today's lesson on women's agency

[sam]

Some of you may have seen this report about Chinese men paying for 'ghost brides'.

http://abcnews.go.com/International/print?id=2825821

BEIJING - Police in northern China have detained three men for the deaths of two women whose corpses were to be sold as "ghost brides" to accompany dead men in the afterlife, state media said.

Authorities indicated that the killings last year were not isolated cases, the Legal Daily newspaper said on its Web site, but it did not give any details.

Yang Dongyan, 35, a farmer from Shaanxi province, said he had bought a young woman for $1,600 and planned to sell her as a bride, according to the paper.

But then he met Liu Shenghai, who told him that the woman could command a higher price as a "ghost bride," it said. The tradition, called "minghun" or afterlife marriage, is common in the Loess Plateau region of northern China, where a recently deceased woman is buried with a bachelor to keep him company after his death.

Yang killed the woman in a ditch, bagged her body, and sold her for $2,077 to Li Longsheng, an undertaker, who said he could find a buyer, the paper said.

As terrible as this sounds, I'd like to apply the current pro-prostitution way of thinking onto "ghost brides" to see what it yields in terms of a woman's right to choose an economic option that's morally repugnant to most people.

In Iran prostituted women are temporarily married to tricks who have the marriage dissolved after a few hours of exercising the raping privileges that come with Iranian husbandry. These women, like sex workers everywhere, are "temporary brides" so how much of a stretch is it from there to "ghost brides"? Let us ponder if such apparently harmful traditional practices only seem sexist and femicidal by persons unable to grant "death worker" women the same rights to free agency as "sex worker" women are supposed to have.

It is well known that sati is the Indian practice of widows immolating themselves on their husband's funeral pyre. Reading the Wiki page might make what you're about to read here more clear.

There is some question over how many of these women committed suicide versus how many of them committed "forced suicide", but suffice to say it is undeniable some women have chosen suicide in the form of sati as the way of enacting their religious and cultural beliefs upon the deaths of their husbands.

Is it cultural imperialism and a denial of women's self agency to tell adult women who wish to commit sati that they will not be permitted to do so? Just because some women are pushed into forced suicide doesn't mean they all are and feminists are supposed to honor all women's choices and rights to religious and cultural freedom. Oregon has a law that gives certain people the right to 'die with dignity', and a longer life lived with a future "death husband's" money will surely produce a death with more dignity than a shorter life ended by slow starvation without said money.

Should the regulation and promotion of a profitable death industry where men purchase some Chinese women as "death workers" be permitted if some women agree to be pre-paid for accompanying a man into the afterlife upon his death? What if a Chinese woman has no other way of making the large amounts of money needed to keep her or her family alive other than death working, does that make Chinese men soliciting women for death work acceptable and brokering deals between willing death workers and minghun-believing men an ethical business?

Would the afterlife bride industry be more palatable if women did the brokering the way it's assumed the business of renting temporary brides to men is better when madams are in charge instead of pimps?

What do you think?