Egyptian girl strips to protest; western media censors her photos

She sure did.
Feelings may trump reason - but they also have a short shelf life.
She and her protest will be forgotten in a couple of weeks, and then things will go back to usual, or worse.

Lasting social change for the better requires more than just provocations.
There need to be a workable plan of action and resources.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Good post Trooper.
The pictures of the atrocities of Hitler's concentration camps had to be published, and seen,
otherwise people would never have believed it happened.

I may be contradicting myself, here.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

By choosing to participate in this forum, you agree to be exposed to anything posted at this forum.


Just like by choosing to read a particular newspaper, you agree to be exposed to anything printed in it.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Except there are rules against posting that material on this forum.
Note the moderator has removed the pictures from being displayed inline.

 

Maybe so, Signal, but I won't forget. Many are silenced by fear but not forgotten.

A Voice Is Silenced

Waste Deep

 

What was that about, then?

 

Perfect example of Godwin's Law.

Equating showing pictures that included nude dead people (who can not be humiliated any longer) at Hitler's concentration camps so the world could see what had happened there with posting this girl's photo inline in this forum makes a mockery of the former and does nothing for the issue of the latter.

 

She's all yours bro.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

Yeh good luck with that!

 

Does anyone know the age of this girl it may have been censored due to her age and the child porn laws in the west. If she looks to be under age perhaps it is best to censor the photo as the preverts would get off on it.

 

Apparently other people have said she's 20 according to her own blog. Though should we take that as read? I doubt any proof was required to make that blog.

 

Regardless of age, his premise is wrong because she isn't being censored in the West.

Not publishing a photo is not the same as censoring it.

By that logic we could be equally accused of censoring the other trillions of photos that exist that we don't post here.

 

I thought the whole point S.A.M. was trying to make...well, it's a complicated one...
For instance...one of our supposed motivations for being in Afghanistan is to liberate women. We're supposed to be championing the rights of women, our whole culture is. But we still can't show all of a woman in the media.

We still consider more than a certain amount of skin showing to be overtly sexual. The difference is degree, we don't demand head-to-toe coverage, but we do demand certain things be covered.

But actually, the western media does censor violent images out more, as well. The audience is both prudish and squeamish.

Yes, females have it better here, but we're not really 100% liberated either? Perhaps that's it.

 

I thought the whole point S.A.M. was trying to make...well, it's a complicated one...
For instance...one of our supposed motivations for being in Afghanistan is to liberate women. We're supposed to be championing the rights of women, our whole culture is. But we still can't show all of a woman in the media.

We still consider more than a certain amount of skin showing to be overtly sexual. The difference is degree, we don't demand head-to-toe coverage, but we do demand certain things be covered.

But actually, the western media does censor violent images out more, as well. The audience is both prudish and squeamish.

Yes, females have it better here, but we're not really 100% liberated either? Perhaps that's it.

Wooh...too much personal invective in this thread.

 

And that to you is what has to occur for women to have full rights?
The right to be shown naked in public?

It's in the same vein as my right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins.
Your right to go around with nothing on is offset by other's desire to not see you with nothing on.

It's a balance.

Only in public, and even then, if the people with you are consenting, then public is ok such at nudist camps, nude beaches etc

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exotic_Erotic_Ball

Chimkin, if you want to post nude pictures of yourself on a web site there is absolutely nothing stopping you.

Indeed if you want to post pictures of you having sex that's also allowed.

In fact, if actual children aren't involved you can pretty much post anything you want on your own website, or sell your image.

So I'm curious, where are you not 100% liberated?

Arthur

 

You're right, we're not 100% liberated here - but women aren't being forced to cover up in chadors or headscarves either, are they? Could you see a completely naked man in the media? On the basis of those two points, one would be forced to conclude we're quite near to equality in representation. Does this seem erroneous?

 

In the first place, that latter motivation is a minor one, if not a mere pretext. You may recall that various women's rights groups were calling for intervention against the Taliban long before 9/11, without such ever amounting to anything, and that they did not feature noticeably in the subsequent invasion and occupation (Hillary's more recent PR notwithstanding).

In the second place, I don't really see where refraining from publishing full-frontal nudity (male or female), in mass publications marketted to all-ages audiences, counts as much of a strike against "the rights of women."

Yeah, but it's down to, literally, genitalia, (female) nipples and buttholes. It's unclear to me how that adds up to an oppressively puritanical standard. Note that there are some states in the USA where women can go around topless in public, exactly for the reason of gender equality. And of course, various other Western countries wherein topless/nude sunbathing/swimming in public is totally acceptable, nudity and sexual content appear in prime-time TV and mainstream publications, etc.

