Three stories coincided this week, which formed that perfect kernel of poignancy, which one feels cannot help but reside in the world's consciousness. These are the dots in the matrix of history that can smudge and bleed over one another. They leave an impression in the typescript that cannot be tidied up or skipped over; the reader is forced to return to the passage to check and inevitably to conclude that either the printer made an error or something here went very wrong in the writer's mind.
Malala Yousafzai was returning home on a school bus when militants boarded the bus and shot her twice. Once in the head and once in the neck. Malala is often described as being a 'teenage education activist', by which we might suppose that she were an undergraduate developing a political consciousness. Malala is 15 and has been actively writing and speaking on education for girls for 4 years. Her improbable survival, which hinged on incredible medical expertise and a level of goodwill not necessarily available to all, is a great relief to the soul.
Across the Pakistan/India border, in what many consider to be a more civilised country, an unnamed woman's murder/rape trial is to be held in what is being seen as a moment of national self-reflection. The details of this crime are horrific enough but the news, by hinting at further, unpublishable horrors, leaves the reports with a sense of the unheimlich. To put it as baldly as possible, it appears that a group of 6 men, including the driver of the bus on which the attack occurred, set out one evening to capture and rape a woman. In a statement from the driver, which may yet prove to have been coerced by police, the driver described the motive as being the pursuit of 'a lot of fun'.
Which is one of those things after which you cannot help but take a new paragraph. Somehow the movement of breath and pulse demands it.
Again to be as crisp as one can, the group carried out their intent. A young woman of 23 was being escorted home on the bus by a male friend when they were set upon by the group. The man was beaten with a metal bar to incapacitate him while the woman was raped and assaulted to the point of death. They were then thrown from the bus. Whether the statement was coerced or not, these things were certainly done. A group of human beings made a collective decision to put their desire for some form of atavistic pandemonium ahead of the most basic form of human solidarity. There is no relief for the soul here.
In the meantime - across the globe at Westboro Baptist Church - a tiny but beautiful symbol of hope arose at the heart of western bigotry and patriarchy.
For those unfamiliar with the WBC - this church was the one who protested at fallen US soldiers funerals, coined the term 'God hates fags' and generally sat like a bleeding sore on christian America's conscience for the past 57 years. Despite their relatively small number, the WBC distinguished themselves by their gift for media manipulation and stirring up of controversy. The face and voice of the WBC in the media was a lady by the name of Megan Phelps-Roper, the granddaughter of community founder Fred Phelps. In several memorable TV appearances, Megan would duck and weave and was always identified by the presenter as the one with whom they could tangle safely. Because she was nice.
Before you call come at me with sharp sticks for suggesting that someone could be nice and clearly a bigot at the same time, Megan left WBC with her 19-year-old sister, Grace and has renounced the church's positions on homosexuality and the responsibility of the Jews for the death of Christ. She was born into a family who loved and cared for her and expected her to join the family religion. At 27, she has finally broken free and has written well on her own behalf on her reasons for leaving WBC.
What these stories together have captured for me is the need for a renewed political solidarity with the women's movement. For my lifetime after the age of consciousness, feminism has been at a standstill; creative industries and service industries were close to conquered by the end of the eighties. Together these sectors seem to cover so much of daily life that many declared the struggle over. The stereotype of the angry feminist could then be safely mocked our of existence again.
Well I say that that is a very poor show indeed. The violation, brutalisation, subjugation and annihilation of womankind is happening right now across the world. There is a spectre haunting the regressivist politics, which it dare not face and in order that it need not do so, it has bound that face in cloth. In America, actual politicians proposed the use of 'trans-vaginal ultrasound' which is exactly what it sounds like - medicalised rape - as a mandatory procedure for patients seeking abortion.
In Britain, our Prime Minister is a comfortably polite misogynist, capable of addressing parliamentarians as if they were maids if they happen to be women. Until we have a new Feminist International, with the power to exert influence on the wealth, health and sex lives of men in the Swat Valley, at bus stops in New Delhi and Kerala and within the Westboro Baptist Church compound, the standstill will remain.
Imagine what kind of momentum might be gained however, if women like Malala Yousafzai, Megan Phelps-Roper, Aliaa Magda Elmahdy could come together in a recognised cause. It is not merely a gender taboo that keeps women oppressed - it is the prohibition on sexual freedom that unites all forms of oppression. Whether totalitarian, theocratic or the cruel mixture of both, the subjugation of women is a function of the cheap thrill of domination and will only end once the perverted torturers are forced to step back.
