According to her bio on freethoughtblogs.com, Taslima Nasreen:
“[I]s an award-winning writer, physician, secular humanist and human rights activist. Nasreen’s fiction, nonfiction, poetry and memoir have topped the best-seller’s list. Her writings won the hearts of people across the border and she landed with the prestigious literary award Ananda from India in 1992 and 2000. Taslima won The Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought from the European Parliament in 1994. She received the Kurt Tucholsky Award from Swedish PEN, the Simone de Beauvoir Award and Human Rights Award from Government of France. She received Le Prix de l’ Edit de Nantes from the city of Nantes, France.”
“She is a Humanist Laureate in The International Academy for Humanism, USA. She won Distinguished Humanist Award from International Humanist and Ethical Union, Free-thought Heroine award from Freedom From Religion foundation, USA., IBKA award, Germany,and Feminist Press Award, USA . She got the UNESCO Madanjeet Singh prize for Promotion of the Tolerance and Non-violence in 2005. She received the Medal of honor of Lyon. She got honorary citizenship from Paris, Nantes, Lyon, Metz, Thionville, Esch, Venice, Barcelona etc. Taslima was awarded the Condorcet-Aron Prize in the “Parliament of the French Community of Belgium” in Brussels.”
“Bestowed with honorary doctorates from Gent University and UCL in Belgium, and American University of Paris and Paris Diderot University in France, she has addressed gatherings in major venues of the world like the European Parliament, National Assembly of France, Universities of Sorbonne, Oxford, Harvard, Yale, etc. She got fellowships as a research scholar at Harvard and New York Universities. She was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow in the USA in 2009. Taslima has written 35 books in Bengali, which includes poetry, essays, novels and autobiography series.”
Unfortunately, in spite of that long list of international esteem and praise, and in spite of being the winner of every literary award and humanist laurel of praise ever invented, Taslima Nasreen remains…
…an idiot.
She began a posting on the hilariously misnamed feminist-flavored host freethoughtblogs with the declarative sentence. “Men hate woman’s body[sic]”. In spite of the confusion over verb tense, this was easy to parse. Men’s apparent hatred of women’s bodies being the driver behind the near universal use of women’s bodies to sell everything from cars to deodorant. Oh yes, men hate women’s bodies – which is what gives women so much power over men, right? Because men, the heterosexual ones anyway, find the female form so unappealing? This perfectly explains why the female form is now and always has been featured in so much art through history, right?
Nasreen continues, adding:
Women learn from men to hate their own bodies.
Assuming for a moment that Nasreen’s insanely idiotic claim of male hatred of the female form is true, the attendant claim that women learn to hate themselves from men is an indictment of women’s independence of mind and adulthood. Can’t women think for themselves? Although the claim of male aversion of women’s bodies is false, why would women simply inherit hate for their own bodies just because men supposedly hated them. How much inane stupidity are Nasreen’s readers expected to uncritically swallow?
Media has been busy for decades advising women what they should wear and how they should look like.
According to Taslima Nasreen’s bio, she was born in Bangladesh, but in light of her nearly endless list of literary accolades, phrases such as “how they should look like” are difficult to overlook. However, through the media, corporations have been telling men and women what to wear, what to look like, and what to buy for decades, the fact remains that women control 80% of disposable income and are catered to, flattered and marketed to more than men. If that burden is too terrible to bear, maybe a little less COSMO and a little more philosophy, math and science could benefit those poor, self-esteem-challenged victims.
Men hate women’s hair if they[sic] are not silky and long. Most women keep their hair long even though many of them feel comfortable having short hair. They use different chemicals to make their hair silky.
Grammar issues aside, this is pure dribble. “Men hate women’s hair if they are not silky and long”? I’ve seen this nonsense before, and I’m pretty sure it was in a shampoo commercial. Men do not hate hair, long hair, short hair, silky hair, whatever hair, men, generally speaking do not care about trivial concerns addressed in make-up advertisements and women’s magazines. The attribution of hatred to men, by this much celebrated humanist scholar is persistently shocking throughout the body of her article. The claimed concern by men over trivialities usually relegated to the pages of glitter magazines is frankly surreal.
Men do not like the colour of our skin.
