her mother's stand so many years ago. Even so, Somali culture is a defining element of her identity.

 

I, too, am a woman of colour living in Toronto, and I set out to show the struggle women of colour share in expressing our identity in a society that is predominantly white and controlled largely by men.

 

I thought I would tell this story through the experience of four diverse women: Ahmad; Breanna Ellis, a Brampton high-school student; Afua Cooper, a University of Toronto historian and opera star Measha Brueggergosman. My roots are in Jamaica like Cooper and Ellis, who was born in Canada.

 

What I found was four interesting, articulate women who, if they struggle at all, are fighting very different battles — but there are some intersecting lines.

 

For Ellis, it's the black culture's embrace of gangsta rap and its denigration of women.

 

For Cooper, it's the failure of blacks to appreciate their own history and culture.

 

For Ahmad, it's not only the male-dominant assumptions of the expatriate Somali community, but also — and much more central to how she sees herself in the world — the negative view many in Canadian society have of Muslims.

 

And for Brueggergosman, well, there is no black-specific conflict. But this 27-year-old New Brunswicker, whose Afro-Canadian roots go back four generations, does believe that women have a responsibility to be more supportive of each other if they want to change stereotypical and negative perceptions.

 

"We're surprised when there is a woman pilot. We are surprised when there is a female cab driver and we are surprised when there is a female president .... We are so pleasantly uplifted by the fact that there is a female president anywhere," she says. "Then, at the same time, we vilify any woman who wants the job."

 

Statistics reflect the problem. Very few women, regardless of race, lead their countries, despite the fact there are far more women in the world than men. Of the 191 United Nations member countries, only 12 — or less than 7 per cent — are run by women, two who came to power only within the last couple of months, and one in recent weeks.

 

Brueggergosman feels if women vilified each other less, they could accomplish more. "Women can say they love to be women but they don't love other women," she says.

 

The others echo her concern.

 

Ellis, who is 17 and in her final year at Notre Dame Catholic Secondary School in Brampton, says she sees this unpleasant side of women in bullying. A close friend was a particular target.

 

"When she just came to school, a lot of girls would hate her and make fun of her just because she had light skin and `good' hair and because more guys would talk to her than the other black girls."

 

Cooper, a 48-year-old professor of black Canadian history and Canadian studies at U of T, believes the anger and frustration we see in young black women is tied to an absence of black female role models, an ignorance about the history of black women's contributions to society and an unconscious assimilation of white western cultural biases that limit the development of a robust black female identity.

 

"Even in terms of beauty, we're too fat, our nose is too big, our hair is not long enough, we're not light enough," she says.

 

An immigrant from Jamaica when she was 22, she says no such negative messages warped her upbringing.

 

"My aunts, my grandmother, the elders, provided a road for me to follow. The way they spoke, the meals they prepared, the stories they told us, the kind of life they gave us, said you are important, you're special, you're worth something, you are a valuable person. The kind of life created for us built our self-esteem and gave us a platform we could jump off of and make a place for ourselves in the world."

 

Ellis feels black girls are getting a very different message because of the all-pervasive rap culture.

 

"It's negative. They don't treat black girls as beautiful people. They treat them like `*****es and hos.'" she says.

 

Other images of young black people in the media are similarly negative.

 

"In the news, you only hear about us if someone got shot. In the media, they don't show enough positive things. We are the ones in jail, we are the ones raping, and we're the ones getting pregnant at 14 years old ....

 

"I don't smoke weed, I don't skip class .... I take college and university classes," says Ellis, who works part-time and wants to be a writer. "I am serious about life."

 

Ahmad, too, worries about the overwhelming negative image of blacks in the media.

 

"Sex, violence and crime sells and we are losing a whole generation because we are selling too much of this crap to them."

 

An administrator at the Somali Immigrant Aid Organization in Toronto, she spends her volunteer hours helping Somali women deal with the conflicts they face trying to hold on to their cultural identities in a society where western culture dominates. She is grateful to Western women who have worked hard to fight the practice of genital mutilation, now illegal, but says being stuck between the two cultures is very hard for many Somali women.

