…Except marriage, obviously.
I love you amanda, but the thing is that while a burka is a handy dandy symbol of patriarchal oppression, it is not Your symbol to use you silly cracker.
You see, one of the ways the islamic patriarchy pushes hijab onto women who would otherwise prefer not to wear head scarfs or burkas or any of that stuff is to use the KultureKampf that western imperialists are waging against muslims as an excuse to guilt trip young muslim women into donning the patriarchy uniform that goes with the particular family’s cultural background.
So many muslim women have been raised and told over and over again by their famlies that they’re betraying their culture and their fellow muslims if they don’t wear the headscarf or dress super modestly that they start to go along with it as they realise how incredibly racist western society is towards them, and you can justify any patriarchal bit of bullshit with that line – way too many of the FGM victims I’ve met (all of whom were fundigelical christians) used the line to justify chopping their daughter’s clits off.
And as the KultureKampf increases in intensity – and it will, the anti-muslim pogroms haven’t even really begun yet, just wait until the repugs notice how many african-american muslims there are in america – the more subversive the act of wearing highly visible symbols of islam will become, and so the more attractive burkas and hijab will in turn become to muslim women.
Racist whtie people are one of the big reasons why it’s hard for white liberals to talk about non-white systems of patriarchy, they dirty the waters and support the islamic patriarchy by giving it something to justify misogyny or homophobia with, because the minority culture can start blaming such evils as equal rights for women and homoseuxals on the white man, and even go so far as to blame the “bad” behavior of minority women and homosexuals for the shitty social status of the minority groups, and so the oppressive systems maintain themselves with a huge intersystem circle jerk powered by whitey and their knout loving POC allies.
Your burka piccie falls on the bad side of that Amanda, not to the same extent as Mark A Rose’s bullshit you understand, but it is still less helpful than it is helpful because it spreads the meme that he was touting that there’s something exceptionally misogynistic about islam (which is where the Othering comes in – out of all the oppressive cultures you could have picked, you picked that one, and remember that authorial intent is irrelevent okay? So note that I’m not implying intent either), and that false belief in the exceptional misogyny of islam is of course then used as justification for mass murder and colonialism that then feeds into things like the Iranian Revolution, where iranian women observed hijab as a direct act of defiance against western imperialism, and so on, and so forth.
If you want to get rid of these bullshit, rape culture affirming, customs and support muslim feminists, you can’t do things like this – there’s too much baggage floating around because of the neo-cons and while you can pretend that the cultural context isn’t relevent, it really is and it’d be easier for everyone if you just stopped digging a hole for yourself.
Remember the golden rule for white people dealing with nonwhite politics: Don’t be T-Rex!
And if you don’t accept any of those other reasons, then just remember that at the very least it’s like the “calling repugs morons is an insult to morons” movement, what did muslims do to you to deserve being compared to Ann Althouse huh?
Not only are you a knee-jerker, but totally misconstruing my earlier point.
I never said you were a closet racist – please give me a god-damn break!!!!
I said – the intent of the ‘joke’ was not THOUGHT about. It was assumed ‘everyone’ would ‘get it’ as most of the bloggers on the net are WHITE.
I recognize the value of pandagon and punkass and their posts about ‘racism’ and ‘sexism’ and ‘classism’ and ‘ableism’ blah blah blah — I wouldn’t be reading these blogs if I felt otherwise (Obviou-fucking-sly). But i do not feel the need to be ‘grateful’ for their own ‘liberal’ outlook and feel that it’s okay for me to point things out when I feel the need to.
I shan’t be replying to further comments by you – you just don’t seem to get it. Goodbye!
As I see it, the problem here is the intertwining of (1) feminism, and (2) cultural imperialism.
I agree with R. Mildred that we’re better off hurling our own cultural idols as iconoclastic insults rather than those whose appropriation raises distracting questions.
I don’t find this image’s use of the burqa to be nearly as offensive as blackface, but I do see it, at the very least, as an appeal to a Western Christian superiority complex in the service of a valid point. And I don’t think I have to say here that there’s no need these days for Westerners to pile on more insults on Muslims. I guess, in my eyes, the offense is that the Muslim woman’s voice does not appear in this depiction. As far as I can see, the central weapon for insult is appropriated from Muslim culture without consent. Does this mean I approve of Sharia law? No. It means that I don’t want to presume to speak on behalf of Muslims who are resisting Sharia.
