All the women SPIEGEL likes to call the “old feminists”
Spiegel Online gives us a conversation with two feminists on what happened in Cologne.
Alice Schwarzer, 73, the grande dame of German feminism, and Anne Wizorek, 34, a prominent member of the new generation of feminists, often have different views about the direction the women’s movement should take. For decades, Schwarzer — as publisher of Emma, the country’s highly influential women’s magazine — has been at the forefront of women’s issues. In more recent years, a younger generation of feminists, led by Wizorek, has sought to challenge Schwarzer’s preeminence.
I wonder if that last bit is true, or just Spiegel’s way of saying they’re not the same person, or something. If it is true I find it very tiresome. Why is there any need to “challenge” anyone’s “preeminence”? How can any social movement get anywhere if people are always too busy trying to knock each other off perches? How, specifically, can feminism ever get anywhere if women over 45 are invariably treated with hostility and contempt? Feminism has never stipulated that it’s only for women ages 20 to 45, and it shouldn’t, so the whole re-hashed Battle with Mommy is a bad idea.
Both women are concerned about recent developments in Cologne that saw mass sexual violence against women perpetrated by Muslim immigrants. The following is an excerpt from a combative interview with SPIEGEL in which the two share their at times divergent views on the violence and the consequences.
SPIEGEL: Ms. Schwarzer, Ms. Wizorek, what happened in Cologne on New Year’s Eve? Was it a particularly extreme example of sexism or the consequence of failed immigration policies?
Wizorek: The events were terrible and, given the scale, a new phenomenon. That’s why we need to take a very precise look at what happened. I really hope that the perpetrators are caught. The ensuing debate, though, unfortunately has had the wrong focus: It is wrong to only speak about sexualized violence if it is committed by migrants or refugees.
Schwarzer: The debate over sexual violence has re-emerged as a result of that night in Cologne. Even Germany’s justice minister, who for years allowed necessary reforms to tighten Germany’s rape laws torot in a drawer, has pulled them out again. But when you only speak using generalizations, you run the danger of denying the specific. In recent decades, millions of people have come to us from cultural groups within which women have absolutely no rights. They do not have a voice of their own and they are totally dependent on their fathers, brothers or husbands. That applies to North Africa and that applies to large parts of the Middle East. It isn’t always linked to Islam. But since the end of the 1970s, at the beginning of the revolution in Iran under Khomenei, we have experienced a politicization of Islam. From the beginning, it had a primary adversary: the emancipation of women. With more men now coming to us from this cultural sphere, and some additionally brutalized by civil wars, this is a problem. We cannot simply ignore it.
Wizorek hinted that perhaps we could, and should.
Schwarzer: Do you know what I just thought of, Anne? You were born in East Germany at the beginning of the 1980s, right?
Wizorek: Yes.
Schwarzer: It’s entirely OK that you missed certain things. In the 1960s and 1970s among the leftests in the West, one of the leading arguments against feminism was that it was only a subordinate issue. That’s what people said back then. The main issue was the class struggle.
Wizorek: I am familiar with the discussion.
So am I. We had it here, with class struggle replaced by struggle against racism. Women were told their struggle didn’t count.
Schwarzer: As soon as you opened your mouth and said the word woman, you were beaten down with the argument that you were betraying the class struggle. There are many poignant writings in which feminists first write pages about their class standpoint before getting to their actual issue. What was then known as class warfare is today called anti-racism. The threat of being accused of racism gave birth to false tolerance. Once, about 20 years ago, a police officer in Cologne told me, “Ms. Schwarzer, 70 to 80 percent of the rapists in Cologne are Turkish.” I was very upset and said: “Then good God, why don’t you bring the issue up?” Because only after you call a problem by name can you change it. And then he said, no way, that’s not politically opportune. So you see, the police have long been extremely frustrated by these hush-ups. I think that’s changing now, and that’s a good thing.
Wizorek: But that’s just another version of this terrible: “One should also be able to say …!”
Schwarzer: No, it’s the opposite. People aren’t stupid. They saw what was happening at the Cologne central station. A lawless space was created in the middle of a city of over a million. That has to be addressed and it has to be done so in a sober-minded way.
Then they agreed briefly, arguing that “groping” needed to be treated as a crime too, along with sexual harassment in general.
SPIEGEL: Ms. Schwarzer, what consequences will Cologne have?
Schwarzer: We need to finally be proactive in enlightening people from Islamic cultural groups. And this applies to immigrants already here as well as to current refugees. The German constitution stands above the Sharia. Schools need to offer classes on gender equality. You also have to offer an alternative to young men with a penchant for violence.
Wizorek: Only the young men? Education is important for all genders.
Schwarzer: Of course, because you have to tell girls what rights they have and you must stand by them as they assert themselves. We have to go into the relevant neighborhoods and do something to counter the campaigning Islamists. We failed to do that during the last 25 years. We also can’t be naïve when it comes to the refugees. Men who commit violence should of course be deported to their countries of origin. We already have enough problems here and we don’t need to import anymore.
Wizorek: Sexualized violence existed before the refugees — it has not been imported.
Schwarzer: I know that because I have been fighting against it since 1995, just like all the women SPIEGEL likes to call the “old feminists.” For us feminist pioneers, fighting sexual violence, which until then was totally silenced — be it abuse, rape within marriage or sex killings — has always been given top priority.
