Women's Day...

Well, men seem to have all the other days, so it seems only fair to have a Women’s Day. I’ve been writing my chapter on gender in the holy books, and it doesn’t make pleasant reading. It came as no surprise to me that women were treated as ‘second class citizens’ in both Christianity and Islam, though I wasn’t prepared for the sheer nastiness of the misogyny on display.

These attitudes have come down to us, essentially unchanged, in many parts of the world, where rape goes unpunished, yet adultery (sex outside marriage, essentially) may be punishable by death, for the woman at least. If a woman is raped, but does not shout loudly enough, she may be found guilty of adultery (she has, after all, had sex outside marriage. This sounds like a sick joke... but isn't).

FGM (female genital mutilation) isn’t a specifically Islamic custom, and there’s nothing in the Koran to demand that young girls should undergo this barbaric practice. Yet FGM proliferates in Muslim-majority countries, where people believe it to be integral to their faith. It is typically inflicted on girls too young to offer informed consent; nowhere in the world do we see adult women queueing up to be mutilated with a sharp stone or nail or razor blade.

Before we condemn these countries (in any list of economic viability, they occupy the bottom places), we need to put our own house in order. A disparity in pay between male and female newsreaders may seem trivial, when compared with what’s happening in Africa, Afghanistan, Yemen or Indonesia, but it’s all part of the same narrative. In terms of gender equality, we still have a long way to go…

I recall taking some pleasing pix of Charlestown in Cornwall, but this is the pic that was licensed today...