Living Overseas and Maid Wages

A good friend of mine used to joke that "only boring women keep clean houses," and being anything but boring myself, I have always vowed to pay someone to do my cleaning if I could ever afford to do so. But I got a rude awakening when I triumphantly posted in my Livejournal that I'm paying my new maid 500 ringgit a month for eight hours a week of labor. To see my actual cost, divide that by 3.5. When I posted that blog, I did so with the idea that my American friends would be jealous, a rare occasion because having a maid is one of the few perks of living in Malaysia. Instead, my friends informed that this 40-yr old woman will be make $4.46 an hour, making me a sweat shop slave driver. The money I am giving her is what she asked to be paid for the amount of work that she proposed to do, though, so what that amount meant hadn't entered my mind. And I have the air conditioning on with NPR's All Things Considered in the background. Surely she could do worse.

My conscience was unsettled, though, so I decided to check up on whether she's getting a good part-time wage for Malaysia. Actually, it appears that house maids are doing pretty well according to this salary guide. There currently is no minimum wage in Malaysia, but look at this article which proposes a minimum wage of 1,200 ringgits. My maid earns almost half of that for eight hours a week. If she has two other houses, she's doing better than that, and if she works 40 hours a week, she's making almost double what authorities here think is a living wage. Despite what you might think, by paying maids so highly, we are empowering these women in a market where their unskilled labor would earn far less in other sectors.

But if all of this is true, then why do I feel like I am doing something wrong? I boycotted Nike shoes and Taco Bell tomatoes back in the day because of labor abuses. Of course, my house cleaning is hardly a matter of out-sourcing U.S. jobs or paying illegal immigrants less than locals. In fact, I am paying her more because it's possible to get Indonesian girls to work for you full-time for 500 ringgits. But do I only make myself feel better by saying "Oh, but someone else is worse!" Or am I legitimately doing what any overseas employer does, which is to pay the local going rate? Methinks I doth protest too much.

Freedom From, Freedom To: A Debate on Singapore

My husband and I just returned to Kuala Lumpur after taking a mini honeymoon in Singapore, which is just an hour away by plane. My frame of reference for Singapore was that it was supposed to be very clean and safe, but ruled with an iron fist that famously stuck to its guns and caned the American teen, Michael Cain, when he committed vandalism there in the 1990s. I was sympathetic to Cain during his trial, and with Singapore's executing a person roughly every nine days, I felt confident that no amount of cleanliness was worth such harsh penalities.

But when I spent some time in the city, I saw that the city's peace is not just about graffiti or litter. In Singapore no one ever made the obnoxious kissy noises at me that Malaysian men prefer over some American hoots or whistles. No cars honked at me to let me know they had power right then and I was a sex object. In fact, there were lots and lots of women walking alone to and from buses, subways, and shops. Unaccompanied women, at least not without another woman, are rare in KL because then you are even more likely to be the victim of a mugging, or "purse snatching" as the police frivilously categorize such crimes if you try to make a report. We even had a woman taxi driver, which is unheard of in KL because it would be like a roulette game with male passengers.

The downside of this utopian depiction of a city with four million people is that there were cameras probably every twenty-fourty feet or so on all the sidewalks, outside the entrances to buildings, etc. On Clarke Quay, there was a fine of 1,000 S$ for littering or riding a bike in the tunnel. Sure, that's a lot of money, but people shouldn't litter anyway, and bicyclists should assume responsibilty not to injure pedestrians, right? And in a broader sense, whatever the penalities for stealing, stealing is wrong, right? I might object to the strict drug laws, but then again, in such a lovely city what's there to escape from? Unless of course you are LGBT, and I do think that's not right because if everyone isn't free to love, then love is not free.

But there's no lack of art museums and small contemporary galleries, and there was far more nightlife in terms of live bands and friendly clubs and bars there than in KL. Not that KL doesn't have bars, but I've never seen one where the patrons looked entirely comfortable with each other the way people were in Singapore where I took such liberties as putting my purse in the seat next to me, walking on the sidewalk alone, and smiling at strangers. I am not kidding that you can't do those things safely where I live. Singapore does have gay bars, which the city tolerates, and I hope it continues to move in that direction. I would say that a lack of gay rights was the only discernible major problem, and that's not okay, but it's a great place to start in a country that has legal abortion and sex toy stores amidst the bustles of Orchard Street, the major shopping thoroughfare.

I am still against the death penalty in the U.S. for lots of reasons unrelated to this post, but what I like about a general enforcement of penalties and strong police protection is that if it works, you actually are protected, and you are free to do anything that's not against the law, which is like a civil liberty to me. In the U.S. women organize Take Back the Night, but in many other parts of the world, we'd need to start with Take Back the Morning and Afternoon. Not true of Singapore, and for that we'd do well to take note.

