Women who choose to wear
The BBC picks up a very long pair of tongs to talk about [whispers] hijab.
Europe’s top human rights organisation has pulled posters from a campaign that promoted respect for Muslim women who choose to wear headscarves after provoking opposition in France.
See it? The very long pair of tongs? It’s the “choose to” bit. It’s tendentious to talk about Muslim women “choosing to” wear hijab when in fact women are forced to wear it, and tortured or even killed for refusing to wear it, in many places where Islam has not liberalized even slightly.
It’s probably the case that many Muslim women in Europe do have a choice, but it’s also well known that many of them don’t – that their parents or brothers or husbands don’t let them. We know that rules about female “modesty” are enforced with violence in France and the UK as well as in Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. It’s certainly more than well known enough for a news organization like the BBC to be aware of it. But still they insert that “choose to” even though they must know better than that.
The Council of Europe released the images last week for a campaign against anti-Muslim discrimination.
That doesn’t actually look like freedom though, does it – that tight muffling thing wrapped around the head and neck, and notice also the long sleeves on what the hijab-free woman seems to find a warm day.
Several prominent French politicians condemned the message and argued the hijab did not represent freedom.
But some Muslim women who wear headscarves said the reaction showed a lack of respect for diversity and the right to choose what to wear in France.
France’s youth minister, Sarah El Haïry, said she was shocked by one poster, which showed a split image of one women wearing a hijab, and one not.
In an interview on French TV, the minister suggested the poster had encouraged women to wear headscarves. She said this message jarred with the secular values of France, which had expressed its disapproval of the campaign.
On Wednesday, the Council of Europe told the BBC that tweets related to the campaign had been deleted “while we reflect on a better presentation of this project”.
Maybe there isn’t one. Maybe there just is no good way to frame the hijab as a “choice” when for millions of women it’s no such thing.
I’m trying to understand what is the problem that these ads were supposed to address.
If people are engaging in street harassment or discrimination against Muslim women in hijabs, that’s a problem regardless of whether or not the women are freely choosing to wear them. The ads simply don’t need to wade into that issue by assuming that it’s a free choice — it’s not like it would be ok to harass or discriminate against a woman who’s already being bullied at home.
On the other hand, if these ads are intended to tell people to shut up about their opinions about the hijab, then they’re inappropriate. Again, doesn’t matter if it’s voluntary or not. Feminists (and people generally) are allowed to have and express opinions about cultural standards for women’s clothing, whether those standards are rooted in religion (hijabs) or not (high heels), and whether there is actual coercion involved or just cultural influences, and “human rights organizations” shouldn’t be in the business of telling them to shut up.
I agree that people should be nice to women wearing hijabs. But, first and foremost, this is a terrible simile.
I imagine that if you gave 100 top high school scholars, well adept in taking tests involving analogies, similes, and metaphors), the beginning of the simile:
Same problem with women who “choose sex work.” A privileged few who claim it’s fun, easy money which does them no harm are supposed to define prostitution itself as a form of female empowerment, one which can “go wrong” but is fine itself. Got into a small debate on the topic with my son this Thanksgiving. Both the hijab and prostitution are firmly embedded in patriarchy. They do not symbolize “freedom” no matter how they’re chosen.
Freedom!
Sastra, I’m recalling Xaviera Hollander’s book “The Happy Hooker” from the 1972 and how that advertised prostitution as something women could happily do. My experience as a semi-truck driver back then when prostitutes would bang on my truck door didn’t jive with that book. I felt very sad for them and didn’t think it was a choice they happily made.
J.A., I think this is part of what makes it so difficult to address the social problem of prostitution. Some women, such as Xaviera Hollander, do choose it. She resigned as a secretary in the Dutch consulate in Manhattan to become a prostitute, which was far more lucrative for her. She went from making 1K a night in 1968 to running the biggest brothel in Manhattan in 1971. After she got busted and deported, she published her memoir, and the next year she started writing a column for Penthouse, and getting paid in other ways because of her notoriety. She had the choice, and chose later to stop (and continue making bank off it for the rest of her life). I haven’t much idea whether it’s worth reading the seventeen other books she published after that, but you can go stay at her B&B in Amsterdam and talk about it with her if you want.
I read The Happy Hooker when I was fourteen. My English teacher threatened the class if anybody was found with it, and naturally I found a copy (my mother had one, and gave it to me). I thought it was intermittently gross, and it didn’t do much to make me think any better of prostitution, but its confiscation was one of the high points of that English class, much more amusing than being screamed at about Cornell note taking.
If the entirety of prostitution were experiences like Ms. Hollander’s, that would be better than what we’ve got now. Most prostitutes can’t really be said to be doing it by choice, as she was. Many prostitutes are strung out on drugs, or have had their papers confiscated, or are otherwise involuntarily controlled; some are literally branded by their pimps. Yes, the women who banged on your truck door were not “happy hookers.” They were almost certainly sad, strung-out, and abused, and living precarious lives.
In terms of effective public policy, it’s unclear to me how we create a situation where there are no women in that latter situation. It’s unclear to me, on the one hand, that if we institute very strictly enforced prohibitions against prostitution that this will result in no women living sad, strung-out, abused and precarious lives. It also seems unlikely to me, on the other hand, that if we try to legalize and regulate prostitution we will get that result.
I don’t think so. And I think that middle-class women who go on some sort of pampered sexcapade and then claim that elevating sex work is integral to feminism are doing a grave disservice to those poor women who don’t really choose it.
In the 2018 primary season, Krysten Sinema had one challenger for the Senate Democratic nomination. At least one but none of them made much of a splash with the electorate. The one that I knew was Deedra Hill Abboud. She had been raised as a convervative evangelical Christian in Arkansas and married a Muslim man. She is very liberal, very Bernie-esque. She chooses to wear the full hijab as a convert to Islam. She and I had been friends on Facebook for a while, until I asked a question about a model for the Sports Illustrated titillation issue wearing a burkini. I wondered how that could square with Islam’s modestry rules since the idea of the issue is to show off women’s bodies in bikinis or even body paint. She construed my question to mean that I hate muslim women somehow because I don’t think they should be forced to wear burqas and didn’t respect her choice, which is hers, hers, hers. So she made it all about herself and refused to listen to my questions about how it is not likely a choice for most women who get stuck in them.
I explained that I lived in an apartment complex with many Somali Muslim families, and the complex has a pool. The girls couldn’t wear swim suits so they had to sit in the heat and watch their brothers swim. I don’t see how being sexualized so much by their parents that they had to be covered up as pre-teens could be a choice. Deedra went back to her own choice.
I gave up, but she started a new thread of her own about ignorant men who speak against the burqa. I chose not to participate.