Please change the letters format back. This is horrible to try to read.

There's also the father figure element. Amish women are treated like children who can work, and incest rates are very high in this community (sorry, but its true). It would seem the appeal of this world is the simple longing for a father figure as a lover.

The standard romance novel plot calls for a woman to fall in love with a tough guy who initially treats her indifferently or even badly, and who then reforms.

In real life, of course, he never does.

One wonder why we are conditioned to fall in love with guys who treat women like crap. Why do we even think we would like that?

if you weren't trying to use the letters format to write a whole damn book addressed to one individual, the letters section wouldn't need to be changed, and would be much more enjoyable for everyone. These two or three people who get into shouting matches can take it off-thread, and need to.

Just MY suggestion.

Street harrassment of women in Pakistan is so bad women cannot go out without men along to prevent "Eve teasing" as it is called. The veiling does not prevent any of it. Men will stare after, whistle at, follow, and attempt to grope women any chance they will get. It's running a gauntlet to go shopping in Pakistan, veil or no veil. Riding public transport is also very difficult. One woman I knew, a convert from the States, had a fist jammed up between her legs on a bus in Karachi while she was fully veiled and her husband was with her! So where's the freedom? What is the effect of the veil, exactly? The modesty theory apparently does not work very well...

The upper class Pakistani women Wolf talked to were probably much like my old comrades back in the day. The spiel of "the veil really makes us free" is memorized and rolled off easily without much thinking or effort. The Pakistani women who talk to Western feminists are repeating a stock piece of propaganda from their own religious community--they are not giving us any "insights" into what they really think.

They have never said in their lives what they really think. They go quietly into arranged marriages with vicious men who get potbellies in their twenties and who are physically and emotionally repulsive to them, but until you've known them for a couple of decades, you won't know what they really think of that. They are financially dependent on their parents and then their husbands, and they can't piss them off by actually saying what they think.

So when a Western feminist shows up, they will give the "feminist Islam" spiel. This is not the truth. It's just what every brainwashed, Stockholm-syndrome afflicted person would rattle off in the same situation. Wolf should know that.

Women from fundie Christian religious communities in the States who say "we are really free" should also be taken with a grain of salt, for the same reason. They are psychologically damaged unreliable narrators. Frankly, I think their children should all be taken away from them, although I know that's impractical. At the very least, we should stop allowing them to homeschool.

Just my two cents.

You have a PhD, so do a lot of people--irrational people, screwed up people, oppressed people. Having a PhD makes you neither intelligent nor sane. I'm not saying you are not--I don't know you--just saying the PhD isn't much evidence of that. What would prove that is the strength of argument--and you haven't offered much of one yet, besides, "well, it's worked out okay for me".

"Feminist Islam", like "Creation Science", is an oxymoron created by religious nutjobs so that they'd sound a bit less like religious nutjobs in the modern "reality-based community". That's all.

Islam isn't feminist, and its religious texts advise violent treatment of women who step out of line. Those are the facts, and no amount of finessing can ever change them. There are lots of nice people who want to be Muslims who make elaborate mazes of excuses to sidestep a basically simple issue. I'm just not one of them, any more, and sort of resent the mental energy I exerted on it when I might have been engaging in real critical thinking.

And yes, in my case as in yours and every other one, there was a man involved--there always is :)

It seems to be feminist rite of passage to go all Germaine Greer nutty at some point and "rediscover" all the faux advantages of Life-With-Father era sexism and discrimination--esp. when other, brown people cultures are involved. I'm sorry to see Naomi Wolf going through this particular stage (which I'm sure she's going to later find embarrassing). I thought she was brighter than that.

I hit this stage in my early twenties, and included in my list of follies a conversion to something called "feminist Islam". Like "Creationist Science" it does not exist, and I'm happy to say "feminist Islam" is now safely discarded on the trash heap of stupid things I did in my youth.

Must be kinda tough to be thinking "Hey, the veil is really cool because then men don't objectify women"! in middle age though--Yikes. I mean, did she talk to any Pakistani men? Does she have any clue what they think of women?

Objectification doesn't even cover it. Most men from that country have a great deal of trouble thinking that women are for anything other than having sex with and making dinner. They literally cannot wrap their minds around any other concept. Wise up, Naomi.