Celivia
I can appreciate your quest to improve the lot of women the world over. However at the present moment, those women of age who are needed by the family to work the farm are being sought by the western clothing manufactures in the big cultural centres like the capital Phnom Penh. And to make way for those clothing companies thousands of families are being displaced, broken up, lost. All of a sudden women have become a commodity, marketable, and this is NOT a Cambodian cultural attribute. Watching their families disintegrate and their young women traded like cattle, drug use, sex trade. Worshiping money above family values is not what was the Cambodian Buddhist way. The author of this story happily isolates the reason and context behind "You should always highly obey your husband" (because it is your husband who loves you not the fellow waving the handful of riel or dollars) and excludes the rule of obligation of husband to wife. Can't foster anti-male hatred or push feminism if it becomes known that husbands must honour their wives.
How soon we like to forget that Christianity and Judaism and Islam also teach that wives ought to obey their husbands and that husbands ought to honour their wives. Can you just imagine the horror story when the author bumps into that little tid bit.

Obviously this is how more of the aid money should be channelled - let’s just air-drop some feminists.

Cambodia needs another occupying force, as much it needs western feminism. Parasitic indeed.

Why is it that instead of discussing the issue: the treatment of women in Cambodia, the discussion degenerates into slamming feminism?
If the roles were reversed and men were in the exact same position the Cambodian women are in, there would be cries of outrage.

Husbands must honour their wives?
Husbands do as they like in Cambodia where Domestic Violence is of astounding rates.

I don’t care what you all have to say about feminism- the issue is the treatment of women in Cambodia and the aid needed.
Whether feminism even exists or not, the treatment and rights of Cambodian girls and women need attention and they need help now, not when feminist bashers decide 'when'.
The feminist and female bashers do not have to give their permission or rationalise that rights for women must be appropriate or depend on cultural norms.

Let the Cambodian women decide; offer help and let them decide what to do with this help.
Show me an article where it is made clear that Cambodian women do not need help and I’ll look into it, but don’t speculate with all kinds of home-made theories to justify withholding aid.

Fact FYI: In countries where women's status is raised by education and opportunities the overall economy of that country improves. Where women continue to be treated as chattel that country stays in the stone age.

The men who condone inhumane treatment of women are simply revealing their own hatred of women in general.
Clearly these men have so little confidence in themselves that they bash any attempt of equality with women.
Real men are not threatened by equal standing with women. Real men fight for humane treatment of all people regardless of sex, colour or creed. Men who excuse subjugation of women are pathetic, feeble little cowards.
Notions of subservience and submission belong in the past. They are regressive and outmoded. Anyone who tries to justify these notions should be regarded with complete contempt as not worthy of civilised discussion.

Celivia says, "Real men are not threatened by equal standing with women. Real men fight for humane treatment of all people regardless of sex, colour or creed."
Exactly my point Celivia. But it's not about equal standing with women. Once again your focus is on the exception to the rule. In Cambodia to day Cambodian men have no standing. They're ruled by western influence and western interest and western investment. Their values have been cast aside, new values are being dictated. Their land is being taken from them, their water diverted, their forest clear cut, the top soil scattered by the wind and flooding, soil erosion, and their families broken apart all in the name of progress. The army only protects those with money, the police only arrest those who can't pay the bribe, and the judges will not take legal action if the money is right.
The average Cambodian family exist on $2.00/day. That two dollars has to cover everything. The average Cambodian cannot afford justice of any kind.
So "Real men fight for humane treatment of all people regardless of sex, colour or creed." Your only concern is for the women. There is nothing equal about that.

aqvarivs,
I am worried about the men too, and agree that the situation for them is terrible, but I am focussing on women here because not enough people seem to worry too much about them.

I obviously don’t know as much about Cambodia as you do- thanks for pointing out the corruption again; I am trying to understand the bigger picture but yes, I have to admit that like the author of this article, I am concerned about the women for the reason that they seem to have been forgotten amidst the disasters of corruption.
All I can see is that women matter as much as men do anywhere, not just in Western democracy. There are no degrees of equality- either all human beings have equal opportunity or we, as a race, continue to live in a regressive feudal manner with men as the overlords.

The majority of news articles or info on Cambodia make it clear to me that even though as you say men don’t have much standing either, Cambodian women still face more challenges than Cambodian men; e.g. it’s much harder for women than for men to move forward politically, to deal with discrimination and under-estimation, to face financial constraints, have less status, etc.

I believe that (as some articles have addressed) the women, e.g. as councilors, when empowered, trained and given a fair go, could have a positive impact especially at community level, even though they might find it very challenging to balance their ‘family duties’ and councilor duties; a challenge many men do not have to overcome. Women’s experiences matter and should be valued.

Training men and women to work together to rebuild communities (or on larger scale) must be a better thing for the country than training women to be their husbands’ servants and to ‘behave’ and to be agreeable and submissive, surely? Women do have something of value to add and we should insist that they are included in decision making.

Sorry Boaz, I missed your response to my indirect question probably due to its (my question's) irrelevance to this forum.

But you didn't exactly answer my question, did you?

Let me try again. Did you at any point accept and adopt the mores and lifestyle of the people at whom you were preaching, or did you consider it more appropriate that you continue to set an example by maintaining your own, during the learning process?

You see the point I am making here, don't you? At some point, you were an alien in another culture. Did you or did you not make any concessions to their existing views (before you changed them with your silver-tongued rhetoric), or did you insist on adherence to your own?

I am sure you will try to fob it off as "just doing God's work", but it would be the height of hypocrisy, would it not, if you were to have acted in a way entirely contrary to that which you demand of others.