Watch out, you’ll be wearing a burqa next!

Peter Hitchens in the Daily Mail above a photo of a woman in heavy eye makeup with carefully groomed eyebrows and flawless skin, wearing a niqab.

Behold my proposed new autumn look for women in politics. The black, I think, is flattering and it radiates an air of cool unapproachability. No Minister would put his hand on the knee of anyone dressed like this; indeed, he’d have trouble finding her knee, or anything else.

Well, isn’t this what you want, all you squawking flapping denouncers of groping men and ‘inappropriate’ jokes?

You have lots in common with Militant Islamists on this subject. They, too, believe that all men must be assumed to be slavering predators.

And these beliefs lie behind the severe dress codes and sexual segregation which modern liberals claim to find so shocking about Islam.

Yet on this, it turns out that you agree with them. Any male action, any form of words you choose to disapprove of can and will be presumed to be guilty because, well, men are like that. The culprit will be ruined for ever.

Yes, certainly, if we denounce men who unilaterally grope women, then we are endorsing and even demanding imposition of the niqab on women.

Or not.

Those aren’t the only possible options, actually. We all probably have experience of them: of working (niqab-free) with men who don’t grope without an invitation. I think that’s much of the point: women should be free to work and play and walk around in the world without wearing buckets over their heads and without being groped (or worse) by men who apparently think women are a public utility.

Hitchens is coat-trailing, as right-wing assholes so often do. (See: Brendan O’Neill.) He can’t really be stupid enough to think that objecting to sexual harassment=believing that all men must be assumed to be slavering predators. Harvey Weinstein appears to be a slavering predator; it does not follow that all men are. That’s not very difficult, surely.

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