Love the idea of Iran dedicating hundreds of millions to its R U INVISIBLE, FEMALE? technology; love even more our Treasury saying fuck you go ahead but we’ll try to make it hurt.
Pasargad Arian Information and Communication Technology Company is currently working on clitoral recognition surveillance tools [CRST] that will detect a still-intact clitoris. Once detected, the organ will be targeted by flesh-searing drones.
The wise Finns move toward uncovering their poor burqa’ed children. Brava.
… follow the honor killing trial.
Lovely that the attempted murder was filmed.
Lovely that Fatima has the guts to take the stand.
Not lovely that people willing, in public, to kill their daughter exist among us.
The famous final line of The Sun Also Rises will do for our response to the International Criminal Court having “issued arrest warrants for two senior Taliban leaders in Afghanistan, accusing them of crimes against humanity over the persecution of women and girls.”
The sadistic treatment of that country’s female population is the stuff of nightmares, and I guess it does the heart good, or (if they’re allowed to know about it) does the women/girls of Afghanistan good… But the ICC has no real power to do anything in this case, so we’ll have to be content with whatever symbolic value the gesture represents.
In 2021 … 62 percent of Americans said that transgender athletes should be able to play only on teams that matched their gender at birth; by 2023, that figure had risen to 69 percent. This is not bigotry at work. This year, the same pollster found that a solid majority of Americans — 56 percent — favor policies protecting trans people from discrimination. Americans are broadly fine with transgender people. They are fine with gay people. They just reject replacing the fact of biological sex with the phantasms of gender ideology…
[F]ighting a losing battle to allow trans women to compete in women’s sports and for biological men to be in women’s intimate spaces and to perpetuate risky, inadequately tested sex changes on children, including gay and lesbian ones, is dumb, offensive to common sense and risks a much bigger backlash.
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U Penn has now rescinded trans swimmer Lia Thomas’s medals.
If veiling is, at its core, about controlling women — and if it rests on the idea that men aren’t responsible for their actions — then refusing to challenge it isn’t tolerance. It’s surrender… We must face Islamist misogyny in the UK, eye-to-uncovered-eye.
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Some say the vile theocrat running Iran may be replaced under pressure of current circumstance. Maybe the next person will toss the mandatory hijab law.
… dehumanizing.
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Consider on the other hand Mona Eltahawy:
A bizarre political correctness has tied the tongues of those who would normally rally to women’s rights. One blogger, a woman, lamented that “[then-president] Sarkozy’s anti-burqa stance deprives women of identity.” It’s precisely the opposite: It’s the burqa that deprives a woman of identity...
Why the silence as some of our women fade into black either as a form of identity politics, a protest against the state or out of acquiescence to Salafism?
As a Muslim woman and a feminist I would ban the burqa.
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And consider Marie Gilbert:
As a French feminist, I am surprised to see English-speaking feminists defend women’s right to wear the niqab. The niqab may be a religious symbol (something that is still, however, the object of much debate among specialists of Islam) and one that is (sometimes freely) worn for religious reasons. Those feminists who so openly criticise any stand against the niqab, however, seem to forget that the niqab, beyond its religious dimension, is also, very clearly, a sign of women’s inequality and inferiority. This, rather than an anti-religious feeling or Islamophobia, accounts for the French ban and for the call, voiced by some French personalities, on Muslim women to renounce wearing the niqab.
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Back to the burqa defender —
“The bloodstained perpetrators [are] sitting in the halls of political power,” writes she. Right out of “Politics and the English Language.”
Let’s take this one element at a time.
If anyone ever tries to sell you on the idea that wearing a burqa or niqab is comfortable, feel free to laugh in their face. Anyone who has ever witnessed what it’s like to walk around cities, often in sweltering temperatures, draped head to toe in black, knows just how punishing the garment is. Go ahead and argue that it pleases Allah to see women and little girls with no peripheral vision try to navigate busy streets. I mean, that argument at least is in line with twisted hyper-modesty edicts. But don’t try telling us that these deathly weeds are comfortable.
As for safety: Walking around severely perceptually and physically hampered is not safe at all; and if you mean safe from the raping ways of all evil men… Men who find your eight year old daughter as evilly seductive as they find you… Look at the normally dressed women around you, moving freely among normal men. Try to work on your attitude toward men rather than cling to an outsized sense of the degree of danger to you they represent.
Do you really think the people gazing at your invisibility behind full body black cloth feel respect? As your husband in jeans and a t-shirt, and similarly free boy children, gambol about in front of you?
There’s nothing patronizing about pointing out that there’s something disturbing about someone whose lived experience tells her that walking around with a symbolically rich black fabric over her mouth generates personal comfort and respect from others.
… Algeria, Azerbaijan, and Bosnia, encompassing ethnic, political, sectarian, and geographical diversity in Muslim populations, … have restricted the [burqa] in public spaces. Some of these Muslim states also have bans in place for the hijab, the Islamic head covering, in legal and public institutions that limit the display of all religious symbols. The number of Muslim-majority states outlawing the face veil is increasing.
