More Mourad

Though Mourad tries to sound funny, her description of her childhood does with time begin to sound whiny, and from time to time borders on that famous (and tiresome) anger of modern liberated women.

Whence does this anger come?

Perhaps her lack of understanding of her Indian family offers us a clue. Their -- Indian -- lives may be dull, enslaved even, but they are orderly: they know what to expect and how to behave in most situations; but Mourad -- a modern European woman -- is free and -- without a clue how to use that freedom. She has no access to the old models of being a woman; and the new models which she wishes to follow are incomplete, they are a work in progress, largely informed by ideas of justice and equality, they have not been sufficiently tested by life. We do not know whether they will work, or even whether they can. Many may not, especially the ones which assume that to be truly the equal of men a woman must be like a man in all ways, which probably can't be right, but which further assume in a simplistic manner that men are like this rather than like that, an assumption which is often insufficiently grounded in empirical observation, or at best based on poor sampling.

As a result the lives of modern women -- lives lived by the lights of the new ideologies -- are a work in progress, a living experiment; there are insufficient clues to know which experiments are likely to pay off and which will not; failures are frequent and painful; and the worst of it is that, given how short our lives are, and the irreversible nature of some experiments (such as having children), a failed experiment has a huge cost. Are modern women as a result more or less happy than women were in former times? Who knows; the truth is, that modern life is hard and full of pain and failure and disappointment.

And then there is the anger, intentionally released by feminist ideas, to be used as a weapon against oppressive males. It is a double edged sword: anger hurts the angry as much as it hurts those against whom it is intended to turn -- perhaps hurts the angry even more.