Non-hijabi woman goes to jail
How sweet: just as Birmingham offers a new statue of The Hijabi Woman, Iran beefs up its punishments for women who try to escape the damn thing.
Iran’s parliament has passed a controversial bill that would increase prison terms and fines for women and girls who break its strict dress code.
Those dressed “inappropriately” face up to 10 years in jail under the bill, for which a three-year “trial” was agreed.
And by “inappropriately” they mean for instance a stark naked head and neck. Funny how men are allowed to have stark naked heads but women are not.
Under Iranian law, which is based on the country’s interpretation of Sharia, women and girls above the age of puberty must cover their hair with a hijab and wear long, loose-fitting clothing to disguise their figures.
While men don’t have to do any such thing.
On Wednesday, members of parliament voted by 152 to 34 to pass the “Hijab and Chastity Bill”, which says people who are caught dressed “inappropriately” in public places will be subject to a “fourth degree” punishment.
“People”? Does it say that? Not “women”? But men don’t wear hijab at all, so a hijab bill wouldn’t be talking about “people” as opposed to “women” would it? I don’t trust the BBC not to be sneaky and dishonest on this subject.
The bill also proposes fines for those “promoting nudity” or “making fun of the hijab” in the media and on social networks, and for owners of vehicles in which a female driver or passenger is not wearing the hijab or appropriate clothing, according to AFP news agency.
Any person who promotes violating the dress code “in an organised manner” or “in co-operation with foreign or hostile governments, media, groups or organisations” could also be imprisoned for between five and 10 years, it says.
Women must be terrorized and punished and blotted out. Women are the source of all evil. Women are a temptation to innocent men, and they must not be allowed to get away with it.
Earlier this month, eight independent UN human rights experts warned the bill “could be described as a form of gender apartheid, as authorities appear to be governing through systemic discrimination with the intention of suppressing women and girls into total submission”.
Ya think?
They hate women. Really really bone-deep hate them.
It’s sex, not gender.
I’m sure some of them do, but that’s not what’s driving this.
Window dressing
More window dressing
What is driving this is two things: oil and polygamy. (Iran has both.)
States with oil (and other high-value mineral resources, like gold or diamonds) are subject to a kind of curse. Instead of healthy economic development, they get conflict and civil war as competing factions fight for control of those resources, or else authoritarian governments that seize the mineral revenue and use it to perpetuate their own power. We see this in places all around the world.
In places where polygamy is disallowed, men compete for women, but in the end each man can have only one wife, and that limits the evolutionary return to that competition.
In places where polygamy is allowed, men fight for women; the losers die and the winners accumulate multiple wives. This multiplies up the return to fighting and violence enormously.
Think about it this way. For a population in steady-state, each individual leaves, on average, exactly two descendants. Allow that the women will leave two descendants regardless. Then a man with two wives doubles the representation of his genes in the gene pool; a man with four (the maximum allowed under Islamic law) quadruples that representation. This creates huge selective pressure for men to keep multiple wives, and we do see this behavior in men in all places where polygamy is allowed.
But…it isn’t enough for a man to kill off his rivals, claw his way to the top and collect a harem. He also has to make sure that those women only have sex with him: he has to keep the women from choosing their own sex partners.
One way is to keep the women in cages, like a prison. Stories do trickle out of places like Iran from time to time of women who are effectively imprisoned by their own families, but doing that at scale is expensive and inconvenient. The men want their wives to be able to function at some level in the world–do the shopping, care for the children–but not to be able to have any outside sex.
The primary means by which women attract men is by displaying their bodies. That is pretty much the starting point for courtship among humans. The purpose of the hijabi is to prevent women from displaying their bodies: to stop courtship before it can start.
And this isn’t something that you can do by halves. It’s no good for the elites to keep their women covered if the rest of the population is allowed to walk around in jeans and T-shirts. It’s way too easy for a covered woman to take off the hijabi, blend in with the crowd, and have sex with a man of her own choosing. They have to keep the whole population locked down, so that any uncovered women will stand out and can be recaptured.
Finally, the men on top really did fight and kill to get there. Now that they are there, they will use the entire power of the state apparatus to ward of challengers and maintain their position. But the whole point of being on top is to get the women. Now that they have the women, they will equally use the entire power of the state apparatus to maintain control over those women. That’s why we see things like 10-year prison sentences proposed for not wearing the hijabi.