Since RAWA keeps coming up in defense of this image, I would appreciate a statement from RAWA saying that this image upholds their values and objectives. Being familiar with RAWA’s work is not enough.
Peace.
Excuse me? “But don’t go around putting up photos of it as an ‘inside joke’ amongst ‘your white friends’.” That’s a direct quote, and if you’re going to claim that you don’t know the signifiers behind that sentence, that’s fine, but that also means you need to accept that I didn’t know my signifiers before making the photo, which is really my whole claim here.
I said – the intent of the ‘joke’ was not THOUGHT about.
Right, and I apologized.
It was assumed ‘everyone’ would ‘get it’
With you so far.
as most of the bloggers on the net are WHITE.
No. You’re ascribing intent and attitude, to me, that is NOT. APPLICABLE. As I have gone over before – my error and insensitivity was in my very ignorance that there would be a racial overtone to the photo in the first place. Not that I thought I could get away with said racial overtone.
But:
But i do not feel the need to be ‘grateful’ for their own ‘liberal’ outlook and feel that it’s okay for me to point things out when I feel the need to.
I don’t understand who’s asking you to be ‘grateful’, or asking you not to point things out. “Taking exception to something specific you say” is NOT the same thing as “trying to shut you up.”
I shan’t be replying to further comments by you – you just don’t seem to get it. Goodbye!
Well, okay. I’m sorry to see you go, as one thing I have maintained throughout is that it’s not my intention to alienate people of good intentions.
It’s probably safe to assume that anything you have said which I haven’t addressed, either before or after you said them, means that I am essentially in agreement with you. The points of disagreement are the points which are worth going over – but not with someone who thinks that “disagreeing” is “knee-jerking.”
RAWA believes that the United Nations has not been able to address the problem properly. If the UN can send a large number of peace-keeping forces to places like Cambodia and Bosnia, why should it not be adopting a similar policy in Afghanistan? It is all the more important to have large peace-keeping forces in Afghanistan where most fundamentalist groups owe their power to the support of foreign countries. It is very unfortunate that UN activities are limited only to negotiating with fundamentalists, and it is very apparent that the UN is not willing to take any steps that would annoy them. We advocate that the UN view Afghanistan as the homeland of the Afghan people, and not as the property of a few armed militia. The UN should take into account the will of the people of Afghanistan and must not proceed according to the whims of the fundamentalists.
There seemed to be some confusion upthread on RAWA’s position on UN peacekeepers in Afghanistan and whether or not Feminist Majority is overruling their wishes.
actually, I never said a thing about the UN, I said U.S. interventions. Having a nuetral force enter a countrie with no underlying hopes of colonzing or permanetly usurping the resources of the nation is completly different than a nation that has documented its desire and need to “birth” a new middle east. RAWA recognizes the differences between the two and have made their opinion known for many years.
Since you specifically objected to the call for peacekeepers, I figured it was a relevant point of information. The U.S. doesn’t really have “peacekeepers” under direct U.S. leadership, though we do give troops to the UN for peacekeeping.
[...] Kudos to Auguste and Amanda for taking BFPs, Sly Civilian, and R Mildred’s criticisms seriously rather than just delivering the verbal smackdown. Both of them have, in my opinion, been very gracious in listening to the critiques, offering their own explanations (and disagreements), and trying to come to a common ground. You see folks. It’s not really that hard. [...]
[...] trackback from your own site. *del.icio.us *Digg it *Furl *ma.gnolia *RawSugar *Shadows *Simpy *MyWeb Technorati Tags: Community, Feminism, Media, Politics, Racism, WorldPolitics [...]
If we can agree that anorexia and high heels are symbols of patriarchal oppression, even when women choose to participate, we should also accept that burqa is a symbol of oppression even when women go along with it.
In fact, the burqa is an even more potent symbol of oppression because it was forced on the women of Afghanistan by the Taliban in very recent history. Many women in Kabul and other cities favored Western dress before the Taliban took over, but one of the Taliban’s first acts was to shove women into burqas and quiet shoes before remanding them to virtual house arrest.
