Letters to the Editor
alarajrogers
Published Letters: 440 Editor's Choice: 86
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Not your choice, Jeffrey.
[Read the article: Spiking taboos in Kenya]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Martin Luther King Jr. was a black man. He had every right to say "No, we will not tolerate this oppression in any way, shape or form -- we will stand up and fight," while speaking for black people.
Until you are a Muslim Kenyan female athlete you really don't have the right to say that they must stand up and challenge every aspect of their oppression, right away.
If these women cannot, within the structures of their society, participate in sports without wearing overly bulky clothing, but they choose to wear the overly bulky clothing and still continue in sports, who are you to say they can't do that? Who are you to say they must stand up and challenge *all* aspects of what is an extremely severe and pervasive cultural oppression, immediately, instead of taking baby steps? And if they choose to participate with Nike in purchasing somewhat less oppressive clothes that make it easier for them to engage in sports, isn't a declaration that Nike should not participate in this essentially removing their freedom of choice?
Women are not stupid. These girls have probably already calculated the odds of their being able to play in reasonable sports clothes and decided that the fight to achieve that would be much, much harder than the fight to achieve being able to play sports in a hijab. Also, some of them may genuinely prefer to do so on the grounds of modesty. I almost gave up my favorite sport, swimming, in high school because all swimming suits for women I could find exposed a great deal of my leg, and I was deeply embarrassed by being seen by men with so much leg exposed, as well as embarrassed about the fact that I had too much hair in places being exposed by these high-cut swimsuit bottoms but not willing to endure the pain of getting rid of the hair. It was just easier to stop swimming. It would have been even *easier* if I'd been given the option of swimming in a swimsuit with a little skirt. Yeah, that would be less hydrodynamic than a regular swimsuit and would have slowed me down in the water, but given the choice between the severe embarrassment I felt, the fact that the embarrassment was keeping me from swimming at all, and the fact that I could have swum *at all* in a skirt, the lessened hydrodynamics would be irrelevant. Muslim women don't necessarily *want* to be outside in public wearing short sleeve shirts and shorts. If wearing the hijab makes them feel comfortable enough emotionally to be able to participate in the sport, who are you to say they can't have a sports hijab or that Nike is wrong for making one?
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Women and bad boys, men and bad girls
[Read the article: Good Manly America]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]My ex dated a woman who emotionally blackmailed him into sex, a woman who broke his nose, and a psycho stalker. My husband's ex-wife is a compulsive liar. My housemate has dated so many crazy, bitchy or just plain nasty women, I can't keep track of them all. There is nothing gender specific about the compulsion to date sexy, dramatic people who are unstable and really, really bad for you. Women just get the press for it because when men date a lot of psycho women, they end up declaring that all women are psycho, and no one talks about the syndrome of nice girls being unable to get dates, whereas if women try to claim that all men are cadly bad boys, hordes of men will come out of the woodwork to declare that they're nice but women won't date them. (Nice men who are *getting* dates presumably have better things to do.)
It's really not true that women date exciting assholes and pass up nice sweet guys to any greater extent than men date sexy unstable bitches who are good in bed and pass up girls who are modest and a little shy. Or who, god forbid, are overweight. It's just that men are not *famous* for it, though given the dating track record of every man I know well enough to know his dating track record, maybe they should be.
I will say, however, that in my experience, women want men who are self-confident. Whether you're a Manly Man, a Sensitive New Age Guy, or any combination thereof, being confident in yourself and self-assured is an attractive quality. Men do not seem to value self-esteem in women the way women value it in men; thus the "nice" girls who can't get dates are not the ones who are self-effacing but the ones who don't match some beauty ideal. Unfortunately this *does* mean that great guys who are shy and self-effacing won't do as well as assholes with egos the size of Australia, but it doesn't mean that what women are *looking* for is assholes.