Letters to the Editor

• The Veil is irrelevant.

  [Read the article: Scoring feminism]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  Westerners *do* have a bad habit of reducing the issue of Muslim women's oppression to "oh my god they have to wear a face covering!" This is incredibly stupid and belittling. Clothes are something one may choose or not choose to wear, and there are Muslim women in free countries who choose to wear the veil. The issue is not the damn veil.

  The issue is the honor killings -- women murdered by their *families* for having sex, or thinking about having sex, or even for being raped. The issue is the Afghani girls' schools being burned down and the teachers who teach girls being beheaded. The issue is Saudi women being unable to *drive*. The issue is the complete societal disregard for domestic violence, so that it's common for women to be murdered or disfigured by their husbands. The issue is having to come up with four witnesses to prove you were raped, when your rapist only has to say "she consented" and *you* will be the one punished. The issue is that men can divorce women by saying "I divorce you" three times, *and* then they get custody of the children, and women who cannot get jobs without male permission are stuck without a man to grant that permission. The issue is women being murdered or beaten for refusing to wear the veil (which is a totally different issue than the *existence* of the veil in the first place.)

  To be honest I think that "feminism" qua feminism is done in the West. We cannot progress any farther without including men in our struggle, because the situation we face in the West is that the law grants us equality to men in almost all respects, but cultural sexism still affects both men *and* women in negative ways, and feminism is not going to get any further by continuing to follow a zero-sum philosophy in which female gain is male loss and vice versa. Fairer child support enforcement that works with noncustodials to help them get jobs to pay their child support and also works to help maintain the emotional relationship of noncustodials and children, de-stigmatizing "daddy tracks" and providing more social support for families of all sorts, ceasing to refer to fathers as babysitters, encouraging men to enter professions such as elementary school teachers, stronger defenses of the rights and responsibilities of men *and* women to obtain and use birth control... these are all things that benefit both men and women, and I see the future of Western feminism as bleak unless we can reconstruct our image of what feminism *means* to include men in a struggle against a sexist society that both men and women create.

  However, in most of the world, they're still at a much more basic level where men really *are* the enemy (and yes, women participate in their own oppression, and men can suffer many problems and inconveniences because of the degradation of women, but the basic problem there is that women are seen as morally and legally inferior to men.) Feminism is "purer" there because the issues are almost entirely about male control over women. Here, men no longer control women -- society controls men and women, and society is created by men and women, so our struggle needs to move to a different phase. There, the concept that a woman has basic human rights is either weak or simply not present.

  Western liberals do have to get over the notion that it's okay for a society to enslave its women, allow men to torture, beat, rape with impunity and murder women, and deny women education or job opportunities because "that's their culture" and "who are we to judge?" Wearing a veil can be a legitimate cultural expression. Being murdered by your brother because you were raped is not. But it's apples to oranges, because the battle in the West is a completely different one -- less demanding, less vital, but more difficult to articulate what exactly what to *do* because the goals are like nailing jello to a wall. It's very, very easy to say "It's wrong for men to be able to murder their wives and get away with it". A lot more complicated and confusing to talk about the issue of who makes more money and who drops out to take care of the kids in the US.

  Permalink Friday, March 24, 2006 10:33 AM