Remember those “slaves” in Saudi Arabia, whom it’s halal for their owners to rape.
There is a lot of talk in Germany among many younger, progressive type people about how Alice Schwarzer basically turned into a racist hag and doesn’t respect the agency of sex workers and about how her views on porn are soo outdated and so on and so forth. It’s irritating. Especially the refusal to acknowledge the ageism in that thinking or the refusal to even consider how she might have a point to some degree.
No, no. It’s not the migrants’ fault (or, heaven forbid, that of Islam itself) at all. It’s the “The West” that’s really to blame. And there’s even a course at Harvard to enlighten you.
http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/197143/how-not-to-teach-about-islam-harvard-edition
Here’s another infuriating analysis. The logic, as far as I can gather, goes something like this: mentioning the Cologne sex crimes without first discussing all the crimes of the West and of Western men is an act of imperialism whereby migrants are made into a “category of sub-human” . . . and, therefore, something something, “racist presumptions” that “inferiorise racialised bodies”.
https://newmatilda.com/2016/01/23/the-cologne-attacks-and-the-white-elephant-in-the-room/
Gordon -that’s an interesting idea, because it seems to assume that feminists haven’t been talking about the problems here. I think we should approach Ophelia and see if there is any way to persuade her to get outraged at the anti woman attitudes in the United States. Perhaps between the two of us, we can persuade her to channel a tiny bit of energy that way.
Just in case anyone misunderstood my sarcasm, I am not suggesting Gordon agrees with this argument. It is clear from his post he was infuriated by it, so no sarcasm is directed at him. It is just the general idea that somehow “old feminists” are ignoring the problem of the west!
re Helene’s quote about the Harvard lecturer who thinks rights for women is tied to colonial conquest. As soon as I get over boggling that someone so incapable of adding 2+2 is lecturing at Harvard … okay, I think I’m over speechlessness for a moment …. Has she never heard of the Enlightenment? Of the whole idea of the Rights of Man? Of the breakthrough insight that ZOMG! the ideas apply to those other humans shaped like women? That colonialism was about trampling rights, not about promoting them? That there’s no shortage of historical data on how non-Western populations treated each other prior to colonization by the Western powers?
Where the hell did she get her education? Home schooling from a dreaming imam or something? What the hell is Harvard doing hiring someone like that? (I’m taking it a bit personally. That’s my not-so-alma mater. I’m going to look into it and write them one of those alumna letters they like so much.)
It is frustrating to see how Spiegel is trying to emphasize the differences between the 2 women. Focusing on the differences is a distraction from the more important goal of stopping sexual violence.
About 25 years ago I was a parent governor of a school in Ilford in East London. According to their statistics, the intake was 60% Muslim. Most were from Bangladesh but there were some Kurds. At the time, apart from language difficulties, I had no problem talking to any of the mothers and they seemed to have no problem approaching me about any issues they might have with the school. One of then told me that she likes living in England because she can have more of a say about how her children are brought up. Most of these people came to England because they wanted a more western way of life, not because they were trying to escape from anything and so had some sort of commitment to finding out how the society works and what its values are.
However things seem to have changed – I have been told by one of my Muslim friends who still lives in the area that this would not be possible today. He puts this down to the spreading of Islamist propaganda among younger Muslims. Although I hadn’t realised it myself, I had provided a small area in which these women could start to find a way out of some of the traditional misogyny of the communities they came from. Today the Islamists would simply not allow this to happen. Nevertheless most Muslims who live in the area would be shocked by what happened in Cologne.
Even though most Muslims are not Islamists, the mere existence of Islamism as a political force will tend to make the traditional misogyny of some Muslim communities seem more acceptable. I should imagine that most of the perpetrators in Cologne were not in the West out of choice, had no idea what Western values are and, even if they rejected it, have been influenced by the Islamism that has affected the culture they were brought up in. Even so, even though there were many of them, they are but a small proportion of all the young male refugees to have come to Europe recently.
The solution, as always, is not to try to find groups to blame but to find out what exactly happened and why and to work out what to do about it.
It’s worth remembering that in Islam, nobody has any rights; there are obligations to obey the Invisible Sky Fairy, and his bff Mo, but little else. Only the dissipation of Islam can change things.
I would just like to point two things out.
1) That 80% turkish rape perpetrators “statistic” looks bogus as hell. 80% sounds like off the top of the officer’s head, nothing rigorous. Which means it can be biased by any number of things: that officer particular precinct or selection bias (like how people perceive women as hogging 87% of speaking time when they get to speak 50% of the time in a group). Also, as a policeman he only comes accross reported rapes. A survey of reported rapes in Paris was published a few weeks ago: and you see a large part of the alleged perpetrators being of north african descent. You also see the rate of “stranger rape” at 50% when surveys of the general population seems to suggest it hovers around 20%. Stranger rape by “outsiders” seem more likely to be reported (and also believed by law enforcement. It has been showned on this very blog that police will sometimes refuse to take a deposition or stronlgy discourage it in the cases of what they consider “gray area” or for various victim blamey reasons) Since when do we trust reported rapes and law enforcement statistics to be in any way representative of the reality on the ground?
2) Asylum candidates and people who got recognised as refugees can not be deported even for criminal offenses, they have to be tried and their penalties have to be executed in their host country.
I agree with the rest of Schwarzer analysis.
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