Revolution #192, February 14, 2010
From the Burkha to the Thong:
Everything Must, and Can, Change—WE NEED TOTAL REVOLUTION!
A National Campus Speaking Tour by Sunsara Taylor
IF YOU ARE A WOMAN
YOUR BODY IS A BATTLEGROUND
Anywhere you look, women are being slammed backwards. In Bangkok and Bangalore and Moldova young women are stripped naked and sold across borders as sex slaves. In Indonesia and Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia women are shrouded in veils, kept as property, and even killed if they somehow “dishonor” their family.
Meanwhile, in the U.S. we are told women are no longer oppressed. Yet, how many will learn to starve themselves, cut themselves, hate themselves, internalizing the images that saturate society of women as objects of sexual conquest, the butt of a joke, or baby-making machines? How many will be taught that their value is reducible to being sexually desired by men, but called “sluts” if they actually have sex? How many will be beaten, raped, or told that nothing they accomplish is more important than motherhood? And all women still have to look over their shoulders walking home at night.
To be born female on any part of this planet is to be born into a lifetime of danger, disrespect, discrimination and denigration. What happens to a woman—whether toiling her life away in sweatshops from China to Haiti, being raped by soldiers in the Congo, or being denied an abortion in the U.S.—is NOT her individual problem. What happens to 3½ billion human beings is not individual, it is systemic and global. It happens to all of us.
It doesn’t have to be this way! There is no longer the need for women’s role in society to be dictated by their biological role in childbearing. There is no longer the need for humanity to be hemmed in by patriarchal traditions and oppressive religious morality. Today, this is as insane as it is cruel, as it is utterly unnecessary.
But, the oppression of women is woven so deeply into the fabric of society here and all over the world that it will take total revolution—communist revolution—to liberate women.
On campuses nation wide, Sunsara Taylor will make the case for why there is no biological, god-given, or man-made reason why things have to remain this way—and how things can change through revolution and through building a movement for revolution—starting now! She’ll be recruiting a new generation to put their lives in the service of this most liberating, and meaningful, struggle.
Sunsara Taylor is a writer for Revolution newspaper, a host of WBAI’s “Equal Time for Free Thought,” and sits on the Advisory Board of World Can’t Wait. She has written on the rise of theocracy, on wars and repression in the U.S. and led in building resistance to these crimes, and contributed to the movement for revolution to put an end to all this. She takes as her foundation the new synthesis on revolution and communism developed by Bob Avakian. You can find her impressive verbal battles with Bill O’Reilly, and her various political commentary on things from abortion to religion by searching “Sunsara Taylor” on youtube.
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