Crisis on infinite haberdashery!
So, in addition to little girls being thrown out of soccer matches in Quebec, and the ban in French schools, we now have Nancy Pelosi being accused of "donning the garb of america's enemies" by wearing a hijab on her trip to Syria. The really obnoxious thing about the West's collective obsession with head scarves (and the apparently manifest necessity of freeing women from their comfy, hair-taming, oppressive folds), is that it almost seems feminist if you don't look too closely. The argument appears to go something like this: should women be forced to wear things they don't want to? Of course not. But wait a second - are all these women wearing head scarves or various versions of "modest" clothing being forced to? All of them everywhere? Well, maybe not. So they must be succumbing to social pressure. Thus we will ban the clothing and oppose social pressure with institutional pressure. Liberation ensues!
Um.
Guys: all societies have standards of modesty, and modesty is essentially irrational. The (classic Judeo-Christian) idea that women's hair and faces should be veiled because they are sinful or cause men to be sinful is of course pretty dumb. But I'm still waiting to hear y'all crusade against the irrational veiling of women's breasts, which springs from the same principles. Seriously, men. Turn to the woman next to you on the bus and ask if she wants to be liberated from her shirt. See how that goes.
I guess there are two things going on here. One is that it's a good excuse for salacious racism, which casts all Muslim men as tyrants and all Muslim women as submissives. (If you're very quiet, you can hear the sound of repressed white American libidos. It sounds sortof like a clogged-up milkshake machine.) The other thing is that it's always so much easier to meet fake goals. Why think about what it would take to actually improve the lot of the world's women (you know, civil rights, health care, access to contraception, higher education)? Scarves are so much easier to pick a fight with. Maybe even easier than a downtrodden yet oil-rich Middle Eastern nation. And that's pretty easy.
Not that there aren't plenty of places and situations where modesty rules are the result of outright tyranny. But it's the tyranny that is the problem, right guys? Right?
Or not. Mental note: start wearing hats. If this causes society to crumble, build criminal empire. Liberation ensues!
Um.
Guys: all societies have standards of modesty, and modesty is essentially irrational. The (classic Judeo-Christian) idea that women's hair and faces should be veiled because they are sinful or cause men to be sinful is of course pretty dumb. But I'm still waiting to hear y'all crusade against the irrational veiling of women's breasts, which springs from the same principles. Seriously, men. Turn to the woman next to you on the bus and ask if she wants to be liberated from her shirt. See how that goes.
I guess there are two things going on here. One is that it's a good excuse for salacious racism, which casts all Muslim men as tyrants and all Muslim women as submissives. (If you're very quiet, you can hear the sound of repressed white American libidos. It sounds sortof like a clogged-up milkshake machine.) The other thing is that it's always so much easier to meet fake goals. Why think about what it would take to actually improve the lot of the world's women (you know, civil rights, health care, access to contraception, higher education)? Scarves are so much easier to pick a fight with. Maybe even easier than a downtrodden yet oil-rich Middle Eastern nation. And that's pretty easy.
Not that there aren't plenty of places and situations where modesty rules are the result of outright tyranny. But it's the tyranny that is the problem, right guys? Right?
Or not. Mental note: start wearing hats. If this causes society to crumble, build criminal empire. Liberation ensues!