My owner knows what’s best for me
There’s Rowdha Yousef, who is worried about this alarming trend for Saudi women to start making a few faint gestures toward acting like human beings. She is outraged.
With 15 other women, she started a campaign, “My Guardian Knows What’s Best for Me.” Within two months, they had collected more than 5,400 signatures on a petition “rejecting the ignorant requests of those inciting liberty” and demanding “punishments for those who call for equality between men and women, mingling between men and women in mixed environments, and other unacceptable behaviors.”
Her guardian knows what’s best for her, therefore she wants to help see to it that all women will continue to be required to have guardians whether they want them or not. She is not, apparently, content to have a ‘guardian’ herself (at age 39, with three children), she wants all women to be forced to have them. She doesn’t seem to be slowed down by the thought that the fact that her guardian knows what’s best for her doesn’t automatically mean that all guardians know what’s best for women. It would be expecting far too much to think she should suspect that requiring women to have ‘guardians’ indicates a view of women that is not altogether egalitarian.
This is going to sound like a horrible thing to say, but if I politely listen to what she has to say, and consider her thoughts and opinions fairly, aren’t I being disrespectful? Shouldn’t I, in order to take her thoughts and opinions seriously, tell her to shut the hell up?
Inciting liberty is a crime so unspeakably horrible that there really is no punishment harsh enough.
The credits are to a female journalist and female photographer. I guess the subject is a version of Phyllis Schlafly.
What happens to women who have no male relatives? (Among many other possible objections.)
I suppose the fact that there is this kind of debate is a positive thing. There was an episode of A History of the World in 100 Objects the other day about the pre-Islamic gods in Arabia. It seems that in Mecca itself they had a different god for every day of the year. No doubt they were as ridiculous as Allah.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/about/transcripts/episode45/
(Very interesting Radio 4 series BTW.)
Isn’t there something vaguely contradictory about having the initiative to campaign against women who campaign? Unless of course, her guardian told her to start the campaign. The it works.
Nine out of ten owners said their cats preferred it.
I’ve just asked my dog if she likes me, and she says yes.
Women are just as capable of misogyny as men. I often have to make this point to people who assume that women only wear a burqa because they’ve been forced, as well as to naive feminists who seem to think that just because a woman chooses to act, it follows that the action is a feminist one. The most vociferous anti-women’s suffrage campaigners were other women; it is women who bound their daughter’s feet in China; and it is often women who perform the female genital mutilation. Women are just as good at oppressing women for being women as men are.
“My Guardian Knows What’s Best for Me.”
Sounds like some fucked-up marketing slogan for The Guardian, doesn’t it?
A rather obvious example of Stockholm Syndrome.
Patrick – now there’s a paradox!
And a much more interesting one than the (putative) paradox of the preface, to my mind.
Brian, yes, there’s something more than vaguely contradictory about it, and of course the reporter more than hinted at that fact.
and those 5400 signatures are mostly… male, I suppose? :)
Ironically, Rowdha Yousef is divorced. Her guardian is (now?) her older brother.
Oh, she never said a guardian has to be a husband. A male relative will do. She’s way broadminded.
Somebody say “Uncle Tameerah”. ….
Most African Americans will get this. A play on Uncle Tom. The Native Americans used the term Unlce Tom Tom. Referring to those anti-freedom, let’s accept what we have, and progress slowly, apologists for what is really not Islamic customs. Saudi Arabia: The only place in the world where a full grown woman can not drive (in the big cities — because in the back country, the women do drive!)