Women matter

 Women matter

By MARINA MAHATHIR

MUSINGS

Sunday, 26 Jun 2022

LET us ask this straightforward question: does the Attorney General’s Chambers, and in fact the Government, think that women are second-class citizens? How else can we think about the AGC appealing against Malaysian women having the right to confer their citizenship to their children born abroad, a right that is automatic for men? Worse still, how can the AGC claim that the 2001 amendment that added the word “gender” to Article 8(2) of the Federal Constitution be invalid?

That article originally stated that no one can be discriminated against based on race, religion, descent, or place of birth. To keep up with the times, Parliament amended that article to include the word “gender”. For the first time, women felt protected by the Constitution if not always in reality.

Now here we have the AGC no less telling us that in effect women don’t matter because that amendment should not have happened. It is shocking beyond belief.

What is so difficult about giving women the right to pass their citizenship to their own children just because they were born abroad to foreign fathers? If there is no issue with men having children overseas by foreign wives, then why should there be with women?

The answer of course lies in the patriarchal mindset of our mostly male authorities. Are they afraid of Malaysian women all running off to marry foreigners? Some men feel affronted by the idea of “their” women marrying men from other countries. Indeed some 1.86 million women, some 12% of the Malaysian female population, make up most of our international diaspora. Not all of them went abroad because of marriage, many found greater career opportunities in other countries. But if the AGC is the misogynistic model of Malaysian men, looking elsewhere for husbands becomes a more attractive prospect. Meanwhile men can have any number of wives parked overseas safe in the knowledge that all those kids are Malaysian regardless of whether they spent any time in this country at all.

What are women supposed to do if they become widowed or divorced after having children overseas? They have the right to return home, but their children cannot stay for the long term even when they are minors and still need the care of their mothers. Either they have the untenable choices of being separated from their children, or remaining overseas or returning home but having to go through the expensive rigmarole of continually renewing their children’s visas. Meanwhile their schooling is disrupted not to mention the emotional turmoil that all of them go through. The message to these women is clear: since you chose to marry a foreign man, we don’t want you anymore.

The other choice women have is to ensure they deliver their babies on Malaysian soil which would automatically grant their children citizenship. I know one woman who returned home to have all three of her children just so their status was assured. But this is not something every woman can afford to do. What if, for health reasons, she is simply unable to travel?

Given that so many talented women are part of the overseas diaspora, why do we give them up so easily so that other nations can benefit? Talent Corp was set up some time ago to attract Malaysians home. But for women, the issue of their children’s nationality persists. Now the AGC has pretty much blown any hope of a solution out of the water.

All Malaysian women should be livid about this. Why is it that when it comes to voting, our vote is equal to men’s, yet when it comes to this, we’re considered only half citizens? Is the AGC not ashamed of so blatantly pushing for discrimination? Were they not born from mothers, have sisters or daughters?

I have a daughter who was born 35 years ago abroad. She does not have a Malaysian passport but has permanent residence and has lived here all her life. This is her home; she is one of those who only wanted to return after studying in another country. Yet she cannot vote because she is not a citizen. It’s true that she could have chosen to take up Malaysian citizenship at age 18. But the point is that she (and I) had to deal with bureaucracy to make that choice happen. If I were a man, I would never have had to think about this because she would have enjoyed that right from birth.

But maybe this is a good thing, for the government to show itself for what it is, for all that misogyny to be in full view of everyone. Women make up half the population but are still treated as if we only half-belong here. Some women even believe that women cannot be leaders, echoing the propaganda that men have been spewing lately. Like the Handmaid’s Tale, we are only good enough to give birth but not to even make decisions on our children.

Yet if the system dictates that we cannot give our best to our children, we are immediately gaslighted as bad mothers. Men who neglect their children, who care so little for their offspring that they won’t pay for their maintenance, get away scot-free, even lauded as good pious citizens.

It’s time women fought back against this attitude. We can talk about educating our sons to be better human beings, to treat their sisters and female schoolmates with respect but that’s for the future. We need to deal with the situation now before we lose even more women to the rest of the world. Whenever the next general election arrives, we should be reminding women voters how valuable our votes are and demand better treatment in return.

Marina Mahathir is incensed that after almost 65 years of independence, we’re still having to face Neanderthal thinking about women. The views expressed here are solely her own.

