Meanwhile, feminists in the western world fight to wear a hijab, burkha, abaya, etc. and don’t see them as signs of oppression. I wish i understood the logic. Wish we could all stand up against this together.
For whatever reason, fragile people get real offended by what other people wear.
Update (context): I am not talking about the people in west who want to (not)wear hijab. I understand the premise of that choice. But this word (choice) is used daily in government propaganda. Maybe its analogous to talking about the choice of working in a cotton field to a slave. It’s a whole different environment/context. Hence my negative reaction to this word. It’s a matter of feeling which I just expressed. Nothing against someone who has a real choice, without religious stigma.
It's the same argument: don't make me do something I don't want to do.
It can be very isolating and sometimes dangerous to be the outsider in an area with uniform religious and cultural beliefs.
What are your thoughts on western governments that attempt to ban the hijab? I can't remember if France succeeded.
I believe banning a piece of clothing is not reasonable, like banning jeans or headscarves. On the other hand there is a lot of stigma around hijab if you choose not to wear it among some muslim families so much so that it’s not a real choice anymore and it’s not a simple piece of cloth. So I think it’s not bad to have some legal ways to protect you against your over zealous family/community but this kind of lawmaking is very prone to other issues too. Furthermore, banning and enforcing are two sides of the same authoritarian coin which is ultimately the root of the problem. It’s very complicated. I wish I had a straightforward answer.
In the end it is about a social contract, the details of which may change with the course of time.
Locality and social norms definitely play into this conversation, here in Seattle at least there is a culture that supports nudism, whether it's the summer solstice bike ride, certain beaches that are popular for swimming in your birthday suit, etc.
I've seen art students making life drawings in a city square, for example.
If wearing too little is illegal in most places, why wouldn't it be possible to wear too much, in theory?
You might be cool with that, but I’m not.
Some forms of dress and undress have laws. Others don’t have laws but are still bound by social contracts. The person you are replying to is clearing trying to compare these and pointing out responsibility may come down to the wearer in both cases and wondering out loud that society may punish any extreme state of dress.
At which point did he say you should pass new legislation or that he agreed with it?
I tend to elicit the feeling you are mentioning often, without intending to. I have seen old women move away from me while we were waiting to cross the street. I have been stopped by police because “I was acting suspicious” (I was walking to the gym, after work).
It’s not a nice feeling, scaring people just by being around.
Because of this, I never wear the hood of my hoodie. In general I have to wear as unthreatening clothes as I can. And I avoid dark streets, because someone can see me as a threat and fear makes people do irrational things.
We would all benefit from less fear.
I am not “athletic” though :)
A similar thing would be the ban of wearing nazi symbols.
It's a head covering; it covers your head, which can provide comfort depending on the environmental conditions.
Depending on the specific garment and context, it may provide some privacy/anonyminity.
Comparing it to nazi symbols doesn't seem right; in part because it's not purely symbolic, but also because it's only oppression when you're forced to wear it, not when you choose to. No one is calling for the star of david to be banned because Jews were forced to wear them; if someone wants to wear it, they can.
Perhaps we should examine your beliefs for indoctrination? To use your indoctrination as an excuse to remove your bodily autonomy.
The topic is much more complicated than "fragility" as you are dismissively trying to portray it. We wear clothes in civilised societies for a reason, and different types of clothes have different types of societal effects.
Your freedom ends where the the freedom of the next person's begins.
Also, the Nazis are just really exceptionally bloody-handed. In terms of intentionally, directly killing people, they killed like 16 million people. In terms of intentionally, indirectly killing people, their deliberate use of famine killed eight or nine million civilians in the soviet union alone. Then you add all the people that died due to massacres, or were killed as collateral damage, and you can understand why 30 million people died in the USSR, the vast majority of whom were civilians. It generally gets much worse in areas the Nazis had a longer duration of control: in Poland, they killed about one in five people.
It's generally pretty hard to kill that many people before the 20th century, because the means of killing are too innefective, and the number of potential victims is too small. For what it's worth, Genghis Khan is probably the most bloody-handed pre-modern figure, so if we're going to blame religion for his behaviour, it's probably shamanism that has the highest death toll.
Making it simply a choice of clothing is reductionism and you know it.
Do you consider the widespread laws in the West that require women to cover their chests in public similarly oppressive?
Considering how many Indian Americans convert to a different religion for the sole purpose of escaping the social implications their caste ties them to, this is a good starting point.
- Women should not be forced to wear particular items of clothing
- Women should not be forced to not wear particular items of clothing
What's difficult to understand?
Those hijabs is a clumsy measure to contain the power of sexuality. They recognize its power and the danger of getting it unleashed, but they aren't wise enough to know how to transform it into creativity at the society level, so they just chained it.
Feminists are to authority like atheists are to religion.
In other words I’ve had direct experience with feminists who supported religious clothing in a misguided attempt to support other cultures.
I’m of course not saying that there aren’t people who freely choose to wear such things. But it’s rarely without at least some pressure. We should be careful about what we force people to do but also be aware that not everyones outward choices are free.
To use a phrase that seems to have lost favor: link, or it didn’t happen.
Our experiences are a result of who we associate with. The Muslim women who fought to wear the scarf did so out of having dedication and focus in their lives to studies and discipline (they were med students, engineers, architects).
Trying to support other cultures (admirable) by encouraging oppressive practices (troubling). Not seeming to understand that very much of the women’s clothing is worn out of fear ranging from family shaming to extreme violence.
The far and even moderate left is becoming increasingly bigoted classifying people into bins and setting behavior standards. You’re not just a person you’re a complex set of race, gender, and creed and you have to stay in that lane or you’re immoral. It’s all very odd.
In my experience, there's nothing exceptional about American liberalism in contrast with most of the Western world, while American conservatism has an unhealthy obsession with authoritarian solutions to problems that aren't problems: transgender people, women who don't want to be pregnant, people who want to marry those of the same sex, and books about any of the above that children might read.