A guy’s writing in theNew Yorker,of all places, and he says this:
[A]s the popular legitimacy of the Iranian regime has crumbled, its leaders have clung to antiquated concepts of female modesty to prop it up.
If that doesn’t bait you, nothing will. You’ve been telling all of us that burqas, much less hijabs, are liberating choices for modern women; you have railed against burqa bans; you have organized international everyone wear a hijab days. Now, with a massive hijab burning going on in Iran, western observers seem less and less shy about saying how they really feel about the hijab and its reliable companion – big dark blowsy body robes that cover up any sign that you have a female body (these robes are also mandatory in Iran).
Remember the ill-fated Council of Europe campaign that said FREEDOM IS IN HIJAB???? Remember how it enraged politicians all over Europe and was immediately shut down and rejected by the Council of Europe itself, which basically said We fucked up?
What are we learning here, ladies?
Tell you what. The heroines of Iran are really messing up your campaign to make us see antiquated marks of female modesty as hip marks of empowerment. I see trouble ahead unless you stop being pussies and instead find your Phyllis Schlafly and let her bellow out your truth: Hijabs and body covering robes are beautiful, emancipatory…
Also the Iranians’ incredibly brave efforts. The attention of the world is, rightly, on the dissenters in the streets of Tehran as well as on the Ukrainians. But the forces of illiberal democracy – A sham designation, no? Fascism is better. – in Russia, Hungary, Italy, and of course right here in the MAGA movement – are certainly on the march, and we must always call them out, and fight them with whatever weapons we have.
I do wonder about Europe’s militant hijabis. What do they have to say? Why have we not heard their opinion of this massive anti-hijab movement?
One – only one – Iranian politician gets it. When the state deputizes squads of insane misogynists/religious fanatics to wander all over Tehran harassing women who don’t look quite as much like death warmed over as they would like, you’re asking for trouble.
I mean, I’m sure these loons have been beating/jailing inadequately hijabed women there for some time; but since no one’s up and died, it hasn’t been that big a deal, right?
But it was only a matter of time before the nutso woman-hatred Iran has let loose on its streets (and after all, as Mona Eltahawy points out, violent woman-hatred was already baked in long before the loons assumed power) was going to kill someone; and since Iran already has millions of women who profoundly resent mandatory swaddling, the shit has now hit the fan with the killing of a young woman in custody.
Wonder if it’ll spread to Afghanistan.
It certainly seems to be spreading – quickly – through Iran.
… has attracted growing interest in democratic countries, with the latest proposed crackdown on it coming from Denmark, where a commission has recommended a hijab ban in elementary schools.
What a welcome headline! And when you put it together with what looks like a really serious rebellion against mandatory woman-covering in Iran, the future of the secular public realm, and of equality between the sexes, seems a bit brighter.
We shouldn’t forget, along these lines, the myriad burqa bans around the globe.
The article from whose headline I quote above duly notes the now-notorious irony:
Merely criticising the hijab in Western democracies has also become almost synonymous with “Islamophobia” or attacks on minority rights.
But in Muslim-majority societies it is still regarded as part of a legitimate campaign for the liberation of women from stifling tradition.
On the regime’s recent Celebrate Your Nonexistence Day, some brave Iranian women removed their veils – only the latest form of hijab-disobedience among women forced to abide that theocracy.
Things are of course much, much darker in Afghanistan; UD will admit to having trouble thinking about daily life for girls and women in Afghanistan. But Iran is also a hellhole for women, who must start swaddling themselves at age nine or risk long jail terms.
Yet there’s plenty of evidence that many women and men there are willing to kick hard against the regime’s sex-obsession, even if it means imprisonment. Indeed there is reason to hope that at some time in the not too distant future imams may be able to glance at unveiled women without getting non-Allah-approved hard-ons.
France is a secular republic, and this matters to them. Within that secularity, the equality of women and men – anathema to many theocracies – also matters to them. When France outlawed burqas, burkinis, and other overt marks of gender and religious submission, it made a strong statement about the primary importance of preserving to the extent possible a secular, egalitarian, public realm.
The full draping of women’s bodies in an expression of obedience to religious modesty mandates is anathema to a secular, egalitarian republic like France, so no one should be surprised that the city of Grenoble’s attempt to disobey the country’s burkini ban would provoke an outcry.
Grenoble has done what it can within the country’s court system to try to uphold its refusal to ban the garment, but today France’s top administrative court said nope. Not in public.
Grenoble is free to go to higher international courts, and I suppose it will. It won’t prevail there either.
Okay, but where are the op/eds from rafts of Western women intellectuals, and from jolly burqa wearers all over Europe, saying Well of course there shouldn’t be an edict, but burqas are beautiful empowering expressions of piety and selfhood and you’re all defaming them just as much as Johnny and Amber are defaming each other … ?
I mean, everyone’s dumping on the burqa lately… It’s almost as if people think there’s… something wrong… with a heavy agonizingly constraining black full body bag robbing wearers of sunlight and peripheral vision, and featuring a heavy cloth strip over the mouths of women and little girls as if I mean is there some sort of symbolic value there…? That mouth thing?
So where are its defenders? They’re noisy enough when countries begin voting for burqa bans. They organize big pro-burqa marches and they tell us we’re Islamophobes for objecting to burqas. Where is all that moral passion now that everyone’s acting as if burqas are obviously atrocious? I’m waiting.
The top-to-toe burka, with its sinister, airless little grille, is more than an instrument of persecution, it is apublic tarring and feathering of female sexuality. It transforms any woman into an object of defilement too untouchably disgusting to be seen. It is a garment of lurid sexual suggestiveness: what rampant desire and desirability lurks and leers beneath its dark mysteries? In its objectifying of women, it turns them into cowering creatures demanding and expecting violence and victimisation. Forget cultural sensibilities.
More moderate versions of the garb – the dull, uniform coat to the ground and the plain headscarf – have much the same effect, inspiring the lascivious thoughts they are designed to stifle. What is it about a woman that is so repellently sexual that she must diminish herself into drab uniformity while strolling down Oxford Street one step behind a husband who is kitted out in razor-sharp Armani and gold, pomaded hair and tight bum exposed to lustful eyes? (No letters please from British women who have taken the veil and claim it’s liberating. It is their right in a tolerant society to wear anything including rubber fetishes – but that has nothing to do with the systematic cultural oppression of women with no choice.)
UPDATE: Comes now a charismatic young challenger to Akhunzada…
Campaign slogan: We CAN do better than that! I guarantee that that corpse will be a nine-year-old girl with no clitoris, just sold off to a seventy-year-old man!
To the tune of Clementine.Tried the hijab, tried abaya
Tried to keep our peckers down
But your nostrils we espy - ed
And our stiffies went to town
Only burqa only burqa
Only burqa keeps us down
We are lost and gone forever
When you wear just half a gown
O you whorish godless creatures
How you make our wieners fizz
When you show your brazen features
All the streets are lined with jiz
Only burqa only burqa
Only burqa keeps us down
We are lost and gone forever
When you just wear half a gown