… [I]t is ironic that counter-terror laws applied to all citizens are criticised [in Europe] in a way that Muslim-majority states are not when they pass policies aimed specifically at these garbs.
What is also evident is that more Muslim states can deem these sexist coverings, designed to erase female identities, as not belonging to their society than European states.
… Instead of simply dismissing a burqa ban, the UK government should listen to progressive voices within the Muslim community who condemn such clothing as a tool to suppress women.
Questioned in Parliament about banning burqas, the PM got all How Dare You? flustered, as did a bunch of other politicians. In a country where comfortable majorities support a ban, this was not a brilliant move, because now UD‘s Google News alerts are exploding with BURQA stories out of Britain. Everybody’s talking about it.
The minute a country initiates a serious debate about the burqa, it is on its way to a ban. Talking and reading about it all the time unburies a latency: Latently, millions of modern people really dislike burqas and what they blatantly say about women; and all it takes is manifesting the subject for their dark inchoate messes of feelings about them (pity, guilt, repulsion, studied indifference, helplessness at their small daughters seeing invisible women) to firm up into opposition. I’ve followed this narrative many times; it’s a step by step process into referenda, partial restrictions, etc etc.
So the latest thing is an important Conservative party member announcing that “employers should be able to ban their staff from wearing face coverings.” Also, she will not talk to constituents in “surgeries” if they are fully covered. These announcements will activate religious and political indignation, which will in turn inflame the other side, and so it goes.
The problem is that there’s absolutely no reason for a modern democracy to tolerate gender-based repression and a total refusal to join civil society, and even good people who pride themselves on their tolerance know this. This is why so much of the world already bans/restricts this garment.
It’s banned in Cameroon, Chad, the Republic of the Congo, Gabon, Tunisia, China, Kyrgyzstan, Sri Lanka, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. There are also tons of partial bans, in Muslim and non-Muslim countries. Burqa bans have regularly been upheld by the courts.
In short, however you personally feel about the burqa, its restriction has become a routine and largely uncontested part of the life of many countries and territories, and discussions about banning, or further banning, are ongoing in lots of locations.
It’s a thing, babe, in Morocco as much as in Italy.
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Now, UD‘s own US, largely because it’s so large (most people here don’t ever encounter burqas), hasn’t had anything to say about burqas; but, well, England. Now England…
England’s the big holdout; no burqa bans here!
Many of its neighbors, as we see, have gone the total or partial ban route.
And at the very least, these neighbors don’t consider mere debate about the burqa to be an abomination. How can it be, considering what’s going on in the world with the garment? Do you really want to hold yourself snobbily aloof from this widely shared/discussed concern?
Embarrassingly, yes. An MP brought the matter up in PM’s Questions the other day – the sort of thing one would expect to happen, and one would want to be prepared for – and got a fierce appalled Lady Bracknell put-down from the PM and others.
I mean how dare you. How dare you.
It is amusing – embarrassingly so – that England continues to feign indignation that anyone, anywhere, would have the nerve…
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Here’s the deal. The story is now all over the British press, which means the latent unhappiness in much of the population with full facial veiling is now being made manifest.
Dig. You’re supposed to shut up about the burqa and keep it out of the press precisely because the moment you break the uncomfortable national silence about it, millions of Brits will realize that now that you mention it they are quite unhappy with the thing.
I mean, uh, strong majorities, when asked, support a ban.
It’ll be interesting to see whether the government’s attempt to strangle vox populi through incredulous contempt will work.
Here at UD, we cover both anti-hijab and pro-hijab protests in Iran, where they put you in prison, or at least bankrupt you, for failing to wear the mandatory hijab.
[Photo Vahid Salemi/AP]
Here, enraged women eviscerate the government for failing to destroy the anti-hijabis, and, while we’re at it, we demand MORE VEILING YOU FOOLS YOU INFIDELS.
Why let women get away with a dinky little head doily? Make it black, make it thick, make it full body, baby!
However!
Tehran Governor Hossein Khosh-Eghbal said … that the [pro-hijab] demonstrations were “illegal” and warned that police would disperse any further protests held without permits.
lolololol
An Iranian filmmaker offers his all-hijab all the time movie at Cannes, where, interestingly, all of the film’s actresses showed up hijabless.
And big thick black robeless! MOST immodest. I hope someone has reported them to the Chastity Law’s Morality Police.
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Ah. That’s more like it.
Nothing like informed consent to this serious constriction can be said to exist; nor is there any reason for a modern society to play along with the grotesque belief that five year old girls must cover themselves because they are sexually arousing to men.
Macron’s party proposes forbidding “minors under 15 from wearing the veil in public spaces,” and would make it a “criminal offence for coercion against parents who force their underage daughters to wear the veil.”
For most of these children, the veil is only part one. There’s the unvarying uniform of the long baggy black dress, and the comprehensive gender segregation that keeps them out of many normal childhood activities. The French government rightly sees this mode of female upbringing as emblematic of a repressive fanaticism seriously at odds with the free, egalitarian values of the state.