so some stranger on the street doesn't beat you with a stick, can be anything but oppressive.

that from happening. I prefer the Western model of make-up and attractive -- even sometimes skimpy clothes. After all, dressing with just eyes showing in order to prevent a man from being sexually turned on is taking on the blame for what a man needs to learn to deal with.

But women shouldn't have to be fashion slaves to either model of extreme enticement or draconian shrouding. Myself, I usually just dress in a functional way so I can do things in an unhindered way yet still look attractive.

I am more like the women in the middle of the three models of dress this cartoon presents.

Yeah, Saudis require them, and Iran requires a hair and neck covering. In most places, though, it's simply customary. Granted, there can be forms of coercion that are not governmental. Pressure from family, for instance, or maybe the inability to get a job without dressing conservatively. But we have social rules that are almost as bad. Try finding a "professional" pair of women's shoes that are actually shaped like a human foot. Or for men, why do we have to wear a colorful, silk noose to work? The fact is, most Muslim women who wear head coverings or even veils do so because they see it as part of their femininity and resent westerners who equate it with oppression. Wearing a fully-covered black outfit in Jordan, for example, says "I am an upper class lady who is way out of your league, so don't talk to me."

part of yourself, including your face so some stranger on the street doesn't beat you with a stick. There is a difference between modesty, even very religious modesty, and the erasing of the identity of women.

I understand that there are women who wear the burqa or niqab who say they do it voluntarily. I doubt it would be the voluntary choice for most of those women if other parts of their lives, like the husbands and fathers and mothers who required it, or the strangers with sticks on the street, were absent. Women in places that don't require them could choose to wear a niqab or burqa as well, but without those people requiring it, even conservative nuns no longer wear those things.

I am sure there will be those who say I am being disrespectful to those who voluntarily wear a burqa or niqab. Maybe I am. I just don't believe that it is a likely choice unless there is strong pressure from cultural forces that do not favor women.

...while at the same time recognizing my own secular bias. And yes, in some places women are harshly punished for non-compliance with pretty draconian dress rules. My own feeling is that such coercion is always wrong and that one does not have a right to insist that others follow one's own religious rules, even if everyone is nominally a Suuni Muslim. One thing that is interesting to note, however, is that enforcers of modesty--whether required by the state or just customary--are usually other women, especially the older women in ones own family. The same as true here with mothers and grandmothers teaching daughters to act "lady like," which means modest, deferential, and with learned helplessness. The Saudis are a bit unusual in using male religious extremists to act as morality cops.

do understand that other women DO enforce them, but I think fathers and brothers do as much if not more, or at least more effectively (think honor killings.)

And, I believe if you go back one step and ask, "why would a mother require that of her daughter when she has experienced it herself" you will see that it is because it is the best way for the mother to keep her daughter safe and provided for in a culture where the daughter's only hope for safety and sustenance is if she attracts a husband who will give her those things. So the reason for the mothers' insistence on their daughters' modesty is to appease prospective husbands.

Once again, in those cultures, we are back to the women being forced to live within the confines that the men, and ultimately not other women, set for them.

That's how cultural hegemony works. That's what makes it self-reproducing.

So, do women have to feel that they are oppressed to be oppressed? Or is it up to outsiders to point it out to them? I am reminded of Spivak's often-repeated remark about white men saving brown women from brown men. Or maybe I am just over-compensating as a reaction to decades of Orientalism. Still, I wonder how useful the Marxist economic narrative of oppression really is in the context of gender, especially in non-European societies.

And the answer to that is no.

Though these women SAY they are not oppressed, how do they actually feel and what would they say if there were no possibility of reprisals?

Jaycee Dugard and Elizabeth Smart, when they were first approached by law enforcement, defended their kidnappers, but I think we could pretty safely say both were oppressed during their imprisonments.

For others, they have never experienced life without oppression and don't know what that means. That they do not wish for what they never had does not exclude the fact that they are oppressed. It could even be seen as further evidence of the oppression they have experienced. Upon manumission, some percentage of slaves opted to continue to serve the people who had owned them. They knew no other life. And yet, I don't think any of us would say their enslavement was not oppression.

I find the musings that oppression can't really happen to non-European women to be disturbing.

I'm only wondering if what a European would consider oppression is the same as what an Arab would consider to be so. In France, Muslims--including women--protested rules restricting head coverings as state oppression. When I argued the point that you are making to my Middle East history instructor (who is neither an Arab nor a Muslim), she suggested that if society were to coerce women into uncovering their heads, how would it be different from requiring women to uncover their chests? It all depends on what the naturalized cultural norm is. She also drew the analogy to neck ties for men, to which I responded that I would be the first one to burn mine in the street. That might tie into what you are saying--is someone oppressed if she does not think that she is? A slave can be conditioned to love his chains. There are millions of working poor in this country who have been trained to defend capitalism and excoriate socialism. They clearly vote against their own interests. The question then becomes, what makes us think we know any better? Are we not simply normalizing capitalist secularism and projecting onto traditional religious societies. This is an important question because of the history of colonialism supported by intellectual Orientalism.

