Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Well you know...
When Philip Adams got up and said: "My name is Philip and I'm an atheist."
I was really cross, cause I was gonna do that!
So... I guess we both come out of advertising, so perhaps we have similar ideas.
So I decided to change it slightly and start by saying: My name is Jane, and I am a feminist.
And what I want to say to all the men and women in the audience,
is: I wish everyone of you would go from this venue
and say "My name is -whatever it is- and I am a feminist".
Because it is a word that's been stolen from us.
We are no longer allowed to identify as a feminist.
If you do, there is a kind of recoil in horror, a stepping back, a fear.
Whenever I speak about feminism, I'm always asked the same question:
"But you don't *hate men*, do you?!"
No, but I bloody hate *that question*!
Why is it to be pro-female, which after all... I AM...
is automatically to be anti-male?
And I take Leslie's point, that to be an atheist is not automatically to be anti people who believe differently.
Somebody said to me when I identified myself as an atheist, that to even say such a thing was an aggressive act.
Why is it that everything I identify as being, "I am a feminist and an atheist",
is automatically seen as aggresive?
Feminists believe that women are as fully human as men.
And quite frankly, anyone who doesn't believe that, is not just an idiot,
but prejudiced, bigoted and... wicked.
There are very few people brave enough in the western world to say that they don't believe it.
But there are many people who act as if they don't believe it.
In fact, I would say possibly the majority of the people act as if they don't believe it.
To say I'm an atheist is merely a statement of fact. I do not believe in a supernatural god.
Like Philip Adams when I've been asked about the afterlife,
and am I not concerned about that, and I've always said:
"No, I have no problem with the afterlife, because I assume...
what comes after will be very much the same as what came before."
And after all, there were billions and billions and billions of years of before...
...and I don't remember suffering any pain, or feeling that I missed out on anything much.
I mean, I did miss out on a great deal, obviously: all of recorded history!
But I can't say it worried me terribly at the time.
So I'm happy, once I've had my little moment on this stage,
and I mean this stage, and I mean the larger Shakespearean stage
and all the men and women merely players, to shuffle off into my grave.
My mother wants a cardboard coffin now, so maybe it'll be a cardboard coffin, or cremated,
or whatever the latest climate-friendly way of disposing of one's remains might be...
When it comes my time to go, I'm happy to just GO.
I can't imagine anything worse than going on forever and ever and ever and ever...
I'm a writer.
(I've got my first novel coming up, did anyone tell you? Uhm....)
And I know the best stories have a beginning, a middle and an end.
And I'd like my story to be a good one. I mean, my own life story.
So I expect...
It's had a beginning, I'm a little bit past the middle now...
...and I'm quite happy about the idea of an end.
Like Leslie, I wanna tell you a little of my background.
I am, at the very least, a third-generation atheist.
I was brought up in a family with absolutely no religious belief and no religious tradition.
My father's family some time in the deep dark distant past were probably Jewish,
but there is literally no familial memory of that.
My mother's family were Methodist, but my mother is *so* no-longer-a-Methodist, she could be called an "anti-Methodist".
So as a result, I regard religions rather the way non-Americans regard guida and football.
I'm well aware that it raises enormous excitement and passion amongst its followers, but for the life of me I can't see why!
And I see the harm that it does, and being female, what I mostly see is the harm it has done to women.
I think that religion - and I think I'm gonna point the responsibility directly at religion -
has made women overresponsible and men underresponsible, and as a result has stopped us both from growing up.
I think that religions, all of them, seem to me to be focused
around the idea of controlling women and their sexuality.
To me, that seems to be their fundamental purpose.
They seem to make most of their rules about really idiotic things like what *** women should wear.
Imagine a supernatural being, all-powerful, sitting up there
deciding on the design of fashions for the female race down here on Earth...
Why should such a being care?
Well, of course such a being doesn't exist, but even if it did he wouldn't care, or *she* wouldn't care.
It is *men* who care.
And it is men who have had strong discomfort with their own sexuality, and their own *** responses to women,
and so have created philosophies which have neatly projected that responsibility for their own feelings unto women.
Taslima's point about the burka being the way of "protecting women" - that's what they say -
from male desire is just one example of how religion makes women responsible
for the way men feel about them.
That's not just damaging to women, that's damaging to men.
It's very damaging to men.
Because it means you don't take responsibility for your own thoughts and feelings,
and until a human being takes responsibility for their own thoughts and feelings,
they're not quite an adult human being.
I would suggest to you that for a lot of women anyway,
feminism leads to atheism more often than atheism leads to feminism.
Oh well, *one* person agrees with me!
And that is why religious leaders tend to react more furiously even to feminism that they do to atheism.
Much as they may decry Richard Dawkins,
they don't apply the same level of scorn and vitriol to him as they do to women like Germaine Greer.
And who could be surprised?
Here's just two examples of the way different religions have regarded women.
In the not too distant past, there was debate in the Church of England in the 19th century,
a serious theological debate about women, whether the women could be considered to have souls.
Well of course, the wrong side won, because they decided we did.
What they didn't realise...
What they didn't realise of course is, we don't have souls, and nor do they!
The other, my favourite, and I'll finish with this, my favourite is when an imam was asked
- because we have this new phenomenon of female suicide bombers -
what happens, what heaven does a female suicide bomber go to?
Because a man gets the 72 virgins, but what's *her* reward?
And he said: "Well, if she's married, she gets the best of her husbands."
And they said: "Yes, but most of the female suicide bombers so far have not been married."
This created a great theological problem, but he came up with a solution:
because they're going to the garden of paradise... Yes, they get to tend the garden!
Now ladies, that's something worth blowing yourself up for, isn't it?!
- Subtitles by Dietseleeuw -