May 24, 2012 | National Post

Nazanin Afshin-Jam, Aruna Papp, and the Scourge of Misogyny in the Developing World

May 24, 2012 | National Post

Nazanin Afshin-Jam, Aruna Papp, and the Scourge of Misogyny in the Developing World

On Tuesday night, Toronto witnessed the launch of books by two Canadian activists. The authors were born in very different parts of the world. Yet the crimes against women described in these books — both excerpted on my National Post comment pages in recent days — are strikingly similar.

Aruna Papp, who wrote Unworthy Creature with National Post columnist Barbara Kay, grew up in the Indian Punjab, the daughter of poor Seventh Day Adventists. She describes a culture in which female children are regarded as a curse, while their brothers are spoiled and lavished with love. Female teens who fraternize with boys outside their family, or who reject the marriages arranged for them by relatives, do so at risk of death. While honour killings are rare in Canada, Ms. Papp argues that South Asia’s culture of misogyny survives in Canadian immigrant communities, even into the second and third generation.

Nazanin Afshin-Jam, an Iranian-Canadian beauty queen who grew up in Vancouver, was born in Iran. In her new book, The Tale of Two Nazanins, she and co-author Susan McClelland tell the tragic story of Ms. Afshin-Jam’s namesake, Nazanin Fatehi. Ms. Fatehi (whose whereabouts now are unknown) grew up in a hardscrabble Kurdish Muslim family in the Iranian city of Sanandaj, the daughter of an invalid’s second wife. The savageries she endured — rape by a neighbour, endless beatings, gratuitous humiliation by her father’s first wife — make for hard reading.

When Nazanin Fatehi was born healthy into the world in 1988, the second of two girls, her birth was greeted as a minor family tragedy. “I wanted a boy,” her tear-drenched mother cries out when the midwife announces the child’s sex. “How can I have two daughters? I am so cursed.” For many years, Nazanin’s only real friend in the family was her older sister Leila — until Leila was sent into a joyless, arranged marriage with an abusive thug.

Nazanin Fatehi’s hometown is separated from Aruna Papp’s native Punjab by 3,000 km. Their families have different languages, religions and ethnicities. And yet the pathological attitudes exhibited in regard to the female sex are identical — vestiges of a primitive mindset that still infests great swathes of Africa, the Middle East, and south and central Asia.

It is tempting to regard the men in these books as inveterate monsters. Yet their hatred is something they learned as young children: In both books, we are shown how innocent boys are taught, by their fathers’ example, to despise and control their sisters.

In adulthood, the lives of these men seem just as pathetic as those of the women, even if they endure less physical abuse. Nazanin Fatehi’s father, like many men in Sanandaj, is an unemployed drug addict. The case of little Hojat, Nazanin’s younger brother, is even sadder. By the time he is a teenager, he has learned to treat the women around him as if they were mere images in the pornography he consumes. He lives in a sour state of overgrown adolescence, surrounded by other like-minded youths, making crude catcalls to women. In this addled worldview, women make babies and are invisible — or they are whores. There is no middle ground.

The attitude described in these two valuable books is not just one problem among many that infects the cultures of the developing world: In many ways, it is the defining problem. A society in which half of the brainpower is trapped behind a wall of fear and shame; in which men blame their problems on wives and daughters instead of solving them; in which obsolete notions of “honour” are held above education; is not a society that will advance itself.

Statistics bear this out. Across the world, one of the most reliable barometers of a society’s socioeconomic progress is the literacy rate among women. Educated females have options beyond the kitchen and the crib, and they are less inclined to put up with cruelty.

Here in Canada, it has become common to lament the stresses imposed on family life by two-income families and to decry the ideological excesses of feminism since the 1960s. Some of those critiques are valid. But we should never lose sight of the horrors that still are visited upon women in parts of the world where feminism is unknown. These authors have performed a service by reminding us just how scarring those horrors truly are.

— Jonathan Kay is Managing Editor for Comment at the National Post, and a fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Issues:

Pakistan