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Break the bias this year

Break the bias this year

By MARINA MAHATHIR

MUSINGS

Sunday, 27 Feb 2022

IN a bid to up my knowledge recently, I started reading a book by Prof Leila Ahmed who teaches Women’s Studies and Religion at the Harvard Divinity School. Prof Leila is one of those hugely qualified scholars who has made it her mission to study the state of gender relations since ancient times to see how we got to some of the attitudes we have towards women today.

I’ve only just started reading the first chapter which describes civilisations in the Middle East region in the Mesopotamian era starting from about 6000BC which, being so long ago, must have taken many hours of research to get right. She unearthed some interesting information for us to think about.

For one thing, when those civilisations were agrarian rural communities, women were very much held in high esteem, even venerated. However, as the civilisations became urbanised, the status of women began to decline. No scholar has been able to provide a real explanation why this happened.

One historian, Gerda Lerner of Columbia University, theorised that “the importance of increasing the population and providing labour power in early societies led to the theft of women, whose sexuality and reproductive capacity became the first ‘property’ that tribes competed for. Warrior cultures favouring male dominance consequently emerged.”

From then on it was downhill for women through several millennia. According to Prof Leila, as societies became more urbanised and militarised, a class-based system emerged where military and temple elites became the propertied classes. “The patriarchal family, designed to guarantee the paternity of property-heirs and vesting in men the control of female sexuality, became institutionalized, codified, and upheld by the state. Women’s sexuality was designated the property of men, first of the woman’s father, then of her husband, and female sexual purity (virginity in particular) became negotiable, economically valuable property.”

It’s amazing how some attitudes can perpetuate through the ages. Elements of these patriarchal ideas about women being the property of men remain to this day in many societies. In some countries, women cannot leave the house, let alone go out to work, without the permission of the men in their family. The idea that the kitchen is where women belong still lingers, even though we may now go out and work outside the home, even in high-powered jobs.

In this country, we seem to be dual-natured in how we think of women. On the one hand, it is no longer unusual for women to be educated to university level, even post-graduate level, and to drive cars and aeroplanes. But she is not considered whole until she marries and has children. And while she may have a good job outside the home, her primary roles are wife and mother. It still astounds me to see the social media profiles of many young women who describe themselves first as somebody’s wife and mother before giving their occupation.

Unsurprisingly then, we still have people who give advice that seems to be stuck in the Mesopotamian era. Since your entire life supposedly depends on your husband, it is therefore imperative that you never do anything to let him invoke a reason to leave you. So always talk nicely to him, even if he’s calling you names, and accept his gentle beatings since you obviously deserve them for objecting to his, say, infidelity or failure to provide. I’m so glad that there are Malaysians who have better sense and pushed back at this outmoded way of thinking.

But even when faced with the reality that women are qualified and hold good jobs, Melaka state shared a post on its official Facebook account advising women not to earn more than their husbands to keep them happy. The poor chaps! Given that there are more female graduates than there are male, market forces must surely determine how much each employee makes. Do employers typically ask their potential female employees how much their husbands make to ensure they pay them less just to maintain family harmony?

As it is, there are already many wives who pay more for their household needs than their husbands, husbands who pay nothing towards the maintenance of their children by their estranged wives, and husbands who are quite happy to be kept by their many wives. So if Melaka wants to uphold men’s pride, they should really go after those who don’t pay up.

Moving the goalposts seems to be the favoured route when men fall behind. Some years ago, somebody proposed lowering university requirements for male students because females were outnumbering them so much. Men could get Ds for instance while women needed to get As. The same person must have also assumed that regardless of their lesser ability, the boys would still graduate and obtain jobs before the girls. Oh wait, that’s exactly what is happening.

This year on March 8, we will once again be celebrating International Women’s Day. The theme this year is #BreakTheBias, which seems fitting since despite it being 2022, we’re still having to deal with biases against women. In fact, often the usual offenders against women contradict themselves. On the one hand, they exult motherhood as the primary role of women. On the other, they won’t allow some mothers to bring up their own children. Somehow a mother’s love can be threatening to some people’s faith.

Luckily there are people with common sense and compassion in this country, especially judges. (Has anyone noticed that those who want to separate children from their mothers are usually men?)

But it’s not all bad news. Ever since 2018, women are recognised in our Constitution as an equal parent to their children and must therefore be consulted in any legal decision concerning them. Anyone who says otherwise is violating the Constitution. Malaysian women finally got the right to pass their citizenship to their children born overseas, because our Constitution also says we cannot be discriminated against. We are getting somewhere although there’s still work to be done.

