The days of women [Archives:2007/1038/Opinion]
By: Huda Alawi
Future man will have learned things about women that will make him apologize. Tackling women's issues and expressing them objectively is a complicated process requiring rereading the social address to ensure appropriate discussion of such issues without the influence of subjectivity.
In this context, women's efforts in embodying their rights to defend their existence by expressing their real concerns and problems isn't an easy task, considering the faked values posing a great barrier to women, even while expressing their biological issues. The prevailing social culture helps boost dangerous concepts concerned with edging out women's role in running daily affairs.
Some approaches advocate women returning to the home while others criticize women's engagement and participation in political activities. Additionally, fatwas and jurisprudence provide differing views regarding a woman's niqab (veil), her being a ruler and leaving her home without her man (mahram).
From time to time, societies provoke honor crimes against women while those perpetrators who commit violence against women escape punishment due to the prevailing culture of fear. Women tend to adopt clearer attitudes when explaining their sensitive issues, thus highlighting natural morals and the ambiguous psychological barriers posed to progress in discussing their daily issues.
With its conservative views, society upholds the theory of hypocrisy as a means to avoid the philosophy of stigma. Such a fact supposes absence of the mind and negligence of logic in any scope of freedom granted to women to express their issues without engaging in clashes with cultural heritage.
In order for lifestyle to be unaffected and principles adhered to, women must be granted all of their legal rights; otherwise, they'll be intimidated by the whip of horror and numerous obstacles due to be posed to their progress and qualification.
Educated women always adhere to several principles in their intellectual talks, while women writers are governed by behavioral regulations reflecting their personality as novelists and poets.
Women politicians always are pushed by an organizational fellowship and specific partisan progress, while career women usually exhaust their energy and sell the power of their work twice: first for money and secondly for spiritual support. Housewives automatically prefer the safe way leading to the shade.
In this way, with all its barriers and obstacles, Yemeni society restricts women's freedom of expression and prevents them from publicizing their rights. Society places red lines that are impossible for women to cross, thus likening them to turtles, which are subjected to harm by the outside world if they go beyond their internal world (the sea).
Women's real problem isn't conflict with men; rather, they are struggling against social backwardness and an environment of injustice and oppression. The way women deal with their issues today must be reconsidered in order to rectify the work strategy in such a way suiting the demands of the time and interpreting the requirements of social privacy.
Huda Alawi is assistant professor of criminal law at Aden University's Faculty of Law.
Source: Al-Ayyam daily
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