Adventures in Europe, Chapter 34: Too Many Monkeys!

[tacit]

The day after our nocturnal traipse around London's gristly but sadly amber-free sites-of-historic-horror-cum-tourist-attractions and equally livestock-free Tower Bridge, your humble scribe awoke and, after tea and eggs (marred only by the horrifying sight of seinneann_ceoil's flatmate digging into black pudding with gusto) travelled to the House of Joy, the

Comments

[blazingrowan]

FAIL

To paraphrase something I read a while ago - Dawkins has said he feels a sense of visceral disgust upon seeing a woman in a burqa, much like the feeling I get when I see a white Oxonian man telling women that what they wear disgusts him.

How many people who wear the burqa have you spoken to? Do you think it's entirely about being stoned to death otherwise? This is rubbish, and I'm disappointed in you.

I am not defending the burqa or the systems involved. I know breathtakingly little about it, as do you. Any opinion either of us form should be based on the expert knowledge of women personally involved. Anything else is irrelevant.

Call yourself a feminist ally? The first thing allies do is *listen.*

[blazingrowan]

Meta: I don't hate you. I'm telling you off because I like and trust you. If this is something you'd like to have a discussion about, I'm willing to. (Know that I absolutely, utterly hate arguing, though. I only do so where it's important and I trust the people involved lots. It would also be entirely a meta argument :D as I say, it's not for either of us to comment on the burqa. Fyi, I won't be on LJ much til Monday: I'm not ignoring any responses you make.)

[tacit]

I don't have a sense of visceral disgust at the burqa, or for that matter any article of clothing with perhaps the exception of plaid golf pants

[pstscrpt]

Problems in one culture don't excuse problems in another culture. You could just as well excuse slut-shaming because we at least don't cut off the clitoris. That's bullshit, too.

[tacit]

I don't think that BDSM is a good analogy, considering that I am not aware of any BDSM groups where the penalty for not participating is to be stoned to death or burned alive.

I get what you're trying to say, I really do. It's difficult to look at some behavior or cultural norm that's different from your own objectively.

The danger, though, in adopting an entirely relativistic, subjective approach is that it may allow you to gloss over, or even condone, atrocity.Yes, no society is perfect. Yes, there is no such thing as a society, including the society I live in, whose treatment of women is flawless.

My belief, and one that I hold very strongly, is this: It is not necessary to live in a flawless society in order to recognize and condone atrocity. It is not necessary to live in a society whose treatment of women is perfect in order to say "It is reprehensible to drag women into the public streets and beat them to death if they wear clothing you do not approve of." Countering examples of such atrocity by saying "Well, Western society

[tacit]

I would completely agree with you, but you didn't ask the person who was wearing the burqa if someone forced her to wear it. Not every woman who is wearing a headscarf is doing so because she's forced. What I'm saying is, dont' assume it's forced in every case, because it isn't.

Ah, I think I see the disconnect here.

It seems like you might be thinking that I am assuming the woman I saw was, individually and specifically, being forced to wear the burqa. if that's the case, let me clarify: I don't. That's not what I'm try8ing to say, and I'm not proposing that there are no women anywhere who wear it voluntarily.

Instead, seeing it sparked a train of thought that ended up with the guys I saw on CNN back when the Taliban was in power, smugly asserting that the ultra-strict laws existed for the sake of the women they oppressed, which to me sounds like the kind of rank bullshit that would exist if someone tried to claim that the institution of slavery was for the benefit of the slaves.

[meihua]

... seeing it sparked a train of thought that ended up with the guys I saw on CNN back when the Taliban was in power

No, you said this:

I saw, for the first time, a woman wearing a full burqa... And it was, if I may put it delicately, profoundly fucked up. Seriously, deeply fucked up beyond any rhyme or reason.

A woman wearing a burqa is not "fucked up". A woman wearing one under threat of violence (and for no other reason) is "fucked up" but that's not something you knowingly saw.

So you don't get to call it fucked up.

[meihua]

What I'm saying is much simpler, and much more limited in scope: a guy who forces women on pain of public execution to wear a burqa, and then says "I am doing this because it empowers women," is full of shit.

No, you said this:

I have also heard that the burqa is ennobling and liberating to women, because it frees them from having to compete in the arms race of sexualization in order to feel that they have value. To both of those things, I say bullshit. Absolute, unmitigated piles of fresh, steaming bullshit.i.e. you said it is never empowering

[tacit]

Thank you.

Seriously. Thank you very much for discarding the things I wrote that don't agree with your interpretation, and for telling me what I meant instead of listening to me.

And especially, thank you for calling me "racist" while you were at it. Your words are a model for the way I should behave, and I am most humbly appreciative of your example.

[meihua]

We're not face to face so I can't discuss your entire post. I can just point out where your tactics are bad and where you're being culturally imperialist (i.e. racist

[tacit]

I see. So you feel I'm not being effective in my tactics because I'm not really listening to others, and you point this out with...

...ineffective name-calling and, err, not listening to me.

Nice.

Tell you what. Get off your high horse, quit smugly trying to take the moral high ground, stop pontificating, and come back to this.

Or don't.

[meihua]

Ok, last shot:

http://amptoons.com/blog/2005/12/02/how-not-to-be-insane-when-accused-of-racism/

This is a post endorsed by lots of anti-racist activists, and also works well for feminism (and I think would be quite widely endorsed for that as well - not that feminismfail and racefail are comparable in lots of ways, but I think the emotions of being called out can be).

[tacit]

*snort*

Yeah, I can totally get behind you on the emotions on being called out. Sucks, doesn't it? Here you are, feeling all self-satisfied, telling other people how it's done without listening to them, and then somebody goes and calls you on it. Sucks, doesn't it?

Just so we're clear, though: You can take this personally. It's not that I'm intractable; it's that your conversational rhetoric comes across as condescending, self-satisfied, and arrogant. I am, and have been elsewhere in this thread,perfectly willing to sit down and have a reasonable conversation with someone who's taking issue with my ideas, my approach, or both. I'm dismissive of you because it's you.

You have, in this thread, done everything you've accused me of: you've told me how I feel rather than listening to me; you've come across as smug and superior; you've been insulting in tone and manner. And in the process, you've alienated someone who might otherwise be sympathetic to your ideas.

Well played.

You're free to reply or not as you see fit. I'm done with