And we do know that, but there’s fresh and sad evidence. One is the erasure of women in a picture of Israel’s latest government. The first picture was altered for ultra-conservative newspapers which ban showing pictures of women:
It gets worse. The NY Times comments:
The news this week has been bad for supporters of women’s rights in at least three parts of the world, with women in government digitally removed from newspaper photographs in Israel, video circulating of a woman being flogged in Pakistan and a change in the law in Afghanistan.
The NYT site has what seems to be a picture of the flogging. It is disturbing.
The Afghan law is in some ways worse than the marital rape one we commented on earlier. It will give a fortunately small proportion of men very extensive control of their wives. Details are at the link above.
Horrific.
The flogging is bad per definition, but this video does not show what is normally done with a flogging, this is rather mild. With a “normal” flogging, which happens on bare skin, the skin will burst after a couple of whiplashes (which are landed with a lot more force than this), and since normally the sentence is somewhere into the dozens of whiplashes, the ugly scars will never disappear, and in all likelihood, the muscles will be permanently damaged.
If anything, this seems like a kind of promotion video, rather telling us that what they do is not so bad at all, merely correctively degrading (a sort of public spanking. Erg. Perverts).
There is some follow up on it on bbc news
[…] same law that forbids women from leaving the house without male permission. (JJ mentioned this bit here.) Both of these are grotesque infringements on women’s freedom, yet the rape law is getting […]