Really? Men do not? Maybe what our great feminist arbiter of right and wrong means is that whoever wrote the advertizing copy for skin whitener in whatever puerile lifestyle magazine she skimmed recently – that copywriter convinced her she needs darker, or lighter, or shinier skin. Nasreen however attributes this “do not like” to simply; men. Jesus wept.
So women bleach their skin or get their skin tanned. We spend almost all our money to buy cosmetics so that we can decorate ourselves and become someone men want us to become.
Of course, what’s really being said here is that women, spenders of almost all disposable income – women are not responsible. If women are foolish, vain, insecure, credulous puppets of advertisers who throw their money in whatever direction they’re told, thats men’s fault. Women are victims, women have no will of their own, they’re just innocent objects the bad men of the world control. And if their skin according to whatever bling bling magazine they read is the wrong colour, that’s men’s fault too. Nigger, please.
[S]o that we can decorate ourselves and become someone men want us to become.
How about becoming whoever the fuck you actually are, like a grown up. Take some personal responsibility for yourself Nasreen, and readers of Taslima Nasreen. Or are all females just too much the fragile, and free-from-volition victims, defining themselves by victimhood and pretending to be the empty vessel of other people’s desires. Nasreen’s antagonist isn’t even A man, it’s all men. We’re a collective now, I guess ill have to start going to the meetings.
We want to make men feel happy.
…says Nasreen, I guess that where she was going by telling us we hate women, that makes me feel happy – being told I hate people delights me. In truth, Nasreen, by repeatedly telling men they’re filled with hate, seems intent on making them feel guilty.
Next, Nasreen declares what men don’t like in terms of hair colour. Men, the monolith – given singular preference by our instructor, Nasreen. In fact, biological attraction is tied, evolutionarily to signs of fertility, of which grey hair is a contra-indication. Blame is assigned to men-the-monolith, and women’s apparent monolithic countermeasure, to dye their hair – laid in blame at men’s feet as well. Women, practicing deception to mislead the natural attraction to signs of fertility is characterized as another male failing.
Men do not like us when our hair turns grey. So we dye our hair.
Interestingly, the description offered by Nasreen, “So we dye our hair” indicates calculation and agency in women doing said dying. What a revolutionary idea, women acting on their own behalf, almost like they’re adults.
Continuing, Nasreen decrees even more of what men, according to her, hate.
Men hate women’s eyes, eyebrows, nose, lips, cheeks, neck, ears.
As a member of Nasreen’s monolith, designated “men” – her claim on authority of what men hate is tiresome, and false. Men hate all these body parts? Baloney, rubbish, and insupportable drivel. Following this declaration of the preferences of men, and whether it is wrong because Nasreen is ignorant, or merely lying is a matter left unexamined, but she follows it with a statement of women’s action – again, in the monolith of all women.
Women paint their eyes, eyebrows, cheeks, lips. We wear jewelries on our neck, we pierce our nose and ears to wear ornaments.
- Women paint their eyes, eyebrows, cheeks, lips.
- Actors performs actions.
Women paint their eyes et-cetera. Whose eyes? Women’s eyes, that is, the eyes belonging to women are painted in acts of volition, by women. Do men paint women? No, they (women) paint themselves. Perhaps then, men force women to paint themselves. Clearly not, as many women go out and about without such self adornment.
We wear jewelries on our neck, we pierce our nose and ears to wear ornaments.
Even more self actuated self expression and self actualization by women, and why? Because they are held at the points of gun barrels by men? No, it turns out not. Women do these things, painting and adorning, and even dying their hair because it attracts positive attention. In other words, women, to various degrees use make-up to control the behavior of men.
Taslima Nasreen is trying in her article to foster the impression that women are agency free shuttlecocks at the mercy of the prevailing winds, or of men. However, she repeatedly fails to support this. She includes declarative statements of what women do. Doing things is what denotes people with volition and agency.
The next stupid claim offered as doctrine is:
Men hate women’s breasts if breasts are not round and large.
While it’s true that many men enjoy large round breasts, it is flatly moronic to infer from this that breasts not conforming to this ideal are not also greatly admired. In addition, breast size and shape, like skin colour and every single thing in Nasreen’s idiotic list of what men love or hate, is a superficial cosmetic detail which ultimately doesn’t much matter, except to shallow, superficial people. So, based on this so-authoritative decree of what men hate in breasts, what?
