Walked out of my Ethics class, trigger warning rape/sexual assault. Bride kidnapping.

[hani]

The topic was ethical relativism. The professor showed us the first part of an AlJazeera English Witness program in 2009 covering bride kidnappings in Krygyzstan.

Click to view

In the beginning several men talked of kidnapping a woman previously and one of the woman's relative told them:

"A girl is like a foal.  She's seen nothing in life... Of course, when

Comments

[thethornbird]

...

[hani]

Yeah...

wow

[froganon]

Those guys in your class-- yuck on them. It truly is a horrible thing this kidnapping of women for brides. Makes women into objects. Not all societies or cultures are created equally. That sort of place where that sort of thing is accepted and acceptable is not anyplace where I'd want to be. I would have left the class also.

Going home to read more on that sort of thing-- perhaps not the smartest thing you could have done when you were already triggered. Understandable. I've done things like that too.

I salute you for getting through it in the best way that you knew how.
spike

Re: wow

[hani]

The person who made the comment about not needing roofies, all you need is shame, was part of the group I had to meet after the class... Another reason to get the hell out of there. I know he was commenting on how it was worse in Kyrgyzstan than, say, the USA, but it was still an insensitive manner to do it in!

Yeah, it wasn't the smartest but my mind was obsessed about it. >_

[paulliver]

One of the hardest movies for me to sit through was "Blind Mountain" about kidnapped mountian brides in rural China. It focuses on one woman, but you soon realize that every woman in the village was kidnapped because the villagers only want to raise sons.

If you get into primate studies, there's some really horrific stuff as well. And really, humans are just apes that could, and should, know better, but it's a long climb upwards from Paris kidnapping Helen.

[hani]

Now I know to avoid that movie!

Yeah, females just being son-birthing objects... Gah.

[big_yellow_moon]

Sometimes I hear that phrase "ethical relativism" used to accuse "liberals" of having no morals. I think, like most things in life, we have thresholds. I think most of us would tolerate such things as Amish insisting their children wear simple clothes and attend Amish schools. No, it's not what we would do but it is "their way" and I wouldn't say that it's "evil." But the level of abuse that happens in many Islamic countries crosses a line for almost all of us who live outside that world. You probably remember the Time magazine cover from last year of the girl whose face had been slashed as a punishment

[hani]

Yeah, the professor used Nazi Germany as her initial example. Unsurprising, given its common place in Western education and that the university is in Poland...

Thanks. :)