Are we better?

What I love about political theory is that it is constantly giving me new perspectives on how to look at almost everything in our past, present and future.  For me, Narayan's article offered just that. I found that I couldn't help but agree with almost all her arguments and the evidence she supported them with was done very well. It made me think (once again here I am going back to my paper) about my paper, Okin and many of the things we touched on in class that day on multiculturalism. We see ourselves in Western societies as setting the example for other countries, particularly in the form of women's rights and protection. Our culture is more humanitarian, better developed, superior. Sometimes I have to wonder, especially after reading her piece, do we really have that much more? "Death by domestic violence in the US seems to be numerically as significant a social problem as dowry murders in India." As Narayan argues, Western societies see acts like dowry murder as horrifying and nothing like we see here in the US. "Burning a woman to death in the Indian context is no more exotic than shooting her to death in the US context." I feel like her argument is right, we are really just often times doing the same thing to women here in the US as they do in countries in India but just under different contexts. Women are dying from domestic violence in all countries, including the US. Are these cultures really in different than ours? Narayan does not believe so, and I can't help but kind of agree with her.