I don't doubt that women are often oppressed in the Muslim world, but it usually has little to do with their headgear. Frankly, that was never even an issue until the British and French made it the marker for the inferior, backward, non-European society. European imperialists tried to do away with the head coverings and Arabs, including some educated women, responded but insisting that headscarves and even veils were necessary for their culture. You should read Houda Sharawi's book on the subject. It is also clear that the debate over women's clothes was almost entirely an upperclass argument. Poor women and men had far more pressing problems. In the desert, both men and women wear head coverings because they have to. When I was in Jordan and Egypt in 2012, I wore an Arabic head covering because the sun and heat was so intense. Now urban men have been deprived of that and go about their business in European trousers and shirts with bare heads, suffering in the heat. Laws like those in Iran that give most of the power in the family to the husband are far more oppressive to women than their outfits. Yes, the penalties for immodesty in Saudi Arabia and to a lesser degree in Iran are monstrous. If those rules were based on race or religion, it would be considered a crime against humanity. So it is no less egregious because they are based on sex. But most of the Muslim would is not like Saudi Arabia.

TO cover their faces and every other aspect of their identity.

If women are coerced to cover their faces and erase every aspect of their identities, then their oppression does, indeed, have to do with their headgear. The fact that the excuse that is used to justify this is a distortion of a religious teaching has very little to do with the religion in question..

Men have not been deprived of head coverings. No one is preventing them from wearing head coverings if they want to.

And "the debate is an upper class argument" is the same as saying "first world problem." If you think it is relatively unimportant, why did you bring it up?

Since this is becoming silly, I will say good night to you.

I do not believe Megan is sincere. The least suspect motivation for her site is that she has chosen feminism, a hot topic, as a vehicle to showcase her art, a more suspicious account is that she is an establishment plant assigned to discredit and debase feminists.

She can have the worst motive in the world but still be right (or wrong, I see it as a matter of perspective).

She seems to associate with a fair number of oppressed and subjugated women, judging from the things they say to her. And they seem to think her feminist position is all a ruse. Or, perhaps it is just her perception?

Ad hominem would mean I don't know anything about her, I am just on the attack. Reality is that I can tell quite a bit about her by her art and what she writes. She is attacking both "bad" feminists and non-feminists, so far only she is right, a shining beacon of truth.

In other words, if someone delivered that cartoon anonymously, would the words and images on it on their own make a convincing case or not, or perhaps it would be valid in some ways, but not others? If a paragraph praising female agency in the world came from Elizabeth Warren, we would like assume she is being sincere and reasonable, while the exact same paragraph from Sarah Palin would make us think she is being a hypocrite or just an idiot for not realizing that she works against that goal. Either way, however, the words in that paragraph by themselves would still be accurate. When Ohio's fascist governor John Kasich decided to accept Federal funds to expand Medicaid, he said it would benefit people in real need. He was absolutely right even though he actually does not give a shit about poor people.

We should talk about this. When I was a little girl we had to wear dresses to school. When skirts got really short in the 60's you could be sent home if you could not touch the hem with your fingertips. So dressing has always been restrictive for women. I was very glad when we could wear pants to school.

We sure didn't get those women out of their burkas in Afghanistan, did we? I think that those women may be under even more repression and have less rights than before we went to war there.

Last edited Mon Mar 3, 2014, 02:36 PM - Edit history (1)

that is, a caricature rather than an actual observation. The author apparently was drawing on her own youthful misguided view that as a feminist she should tell other individual women how to dress. The feminist discussion is a broader one of whether the cultural norm is benign or encourages gender inequality. When women are told that they must dress modestly and there is no similar standard for the men of that culture, it's a cultural norm that deserves to be questioned especially when the dress code is so extreme that it causes women to be disadvantaged. Women required by their culture or government to wear burquas or niqabs in public, both completely neutralizing their faces and their individuality, are clearly oppressed even if they believe that it is a free choice to wear such garments. If a woman will be beaten, jailed, or killed for showing her face or hair in public, it's a problem.

The cartoon also seems to use a topless woman as a proxy for something else. I'm guessing here that the author doesn't actually have experience telling a topless woman on the beach that she was oppressing other women and I can't imagine she's encountered many women dressed that way in other venues. So instead it seems to be an attempt to reduce an anti-porn argument to a clothing issue.
If that's the case, it's sadly an oversimplification. If instead the author is using the topless woman as a proxy for women dressing in ways that are uncomfortable or that enhance objectification, I'd need to see a few more words to understand what her perspective is before addressing that.

The cartoon appears to reduce feminist's concerns to petty grievances. You stated what I was thinking quite eloquently.

I like her art, she has talent and an entertaining style, but that is not enough to make me want to suffer through her shallow perception of feminism.