Women and the System of Masculinity

When a woman opens her eyes to the world, when she starts to understand herself and find herself under the thuggery of the Masculine System as a slave, she will feel the loss of the importance of her gender. A brief exegetics of gender roles in the Middle East focused on Kurdish women.


by Diyar Mullai
The opinions and ideas on gender are chained to an ancient system’s wrong ideologies. A woman’s demands and her suggestions are intertwined in this system. This condition has made women feel like a strange being. And this strangeness is one of the reasons to women’s alienation in society.
When a woman sees her real place in the society. She will be shocked. She will stare without being able to do anything except watching herself being controlled, raped and reduced. Some women accept this system as a gift from God, without thinking about their destiny. There is another group of women, who do not agree with the system, and therefore end their lives by suicide. They do not see any alternative. A third group of women never agree with the system. They always confront it and fight for their rights. And the Masculine System shows different kinds of violence against them.
Because the way of my thinking totally differs from the society, I, as a man, see myself in the war trench fighting the system. I am fighting against the way in which the society always makes differences between the two genders. As I see it, many men neglect this.
I am writing this article to show just one side of the massive violent treatment against women in the Middle East – and especially the Kurdish women, who are being oppressed both because of their gender and their origin. I felt upset by this equality and therefore began my research. I started reading theories on gender and collected information from society, family and friends. I found out that the oppression of women is a part of the masculine system. The man placed the women in his system and forgot that women are in a specific physiological and psychological situation. But in the masculine system the presence of femininity is seen as a crime.
In the small system of the family, the men have authority to reject or approve the decisions of the women, because she does not exist to have an opinion, and cannot participate in decisions, but must follow her husband’s, dad’s or brother’s orders. And in that situation you only see silence in the face of that women. All women’s stuff, privileges, clothing, way of talking or walking and many other things are colored by the man’s oppressive power.
After deep thinking about these issues, I could not accept this old unequal system. Many men wanted me to treat women like they did, tried to make me agree with their opinions and deal with my family members in the same way as they do. That is why I, and many others who have the same thinking, reject the masculine system and forever will disagree with everything it implies.
In most of the Mid-Eastern countries women are oppressed physically and mentally. When the following three conditions are taken into account, one can easily see that these women are being deprived of their human right:
Circumcision of Girls - This is a surgical operation where the clitoris is cut away in order to control the sexual sensitivity. In this way the man can control the woman’s own sexuality. This kind of crime against humanity is practiced various places in the Middle East.
Stoning - This is an Islamic kind of penalty against women that implies execution by stoning.  It is painful to the human sense that women are being killed in such a brutal manner.
Governmental violence - The authorities and the governmental powers support most of the violence against women.  Often the families carry out this violence, but the governmental powers are behind them, supporting these kinds of treatments against women.
Besides these very violent oppressive structures, many other things are going on, such as marriage by force, unlike marriage, marriage of under ages by force, women swapping between two families, etc. According to Islamic law, girls can get married when they are nine years old. The girl has to accept the way her husband wants to deal with her, and she must fulfill her husband’s needs according to old traditions. I cannot describe them all here, but I would like to mention one very problematic thing: The woman is considered the privilege of a Man. This causes that many women in poor countries are killed every year.
In my point of view a woman is not the privilege of anyone. The privilege of the woman is her freedom. We must try hard to fight for freedom and equality and support women’s struggle in the Middle East.
I cannot understand that anyone considers a peace of flesh as an honor. Often men dream of having sex with a beautiful woman and see her naked body parts. But when that man gets angry or is in a fight, he uses the names of the female body parts as swearwords. Even when men swear to another man they use women’s body parts as swearwords. I really don’t understand why people would do such a thing. Why degrade the woman by using her body parts as swear words? I don’t understand why!
It is necessary that women start a huge revolution against the Current system. Women have to gain equality. Half of the world’s population is after all women – and the other half was born by them.