Like showing their nipples?
It’s not that I like Iran, but in may ways it is more progressive than the surrounding states that USA supports, and oddly people there tend to be more positive of Americans as well. They don’t like US foreign policy, of course, but they understand the difference between individuals and their government.
We don’t need such extreme examples either. Look at the social pressure on women in many public gatherings to wear high heels -which are far more uncomfortable than a headscarf. Some employers even require it. (I know at this point that some right-winger will start on about the rights of employers because they’re paying the money, but there is sexist tripe and there’s sexist tripe, and that argument is somewhere in between the two.)
There is one delightful counter example. When becoming a QC (senior lawyer) in the UK, men have to wear an 18th century uniform which includes rather silly (and very expensive) buckled shoes, while women can wear ordinary flat black shoes with buckles, of which there is apparently a variety. The men complain but put up with it because it’s a ceremony implying high status. Would they put up with it if they had to wear tights and this particular kind of buckled shoe every day for work?
So your argument is that somehow jailing women for showing their faces gets a pass because politicians decided to support even worse countries?
Well, there are two ways to respond.
One is to say “you don’t know what you want; you’ve been brainwashed.”
The other is to say “OK.”
My own ethical compass centers on the later, as I think it’s preserving of human dignity to give people the benefit of the doubt, even when I’m wrong about it. Better to be wrong occasionally than to discount another person’s choices because “I know better.” That’s one of the things that got human culture into the mess that it is currently in.
But it’s neither illegal to not wear high heels, nor to protest company policies or the social pressures that support the high-heel standard.
I’d also venture a guess (because I - just in time- realized it might be a bad idea to Google “indecent exposure penalties” on my work computer…) that the penalties for toplessness in the U.S. are gentler than the penalties for not wearing a hijab in Iran…
Something few appear to consider is that what constitutes one’s “face” (if any) is subjective. It essentially means whatever area of the body one uses to connect to other persons. This can be the head, but also the genitals, hands, voice, or possibly others. I think this also accounts for much of what many refer to as “face blindness” - that people don’t consider that others may not consider the same features equally significant.
People such as myself who consider staring at one’s head to be mainly an imposing distraction might welcome covering it precisely because it is not our “face”.
I agree that they most likely are. But what I think is more significant is that US and European sexist dress codes are still largely codifications of religious ethics which arguably have no place in what professes to be a secular culture. People play it off by insisting that it is somehow “cultural” rather than religious, and a matter of “just being decent and civilized”. Which also inspires criticism in the US of its ethnocentricity - that Eurocentric dress codes in the Americas are also contrary to long established indigenous traditions.
I don’t disagree, I was mainly making the point that we are quite good at the mote and beam business. I’m not comparing the Iranian judicial system to the US judicial system (though I would note that, unlike Saudi Arabia, Iran at least has a judicial system which can be compared to Western systems.) I’m comparing social pressures on women to conform to male-determined norms, and noting that they happen in both the US and Iran.
When Ségolène Royal went to Tehran recently she wore a headscarf; years ago she was in the papers for wearing a bikini on a beach in France, though French male politicians wear tiny Speedos without comment. My view on the chess business, for what it’s worth, is that American competitors are most unlikely to be at any risk and that complying with local dress standards isn’t giving in to the patriarchy. Would Iran be much better off without the theocracy? Almost certainly yes (the Revolutionary Guards don’t help either), but the abuses under the Shah were largely the fault of the West and the theocracy is just another example of the result of Western interventionism. I can remember when Private Eye used to refer to him as “The Shit of Iran”. The belief that we can “defeat” unpleasant régimes by constantly confronting them currently isn’t working terribly well, diplomacy might be worth trying.
Jo Cox MP was murdered by a right-winger in the UK this year. Feel free to start a boycott (I’m semi-serious, I would be delighted if the rest of the developed world started a boycott over the ridiculous decision to leave the EU and the right-wing stirring up that resulted.)
Wrong country! Look at Enkita’s picture above. Women show their faces in Iran, and at least in the major cities are in a tug of war with the religious police on how far you can push back your hijab and how thin and colorful it can be. The countryside is a bit more conservative.
I think the attacks on Iran are often hypocritical, in reality more an expression of the political hostility between Iran and USA than any real concern about women. I hope that if sanctions against Iran are dropped and there is more travel to the country the clergy will have to retreat on issues like these.
Point well missed. The point isn’t whether they are covering their faces or their feet or anything else for that matter. The point is that they have laws governing the behaviour of women that do not apply to men. Failure to comply will result in jail time. That is oppression on its face. Do not support oppression.
Not in Iran, I don’t believe. You’re thinking of Afghanistan under the Taliban.
No and they give gay people the option of gender reassignment surgery, which is wrong. Being gay and being transgendered are different things of course.
No one in Iran wears a burqa. Nobody.
It is beneath BoingBoing to form an echo-chamber for the pseudo-liberal hate mongering of the British tabloids.
I agree the hijab enforcement is bullshit - but we are skating dangerously close to Islamophobia on this one. Iran’s government is harsh, and can be capricious and brutal in example punishments over the exercise of simple civil-liberties. It is not worse in this than MANY US allies.
The State Department travel ban is political bullshit. Very few who’ve been to Iran will disagree with me on this. Iranians are wonderful, genuinely deeply generous and appreciative - especially of guests and visitors. There’s a reason that your are officially discouraged from visiting “the enemy” and why Iran are continually propagandized as a “sponsor of terror”.
Who’s delivered more death, destruction and mayhem, illegally, across the world than the USA? Iran has in comparison, merely official rhetoric.
The US has more people in prison than any nation in the history of the planet. Has directly funded more killing in wars than any other since the end of WWII. Supports brutal oppression in Saudi Arabia 1000 times worse than Iran. Funds Israel, that imprisons and tortures children.
What if the culture brainwashed them into wearing a bikini.
I think it makes more sense to listen to women instead of talking over them and assuming they can’t make decisions for themselves, even in an theocratic authoritarian society like Iran. Many women have left the country because they didn’t like how they were treated. But many have stayed, for whatever reasons. I don’t think it’s fair to assume you know better than they do, either way.
Was Jo Cox’s murderer employed by the UK government? Did Jo Cox’s murderer escape punishment for the crime? Did Jo Cox’s murder happen in the context of a massive violent assault by government forces upon peaceful protesters?
False equivalence is false.
Yes. Like France.
I’m not referring to state law in that post but rather the orthodox version of Islam associated with the burka Rob says he would wear.
Maybe not always, but often…
I’d be appalled if the women’s world chess championship was set in a country that required the contestants to wear a bikini at all times in public under threat of arrest. I would not assume that women were ok with that just because they hadn’t fled the country.
