Women competitors must wear hijabs at chess world championship, oddly awarded to Iran

You know what? I think my meaning was plenty clear enough, and I’m not going to overly complicate it by qualifying it to accommodate your observation.

I don’t think you need me to explain it, do you?

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Yes, actually I do. I do not know what you mean unless you explain it clearly. I do not read minds, and I do not know you personally, or at all, so guessing at what you’re getting at is not a good idea at this point. I think clear communication is a good thing in civil discourse.

There. I still think the first version had more zing.

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No confliction. Here’s the liberal view on the matter: it’s not OK for any state to demand that people, at home or abroad, dress in a certain manner; it is OK for any person to dress in a certain manner voluntarily.

Iran demands that women at home and abroad wear a hijab – that’s not OK. Domestically there that demand is enforced by law. Abroad (e.g. in the UK) no-one cares what these fundie conservatives demand.

The UK allows any woman to wear a hijab if she wishes – that is OK.

If you need it simplified further, please ask.

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All cultures “brainwash” their adherents. Sometimes the results are good, sometimes bad.

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My thinking is similar, yet I’m “conflicted” in the sense that we, in the US, have sexist, state mandated dress codes, too. In many areas men can go topless, but women (who also have nipples just as men do) cannot. I’m not saying hair and breasts are equivalent, but that the state mandated sexism is, where the same anatomical feature found on both sexes is treated differently by state order, not just a voluntary choice. We would expect women visiting the US to obey our sexist dress codes, just as Iran does.

I point this out not because I agree with our sexist dress codes or Iran’s, but because I’m looking for a bright line that might say why it would be wrong for Iran to require head scarves for women only but ok for some municipalities to require nipples to be covered, for women only. And I don’t think there is one. We are, to some degree, what we find abhorrent in Iran.

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Most areas and cultures are critical of other’s traditions, but blind to their own. The UK isn’t much different than Iran in this respect. If a woman was attending to play from a place in the tropics where they customarily leave their breasts exposed, a UK event would probably be scandalized if she didn’t make an effort to dress like a European. They would also refute that the insistence is religiously motivated, despite the ease in demonstrating that that is precisely what it would be. Those in the UK and elsewhere in Europe would probably deny to their last breath that UK women are being oppressed by those same expectations.

ETA: Skeptic beat me to it!

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Even so, thanks :slight_smile:

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I was responding to uplandupland’s lame attempt at a “gotcha.” In regard to your comment, the bright line is that this championship is an international event. In such instances, the dress-code bar is traditionally reduced to a “lowest common denominator,” currently a ban on bare breasts and genitals that’s common to most cultures that participate in those events. Even so, most liberals would shrug if a female participant from a culture where going topless is the norm decided to contravene that “lowest common denominator” taboo, just as they shrug when a female competitor dresses more modestly at the event (e.g. swimming in a “burkini”)*.

[* obviously there are questions about whether the competitor’s state has forced her to wear the more modest outfit, but that’s addressed as a separate issue of liberal anti-authoritarianism]

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I agree. The point of my response is that there’s no real conflict from the liberal point of view regarding the hijab. Liberals in the UK would likely not have a problem with a woman competitor from a culture where bare breasts are the norm going topless at the event (just as they don’t generally have a problem with local women doing protest marches asserting their right to go topless).

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You would need to verify that the players are not actually teams of players,

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Put 'em on Twitch. We could find out if viewers of chess matches are less obscene than viewers of Dota :wink:

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This topic brings up something I almost missed, which is that there’s a Women’s World Championship. I didn’t know we had gendered championships for chess.

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Who plays Dota? Old grandpas?

No, it’s all 10 year olds who know all about the cyber.

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Are there still such places (in the tropics specifically)? I was under the impression that invading cultures had shamed them all into covering up.

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There are such places. What do you mean by “still”?

Based upon what? I am not convinced that most people are concerned about what invading cultures think. But if European media refuses to popularly show such cultures, I suppose it would seem natural for people to be unaware of their existence. I don’t know how popular chess might be in such areas though!

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The Piraha seem to still do this, from the most recent media I’ve seen. But they aren’t very interested in talking with people from the outside and their culture is still rapidly getting homogenized by surrounding groups as insular as they are.

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That which once was, and yet, somehow, remains extant…

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Theres this case as well

Free Naanin Ratcliffe

You might go, I would not.