Don’t think that is an answer Danny expected or was looking for…

Which is funny it is funny in a way.

If by “women of color” you mean African American women, maybe I can shed a lttle light. Otherwise, I don’t know. White feminists fought for the right to go to work in a man’s world, that is; outside the home. Black women did not fight for this right, because they had always worked outside the home, often as domestics in the homes of the white women. Womanist theology (black female theolgy) acknowledges that the “struggle” for black women is more about race than gender. Black women had no beef with black men, but white women wanted to moved into a white male realm and, therfore, had a beef with white men. Thus, bra-fires!! The struggles were not the same.

Today many of the struggles for equality cannot be broken into neat parts. Pioneers in both the feminist and the womanist movements were liberal. Today that is certainly not the case. Many politically conservative women are concerned with issues that matter to all women. So are men. A feminist is not necessarily female. A feminist is a person who believes that women ought to be in charge of thier lives to the same degree that men are in charge of theirs. In other words, women and men should both have choices.

I believe it is always foolish to jump into a struggle (or an discussion) without knowing the facts. Things are not always what they seem. People may or may not want what we think they (ought to) want. If we force “good things” on people, sometimes, due to circumstances we do not know or understand, people die. The dead cannot be free, only dead.

(And I am not talking about life after death, which, yes, I believe in.)

http://ymarsakar.blogspot.com/2006/12/tinks-rant.html

Without force, it will be very hard to convince any of those people to do the right thing.

White liberal American women fought for (among other things) better opportunities for women in the workplace: wages comparable to men doing the same job, more promotions, maternity leave, etc. They know they want these things because they are fighting for themselves.

Do women Islamic women want to “break free from their invisibility”? If not, are we to force this upon them?

Now abuse is another story. Abuse comes under the heading of human rights. All people have the right to live unabused. But do these artists have an obligation to speak to that wrong? Is it wrong or negligent to comment on one social ill (say, the war) without commneting on all social ills (including human rights in Islamic countries)?

I haven’t a clue why you thought my tone was “moral relativist.” I said

1) it’s legitimate to make a statement opposing one wrong without making a statemenet about another, (just as this thread is about feminist artists and not about Jimmy Carter. Although Bookworm has problems with both, she addresses them one at a time. So may these artists.)and

2) that maybe the artists don’t necessarily know what the Muslim women need or want and, therefore, don’t speak for them in this particular art show.

What’s “relativistic” about that? And in you word-switching illustration, you fail to point out that the north and the south were parts of the same country under the same govenmnet. It does matter.

I can just imagine a 1950 Southern Legislator (or Stephen Douglas) lecturing his northern counterparts in these same terms, except substitute the words “women” with “slaves”, “white liberal American women” with “northerners” and “invisibility” with bondage…oh heck, “invisibility” probably works in this context as well.

Can you understand what I am getting at?

I have very many different ideas in my head. I wonder if they cancel each other out in terms of dissonance.

Harm or not harm is based upon utilitarian ethics, which is more or less based upon numbers theory. Factoring in how many are harmed, and adding them up.

It is different on its foundations from core principles of individual rights and classical liberal Aristotelian beliefs, simply because to individualists, one individual harmed is not equal to a simple addition or tallying of harms. They are not numbers.

But that really isn’t the prime flaw of utilitarianism. Because utilitarianism factors in the harm done by human methods, which aren’t exactly complete.

So there is no true tally of how much harm is done to whom, therefore when you start adding people up, the sum is not guaranteed to be correct. This applies to before hand of course, given that hindsight more accurately sees the total harm, if only at a time in which affecting the amount retroactively won’t be possible.

I have heard some scientists prefer utilitarian models as ethical models. I wouldn’t recommend doing that, but they have their reasons.

So, I go with deductive logic once again. The question I ask of myself is then “does the artists portrayal of the problem actually reflect what is true or simply what is desired”.

Does the actions of the artists promote or detract from the global liberation of women from oppression.

And then, does the actions of the artists promote allies from the good, or allies from the bad concerning the ultimate end goal of equal rights for women in the world.

From these deductive principles, which are binary and mutually exclusive, conclusions may be formed without attempting to count the total harm done.