More to the basic point: is Western society (or, any particular Western society) not entitled to some set of cultural mores addressing the question of how much nudity should be shown in which media? Particularly if said standards are the product of principled reasoning about the rights and responsibilities of all involved?

Neither are males, for that matter. No society, anywhere, has ever been, or will ever be, "100% liberated." It's a fantasy, and so a misleading and useless standard for assessing the real world. Leads to inane equivocations like equating the blurring of nipples and genitalia in general-readership publication to Taliban-style oppression. A person is not a hypocrit, in any meaningful sense, because they both support women's rights and happen to inhabit a country where women are not "100% liberated." More than that: a person is not a hypocrit in any meaningful sense because they support women's rights to some extent that falls short of the Utopian "100% liberated" standard. A principled person can perfectly well support the rights of women to education, personal autonomy, fair treatment, voting, etc. without endorsing the idea that mainstream news publications need to depict nudity (particularly when the bans on publication of nudity apply just as much to male nudity).

 

This agree with, unfortunately some places of employment may see a nude woman as pornography which could result in termination.

However, the photograph, while nude, was not pornographic and should, in a just system, be treated no differently then a photograph of a nude statue .... a woman modeling a bra would be more pornographic.

Spoiler

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

or: I'm too sexy for this box

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

Spoiler

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

I suggest we add a spoiler/image button to the tool panel (unless it's there somewhere?)

 

Agreed, but people trumpet it anyways, when it's patently horse puckey.

Not usually, but in this particular case, does it not strike you as ironic? It certainly does me.

No...and while males don't necessarily all realize how their gender roles hurt them, those gender roles do.

I'm...not sure I'd go that far.
In fact, I would not.

If they are demanding-and trying to force other cultures clean up their act...while not making efforts to fix the inequalities present in their own culture...there's hypocrisy.

Women still do make less than men in western society.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...e-less-than-men/2011/04/01/AFuNgr5G_blog.html
Is there a push to fix this among the men in the United States?

 

And to the extent that somebody wants to challenge an individual who has actually advocated such, that might be a different story. There are some such people here. Using this line to accuse "The West" of hypocrisy is a different game altogether, though.

No, why would it?

Some males have little trouble realizing such. These would typically be males that do not fit nicely into the assigned roles, as in the female case.

First of all you are, again, addressing a strawman. If you can point me to somebody making a stink about the plight of foreign women while turning a blind eye to oppression of women at home, then by all means go ahead and challenge them on it.

Second of all, it has yet to be established that the prohibitions on publication of nudity (of either gender) qualify as a gender inequality. Let alone, one that merits being mentioned in the same sentence as the sort of thing that the Taliban advocates.

Third of all: regardless, so what? If you're insisting that I have to choose between condemning the worst instances of oppression of women, or avoiding being called a hypocrit by anonymous internet agenda-pushers, I will choose the former without the slightest hesitation.

In fact, I'll go further than that and assert that anyone pushing such a false choice is themselves an enemy of women's liberation. They are pushing an agenda to silence critics of the worst instances of female oppression in the world. That they think they've found a cute way to do that, by making the perfect the enemy of the good, doesn't mean they have a point. It just means that they're feckless and craven.

Point me to a person who thinks that's perfectly fine, and also goes around harping on the plight of women under the Taliban.

If the standard is that anyone who is not perfect - or even, lives in a society that is not perfect - is not allowed to complain about anyone else, then the outcome is simple: everybody has to shut up about everything, for ever. You are not allowed to note hypocrisy in others, since I guarantee we can find some instance of hypocrisy somewhere in your worldview. Or, to run with the even-more-debased standard actually at issue here: we can find something which we can construe as hypocrisy, and thereby silence you.

Are you starting to see why this line of rhetoric is incompatible with productive, mature dialogue?

There's a push to fix that amongst feminists, of both genders, in the United States and elsewhere. Which would be the exact same people that decry the treatment of women under, say, the Taliban. And there's progress - most college graduates in the USA are women, as are most managers, and most workers. It's to the point where trendy analysis magazines are lamenting "the end of men:"

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-end-of-men/8135/

But, if you can identify any craven "feminists" who are just exploiting it to further some specific agenda, then by all means out them. You could probably find some high Bush admin officials that would fit the bill, who tried to use such to drum up support for taking out the Taliban. But it just doesn't wash as a generic criticism of "the West." To get to that, you have to rely on a slew of fallacies.