I want to emphasize that there is no point bemoaning this sad state of affairs, or arguing right or wrong, good or bad. This is the behavior that we do see among men, and it is the result of millions of years of evolution. The only way to suppress this behavior is to remove the evolutionary returns to it. As a practical matter, this means getting rid of oil, or polygamy, or both.
Steven, you have given the standard evolutionary answer. No doubt there is some truth to it. But…if you read the things that are said about women, both in the ‘holy’ books and in the speeches/reports/etc, written by men, it is plain that misogyny is actually the driving force.
Women are routinely seen as dirty (hence the separation in some cultures during menstruation and the tittering teenage boy response to it in others). They are seen as deceitful. They are seen as harlots. They are seen as something that must be controlled, or they will destroy humanity.
Reproduction is the easy answer…after all, men don’t know for sure if it was their sperm that impregnated the woman unless they keep her on a short leash. But that doesn’t lead to the hatred and bile that is spewed at women in Muslim countries, Christian countries, Hindu countries, Jewish countries, and probably in atheist countries, though I don’t have any knowledge specifically.
It may originally have been about controlling the means of reproduction, but over time, that goal morphed into a hatred of women that is deep, entrenched, and disgusting.
One can sum it up much more briefly – women are a threat because they could get pregnant by Another Man, thus tricking a man into wasting his resources on some other guy’s kid. This is why religions are so fond of calling women whores and sluts. Whatever. The upshot is this poisonous hatred and insistence on control, and that’s what interests me.
@Steven
Perhaps you have overlooked places like Norway (oil) and Australia (mineral wealth). The authoritarian governments of the Middle East are the legacy of British and American efforts to ensure unfettered access to oil and it is always easier for a capitalist to deal with an autocracy than a democracy.
The balance of your post reads like the justification for male behaviour that I have heard and read from many men such as Jordan Peterson, Robert Bly, et al.
Rev David Brindley @5
It’s not a justification; it’s an explanation. How much of it is true is a separate matter (I’m not proclaiming an opinion yeah or nay, just saying. It’s evolutionary psychology: an attempt to understand the evolution of behavior.)
Which reminds me, I saw something interesting just the other day. On Facebook, I belong to a group for Pakistani feminists. One of them posted a cartoon that showed men staring at a woman walking down the street in a burqa. A BURQA; fully covered. The men were depicted with necks like snakes, all stretched out towards her. One woman commented:
(A man commented that the cartoon woman should not have been walking by herself.)
The burqa is obstensibly to protect women from male leering, which shows how little respect such societies have for anyone, but especially women since it’s their freedom that is restricted because of male inability to control our urges.
I asked a ChatGP AI Bot about the rates of rape in countries where burqas are forced on women, but it turns out that the World Population Review doesn’t have reported numbers for several countries that would be of interest such as Iran, Afghanistan, or Saudi Arabia. Also, the reporter noted that rape comparison statistics are very hard to gather because of the lack of reporting due to various factors including the legal definition of rape, and the fact that women are discouraged from reporting it due to the way the legal system treats victims. (Dubai famously treats rape victims as adultresses.)
However, I recall reading long ago that rape is still very common where women are tented up. Such covering protects no women from assault. But, here’s the report that I did find:
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/rape-statistics-by-country
There is a note that Sweden looks very bad but actually may have the best reporting rates. There are no good conclusions we can take from these comparisons.
Several years ago, I stumbled across a music video from Saudi Arabia. It was a song by a man who deeply loved his wife, and the commenters all mentioned how romantic it was. But the problem for me was that even though the singer was prominent throughout the video; walking along the beach, in the woods, smelling flowers, etc., but there was no representation of the women he was so smitten by. Romantic love exists, but women don’t?
Wellllllll that may be ostensible according to some defenders of the burqa, especially ones outside countries that mandate it, but Islamist governments and “activists” make it very very plain that it’s to keep those disgusting tempting whores as invisible and blank as possible, as well as a pretext for throwing them in prison, whipping them, stoning them to death, and all the rest of it. It’s deep deep deep contempt and disgust and hatred.
I wonder if there’s any other policy that involves putative “protection” of the target while being imposed by others and enforced with violence and death. I can’t offhand think of any.
The English army claimed that they first rolled into Northern Ireland to protect the Catholics after the Civil War, but that soon proved to be a lie. I can’t think of any other instances off the top of my head.
Ah good one – which nudged my memory into producing “we burned down the village to save it” – which is from the Vietnam war if I remember correctly, but could be from a lot of colonialist wars. I guess it is quite a popular trick.