Anne Slams Kylie Bisutti As Agent Of Women's Oppression In Her Message That Women Must Cover Up & Be Modest

British Vogue appears to be dailing for page views today, with their headline Former Angel Slams Victoria’s Secret. Thinking I would be reading about a real Victoria’s Secret Angel, I ran into the self-serving, highly-promotional, born again Kylie Bisutti who “has clarified the reasons why she quit as one of the faces of Victoria’s Secet.”

There is no clarification because we read this story before.

“That’s when it hit me,” she recalled. “I was being paid to strip down and pose provocatively to titillate men. It wasn’t about modelling clothes anymore; I felt like a piece of meat. The next day, I broke down and started sobbing. I was in my bedroom and dropped to my knees and started to pray, saying: ‘God, why did you have me win the Victoria’s Secret Angel competition if it was going to make me feel this way? I’m not honouring my husband. I just want answers!’”

Bisutti — now married and living in Montana — is launching the next version of her public face with a book and clothing line designed with modesty in mind. Today’s women have no trouble covering up if they choose to do so, and I pray she’s not launching a line of burqas. I say that — not because I have a deep-seeded problem with burqas — but because I do have a problem with conservative religions that focus on female modesty.

The women of Egypt are living through this very nightmare as we speak, as the Muslim Brotherhood seeks to reintroduce burqas into public life for Egyptian women. In my long-standing involvement in trying to stop the brutal flogging of 40,000 women a year in Sudan for not wearing proper clothing, I assure Kylie Bisutti that her message only fuels the global surge of right-wing radicalism that is taking control of the bodies of American women. Think transvaginal ultrasounds; using an IUD is called murder; and the founder of Eden Foods now facing a boycott for suing the Obama Administration over the contraception coverage piece of the Affordable Care Act. Eden Foods founder Michael Potter believes that people engaging in birth control are unsavory people performing unnatural acts.

Religion & Women’s Oppression

Jimmy Carter on Religion As Agent of Women’s Oppression

Speech by Jimmy Carter to the Parliament of the World’s Religions

Melbourne, Australia, Dec., 2009

I am pleased to address the Parliament of World Religions about the vital role of religion in providing a foundation for – or correcting – the global scourge of discrimination and violence against women. As will be seen, my remarks represent the personal views of a Christian layman and a former political leader.

There are international agreements as well as our own Holy Scriptures that guide us:

Article 2 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: “Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, origin … or other status …”

The Holy Bible tells us that “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:28)

Every generic religious text encourages believers to respect essential human dignity, yet some selected scriptures are interpreted to justify the derogation or inferiority of women and girls, our fellow human beings.

All of us have a responsibility to acknowledge and address the gross acts of discrimination and violence against women that occur every day. Here are some well-known examples: continue

Anne’s Big Fight Ahead

Controlling Women’s Bodies Is A Fight To The Finish

Male-dominated global cultures continue to wrestle with female sexuality. The most repressive forms of Islam are at war with womens’ bodies, throwing head-to-coverage on the female form.

Simutaneously, Western societies, led by the Internet, unveil women’s bodies as never before, rendering us all voyeurs.

Some women do what they are told, having no political or cultural voice in how they are packaged for consumption. Others express their discontent of cultural realities around women’s bodies, making clear that they are ‘good girls’, when others are ‘bad’.

A third group, led by celebrity sensations like Shakira and Angelina Jolie, are using their fame to articulate a holistic essence of womanhood.

Shakira’s vision of woman as ‘she wolf’ outrages some people. But the Smart Sensuality women’s movement is growing culturally in its influence, and Shakira is a strong global voice in articulating this ‘new woman’.

Religions, led by Conservative Islam — but joined by the fundamentalist wings of most large religions — condemn immodesty in women. Just when it seems that we face nothing more than a black hole, a new dialogue is emerging from darkness on two fronts. The Internet dialogue that allows articulate people of diverse cultures to communicate about female sexuality and physicality is making for strange bedfellows. I wrote a life-changing journal essay a few weeks ago about burqas, prompting a rare exchange between Western and Muslim women who choose to veil themselves. (continue right column)

Shortly after that jolt of Internet traffic, I became the lead Western woman’s voice — in terms of expressed Internet support and number of postings — in the Lubna Ahmed Hussein case.

Refocusing my own mind around Khartoum’s intention to flog Lubna Hussein for wearing trousers, I confront the reality of the subliminal, global passions that remain about female sexuality.

The very cultures cutting out the female clitoris are huge consumers of Internet porn. I have seen the statistics — no the IP addresses — with my own eyes. A male colleague showed me, and I was astonished. And women are dying because a glimpse of ankle has dishonored the family in these same countries.

Screaming that female sexuality must be contained, men also can’t get enough of it. This is a very dangerous, pathological reality for global women.

In America, Too, Hypocrisy Rules

Just this week I took a look at porn subscriptions in America.

As you might surmise, even in America, the states that yell the loudest about the need for women to ‘cover up’ and control their animalistic urges, sign up monthly in numbers that exceed New York, California and more liberal states — the ones with ‘no morals’.

This is the abyss of hypocrisy threatening women’s lives on a daily basis.

From my perspective, female sexuality is front and center, in the ‘battle for civilization’, even though the fight is clothed in religious identities.

One wonders if there is any light at the end of this tunnel.

As the women of Khartoum yell to the world that they’re not returning to the Dark Ages, and young female converts to Islam in America, Canada and France willingly take up the veil — often against the wishes or recommendations of their husbands and mothers — a strange voice came out of Khartoum the other night.

Roba Givia, a male Sudan Tribune journalist, reflecting on the whipping of women in Khartoum, wrote a superb piece Sudan is still living in an era of Arabs before Islam.

Many Local Sudanese Horrified By Flogging Woman Video Dec. 11, 2010

The horror of flogging in Sudan reared its head this week in a video that’s no less riveting in its inhumanity than the details of Lubna Hussein’s indencency hearings that went on for months in 2009. For new readers at Anne of Carversville, I became very involved in Lubna’s case in the summer of 2009, after being contacted by a loosely-confederated group of concerned men in the region.

My closest ally in that 2009 group returned to Facebook this week and contacted me with the video that frankly causes me nightmares. I have played this video over and over in my head awake and asleep.

There aren’t words to express my revulsion at the administering of ‘justice’ Sudan style to this young woman and the 40,000 more that will probably be flogged in 2010, based on Sudanese court records of 40,000 floggings in 2008.

Nesrine Malik wrote about the flogging for The Guardian today: Sudan’s public order laws are about control, not morality.

After being pulled down repeatedly on YouTube, with complaints coming fast and furious from the believers in flogging episodes like this one, the video is now alive on AOC. It is also on CNN and Al Jazeera, says my friend, although I can’t find it in the international editions.