The Sexual Harassment Bill is coming up in the next Parliamentary meeting. Dare we hope that our official women’s champions in the House will keep up with the 21st century?

Marina Mahathir wishes that some men would ruminate on how they would feel if their mothers were never allowed to see them. The views expressed here are solely the writer’s own.

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We need the leaders we truly deserve

We need the leaders we truly deserve

By MARINA MAHATHIR

MUSINGS

Sunday, 30 Jan 2022

WE have a national flag, national anthem, and these days we have a National Pose too. It’s the palm of the hand slapped against the forehead, preferably with the head hung low and cheeks reddened.

When we see our flag fly or sing NegaraKu, our hearts swell with pride, tears might spring in our eyes. But with the National Pose, our eyes may water as well, but only out of shame.

What brought about this new stance? Tell me how you else you would react to this?

• “Logging is good for tigers.” Kelantan Forestry Director quoting “an expert from Sarawak.” (The National Tiger Survey 2016-2020 states that there are now less than 200 Malayan tigers left in our forests. There are no tigers in Sarawak.)

• “My brother used my account to buy the shares.” Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission Chief Commissioner. Kinda like letting your kids use your Netflix account to watch movies?

• “We can’t conclude if he did anything wrong.” Securities Commission. (We’re not sure if two plus two equals four.)

• “Help us fight graft, MACC urges public after drop in Transparency International ranking.” Memimpin melalui teladan?

• The Wall Street Journal says we’re the most corrupt place to do business in. What a surprise!

• And so on...

Palm slams forehead, cheeks burn. What is going to hold our heads up high again?

I’ve been through embarrassing moments abroad when our politicians have said something stupid and then tried to cover it up. In the late 70s when we had many Vietnamese refugees landing on our shores, our then Deputy Prime Minister announced that we would shoot any that washed up on our beaches. Predictably, outrage ensued around the world. He then gave the standard politician’s excuse, that he was misquoted, that he actually said he would “shoo” them away. Did anyone believe it?

But at least in those days, these gaffes were few and far between. You had a respite from them during which you could stand tall. These days however, they come fast and furious until you develop a perpetual crick in the neck as you hold your head down so that you don’t have to face the raised eyebrows of disapproval from your overseas friends.

There’s a saying that we get the government that we deserve. That’s probably true. But at least if we did vote fools in, we can take responsibility for them. But we didn’t vote for this lot. Can we imagine any of them standing on a world stage and people coming away thinking wow, he/she is impressive? What do we say when our foreign friends give terrible reviews of our policies?

It makes you wonder how people get to be our leaders at all. Obviously, there are no minimum qualifications, except for being male. Educational attainments are mostly miniscule, professional experience doesn’t seem to count for much especially when we remember we had a medically-trained Health Minister who gave out dubious medical advice. But most of all, what our leaders seemed to lack is heart. That organ on the left side of our bodies that tells us to empathise with those unluckier than us and then gets us to reach out and help.

How else do we explain the lack of sympathy with those folks who almost drowned in muddy water in their own homes and had to wait days shivering of cold and hunger for help to come? Or those advocating for people to drain their already meagre EPF savings despite knowing they won’t have much to live on in their old age? Or being devoid of concern at schoolgirls facing sexual harassment in schools, or the cursory attention paid to the outrageous period checks that the same schoolgirls must endure.

If our leaders don’t much care about us as long as they get their Alphards, how can we expect them to care about other human beings in our country like migrant workers and refugees? Every time some scandal involving our government erupts, which is often these days, migrant workers and refugees get raided and arrested. Are they meant to be distractions, like whisky label non-issues?

No wonder that so many of us no longer want to follow the news. It feels masochistic to subject ourselves to constant insults to our intelligence. We hunger for stories of good leadership and find them through the strength and resilience of ordinary Malaysians. None of them had to be voted in to mobilise to help their fellow citizens.

They relied on their own hearts and instincts, their own humanity. The rest of us did what we could, even after two difficult years when we were already called upon to dig deep into our pockets. We just knew that none of us would survive if we turned a blind eye to those who were suffering.

Meanwhile we watched those who imagined themselves our leaders fighting among themselves to claim the title they don’t deserve.

Marina Mahathir is a Malaysian sociopolitical activist and writer. The views expressed here are solely her own.

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