webofevil | (no subject)

At first, it may seem odd to derive any hope at all from the widely circulated footage of an Egyptian woman being beaten to within an inch of her life by soldiers, especially as it captures the prevailing mood of what has proved to be a bumper year for authoritarian violence, but I choose to for a simple reason: there has been no sign of any self-appointed Leaders of the Faithful labelling her a whore for having her flesh revealed by her attackers or accusing her of adulterous fornication with a soldier's boot. Don't get me wrong, the idiots who think that way are still plentiful^[1], but it's a small sign of change in the Middle East that they don 't have the currency they did even five years ago. Troops on the streets seem to concentrate minds on more immediate problems.

^[1] Just as they are here. We have no cause to claim superiority over any culture that officially blames its women for the sexual violence they suffer when our own territory still contains people who think women can provoke sexual assault merely by how they dress.