Editorial: A liberal offering of torture

That staunch champion of women's rights (yeah right), former US President George W Bush, notoriously used the cause of Muslim women's oppression as a convenient excuse (among others, such as non-existent weapons of mass destruction) for warmongering in the Middle East.

Certainly rules imposed on women in some fundamentalist Muslim countries - compulsory coverall clothing, walking several paces behind men, prohibition from driving or sports - are violations of human rights, no matter how they're justified by cute cultural or religious traditions.

But here in the allegedly liberated West, which marked International Women's Day last week, we needn't be smug.

Yes, women can vote (although even Switzerland only introduced women's suffrage as late as the 1970s) and feminist action has seen off gender discrimination in employment, workplaces, clubs and public bars, and laws which treated women as the property of husbands or fathers.

However, female pay rates still lag significantly behind men's, boardrooms and governments remain male dominated, and the pressure for women to appear rich, thin and young is just as tyrannical as any burqua.

All but the most thick-skinned of women are sitters for destructive consumer exploitation.

The market offers endless opportunities for self-mutilation - among them carcinogenic cosmetics, shoes with spine-killing heels and crippling pointed toes, excruciating hair removal products, life-threatening elective cosmetic surgery, toxic hair treatments such as perms, dyes and fixatives, and expensive, malnourishing food fads.

These instruments of torture are tragic because women - haunted by low self-esteem about their own body images - regularly undergo them "voluntarily", exercising what markets have fooled them into thinking is "choice", in order to conform.

In fact they are no less harmful than the historical bone-breaking corsets, lead-based face powders and foot binding which more contemporary "liberated" societies take pride in having abolished.

Lingering patriarchal prejudices persist, such as the perception that domestic drudgery - laundry, cooking, dishes and toilet cleaning - is really women's work; that public breastfeeding is somehow indecent; and that female sexual body parts can be displayed for profit and titillation in advertising and entertainment media while male members - erect or flaccid - are somehow sacrosanct and therefore not on show.

Male primogeniture is still enshrined in the succession to the British monarchy (although finally under review) and the Roman Catholic Church remains implacably opposed to female clergy (and wedded to the priesthood celibacy which appears to foster an endemic predilection for sex abuse).

Sadly, the old feminist Christmas message - the birth of a man who thinks he's God is an absolutely everyday event - still applies.

Communities are riddled with misogynist blokes and power-tripping philandering lechers unable to see women as anything other than sexual objects or servants.

Not a pretty picture.

I daresay unreconstructed male chauvinists, threatened by the relative rise in female autonomy, blame feminism for the current unsavoury increase in violent crime by (especially) young women.

It just goes to show that gender stereotyping, concocted for the convenience of perpetrators, always was a myth.