We go for breast implants.
We, being the monolith; women. In the feeble attempt to cultivate a narrative of victimhood, Nasreen doesn’t even bother to float the lie: ”men make women get breast implants,” although the clumsy grammar and clear dissimilarity with reality may indicate software driven translation into English – from crayon, perhaps. But no, it’s women who – exercising agency and volition, go and get themselves breast implants. Why? To exert greater control over men’s sexual response and attention. To exert control over men, because according to the winner of every literary and human rights award ever named, men hate women. Quite obviously then, women should define themselves as referential to men, or to what they hate. Self definition as humans apparently never occurred to the monolith that is women, or to Nasreen.
We go for breast implants. Implants leak, rupture, burst. We increase our cancer risk.
And if this really was driven by men, who apparently hate women, isn’t this supposed male-accommodation rather stupid of women?
Men hate our natural abdominal fat.
Do they? Do men hate abdominal fat? Is that what men are? Haters of body parts? I wonder how humanity survived – reproducing to remain a viable species on this planet millennia after millennia through human pre-history, if indeed men hate women’s natural body fat.
However, positing the claim – briefly as if it were true, what do women do? Why they exercise their adult volition and agency:
We almost stop eating to reduce our fat to please men. We suffer from anorexia, bulimia and other eating disorders. We become skeletons. We die.
And all to please men, who, according to Nasreen hate all the parts of women from not-round-enough breasts to too fat abdomens. To please these hateful men, women starve themselves and die. This seems rather stupid as an exercise of self agency, surely women aren’t so foolish as all this? Surely theyre motivated by more than a referential identity, tying all self image to whatever it is in Nasreen’s mind that men hate?
But what else do men hate?
- Men hate women’s legs.
- Men hate us if our hymens are broken.
- Men hate our vagina[s].
- Men hate our natural leg hair.
Et-cetera.
This list is so stupid, so false, and so frivolous – that each body part, apparently a matter of grave concern and a target of male hatred. To say Nasreen’s list is insulting also insults the intelligence of men. Who rather than assayers of collected body parts, generally regard women as people, complete. But that difficult truth doesn’t fit into a narrative of demeaning objectification, reduction to parts, and make-believe hatred.
In answer to each item men supposedly hate, Nasreen lists detailed accounts of self injury by women. What women, her monolithic “we” do to themselves – of their own free will, but apparently, still victims. Women’s actions are never their own, no, somehow evil men, using the magic of patriarchy, they are the puppeteers of female adult human beings.
And what of men in Taslima Nasreen’s imaginary world?
We tell men that we like them for who they are.
Actually, Taslima Nasreen tells men they are creatures of hatred. If men really did hate women in every separately listed portion of their anatomy, and women: “ lik[ed] them for who they are” then women would be stupid, self-abasing idiots wouldn’t they? In spite of Nasreen’s demonstration, in most cases, women (the monolith) are not so pathetic.
Continuing on men:
They do not destroy their natural body to make us feel happy.
…except when they die in coal mines, in diamond mines, in the Atlantic fishing and crabbing, in forests cutting lumber, on oil rigs and tankers and in battle, everywhere men die on the job. The death professions which keep the world running safely for women, while those oh-so-hated women spend 80% of the world’s disposable income. So, men actually do destroy their natural bodies to keep women safe, fed, housed, and protected. But according to Taslima Nasreen,
[p]atriarchy [is] a system artificially imposed on society causes all the injustices and inequalities against women.
Yeah, sure it is.
One of the highest rated comments on this woman’s article calls her a goddess. It doesn’t say “of stupidity” or “of lies” but it should.
However, the most remarkable aspect of Taslima Nasreen’s article is the contrast between writing which indicates the point of view of a foolish child, and a byline enumerating multiple literary awards and accomplishments. In addition, the largely complimentary tone of comments left on Nasreen’s free thought blog shows no apparent awareness of an obviously immature, ignorant and stupid point of view. It may be that her readers are as foolish and silly as she seems to be herself. It is quite sad.
http://freethoughtblogs.com/taslima/2012/05/30/men-hate-womans-body
