Djelloul Marbrook

Bess, you is my woman now.

Yes, Porgy, I is your woman now.

No, Bess, you are your woman!

When I was a young man in college I heard fifty-five performances of Porgy and Bess, the great Gershwin folk opera. I was diligently watering down the orangeade in the Ziegfeld Theater, doubling the concession’s profits and checking the coats of the rich and famous. But something always disturbed me when I heard those now dated and objectionable lines sung by William Warfield and Leontyne Price. No, damn it, Bess shouldn’t be giving up like that. That’s how it felt to me, even as a kid, that Bess was giving up. Why did she have to be the likeable Porgy’s woman or anybody’s woman? It was so distracting I almost forgot to water the orangeade.

When I heard a credentialed member of the punditocracy smirkily ask the other day, as if his remark had the remotest resemblance to intelligence, whether we should fight a war in Afghanistan solely to achieve equality for women I thought of those lines from Porgy and Bess. That’s just the trouble, isn’t it? We’re still trying to make women someone else’s problem, and we’re still putting this number one issue on the back burner when in fact not even the current worldwide recession is as important.

You could tell how pleased the pundit was with what he thought a perfect rhetorical question. I regard it as an idiocy, because the world would benefit far more from equality for women than another damned war on drugs, terrorists or whatever else the military-industrial complex can cook up. Much of the evil in the world is informed by a compulsion, born of fear, to make women chattel. If women were running half of Wall Street, would the greedy foolishness of bad loans and credit default swaps have flourished as it did?

Not that extremists are not a threat, they are. But we should take note that their prime target is women. Oh, you think not, because they attacked towers and the Pentagon and ships and because they talk of abstract grievances? I think that were it not for the perceived (not the real) equality of women in the West the terrorist threat would not wear such a vehement face. Nothing in life has impressed me more than fear and hatred of women in all its disguises, some genteel and cynical as here in North America and Europe, some violent as in the systematic rape of women in central Africa, some posing as religion as in much of the rest of the world.

I think Muslim extremists fear women more than they despise American support of Israel. I suspect that fear is what drove the attacks on Mumbai, where women are perceived to have achieved a higher status than when the city was called by westerners Bombay. I think there is a worldwide consensus not to talk about the real issue because it’s so threatening, and yet the future of the human race depends on our talking about it. We can’t go on oppressing half the human race and expect to fulfill our highest ideals. We live in disgrace, and we would rather talk and fight about almost anything but this one central fact.

I think Western films, advertising and sports—in which women play a prominent if often demeaning role—is perceived as a much greater threat than Israel or American economic imperialism. And if our current speaker of the House of Representatives were not a woman, wouldn’t the insistent diatribes against the speaker that load the Internet be less hysterical?

The only truly radical idea in the world is absolute fairness for women, because both sexes recognize that it would permanently alter the way the world conducts its affairs. We have seen enough of female leadership to know this: Hatshepsut, Zenobia, Boudicca, La Kahena, Elizabeth I, and many others.

Consider Hatshepsut. There is some reason to suppose, given a stele found in the last fifty years, that she, not Ramses II, was pharaoh at the time of the Exodus. The stele refers to a labor dispute with a people from the north with whom she grew exasperated and expelled.

Whether the story is true or not, it suggests how the world would be turned upside down (and much for the better) if women were to achieve equality. Even the most devout Jew, Christian or Muslim is tempted to smile at this version of the Exodus, simply because it seems so plausible. And that smile is a foreshadowing of how the world might be if half the human race were liberated from the oppression that in thousands of ways afflicts us and therefore diminishes human consciousness.

A war to liberate women? The money would be better spent than the war on drugs or the war on Al Qaeda, because the oppression of women is a greater threat to us than all the nutcases religion can breed. —DM