Global economic downturn is bad news for women's shelters

I normally think of large corporations as necessary evils (but mostly just evils) of a capitalist society, and although I care about the daily employees, I've felt a bit smug about some of the collapses in a nostalgic Fight Club sense--until seeing that the global economic crisis means less money for charities. And that as the Arlington, VA Doorways women's shelter rep says, "domestic abuse spikes during hard economic times — driving more women and their children to the shelters and safe houses." Doorways is looking at possibly losing only a fifth of its budget, which is bad news, but compare that to the Women's Aid Organization in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, which has a shortfall of $200,000 USD, less than the Doorways shortfall, and yet that amount is 2/3 the total budget. The WAO shortfall is also due to the global recession, and if the money can't be raised soon, they will have to close the Child Care Center which allows abused women to bring thier children with them.

It's a commonly held fact that women and children need charity and social services more than men, but lately I felt that such a coversation topic was too divisive, given the broad range of people suffering right now from job loss. But even if men and women were losing jobs at the same rate, women would still be holding the shorter end, because as Susan Faludi so effectively argues in Stiffed, a whole new wave of violence against women is likely to occur, brought about by men who feel emasculated by not being a breadwinner, who can't handle the powerlessness that is intrinsic to suffering consequences of the actions of people more powerful than oneself. And those more powerful in this case are the hedge fund managers, CEOs, deregulationists in congress, and every small investor and motgage holder who attempted to hop onto that bandwagon once it looked unstoppable. And some of those people will also be increasing violence.

So, what the heck is this blog about? I am concerned about how the fall of these major employers will statistically raise incidents of domestic abuse and then concerned that the lack of corporate donations is causing women's shelters to be crippled at the time they are even more in demand. In my naive Fight Club fantasy wherein multinationals crumble because of overexpansion, it never dawned on me that the "extra" of women's well-being would be compromised in such an event. More than this, it never occured to me that of course in a global recession, women in nonwestern countries wherein feminism hasn't nearly made the impact it has in the west will suffer disproportionately; in KL the police are still just as likely to tell a battered wife to go home and cook her husband his favorite meal or ask her "What did you do to make him hit you?" as they are to refer a woman to services like WAO's. In such a climate, clearly the lack of education about violence against women makes fundraising and forming alliances even more challenging for groups like WAO. I'm not saying that charity groups in the U.S. have it easy, except by comparison. And what a sad comparison. Women and children deserve more, and so do men. Men could help by proving the statistics wrong and not increasing violence in the first place.

Roll up your sleeves, friends of women. It's going to be a long winter.

Power and Pole Dancing in Malaysia

I lost my footing on the treadmill when I found the Asian Pole Summit ad in the Expat KL Magazine, which targets expats in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, a Muslim country in Southeast Asia. My first thoughts as an American feminist were that the summit represents an unusual tolerance for female sexual expression, or maybe it’s not so different in this culture from belly dancing. Egyptian women once danced me under the table at a women-only party, but then I consider our proximity to the "lady sex" industry in Bangkok where erotic dance is more empowering to pimps than the dancers. Then I noticed the ad's Simone de Beauvoir quote, “one is not born a woman, one becomes one.”

The appropriation of this second wave feminist cornerstone made me ask “What is a woman--in Malaysia?" Beauvoir’s idea that “women” are a social construct threatens to crumble the Islamic gender norms, which circumscribe dress (even though the hijab is optional here), rights, and behavior. I let local women answer for themselves whether and how they feel might feel oppressed, but in any case the Asian Pole Summit’s audience lives in a society whose majority subscribes to strict gender norms and where men can take a two-hour flight and get all the pole dancing they want. In such a context, to tell women that they can empower themselves via a weekend of “killer workouts” and “exotic titillation” reduces the options for women to the virgin-whore dichotomy while doing nothing to challenge the patriarchal social structure wherein most married women have banking options that rival pre-1950s America.

This country is confused about women. Mini skirts and hijabs rival each other for majority so it feels to me that the only public woman seems to be a sexualized one, and therefore any choice a woman makes about her presentation is a response to the country’s secular-religious struggle. I wonder if female empowerment through the art of pole dancing is possible in a patriarchal society; as Andi Zeisler asks regarding do-me feminism, “If the standards and stereotypes by which girls and women are judged haven't changed, could it really be called empowerment at all?”

No doubt the Asian Pole Summit deserves kudos for its woman-centered approach and the apparent business savvy of its female leaders. The issue isn’t to pole dance or not to pole dance, but it’s a question of power and meaning. I'm not convinced that empowerment from sexy fitness will translate outside the studio's doors where a solitary woman, irregardless of race or class, is a target for robbery or abuse even in broad daylight (don’t be mislead by KL’s low statistics). Maybe the dance's power doesn't have to translate to be effective for an individual woman, but I think she might be best served learning a dance move that includes a few karate chops when she’s seduced a would-be attacker to his knees.