Half the Sky

So I just started this book called Half the Sky. It had been on my reading list for a while and then Shanyi approached me recently and told me she was reading this awesome book and it seemed like the perfect book for me and that bumped it up on the list significantly, and then it came in and I was quite excited. The title is based off of a Chinese proverb that "Women hold up half the sky," and it's sort of a compilation of stories about women's rights in third world countries. I'm only a little bit in, but I've heard plenty of stories of sexual trafiking before and the first few stories in the book are about that, and it's always odd to me the kinds of justifications that people make for any sort of slavery. We live in a country that is so focused on diversity and equality that I can't comprehend what it is to see someone as deserving less than you. I certainly judge people in other ways-- I say "that person is lazy, but it'll come back to ruin his life later," or "she's dumb, so she had that coming" but it's so incredibly incorrect to say that any person is different from you just because of their race or gender that I have no understanding of what it is to live in a country where even the government works that way.

As far as I can tell, the book has two major issues that it deals with: sexual traffiking and maternal mortality. SO.

Sexual traffiking. I don't know when I first heard of this concept because when I was younger my parents kind of pretended that sex didn't exist. I probably first learned of it in church, though, from some missionary returning from Thailand or Cambodia, and I must have been appalled because I am still terrified of the concept. What is surprising and also concerning is that so many women who end up in brothel are sold by their family to do something like working in corn fields to deceitful employers who then take them far away to live and work in brothels. But it's the culture that really gets to me. I understand what it is to be in a culture that values abstinence until marriage, but in my experience that has always meant that the woman has kept herself pure and not given into temptation until she met the love of her life/had it sanctioned under God/insert-your-own-reason-for-waiting-until-marriage. How odd, how dreadful it must be to be forced into sexual slavery and then to go through the incredible difficulty of escaping only to find that there is no job, no family, no future available to you because you have lost your virginity.

Maternal mortality. This one makes sense because it is slightly closer to home, partially because maternal mortality is not a crime in the US, and partly because the Catholic faith was against any kind of birth control for so long, and that is a faith much closer to me than the Hindu or Islamic cultures that run the aforementioned brothels. The side of me that wrote the last paragraph says "what kind of a culture is against birth control, or just condoms? How can you forbid something that prevents so many children who will just end up with worse lives? Can't you see reason, that the women who have the most sex are often the women least fit to be mothers, even just financially?" but then another side of me remembers that my father's side of the family is pretty strongly against birth control. "Birth control interferes with God's will. If God didn't want those women to have kids, he wouldn't have let the women be on that part of their cycle." Which might make sense as an argument except when you realize that it is a monthly cycle and people have quite a bit of sex in this world, especially if they are sold into prostitution. The other aspect of maternal mortality, beyond women who are not yet old enough for childbearing being sold into prostitution, is the issue of women's health. So that bothers me too, that a culture would pay more attention to the health of one gender than the other, but it's also something that I cannot even start to understand because our culture is so strongly focused in diversity.