Its a nice gesture but there are clearly men being beaten in the video as well. Does the beating of one young woman outweigh them all put together? I am bothered by the way the news is reported almost as much as whats happening.

I saw the story on CNN - several of the people they interviewed were very outspoken that they also were protesting the treatment of men. In addition, men had formed a protective ring around the women as they marched. I found this heartening, given the generally repressive nature of Egyptian society.

@Suvorov: Sure, men are being beaten too. However, there are reasons that the beating of the woman is especially shocking.

First, men generally have an instinct to defend women. Yet here they are deliberately beating a woman, even after she is completely helpless.

Second, these are Muslim men in a largely Muslim country. The whole justification in Muslim culture for repressing women is that women need special protection and care. Yes, we all know this is nonsense, and that many Muslim men exploit the situation to beat and abuse their women. However, this is always carefully kept private, behind closed doors. A public beating of a woman for no discernible reason exposes the hypocrisy. This woman does need protection - from what Muslim men and the Muslim culture are doing to her.

That is why the woman's beating is far, far more important than anything else in that video.

> Does the beating of one young woman outweigh them all put together?

Based on sociobiological models of how the human mind operates:

yes.

A society can brutally beat (or even kill) 5%, 10%, or 15% of its young men, and survive.

...but a society can not impair the reproductive fitness of its women, or it will be in trouble.

This is truth, and we've evolved to understand it, at a subconscious level. We are, on average, outraged when presumably fecund women are harmed, and we are, on average, less emotionally worked up when young men are harmed.

Yes, a_random_guy, it is something akin to child welfare advocates who demand ever more in the way of third party contribution to child welfare, but are discovered to be abusing the children in their care. Or fundamentalist politicians who holler about the need for greater societal sexual continence, even as they fall into seedy extra-marital scandals. Or liberal politicians who lecture us about the need to pay more and the sin of greed, even as they evade taxes and obtain private plunder using their connections.

When the sermon's message so diverges from sermonizer's own conduct, we are right to first mock, then sneer, then overthrow.

@Spartee - Can we just skip to the "overthrow" part? I'm really getting tired of just mocking and sneering.

Well, ladies, do you want equality or don't you? It looks to me that women want the glory and rewards without paying the price that men pay.

If this woman didn't want to be roughed-up along with her male protectors, she could have stayed home.

I found the incident quite refreshing, from an "equal rights ---> equal responsibilities" perspective. After a few million more women are beaten and/or killed, they can stand next to their men and claim that they have EARNED respect ... for once.

Jay R, the key point here is that a regime that says it must be tough and overweening to protect women from nasty men destroys its credibility when the protectors are tough on the very people it claims to protect.

This video is showing that occuring, and serves as a moment of clarity at how the thugs are using women as a symbol to cover their real agenda: enslaving both men and women.

Being an unfree resident in Egypt, male or female, must suck. Yeah, women are not as likely to go out and brave the tear gas and clubs, but their lives still suck in regimes like Egypt's. Keep an eye on condemning the gulag operaters, not the female inmates.

Radical Islam attempts to combine the features of tribal/caste societies with those of totalitarian societies. A tribal or caste mentality is a useful thing for a dictator to exploit, because it de-humanizes the "other". And here you see the results of that thinking.

"Keep an eye on condemning the gulag operaters, not the female inmates."

Condemn? I thought I was praising her for having the guts that most women don't have.

And Amy, thanks for emphasizing how disposable men are -- especially when women's interests can be advanced by men's injuries and deaths.

So, do you want women to be equal or not? It appears that you don't. A very reasonable position, I might add, since true equality will be a BITCH for women -- deadly, actually.

A whole pack of armed, gutless scumbags beating & stomping one brave fallen woman. And some tiresome turd of a troll manages to turn that into a whine about men's rights. You're doing a fabulous job of demonstrating the equality of the sexes, Jay R. Just as the likes of Andrea Dworkin viewed everything in the universe through the keyhole of their warped notion of women's rights, you bring your own blinkered perspective to every comment you make.

"And Amy, thanks for emphasizing how disposable men are" If the goons in that video, and the Salafists, and the Taliban, were all rounded up and sent to a desert island with no women, just lots of korans, explosives, and goats, would the world suffer any loss? That one brave woman is worth more than all of them. They are emphasizing their own disposability, Amy isn't doing it for them.

Let's focus on the goons here... Dictator wannabees around the world are desperate for some new tricks. Nazism and Communism didn't work out so well. Terrorism got slapped down hard, and socialism is now imploding. What's a poor dictator to do?

Well, there's the old trick of dividing people into tribes and castes. You privilege some and impugn others; it creates handy scapegoats to blame problems on, and creates a rationale for eliminating "undesirables". Egypt, as we clearly see, is in play, and the players are trying to use various combinations of old and new tricks. But the oldest trick in the book is: demonize your opponents, then publicly beat the crap out of them. Men, women, doesn't matter. They are The Other, and therefore not really human.

This, folks is what they'd like to do to Western civilization. See, all those Westerners running around living a comfortable lifestyle and having different opinions without killing each other? That really pisses them off. It's Not Natural. What's Natural is for people to obey them, or else. Period. Ya gotta keep people down, and you have to shoot rather large numbers of them to set an example.

What's going to happen to Egypt? I think it's doomed. It's been a year now, and no order has emerged. It wouldn't surprise me if the country breaks up, or becomes a failed state a la Somalia. I hate to say this because it means that Blue Bra Woman's struggle was in vain. But I see no path to any good outcome in Egypt. Either the Muslim Brotherhood gains control and kills productive people until the country can no longer function, or civil war sets in and the country is divided up.

(It also wouldn't surprise me if Israel is once again in possession of the Sinai a year from now, this time for good. And that's probably the best possible outcome for the Egyptians who live there.)