Paper 2

Paper 2—Kabul Beauty School

The documentary film Kabul Beauty School details the struggle of a group of American and Afghani women to start a beauty school in post 9/11 Afghanistan. Although the film deals with the many challenges of women in Afghanistan to gain equality with men, one of the most striking elements of the film is the similarity of the challenge the Afghani students face to balance their work life and the need to care for their family and children. Like women in America, women in Afghanistan are expected to take care of most domestic tasks, even when they are the primary source of their family’s income.

In her essay “The Opt-Out Revolution,” Lisa Belkin describes the conflict American women in high-paying corporate jobs experience between the responsibilities they feel toward their job and their perceived responsibilities toward their family. For example, she says, “while a national correspondent in Houston I learned you can’t hop on a plane every morning to explore the wilds of Texas while leaving a nursing baby back home” (Belkin 6). Belkin struggles to satisfy her love of her job with her need to fulfill the definition of a “good mother” and her career suffers because of it—she leaves a high-paying job to become a freelance news writer working from home.

The life of the women in Kabul was a much more tragic and extreme example of this same scenario. One of the women in the school, Nazira, brings some of her American teachers to her home to see what her life is like when she is not at school. Like Belkin, although her job brings in much more money than her husband, she is still expected to care for her entire family, cooking, cleaning, and caring for her in-laws. She must work extremely long hours to accomplish all of this and her career as a beautician suffers because of it. Her husband, like Belkin’s, is not expected to play any role in the domestic duties of the household.

This is not to say that American women are anywhere close to being in the same situation as the women in Afghanistan. We are not. We experience on a daily basis more freedom than women like Nazira even believe is possible. And yet, it’s interesting that Deborah Rodriguez, the author of the book on which the film is based, presents herself as better informed about the “right way” women should live, when American women are still dealing with the same problems as their Afghani sisters. Rodriguez says in an interview, “I always feel pressured to fix everything because I am American” (“Author Interview”).

Although Rodriguez may have originally intended Kabul Beauty School to draw attention to the horrible circumstances of women in Afghanistan and their struggles to overcome them, she also serves, whether consciously or unconsciously, to echo a serious problem facing women in the United States—the very women who were supposed to show Afghanistan a better way of life. Kabul Beauty School shows us that women everywhere need to work together to redefine the expectations of gender if we are all ever to truly be liberated. The issues facing the women in Afghanistan are global are global ones and show us that we need to work more for global solutions.

Blog 11

For my NGO, I chose a group called RHIYA in Bangladesh, which stands for EU/UNFPA Reproductive Health Initiative for Youth in Asia. This group basically works to bring sex education and gender sensitivity education to people age 10-24 in countries where traditional values may prevent this important information from being given to young people.

This group’s work is a gender issue because older members of many Bangladesh communities tend to view young people who are knowledgeable about sexual issues as immoral, especially if those young people are women. In Bangladesh, women are at a greater risk of reproductive and sexual health problems and are generally less likely to receive education about these issues. This group will help put an end to that.

Since the group’s founding in Bangladesh, contraceptive use has increased from 60-78% and young people’s knowledge of STDs has increased from 1.5-20.6%. It’s important that RHIYA has the funding and support to bring education to women in these areas would otherwise be at a higher risk for unwanted pregnancy, STDs, and HIV/AIDS.

This group is relatively unknown in the United States, so reviews are few and far between, but in countries where RHIYA operates, like Bangladesh, the response has been mostly positive. Their website is http://www.asia-initiative.org/bangladesh.php?area=2&page=1&option=1

Blog 10

I think men put on the “tough guise” because they think it gives them power and respect, especially with women. In movies, books, and television, women are portrayed as always falling for the strong, independent man (like Clint Eastwood), instead of a man who freely expresses vulnerability and emotion.

Men of color in particular, like the video said, use this guise because they feel like they have no other way to gain respect in our culture. They don’t have access to education, high-paying jobs, and political influence like white men do and so they resort to the tough guy image.

I think, honestly, that this image makes things worse for men of color. The tough guy persona carries with it a stereotype of danger and unpredictability (you never know if Clint Eastwood or, say, the Godfather, is going to kill you or save you). I think this makes it even more difficult for “tough” men of color to get jobs from white employers. It’s not fair and it’s not right, but white employers might assume that the “tough” colored man will be less reliable than another employer. They might assume he will start fights and just generally be less effective in the work force. They’ll probably never look past his front of dangerous behavior to who he is as a person.

And yet, as harmful as the media’s portrayal of colored men is to them, it hasn’t stopped. I would even suggest that it’s used by white culture as a way to separate and control men of color or to justify giving them unequal treatment. And men feed this discrimination by playing up to the image of the “tough guy” as the best form of masculinity, instead of presenting themselves to the world as the sensitive, emotionally well-rounded people they really are.