I agree, I know nothing about being a woman in Iran. I also think that this was sort of a minor incident between two individual women, neither with a lot of power to change the larger system. As far as I know, both left without getting physically harmed and went back to the lives they were living, so in the end, I don’t feel as worked up about it as Pilgrim Soul.

I think it’s great that feminism emphasizes understanding and not judging and not using the master’s tools and all the good things that everyone on this site believes in, but the question I’m struggling with is — how to handle it when judgements and decisions have to be made? There’s not always the luxury of considering how living in a patriarchal system mitigates a person’s actions. (Again, sorry if too off topic.)

I could go on and on about this because I’ve been thinking about it a lot, but I feel like maybe I’m getting off on a tangent unrelated to this thread? I’m new to posting and not sure of the etiquette. But I would at some future point be really interested in what people think about the issue of individual choice in the context of patriarchy — sure, we all want to be understanding of other women, but at what point do you say understanding is not enough?

@pedimd: can’t answer for notmandy, but as for myself, I think we can’t criticize them from the “I would never do that” place. It’s like that thread the other day on coping strategies vs. revolution. As copers ourselves, we can’t act as though everyone else must be perfect revolutionaries all the time, which is something that often comes up in the context of the Middle East, it seems to me. I’m stealing this from somewhere else, I just can’t remember where, but while supporting women in the Middle East is obviously crucial, it pisses them off when our support often takes the form of “overthrow your patriarchy so it’ll look like ours.”

I think we can get too caught up in the question of, “Are we sisters or are we not?” It seems to me that can’t be a one-way declaration, anyway, and sisterhood, whatever it is, may not involve nonstop hair-braiding. But do we owe women “colluders” a different level of understanding than we owe “male” colluders, in my opinion. After all, there’s some tragedy, as Lucy’s already pointed out, in the fact that even when women seek head pats from their oppressors, their foothold is tenuous – the crowd turns on her pretty fast.

I see your point, but then does feminism require that in the name of sisterhood we never criticize women who deliberately and unnecessarily get their own power at the expense of other women?

I think acknowledging that we cannot and nor do we want to live every life experience on the planet is a start. That every situation has a million shades of grey and that sometimes using arguments that we don’t support in order to stay safe and sane is a reality that many people around the world live with daily.

There are times to be staunch feminists and there are times to stay safe and alive. If you have the privilege to be a staunch feminist all the time great, but not everyone else around the world does.

I used to interview and assess refugee claimants, and I know how hard it is to identify and understand someone else’s experience when it is so alien to your own. Accept it as truth, understand that the world is truly fucked up and that you are lucky to have what you do, I know I certainly did after each interview.

I do think some people seem to have understood what I was getting at, and I don’t agree that the more interesting thing to do with an anecdote like this is to decide who was “right.” In some ways I think that’s clear – Shahrzad was facing an immediate physical threat, and she defended herself in a way that deflected that pretty well. In another way, I think when you’re faced with a “colluder” who has membership cards in multiple underclasses – female, sex worker – it is entirely different. I don’t agree necessarily that they are just to be thrown out for “colluding.”

As for the other, if you don’t like what I have to say, I guess you’re free not to read me. I’m perfectly ready to admit when things aren’t clear, I’m perfectly ready to admit that sometimes I’m a blowhard or wrong or just not eloquent. What I find hard to deal with is that I am not as interested these days in writing rants, and yet people are often responding as though I were. I am fine with people disagreeing with me; I am not fine with them attributing positions to me I have not taken. I may have been unclear in the original post; in my responses in this thread I have been clear that I simply don’t find it as easy to condemn the aggressive woman as the rest of you do.

Anyway, readers, I’m sorry for this mini-shitstorm. I am still a rather defensive writer.