The Taliban takeover is a powerful metaphor for exactly what the religious right and other social conservatives are trying to do to emancipated North American women. Before the Taliban, women in the big cities of Afghanistan were often educated, emancipated, and employed. Obviously, that didn’t make their way of life any less Islamic. They were Muslim women upholding their own standards of modesty, until the Taliban fundamentalists took over and imposed their norms by force.
People who say that using the burqa to symbolize oppression is a way of demonizing Islam don’t know what they’re talking about. On the contrary, Treating the burqa as representative of observant Islamic dress or as a stand-in for Islam itself is even more offensive.
Islamic law mandates that women dress modestly, but there is no theological or cultural consensus as to what constitutes modesty. Burqas are the norm in Afghanistan, but not elsewhere in the Muslim world. For example, in Saudi Arabia, a loose cloak, a face veil, and a headscarf are the standard for modest feminine dress, with the face veil being legally optional. That’s a very restrictive dress code by Western standards, but considerably less constraining than the tent-like burqa. Burqas aren’t standard attire in most of Pakistan, Iran, Muslim North Africa, Indonesia, or North America. Certainly some people wear them, but they aren’t the norm, let alone the law.
Five Things Feminism Has Done For Me…
The Liberal Avenger
Zuzu tagged me with this, and I don’t usually do memes, but then again people don’t usually tag me with them. So, here goes:
1) Feminism doesn’t have to do anything for me.
Yeah, it’s a semi-copout answer,…
“People who say that using the burqa to symbolize oppression is a way of demonizing Islam don’t know what they’re talking about.”
Lindsay, who put those women in the burqas? Evil Islamic men, which means we must go save them! And off we go bombing everything in sight using women’s oppression as one of our pretexts. You saw Laura Bush’s comments about how many women have been liberated, right? And you are not paying attention if you haven’t seen how any reason is used to demonize all muslims/arabs including burqas and head scarves.
During the 2004 elections I remember some paper in the UK wanted their readers to call voters in Ohio to please vote for Kerry and get rid of Bush. There was a backlash, the people they called told them to fuck off and get out of American politics. Most people do not want outsiders to tell them what to do or how to think. This is why it is a bad idea for colonizing nations and their people to use other cultures at the butt of their jokes. It can create a backlash and has done in the past.
I also said that I thought that I would have gotten the “joke” if the intent was to say that the Afghani woman deserved a seat at that table more than another middle class white person adding to the echo chamber. I do not see her as silent, instead I do see that those who were there were simpering and fawning. The Afghani woman would have been the only one speaking truth to power. I imagine that both Auguste and Amanda thought that if Jessica had been wearing a burqa she would no longer be chatting and laughing, she would have been silent and turned into nothing. This is why we say they have some unconcious racism going on, they can not imagine a burqa wearing woman with actual opinions and voicing them at that meeting. It’s laughable and that’s part of the “joke”.
Strawman, Donna. Many feminists, myself included, feel that patriarchy is worldwide and don’t demonize Muslim men. On the contrary, I’m sure that our theocrats here would love to subjugate women. They say as much. Instead, we feel sisterhood and offer humbly to other feminist women our help, under their direction. Which is why I tend to think that RAWA is the first go-to source on what should be done about Afghanistan. I don’t patronize other women. On the contrary, I think feminists of other cultures are probably the first people you should listen to.
I don’t think so. The burqa in the picture was a strawman argument. Or do you think that Jessica in a burqa really crossed Althouses mind? I doubt it. It crossed Auguste’s mind, and yours though, so it says more about you two than Althouse.
I’d really like to know why it is ok for you to draw out Althouse’s writing on the subject to what you believe to be the “logical conclussion” that she wants American women to wear burqas, but it isn’t ok for your POC to do the same to you? Are we only allowed to examine our enemies but not our allies?
