Blocking documentary viewing amounts to censorship

“The essence of oligarchical rule is not father-to-son inheritance, but the persistence of a certain world-view and a certain way of life, imposed by the dead upon the living. … Who wields power is not important, provided that the hierarchical structure remains always the same.”

Thus wrote George Orwell in his novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” which portrays a violent dystopian society perpetuating itself through the suppression and falsification of information. We know first-hand that transparency is crucial to ending any form of violence.

This is why we were shocked by the recent fervent attempts to ban the screening of a documentary called “Honor Diaries,” which tackles honor killings and other violence against women, often embedded in state laws, tradition and political indifference.

“Honor Diaries” will be screened on Friday, April 10, at 1:30 p.m., in MUC 216 during the upcoming Women and Gender conference. The road to this screening was fraught with obstacles – and perhaps still is. The film has been accused of Islamophobia, even though it is supported by groups such as Muslims Facing Tomorrow, the Alliance of Iranian Women and 40 other organizations.

The Association for the Advancement of Women’s Rights, a student group, at first volunteered and then rescinded its sponsorship of “Honor Diaries” because, according to an email, “We are concerned about disrespecting or presenting biased portrayals of the Muslim community.”

At a conference planning meeting, members of AAWR said this decision reflected the importance of maintaining a good working relationship with the Muslim Student Association. And some USD faculty members insisted on canceling the conference screening altogether.

It is not the first time in the history of the University of South Dakota’s Women and Gender conference when certain content has created discomfort – but it is the first time anyone has tried to ban it. One of us (Cindy) remembers the time in the 1980s when USD’s women faculty won a class action suit challenging the gender wage gap and then-President Joe McFadden set in motion the first women’s conference on campus. And now, the misguided effort to ban “Honor Diaries” has shaken our confidence in USD women’s ability to stand up to the oppression that so conveniently profits others.

As women, we have been socialized to play well with others. But we should not regard this as a categorical imperative. We know from the unending history of genocide and from experiments like those of Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo that getting along with some people at the expense of others can be the wrong choice that leads to loss of life and indescribable suffering on a large scale.

Submitted by:

— Miglena Sternadori, professor of media and journalism and the women and gender studies coordinator

— Cindy Struckman-Johnson, professor of psychology

2 thoughts on “Blocking documentary viewing amounts to censorship”

No one wants to see violence against anyone (except deranged people). But I have the same problem with “The Honor Diaries” that I have with the Walk a Mile in Her Shoes, about which I say:

As a former world-peace advocate, I’ve always said it’s a good idea to walk in the shoes of another in order to better understand that person.

But it’s not a good idea for only one sex to walk in the shoes of the other. As good-intentioned as the “Walk a Mile in Her Shoes” is, the one-sidedness can foster as much alienation as understanding.

The program leads many to believe that domestic violence is strictly male-to-female and only males must change. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Consider first, to dispel the myth of general female innocence:

Women are more likely to commit major physical abuse of their children than are men: 56.8 percent to 43.2 percent. [Source: Fire With Fire, by feminist Naomi Wolf, p. 221, hardcover] See also this: “According to the American Anthropological Association, about 200 women kill their children in the United States each year.”

Women are more likely to kill their children than are men: 55 percent to 45 percent. [Source: “Women and Violent Crime,” a paper by Prof. Rita J. Simon, Department of Justice, Law and Society and Washington College of Law, American University, Washington, D.C] See examples in Utah, which has a Safe Haven law, of serial baby killers, in a report dated April 13, 2014: “Police find seven dead babies in Utah County home.“

Women commit almost all of the murders of newborns. In Dade County, Fla., between 1956 and 1986, according to the June 1990 Journal of Interpersonal Violence 5:2, mothers accounted for 86 percent of newborn deaths. [Source: When She Was Bad, by Patricia Pearson, p. 255, note 71.]

Since women, without provocation, batter and kill children, whom they supposedly have been socialized to love, they can, without provocation, batter and kill men, whom they definitely have been socialized — by the media, feminist literature, and “Walk a Mile in Her Shoes” — to distrust, fear, and hate.

The promoters of “Walk a Mile” seem to want women portrayed as innocents who do no wrong. Perhaps without realizing it, they are, I believe, setting females up to come across to many men as holier-than-thou, someone on a higher moral plane, someone who should perhaps be put on a pedestal.

Portraying one group as never to blame and the other as always to blame is not, peace advocaters like myself believe, the impression to convey if you want those whom you blame to understand you. If you want a group — men, in this case — to understand you, let alone listen to you, you must first talk about the mote in your own eye, your own sins; that was essentially the approach President Obama used early on when talking to or about our country’s enemies; it may have helped win him his Pulitzer prize. Because the promoters of “Walk a Mile” have to my knowledge never done this, they have, as they might admit, achieved little. You could argue, reflecting on President Obama’s approach, that the promoters of Walk a Mile protect women’s image in the way that conservative patriots protect America’s image as morally superior to other nations.

Here’s the sort of thing that the Walk a Milers have missed with its walk-in-women’s-shoes-only campaign:

“A rape epidemic — by women?” http://malemattersusa.wordpress.com/2014/12/16/a-rape-epidemic-by-women/

Now consider the recent spate of false rape accusations: the false stories by Rolling Stone, the Duke lacrosse accuser, and Lena Dunham, who in fact may be a serial false-rape accuser.

2 thoughts on “Blocking documentary viewing amounts to censorship”

Letter to the Editor

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