WOMEN FIGHT TO DEFINE THE ARAB SPRING

[Some male leaders are acknowledging the need for change. In Libya last month, Mohamed Sowan boasted that his Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Justice and Development Party had the second-largest number of female members of any party in the Parliament and “looks forward to them having more participation.” In Tunisia, Rachid al-Ghannouchi, the intellectual force of Ennahda, the moderate Islamist party that won the first free election there in 2011, said that in the next election he expects Ennahda’s ticket to be half women and “we might have a larger percentage than in your Congress.” (In fact, Tunisia has already beaten the United States on that score.)]

By Carol Giacomo

Moises Saman for The New York Times

Egyptian women outside a Cairo polling place on May 23, when the 

country held its first democratic election for president.

TUNIS : When Mabrouka M’barek is in the Tunisian capital these days, much of her time is spent writing a new constitution as an elected member of the National Constituent Assembly. It is a role the 32-year-old mother of two embraces with idealistic passion and more than a little amazement. Before President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali was ousted in 2011, she never imagined herself a “founding mother,” as she referred to herself in a recent interview, of this country or any other.

Now Mrs. M’barek — a Tunisian-American whose constituents are Tunisians in the United States, Canada and Europe — is deep into one of the most important tasks of any new democracy. She is helping to write the document that will underpin the rights and responsibilities shared by the government and its citizens.

Men overwhelmingly dominate the Arab Spring countries, but women, enabled by advances in literacy and higher education, are increasingly asserting themselves. In Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Syria, they have been on the front lines of revolution. These nations will not succeed unless women are fully incorporated into political and economic life.

Women in Arab countries have long lagged behind those in other countries in terms of opportunities and leadership positions in politics and business, and this has hurt the region’s overall progress, according to reports by the World Economic Forum and the United Nations Development Program.

Some male leaders are acknowledging the need for change. In Libya last month, Mohamed Sowan boasted that his Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Justice and Development Party had the second-largest number of female members of any party in the Parliament and “looks forward to them having more participation.” In Tunisia, Rachid al-Ghannouchi, the intellectual force of Ennahda, the moderate Islamist party that won the first free election there in 2011, said that in the next election he expects Ennahda’s ticket to be half women and “we might have a larger percentage than in your Congress.” (In fact, Tunisia has already beaten the United States on that score.)

In Tunisia, the most Western and liberal of the Muslim countries, women won 49 of the 217 Constituent Assembly seats in last year’s election. The overwhelming majority of them — 42 — were from Ennahda. In Libya, women hold 33 of 200 seats in Parliament.

But numbers are never the whole story. In Libya, women have been excluded from much of the serious decision-making, and the security challenges of a country awash in militias and guns often push their concerns to the back burner, said Alaa Murabit, founder of the Voice of Libyan Women, a nongovernmental activist group. As in much of the Arab world, there are also strong social pressures on women to forgo careers that are “too successful,” she said.

The Syrian National Council, the opposition group in exile, failed to name one woman when it chose its decision-making body at a conference in Qatar on Thursday. In Egypt, the streets remain so unsafe for women that vigilante groups have begun forming to mete out unofficial justice against those who harass or assault women. The Egyptian-American journalist Mona Eltahawy, who was beaten in Cairo by security forces last year, goes so far as to charge that “Arab societies hate women.”

The new constitutions are crucial to protecting and expanding women’s rights. Not surprisingly, there have been fierce political battles on just these issues. In Egypt, the 100-member assembly drafting a constitution is bickering over a handful of issues, including women’s rights, as it races to meet a Dec. 12 deadline. On Tuesday, it eliminated a provision that would have tied some aspects of women’s rights, like marriage and inheritance, more firmly to Shariah, or Islamic law. But Egyptian Salafists, ultraconservatives who want to segregate the sexes and ensure that women are veiled, are pushing back. The assembly plans a vote on the constitution this month.

Even in Tunisia, where secularists have a stronger voice and Ennahda has espoused more temperate views than most Islamist parties, women had to take to the streets in protest over efforts by some of the more conservative assembly members to dilute protections for women contained in a 1956 law. The Islamists wanted language in the constitution to say that the roles of men and women are “complementary.” The secularists, fearful of ceding any ground, insisted that men and women should have “the same rights and duties” and added an assurance that the state will guarantee women’s rights. Ennahda leaders say that the final document will unambiguously endorse gender equality and universal rights. But until the constitution is formally adopted, no one can be sure.

Still, the Arab Spring has allowed Muslim girls and women to dream big dreams. “For young girls to now tell me they want to be the future president, minister of defense, these are things I never imagined,” Ms. Murabit wrote in an e-mail. But enshrining rights in a constitution and making sure they are carried out are big challenges.

“This is a critical time,” said Mrs. M’barek. “There are two steps in a revolution: You break it and then you build something new. That’s the hardest.”  