I wonder if people would have found offense if you contrasted two pictures, kept the burqa wearing woman in that photo, and also had a photo of the American male plasticized ideal, Pam Anderson in a bikini, wandering a market in Afghanistan. And had the caption, “Is this what Althouse wants?” It would still be hyperbole, but because you are contrasting the sexism of the east with that of the west it wouldn’t appear that you are pointing a finger at the evil of muslim men. By only having the one picture, it is like saying, Althouse is as bad as those horrible muslim men who want to keep women covered head to toe, but she is really worse than that, because she is sexist both ways and would force American women to be covered and muslim women to be uncovered, whether it is what they wish or not.
Wasn’t that the point? That Althouse never would on her own understand her own hypocrisy?
OT: Bring back Pandagon?
If we can agree that anorexia and high heels are symbols of patriarchal oppression, even when women choose to participate
Actually there’s been fierce debate over whether we can use high heels (don’t compare burkas to anorexia please, because the funny thing in all this is that burkas only become violently oppressive in the context of men who are looking for any excuse to beat women anyway – high heels are more physically oppressive than burkas but burkas have a certain psychological edge over high heels, because they come with a whole load of rape culture affirming assumptions about who, when and why acts of rape are committed) as an all purpose syumbol of patriarchal oppression – I know they’re a good symbol of oppression for me, because they represent the casually accepted aspects of patriarchal culture that most people don’t see, but I’m leaning towards the view that as a general symbol they’re not ideal.
Or do you think that Jessica in a burqa really crossed Althouses mind?
Well i might have done, but that is of course assuming we can find the poor abused thing that once was Ann’s mind in the first place.
If we can agree that anorexia and high heels are symbols of patriarchal oppression, even when women choose to participate
Uh, I’ve got a problem with applying this analysis to anorexia. It tends to be both extremely shallow and incapable of analyzing the disorder as a disorder with dimensions beyond simple internalized misogyny. I don’t deny that the typical goal of anorexia is related to patriarchal beauty standards, but that’s not the same thing.
Plus, “choose to participate?” Yeah, not so comfortable with that, either.
High heels are more physically oppressive than headscarves, but not more oppressive than burqas. Headscarves don’t restrict women’s activites or physically injure them.
Whereas the burqa is like a diving bell. The wearer has to peer out through a a screen. These garments restrict a woman’s movement and her vision. Imagine trying to drive a car, play sports, or work in a lab in a true burqa. These garments are incapacitating.
“like the Iranian Revolution, where iranian women observed hijab as a direct act of defiance against western imperialism, and so on, and so forth.”
Actually the hijab in this context was a form Islamist recuperation, which they used usefully against leftist revoltunaries who had naively aligned themselves with Iranian Islamist movement led by Khomeni. When secular Iranian women during the Iranian revolution demontstrated against dress restrictions (among other things) they were denounced as perfumed, bourgeois women by the Islamist rulers. This forshawoded the executions, exiling, torture and purging from the revolution of Iranian leftists.
So the hijab as defiance against western imperialism? Hardly.
[...] Not everyone took kindly to the use of the burka as the ultimate symbol of patriarchy. Brownfemipower at Women of Color Blog, R. Mildred, at Punk Ass Blog, and Sly Civilian called Amanda out on her use of the burka as the ultimate symbol of oppression. R. Mildred was quick to point out the sort of Western imperialism associated with framing patriarchy as something that comes from “the third world” or the “Muslim world.” You see, one of the ways the islamic patriarchy pushes hijab onto women who would otherwise prefer not to wear head scarfs or burkas or any of that stuff is to use the KultureKampf that western imperialists are waging against muslims as an excuse to guilt trip young muslim women into donning the patriarchy uniform that goes with the particular family’s cultural background. [...]
“I’d add that by multiculturalist standards, lynchings in the South are beyond criticism because it was economically depressed white people acting out their aggression. We won’t sign onto the idea that murdering black people is an appropriate way to work out ill feelings (and rightly of course), so why is oppressing women an acceptable behavior?
”
Amanda, that’s a vile analogy and you are a fool, you had Clinton already in the picture, the man most responsible on earth for the oppression of women in Afghanistan, including the burqa, the founding father of the Taleban. And instead of criticising him and this policy, you celebrate it and displace the blame onto dark strangers, because the white President has the right to treat that trash as he pleases, because he like to see tits too, and anyway it’s not personal, only business. Right?
