While listening to an NPR discussion this morning about Karen Hughes's "listening trip" through Saudi Arabia, an interesting thought occurred to me after one comment that the appropriately named commentator made. I had much time to mull this over, what with sitting suspended hundreds of feet above a large body of water motionless (read: stuck in traffic due to yet another broken down SUV in the friggin' middle of the Bay Bridge). A paraphrase:

The Muslim women are telling Hughes, "Your values are not our values. Issues that would be problematic for American women are not problems to us. We are happy. We are content." The problem is not with values being shared or not between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia; the problem is with foreign policy. Hughes will have a very, very difficult job improving the image amongst Muslims abroad because she has no jurisdiction over the policy that is at issue.

To pull from that comment one seemingly smaller issue in the whole foreign policy vs. values at issue deal, I started thinking about feminism.

We, being open-minded forward-thinking college-educated foot soldiers in the army of the intellectual elite, know that feminism is A Good Thing. Obviously. I, myself, am a self-proclaimed feminist who hopes to tear down the pejorative connotation that has adhered itself to the term like an unfortunate fly on fly paper. We, being enlightened, realize that women are equal and should demand equal rights. If any of our "oppressed sisters" at home or abroad seek to overthrow the patriarchal construction crews' building bulletproof glass ceilings, then we should aid them, intellectually or literally. Feminism should be spread throughout the world. But what happens when women don't want
it?

Now, my far leftist conspiracy-theory-esque side (which is like the Sahara compared to a grain of sand when compared to my neo-conservative blind faith side), informs me that such women do want it; they just don't know that they want it ... yet. If they could only see the benefits that we U.S. women reaped after the women's right movement. If they only understood how their culture has been keeping them from realizing their full potential as thinkers and doers.

So, how can we make them realize what they're missing? How do we tell them, "No, you really do want to be a feminist, to be equal." We educate them. But how? First, how many of your local feminist friends do you know that speak Arabic? So, to educate en masse as we would need to do, we would probably have to conduct outreach in English. So they will have to learn in English. At best, we could hope for a few feminist Arab-Americans or a handful of die-hards who learn a choppy Arabic to attempt to get the message out to women in their native tongue.

Second, the cultural logistics. In some countries, a feminist American woman would cringe at the restrictions placed upon her, especially in areas such as travel and clothing. We should reject the covering and the male accompaniment as devices of the patriarchy. But then, how do we travel? The men are not likely to be convinced to ease up on these rules. So, we would have to force the men in power to accept the values and conduct of the American feminist. Perhaps we could place economic sanctions against them or start a preemptive war based on intelligence that the government will not be friendly to American feminist foreign policy.

Imperialism, anyone?

Or, to emulate the expansive vocabulary and historical references characteristic of my colleague Mr. Marcus Aurelius Wilson, cultural hegemony, friends, Ro(wo)mans, country(wo)men?

And then there are the women. That just don't know that they are secretly dying to be liberated. How do we free them? If a position of inferiority for women is an integral part of a religious and cultural tradition, how do we end that component without imposing our culture and diluting theirs?

We, the youthful thinkers of tomorrow, face a dilemma. We hold to be self-evident two truths that appear irreconcilable:

Truth #1: Women should be equal. Feminism is not a theory but the just pursuit of equality.

Truth #2: Cultural diversity should be preserved. Ethnocentrism ruins ancient traditions in danger of extinction, particularly as a result of Americanization.

How do we bring rights to women without Americanizing them? Are there (eek! squirm uncomfortably) positive facets to imperialism? Let's look, shall we, at the Roman Empire, a bunch of imperialists if there ever were any (it's even in the name!). They wreaked all sorts of havoc of the necessary and unnecessary sorts, wiping local cultures and values aside like gadflies. And what was the end result? Order, relative peace, a lingua franca that improved communications and diplomacy, roads that defined effective transportation, ingenious engineering feats like mortar-less aqueducts, universities with scholars mulling over questions like the one I mull over here, forward-thinking and sophistication, the arts. In fact, the quality of life, the standard of living of the average individual, had
undoubtedly improved.

Hmmm, is that famed token imperialist of Bishop Hall, Drew M---, onto something after all?

My hippie peace-loving chillness says no, but ...