My last serious boyfriend was Iranian. He treated me with more respect than any American man ever has and Farsi, like Japanese, only has a single gender-neutral pronoun. He had nasty, filthy sayings about sucking up to women in power equivalent to standard sayings I already knew for sucking up to men in power. I had never heard the equivalent in my life.
Knowing him was a huge, huge personal growth experience and helped me figure out how to stand up for myself and insist men not shit all over me every single step of the way in life. Which is probably one of the reasons I appear to be the highest ranked woman on Hacker News.
So I do have some insights into how women get treated in the Middle East. And before anyone jumps up to tell me my last boyfriend must have been some kind of statistical outlier, that's the same BS excuse people are making in this same discussion for American women who get treated like property in some parts of the US.
It amounts to "La la la not listening. Don't confuse me with the facts."
Certainly, there are differences. But as someone who is still suffering terribly the consequences of having been born female, I find it personally galling for people to act like I'm some kind of loon for pointing out the differences aren't as dramatic as we want to imagine.