Firstly this headline “Ten-year-olds given permission to marry”. It’s not about ten year olds wanting to get married, it’s about ten year old girls being given to fifty year old men as wives. FFS MSM tell it like it really is.
Admittedly, I don’t know a lot of ten year olds at the moment, but remembering back when I was ten I wasn’t in any hurry to get married, and certainly not to someone many decades my senior. It’s not marriage it is rape. A mother who tried to get her eight year old daughter a divorce from her fifty year old husband was told by the court that she didn’t have the right to do so, and that only her daughter could ask for a divorce when she reached puberty. So she can be raped from eight to say 12 -13 years old no problems and then she can ask for a divorce, if she doesn’t die in childbirth in the interim.
Other things that have been simmering - our former Prime Minister - I am so embarrassed by his ridiculous antics. I apologise to all our American readers for what he did to Obama.
There is much much more, but if I keep going I might not be able to stop. So, what’s annoying you today?
Categories: Culture, gender & feminism, law & order, Life, Politics, religion, violence
Hoyden About Town 
I’m with you on men who think they own their daughters in every sense of that word ‘own’, including the right to dispose of. And it’s not just happening in the Middle East either – I’ve blogged both this and a similar situation in the US today.
Ableism.
1. Another person calling for hijab ban (here we go again).
2. Not getting enough time for myself.
3. FLIES.
4. My work hours being shortened due to the ‘global financial crisis’
5. Painters quoting $5000 for painting my house.
6. The mysterious urine smell (mysterious because it’s unclear if we are talking feline or small human, nothing to do with Agatha Christie..unless of course she is the culprit) on the lounge rug.
I’ve actually been feeling a pervasive sense of peace within myself and connection with the natural world. I suppose that’s a bit annoying. I’m not bothered by it though (the inner peace! it just won’t stop!)
Watching The girl in the fireplace, I noticed Renette talked in a very formal way, even though the TARDIS was supposedly translating her speech into normal English. I was wondering what the TARDIS translation system would do with almost-languages, like very strong accents, dialects, slang and creole.
Oh I know – bipedalism. Bipedal humanoid aliens annoy me – use some imagination, people, you have the budget for it.
I’m certainly not defending this custom – not at all. But I’m curious over whether there’s any reliable information available about sexual customs in these countries in these cases. Your comment takes for granted that wife = sex = rape from age 8. And clearly it could, so it will in at least some cases, but I wonder how common this is, and how much more prevalent rape is in their society than ours on an overall basis (easy to point the finger, but we’re not pure, sadly). More particularly, if Islam allows for this, does it also provide protections?
Zana Muhsen, in her book Sold: Story of Modern-day Slavery about her experiences being sold into marriage in Yemen wrote about a girl of about 9 or so being married off to an older man. The man had promised her family that he would wait until she hit puberty to have sex with her, but the family discovered that he did not keep his promise and was having sex with the girl pretty much straight away. From what I can remember, the girl had become pregnant a couple of times before she hit 13 and miscarried each time.
Oz Ozzie,
Child marriage is a human rights violation, regardless of whether the child is raped or not, which unfortunately she most likely will be. Further information below. And now I shall go back to lurking. 🙂
http://72.14.235.132/search?q=cache:difcegojCEUJ:www.planetwire.org/get/4810+child+marriage+fact+sheet&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=6&gl=au&client=firefox-a
http://www.humanrightsdefence.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&catid=36:hrd-articles&id=337:child-marriage-as-an-human-rights-issue-&Itemid=54
I don’t actually know Oz Ozzie, but I suspected that if men are calling for girls to be married off from age 10, then they expected them to act as wives in all senses of the word. I know that marrying a virgin is extremely important, but still there has to be some limits. I believe the prophet married a girl of 15, but she would have been going through puberty. I’m sure that there are some who marry young girls and promise not to touch her until she reaches puberty and who keep their promise. Obviously there are others who don’t.
I don’t know whether it is an Islamic thing necessarily or more a cultural thing. I think a number of different cultures still promise girls in marriage at a young age, but laws prevent marriages before a certain age, such as here in Aust.
I am assuming that marriage = sex = rape (for very young girls). This may be an isolated case. I would like to think so.
@ Tasmiya – I have found that generally small human doesn’t smell as much as feline, especially tom cat even when spayed. I’d be eyeing the cat suspiciously. Have you changed it’s food or something recently? We once changed the brand of dry food we fed our cat and she started weeing everywhere. Apparently we upset her boundaries and she needed to reinforce them again. Weeing on the bed did this somehow. We changed back to the old food.
Tasmiya – I hope you don’t mind, but I think I’d be rather amused and vaguely delighted if it turned out Agatha Christie was breaking into your house to pee on your carpet. In the meantime I understand there’s nothing delightful or amusing about the situation at all.
And there was her mysterious disappearance for 11 days in 1926 (as we know from Dr Who) – perhaps she travelled in time, broke into your house, and weed on your carpet?
Of course *why* anyone who could time travel would possibly waste their time doing that would be an even greater mystery…
Kim, there were many things about The Girl in the Fireplace that annoyed me. I think Mr Moffat did a half-hearted job with the character of Madame de Pompadour. Having done an eyebrow-raising amount of research on her, I feel that there’s very rich material there for a writer he did just not tap into. Then again, he doesn’t seem to have had a lot of interest in rounding out his female characters (‘look at me! I’m stupid, pretty assistant girl in Silence/Forest! Only when I become ugly and stuff do I get smart!’). It was really frustrating. Then again, his writing hooked me sufficiently to get me to do research on her, so it has a fair bit of merit in my eyes nevertheless.
Marie, ta. I guess the numbers speak for themselves
Re: Agatha Christie
“Time travel without a capsule – nasty. Catch your breath and don’t go swimming for half an hour” – The Doctor, Blink
Deus Ex Macintosh’s last blog post..Israel declares ceasefire in Gaza