Beware the New Racism: Pop Culture Hates Women

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Nov 10, 2003

Byline: Shmuley Boteach, SPECIAL TO INSIGHT

The awarding of this year's Nobel Peace Prize to Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian judge and women's-rights activist, was as courageous as last year's presentation to Jimmy Carter was cowardly. While Carter deserves the Nobel "appeasement prize," the peace prize belongs to those who fight for the disenfranchised rather than those who stand up for the dictators who do the disenfranchising. And what group today is more discriminated against than women, both in Islamic culture and in the West?

The abuse of the female sex in the Islamic world is hitting new lows with the increasing encouragement to young women such as Hanadi Jaradat who killed 16 adults and 3 children in Haifa, Israel, last week to become suicide bombers. Even Nazi Germany never thought to subvert the maternal and nurturing instinct within women by making them killers. Indeed, the most depraved Islamic extremists would have to admit that women never were meant to blow themselves up for the faith. If they were, Sura 55 of the Koran, which promises 72 wide-eyed virgins for martyrs, would have to be understood as promoting the wild lesbianism of the type seen in Girls Gone Wild videos.

Writers and thinkers long have noted that one of the most accurate ways of determining the moral state of a society is looking at how it treats the most vulnerable members of that society namely, women and children. Do they oppress and exploit them, or do they cherish and honor them? While Western society is not guilty of turning women into corrupt and compassionless killers, it is at the forefront of an increasingly misogynistic civilization in which the deprecation and denigration of women not only is acceptable, but serves as the primary engine that actually drives the culture.

Misogyny is indeed the acceptable new face of racism. While discrimination against blacks in the United States is so justifiably taboo that even an indirectly pro-segregation comment by Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) cost him his job as Senate majority leader, the loathing and disparagement of women is so rampant that even women have begun to cater to it and are complicit in its perpetuation.

Imagine for a moment that there was a TV show that took 30 Jews to a castle in France and told them that they had the opportunity of befriending a mega-millionaire. The twist in the program is that the millionaire is really a New Jersey construction worker. The objective of the show is to see if the Jews, whom everyone knows love money, will terminate the friendship upon discovering that their new buddy is broke. Imagine also that this show is so wildly successful that fully 40 million people watch its finale, and that a new "international" version quickly is readied for release in the fall ratings season. You would be forgiven for thinking that the show's creator is Joseph Goebbels and that the intended audience is Nazi Germany. But instead that is exactly the show, Joe Millionaire, produced by the Fox TV network where women who meet a suitor are expected to dump him because he's penniless. Incredible! A whole TV show perpetuating the stereotype of women as money-grubbing, gold-digging leaches and parasites for whom love and romance are unimportant compared to credit cards and cash, and not a single feminist organization even so much as protested.

And this has become par for the course in the lucrative genre of reality TV. There is The Bachelor, which exposes women as witches stabbing each other in the back as they compete for a man; Are You Hot?, which literally puts women on the block to have each feature of their bodies evaluated by lecherous Neanderthals as if they were sex slaves about to be sold on the market; and Paradise Hotel, with the crowning portrayal of women as mindless sluts and nymphomaniacs, forever ready to jump in the sack with complete strangers. Of course all this comes in addition to the near-naked female cheerleaders at sporting events, where women are portrayed as dimwitted go-go dancers who stand in awe of muscle-laden athletes.

Then there's the Internet, the greatest technological achievement since man landed on the moon. With fully 70 percent of it devoted to the most graphic pornography, cyberspace has emerged as a cosmic, female-bashing universe. Of the hundreds of spam e-mails I receive each week, not one says, "Come to our Website and watch as we get black men to clean our floors and toilets." Any such communication, however trashy in origin, would be investigated by the government for incitement. But every day I receive about 50 junk e-mails whose average fair is, "Teen whores and sluts who want their mouths stuffed with "; "Tear her womanhood apart"; "Dumb bitch blondes who are so stupid they only know how to "; or the especially inventive "This girl loves being ravished by her horse." Imagine, billions of e-mails a day maligning women as retarded, pain-loving bitches, sluts and whores who love being beaten while they are sexually abused. And to my knowledge, no government agency has investigated any of these Websites. Exploit kids and you're going to jail. Malign women and you make a buck.