Monday, 24th October 2005
“Our guns are our vaginas!”
Sometimes I feel like the world was made just for me and this evening was one of those times. I went to an open meeting about the situation in Zimbabwe arranged by the NGO I work for and one of the big trade unions. One of the speakers, the women’s secretary for the ZCTU made the above statement and I roared! We have launched a campaign regarding the fact that women in Zim can’t get sanitary products and so are using rolled up newspapers as tampons. Yes, you read that right, rolled up newspapers as tampons. It’s a fucking disgrace, but hopefully we can raise a whole bunch of money (and awareness) to buy them a load of sanitary products in South Africa and truck it all in to the displacement camps.
She also told a colleague that I had “the spirit of an activist”, which I am taking as a massive compliment since she is a woman of immense spirit. She has been tortured and raped for her stance on women’s rights and for her to see some kind of strength or defiance in me is cuntingly lovely!
Yay women’s!
(Here’s a BBC article, but alas, it doesn’t mention us! Woohoo - we made Women’s Hour!)
Wednesday, 12th October 2005
Buddha and the feminist
Ages ago, I was sat in a bar in Philly and talking with a Thai woman I kinda knew. For some reason the topic of conversation strayed onto Buddhism upon which she launched into a vitriolic diatribe outlining her intense hatred of Buddhism and the west’s romance with it. She was raised Buddhist and experienced such sexism and oppression within it’s framework, that she felt nothing but bitterness toward it and disdain at the west’s perception of it as a religion of equality and happy, skippy la la land ethics.
I remember that what shocked me most, was the force of her hatred and how much it distorted her. Really, I thought, it’s not surprising that she experienced sexism in a Buddhist environment for the same reasons that it’s not surprising that I do in my ’secular’ one. We both come from patriarchal societies, just ones with different dominant sets of beliefs. It has been for man to shape the world.
Today I say to me - riiiiiiiiight. That would be the romance she was talking about.
All of the reading I have done on Buddhism, up until this last week, (side from the Dhammapada), have really been texts about Buddhism as opposed to Buddhist scriptures. Let’s just say, now that my reading material has been extended a tiny wee bit, that I am slowly beginning to dislike Buddhism too. The outright misogyny and sexism I have come across is shocking and repulsive. On the one hand, it’s no worse than any of the Abrahamic religions, but on the other, my whole little, “if I had to align myself with a religion, it would be Buddhism” bubble has burst and the mud it was made of has splattered everywhere.
Of course, these stories I have been reading are still just man’s interpretation of the Buddha’s teachings and they don’t occupy the same position as say the Qu’ran or the Bible, but still, these are important texts and the views they preach are pretty bloody rancid. I bet the Buddha is ashamed! 
Just in case anyone cares, here are my classes for this year:
Introduction to the Study of Religion (Compulsory, Terms 1 & 2)
Introduction to Islam (Terms 1 & 2)
Buddhism: Foundation (Term 1)
Judaism: Foundation (Term 1)
Religions of the Near and Middle East (Term 2)
Religions of Africa (Term 2)
In other related news, some stupid fuck told me today that women’s experience is no different from men’s, as in, the world isn’t gendered. Another one said that he felt feminism existed soley to explain women to men. I would have laughed, but I was too busy choking…