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Tara Abhasakun is a colleague. We have written together before. I reached out because of the good journalism by her. I wanted to get some expert opinion on women’s rights, journalism, and so on. I proposed a series. She accepted. Abahasakun studied history at The College of Wooster. Much of her coursework was in Middle East history.
After graduating Tara started blogging about the rights of women, LGBT, and minorities in MENA. She is currently a freelance writer. She is of Thai, Iranian, and European descent. She has lived in Bangkok and San Francisco. Here we talk about women’s rights in the US, pornography, and feminist religion.
As I asked Abhasakun about the state of women’s rights in the United States, she went directly to the recent news of the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation. Where, even without a full FBI investigation into the sexual assaults of three women, he was confirmed.
Abhasakun stated, “On top of that, as we all know, he was nominated by a president who claimed to have grabbed women “by the pussy” so there’s that too. I don’t even know what else to say about either of these things, because they are both so utterly ridiculous, yet they’re apparently both possible, and real.”
This led to some discussion on pornography, not coming from the American religious right. In fact, the different perspectives and, most often, lack of condemnation coming from the socio-political Left. Indeed, the views vary from legitimate paid sex work, economic independence, abuse and exploitation of women, and a branch of sexual liberation, and so on.
“Firstly, let me acknowledge that there may be many women who truly enjoy working in the porn industry. I think the issue, however, is what “consent” truly means,” Abhasakun, on sex acts and consent, opined, “When there is money involved, and someone knows that they will be paid to perform certain sexual acts, it means that they may feel pressured to perform those sexual acts in order to maintain their livelihood. Is that really consent?”
She continued to note the same logic around consent can be applied to almost any job. However, we associate complete assent of self to the sex in contrast to a desk job, where we may feel as if we do not need to go to work on some days.
Abhasakun said, “In ordinary sexual situations in which no money is involved, we acknowledge that people must give full, enthusiastic consent to sex, and not feel pressured into it. I have a hard time believing that everyone who works in the porn industry is always giving their full, enthusiastic consent, when there is money being dangled in front of them.”
She provided some musing on feminist porn, but she did not continue onward from there – as her knowledge was limited at the time of the interview.
Following this, the conversation shifted into the incorporation of feminism into religion. The belief in something else, other, out there and outside of us. That pervasive sense of a hereafter and a higher/greater power than puny us.
“I don’t think that belief in a higher power can exactly help, in fact, clearly, belief in a higher power is used to abuse women. And yet, the fact of the matter is that many people cannot help but believe in a higher power. Many people have had experiences in which they were very, very likely to die, and something that can only be described as miraculous happened, and they didn’t die When things like this happen to people, it’s often impossible to convince them that there is not a higher power,” Abhasakun described.
Thus, the belief in a power beyond oneself seems likely to stay, which leads to the conclusion by Abhasakun. The thought about the ways in which to properly see and examine holy texts: objectively. The form of education recommended is secular with pupils reading the texts and then coming to conclusions on their own, i.e., critical thought via autodidactic education. With this mode of minimally or nominally guided education, feminism may influence religion or be infused into faith, seeing religion within a proper historical context.
Abhasakun concluded, “They can begin to think, ‘Maybe the treatment of women in this holy text exists because this was written in a backward time period.’ Then the question can become ‘What can I draw from this book that is useful today, and what do I need to discard?’ From there, the understanding of God will hopefully move away from a judgemental guy scowling down at all of us, to a force that permeates through the universe.”
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Image Credit: Tara Abhasakun.