Amnesty campaign blatantly sexist
I have been a member of Amnesty for five years and I stand over my claim.
Consider Amnesty’s close association with the radical feminist, Eve Ensler. She sat beside Amnesty secretary general, Irene Khan, during the launch of this campaign in London and was also invited to open Amnesty’s Student and Youth Conference in Dublin last month.
Ms Ensler’s play, The Vagina Monologues, has been described by American feminist Camille Paglia as having “a poisonously anti-male subtext.”
Interviewed in March 2004, Eve Ensler stated: “Look at the male energy - it is filled with violence, it is filled with testosterone. Testosterone does not provide for effective policymaking.”
In her lecture ‘Sex, Lies and The Vagina Monologues,’ in Washington last year, Prof Christina Hoff Sommers stated: “The Vagina Monologues features a rogues’ gallery of male brutes, sadists, child molesters, genital mutilators, gang rapists and vile little boys. It is a poisonously anti-male play.”
Amnesty has no such reservations and openly support the play.
In the original version of this play, a woman tells of her statutory rape by an adult woman when she was just 13. She says: “Now people say it was a kind of rape. I was only 13 and she was 24. Well, I say, if it was rape, it was a good rape then.”
The legitimisation of the lesbian rape of a 13-year-old girl generated controversy so that, in later versions of the play, the girl becomes 16 and this particular sentence (or sometimes the whole scene) is removed.
Amnesty’s association with this play indicates that a strand of radical, militant feminism is flourishing within an organisation previously known for its impartial protection of human rights.
Patrick McGinnity
Derrynoose
Keady
Co Armagh