@  The New York Times

WHITE MALE PATRIARCHY  AND ROMNEY PRESIDENCY

[The voters anointed a lesbian senator, and three new gay congressmen will make a total of five in January. Plus, three states voted to legalize same-sex marriage. Chad Griffin, the president of the Human Rights Campaign, told The Washington Post’s Ned Martel that gays, whose donations helped offset the Republican “super PACs,” wanted to see an openly gay cabinet secretary and an openly gay ambassador to a G-20 nation.]

By Maureen Dowd

IT makes sense that Mitt Romney and his advisers are still gobsmacked by the fact that they’re not commandeering the West Wing.

(Though, as “The Daily Show” correspondent John Oliver jested, the White House might have been one of the smaller houses Romney ever lived in.)

Team Romney has every reason to be shellshocked. Its candidate, after all, resoundingly won the election of the country he was wooing.

Mitt Romney is the president of white male America.

Maybe the group can retreat to a man cave in a Whiter House, with mahogany paneling, brown leather Chesterfields, a moose head over the fireplace, an elevator for the presidential limo, and one of those men’s club signs on the phone that reads: “Telephone Tips: ‘Just Left,’ 25 cents; ‘On His Way,’ 50 cents; ‘Not here,’ $1; ‘Who?’ $5.”

In its delusional death spiral, the white male patriarchy was so hard core, so redolent of country clubs and Cadillacs, it made little effort not to alienate women. The election had the largest gender gap in the history of the Gallup poll, with Obama winning the vote of single women by 36 percentage points.

As W.’s former aide Karen Hughes put it in Politico on Friday, “If another Republican man says anything about rape other than it is a horrific, violent crime, I want to personally cut out his tongue.”

Some Republicans conceded they were “a ‘Mad Men’ party in a ‘Modern Family’ world” (although “Mad Men” seems too louche for a candidate who doesn’t drink or smoke and who apparently dated only one woman). They also acknowledged that Romney’s strategists ran a 20th-century campaign against David Plouffe’s 21st-century one.

But the truth is, Romney was an unpalatable candidate. And shocking as it may seem, his strategists weren’t blowing smoke when they said they were going to win; they were just clueless.

Until now, Republicans and Fox News have excelled at conjuring alternate realities. But this time, they made the mistake of believing their fake world actually existed. As Fox’s Megyn Kelly said to Karl Rove on election night, when he argued against calling Ohio for Obama: “Is this just math that you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better?”

Romney and Tea Party loonies dismissed half the country as chattel and moochers who did not belong in their “traditional” America. But the more they insulted the president with birther cracks, the more they tried to force chastity belts on women, and the more they made Hispanics, blacks and gays feel like the help, the more these groups burned to prove that, knitted together, they could give the dead-enders of white male domination the boot.

The election about the economy also sounded the death knell for the Republican culture wars.

Romney was still running in an illusory country where husbands told wives how to vote, and the wives who worked had better get home in time to cook dinner. But in the real country, many wives were urging husbands not to vote for a Brylcreemed boss out of a ’50s boardroom whose party was helping to revive a 50-year-old debate over contraception.

Just like the Bushes before him, Romney tried to portray himself as more American than his Democratic opponent. But America’s gallimaufry wasn’t knuckling under to the gentry this time.

If 2008 was about exalting the One, 2012 was about the disenchanted Democratic base deciding: “We are the Ones we’ve been waiting for.”

Last time, Obama lifted up the base with his message of hope and change; this time the base lifted up Obama, with the hope he will change. He has not led the Obama army to leverage power, so now the army is leading Obama.

When the first African-American president was elected, his supporters expected dramatic changes. But Obama feared that he was such a huge change for the country to digest, it was better if other things remained status quo. Michelle played Laura Petrie, and the president was dawdling on promises. Having Joe Biden blurt out his support for gay marriage forced Obama’s hand.

The president’s record-high rate of deporting illegal immigrants infuriated Latinos. Now, on issues from loosening immigration laws to taxing the rich to gay rights to climate change to legalizing pot, the country has leapt ahead, pulling the sometimes listless and ruminating president by the hand, urging him to hurry up.

More women voted than men. Five women were newly elected to the Senate, and the number of women in the House will increase by at least three. New Hampshire will be the first state to send an all-female delegation to Congress. Live Pink or Dye.

Meanwhile, as Bill Maher said, “all the Republican men who talked about lady parts during the campaign, they all lost.”

The voters anointed a lesbian senator, and three new gay congressmen will make a total of five in January. Plus, three states voted to legalize same-sex marriage. Chad Griffin, the president of the Human Rights Campaign, told The Washington Post’s Ned Martel that gays, whose donations helped offset the Republican “super PACs,” wanted to see an openly gay cabinet secretary and an openly gay ambassador to a G-20 nation.

Bill O’Reilly said Obama’s voters wanted “stuff.” He was right. They want Barry to stop bogarting the change.

@  The NewYork Times