Stop this grotesque sanctiminous fraudulent excuse making; you thought a woman in a burqa was something that would make other Clinton toadies giggle along with you. That’s the most undeniable measure of your compassion and commitments to women you insist on your right to champion by ridiculing and exploiting the image of their pain and lying about its causes for your vanity while gazing in adoring awe at their Persecutor Taleban in Chief.
You say Althouse is remarkably like what she claims to criticise; consider her your mirror.
You see that’s the heart of YOUR cultural relativism; what you condemn in those wicked dark others you excuse in the Great White Man and yourself because, well, veiling, abusing, exploiting and attacking women (and men and children) with specially armed and trained wahabbist paramilitaries is acceptable in your culture.
“Wasn’t that the point? That Althouse never would on her own understand her own hypocrisy?”
Right, and neither would you or Amanda, Laura Bush or Bill Clinton, Catherine McKinnon or those advocating today for US military intervention in Sudan, or anyone else indoctrinated in white supremacist imperialist orientalist thinking.
“In Bosnia, Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon and his successor, the German Christian Democrat, Christian Schwarz-Schilling, have acted as local dictators, annulling elections, nixing politicians and overriding laws as they see fit. Dyncorps, a private military contractor for the US government, was found to have been running a sex slavery ring in Bosnia. This is the perfect epilogue to the way in which the “international community” helped bring bloody carnage to Bosnia as part of its drive to break up Yugoslavia. In Kosovo, under the appointed humanitarian dictatorship of Bernard Kouchner, UN forces and their paid surrogates have been running a mini-Guantanamo, while UNMIK and K-FOR forces have been engaged in more sex slavery.”
http://leninology.blogspot.com/2006/10/of-pride-and-protection-rackets.html
I know it’s impolite to mention anything that wasn’t on CNN this week, but don’t forget to thank the Chief of your culture and his wahabbist extremist paras who accomplished these great strides for Western Enlightenment in Yerup while you are preaching of the evils of multiculti islamophiles and how they are really too soft on misogyny.
the madrassahs which created the Taleban were set up to train terrorists for Clinton’s proxy and eventually declared full scale war on the secular feminists of Yugoslavia and their countrymen, his inherited proxy war on the people, secular and religious, of Chechnya, and Clinton’s proxy war on the people of Afghanistan. You see, the problem with “The Merchant on Venice” is not that ruthless usurers are not so bad, it’s that ruthless usurer is not a synonym for Jew. And the problem with your supposed objection to the subjection of women in Afghanistan is not that this subjection is not so bad, it is that you have this utterly uninvestigated assumption that some unnamed Semites and Orientals, the usual suspects, are to blame. In fact your culture, not “theirs”, is responsible for conditions for people in Afghanistan, which has been ruled by the US effectively since the mid 80s and you deny this and blame a vague and fungible horde of dark islamoscary others for it while at the same failing even to understand what it is and what it isn’t and what the people concerned are doing to improve their lives, defend themselves, and resist your culture’s crimes against humanity. The problem is not that enforced dress for women is not so bad, it is that you acquit those who impose it, who have the power to impose it, and fail to take the least responsibility for deferring your opinions about it until you have taken the trouble to be schooled by those concerned. They are not abandoned children you can simply adopt like kids of the periphery sold to liberals on teevee for a dollar a month; many have a different view regarding who their enemy is and many consider, with good reason, you and that culture you defend and admire as superior to theirs, and whose crimes you whitewash and frame up other people for, to be the main problem negatively affecting their lives, the root problem. You cannot pretend to champion women in burqas and portray Bill Clinton, he who imposed this very policy on them by force with your money, as neutral or admirable at the same time; that’s emphatically a pro-wahabbist extremist attitude, and volunteering to disseminate this propaganda which acquits the actual creators, directors and masters of (minority) wahabbist para forces operating globally and offers a deceitful set of assumptions about it is only contributing to the maintenance of these forces and ensuring they will continue to commit atrocities certainly not confined to the forced veiling of women which result in great profits to their leadership/sponsors whom you support. These assumptions you repeat, as a joke, which suggests they are so obvious only a lunatic would question them -their culture is pro-forced-burqa, our culture is anti-forced-burqa, their culture is anti-feminist, our culture is feminist, all lies – is ignoring what every organisation of feminist women in burqas is trying to get across to you.