 

Her work with immigrant women and her experiences growing up in a predominantly Afro-Caribbean neighbourhood in Toronto's west end have taught her about how black Canadian women view their cultural identity.

 

She is happy about the advances women have made in Canada but, like many, is disturbed by the stereotypes that taint people's opinion of black women.

 

"We need to see educated black women on TV. We need to see more of Oprah. Where are the black women with PhDs? Why are they not on television? And the mothers who struggled and got educated after they had their children, why are they not on TV?

 

"We are not seeing the best part of reality, just focusing on the negative."

 

But Ahmad is even more preoccupied by a different negative image: the view many have that equates Islam with terrorism. She wears traditional dress, including a headscarf, and feels she is viewed negatively because of it.

 

"Since 9/11, the whole world issue of terrorism is at our doorstep. People think if you wear a hijab, you are a Muslim and you must be involved in terrorism. I have nothing to do with terrorism. Neither do the (other) Muslims here. I feel we are reluctant to trust western culture again."

 

For Ahmad, the stereotyping of Muslim women is particularly painful. She immigrated to Canada when she was 10, adopted western dress and went to high school and university in Toronto. Once she had children, Ahmad began to rediscover her culture and her faith. The attacks in 2001 changed everything.

 

"It is now so scary that we're going to be harassed because we are Muslim. It's a big fear that I have, but it will not stop me from celebrating or enjoying my religion or my culture."

 

The challenge for Ahmad bringing up her daughters in Toronto centres more on their faith than the colour of their skin. The cultural trappings of their dress, their language, and their names are like ominous clouds following them wherever they go, she says.

 

"By just giving your name, employers know you are Muslim and you may not get the opportunity," she says.

 

And then there are the constraints that come from within Toronto's Somali community.

 

"We are from a very patriarchal society. As a Somali feminist, I want to have a relationship where my husband and I are equal, where I stand beside him and not behind him. It has got me into trouble a lot of times, but I want to live in a relationship where I am a partner with my husband, not someone my husband has to take care of.

 

"Most Somali men have a problem with that."

 

Even so, she sees attitudes changing.

 

"A number of the men who have been educated here want women as partners, too, so they can help pay off the mortgage quicker."

 

Just as Ahmad is addressing the problem of black identity by working with immigrant women and being strong in her faith, Cooper is using her academic career to fight ignorance about Canada's black history.

 

Her most recent book is The Hanging of Angelique (Harper Collins), the story of the execution of a rebellious black female slave. We're Rooted here and They Can't Pull Us Up: Essays in African Canadian Women's History (University of Toronto Press) is one of the first books she co-authored.

 

"That book was written out of frustration because (the) black women in terms of (her) role in history was not there," she says. "We asked questions and we were told there wasn't much documentation and that wasn't true. We went and found the documentation and wrote it, to put black women's voices out there.

 

"It is very painful to watch yourself being erased even as you are living."

 

Cooper says all women need to work together and find those commonalities that help to define a more global and less race-defined women's culture.

 

"Women all over the world still suffer from certain forms of oppression because of being female. I don't see my womanhood solely in terms of the oppression. I want to see it as something I celebrate."

 

Source

[- Femme -]

"It's negative. They don't treat black girls as beautiful people. They treat them like `*****es and hos.'" she says.

 

Other images of young black people in the media are similarly negative.

It's everywhere. I was horrified that "It's hard out here for a pimp' won the oscar for best song! It's perpetuating a stereotype and I wonder if they realized that it was more of an insult than anything. People were laughing at them --- ****** . And what's sadder, I don't think they even realized that.

[Castro]

[Castro]

For those of you who didn't get the "joke" above, it is a reference to the Mammogram. A process of X-raying a woman's breast for early detection of breast cancer. Apparently, it is a most painful and humiliating experience. And to add insult to previous injury, Mammography has been shown to be, essentially, ineffective in detecting the cancer.