Yes, of course we should be concerned about the treatment of women in girls in such countries - but we should also be concerned about their long term happiness.

Don't trust the propaganda that tells you how awful such things are in these countries. I have visited many of these places, and it isn't what our media will tell you. Just as our media lies about us, our media lies about these other cultures too.

This is not to say that these cultures have no problems - they do. This is not to say that women and girls in these cultures never face any discrimination - they do. But the men in these cultures are not monsters. They typically care about the well-being of their wives and daughters.

And long term, most women are happier when they can express their feminine side, when they can concentrate on being mothers to their children and maintaining a home, than when they must leave their children with strangers in order to go somewhere away from home each day to earn a living.

Of course some women do prefer to work outside the home, to go to work in a competitive environment, to pursue a career - but these are the exceptions, not the norm. These traditional societies have a culture centered on the human norm, we have a society centered on the exception. What I would like is a society loosely centered on the norm with plenty of room for the exceptions.

And if we do care about the long term happiness of the girls we love, we should make sure that they have the room to pursue the path they want, without pressuring them in one direction or the other, without denigrating those who want to be mothers as "mere" housewives.

We have taken the traditional gender norms for granted - and now they are in danger of disappearing, and society is in danger of collapsing.

Meanwhile, perhaps child marriage is not the ideal - perhaps there are better ways to allow girls (and boys) to be their sexual selves. But right now these traditional cultures have the only institutions in the world willing to speak up for girls and for ourselves, the only institutions to say that the love between a man and a girl is not a crime, the only institutions that do not want to see us eradicated. It is hard for me not to be happy to see them standing up for themselves, and for us.




Baldur