Anti-forced-burqa-ism begins at home. For you especially, for American Liberals, who invented the practise of forcing women to wear those specific burqas you pictured and foisted it, and other oppressions, by force of arms and a specially trained paramilitary on women and men in Afghanistan. Not every Afghan man is pro-Taleban, but everyone, man or woman, who ever supported the democratic party in the Clinton era was whether they knew it or not.
“There seemed to be some confusion upthread on RAWA’s position on UN peacekeepers in Afghanistan and whether or not Feminist Majority is overruling their wishes. ”
No, RAWA is complaining that afghanistan is at the mercy of fundamentalists supported by ‘foreign countries’, principally the US. Feminist Majority is calling for *more* US support for their fundamentalists clients, and is thus part of the problem RAWA is appealing in polite diplomatic careful language to the UN to address.
Wahabbism is a an American thing. It exists ONLY on the largesse of US patronage and is a feature ONLY of US clients and inside the most tightly controlled and politically ‘dependent’ and cherished part of the US empire, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, among the CIA network of which Osama Bin Laden used to be the head, among some of Negroponte’s death squads in Iraq, among the extreme right US clients in Bosnia. There are NO Wahabbist organisations or governments in the entire world who are not US creature clients, and there never have been.
There is one case of a US islamist, but not wahabist, client funded by wahabists which has gone independent, which is Hamas. It is not itself Wahabist. It was controlled and funded by the US initially through Saudi, but it became a mass movement and its membership changed its character as it became a legitimate part of the Palestinian struggle. That is the only US-(and in this case Israel) creature Islamist client which left the US nest.
There has never been a Wahabist mass movement or popular movement. Never ever ever. Wahabism is not ‘the culture’ of any people on earth but an ideological instrument controlled by people in Washington DC. It is the extreme right wing ideology of small cliques of US clients doing the empire’s work in places populated by Arab and Muslim majorities.
Devout, highly observant Muslims of course exist elsewhere; among a certain bloc of the political class in Iran for example; they are not ‘fundamentalists’ in the strict sense, which is in any case a term adopted from discourse on Christianity and refers to the literal interpretation of the Bible, and is only imperfectly and misleadingly applied to either Wahabbist extremists or devout Muslims such as some Iranian clerics or members of Hezbollah or Hamas.
A cariacature of what Amanda calls “their culture” – “their” being some undefined brown horde, “culture” suggesting god knows what, but everyone seems to understand what this dance is for – has been created by US propaganda from the behaviour of these US-Wahabbists which is a reality which was also created by the US ruling elite and is maintained with US taxpayer money and US arms. This caricature is useful, indeed indispensible, to the apology for the US and indeed it’s own (unmentionable) Wahabbism. The bad characteristics of US client behaviour are then slyly associated with images and ideas from the actual culture of actual other people from countries with majority arab and muslim populations, and used as signs and symbols not of “their culture” but of the Washington Wahabbism. Thus veil=islam=them=Our Wahabbist paramilitaries and our Wahabbist puppet royals. The veil=their evil culture, their culture defined as misogynist and in every other way horrible because we have assigned our own government’s policy’s to it, this absolving ourselves and “our culture” of its crimes and simultaneously justifying them as remedies for their criminality and ickiness.
“Islamic fundamentalism” doesn’t refer to reality very intelligibly. What it refers to is a ghoulish character whose adventures are related by CNN. We have to recognise this character is a composite of US, of our deeds, and our Wahabbism, not THEM, their deeds, or their Islamic faith, or their Semetic culture.
Step one in rejecting this propaganda is rejecting the caricature, which Amanda chooses to evoke as so obvious it requires neither explanation nor proof of validity, of ‘Islamicism’ as Wahabbism AND of Wahabbism as “theirs”. Wahabbism is OURS, a product of the unique culture of the American Imperial Elite.
Burqas, Photoshop, and the feminist blogosphere…
Perhaps you’ve heard of Burqa-gate, the controversy that erupted in the feminist blogosphere when Amanda’s co-blogger photoshopped a burqa onto Jessica Valenti in order to ridicule the forced modesty crowd that tried to shame Jessica Valenti for wear…
Lindsay, who put those women in the burqas?
Ronald Reagan, Don Rumsfeld, everyone who decided to violently interfere in Afghanistan’s internal governance in the first place, all of us in the US who support these imperalist adventures with our tax dollars?
Well only by accusing others of secret support of the ghost of Reagan can you quell doubts that somehow you secretly love Reagan.
Well only by accusing others of secret support of the ghost of Reagan can you quell doubts that somehow you secretly love Reagan.
Okay peeps, any more irony on this thread from the people who had a fucking spastic fit about how I must love the taliban to critcise the use of a righwing war supporting meme in a petty sniping fest between two white women, and I’m gonna have to start handing out the spankings.
I love you guys, but I can only stand so much irony, you know?
and I’m gonna have to start handing out the spankings.
Me! Me first!
Some people pay good money for that…
[...] And then there’s the feminist blogosphere veil/burqa thing (see also this and this) – an evolution of last month’s Boob Thing. [...]
Uh I didn’t say that, fat doug lover. (If you’re talking to me) Donna asked who put the women in the burquas and I’m answering that imo, we as a country did, since before we involved outself in Afghanistan in the 80′s most women didn’t wear them and now thanks in large part to governments we installed, they do. Donna’s answer is Islamic men did, therefore the cartoon is mocking them, I’m disagreeing that that’s the only possible interpretation. (Um, BTW, I don’t have a special Get Out of Taxes Free Card, so if I were accusing other taxpayers of secret support for the ghost of Reagan, I’d have to be included in that too, see how that works?)
Oh and in case there’s confusion, by “everyone who decided to violently interfere in Afghanistan’s internal governance in the first place” I meant government policy makers, the ones who actually make the decisions and implement the policies.
Gyahhhh. People are trying to explain why the bloody IMAGE is OFFENSIVE. since you ASKED. No. No one i saying anyone is supporting–
actually? I’m gonna just point to Black Amazon commenting over at Bitch Lab, as she sums the bottom line up just fine her damn self. More than fine. Which is the point, here. HERSELF.
http://blog.pulpculture.org/2006/10/06/its-open-mock-at-bitch-lab/#comment-12404
BA did not actually give me permission to do this, so fair warning: just read the fucking thing, then go away and process it. Really. Say something -else- fuckwitted to my friend in my -other- friend’s post and i will hold you down while they kick your pasty ass from here to Saturn.
uh… it sounds like there is a bunch of white woman writing about things they know nothing about, and everyone here is basing their facts off of *sources* like NPR or Fox News…
Number one, misinformed ladies…. don’t talk about the WOMEN of afghanistan if you are going to refer to us as AFGHANIS
i assume you don’t understand how calling us afghanis immediately makes anything you write irrelevant… let me clue you in…
AFGHANI is the same equvilent as an american DOLLAR….
US citizens aren’t called DOLLARS are they? Well, neither are AFGHAN citizens.
We ARE called AFGHANS.
If perhaps, you had called afghan woman as afghans, instead of ‘afghanis’ then I might post something about the subject being said…. as an afghan woman.
But first, get your terms straight people ….
[...] One of the things I thought curious and I wondered, am I nuts to think this? In the discussion at Punkass and at Happy Feminist, people kept saying that US feminists didn’t make the Burqa the ultimate symbol of oppression but, rather, the Taliban did. [...]
Don’t you just love it when WASP women residing in an alien culture draw out what is oppressive and what isn’t with regards to Muslim women?
I was born a Muslim, lived around them for most of my life and I can safely say that I haven’t met a single Muslim woman who was forced to wear the hijab (I grew up in the UAE). You feminazis really need to lay of Fox and CNN, they are like sodium cyanide for your minds.
“If we can agree that anorexia and high heels are symbols of patriarchal oppression,”
Actually those are a natural consequence of feminist sponsored “sexual liberation.” When the feminazis duped women into rebelling against their natural instincts and dumping the roles of wife/mother, women began obsessing about their physical image. In typical doublespeak the Feminazis now blame this on “patriarchy” that phantom foe who is the Sauron of the feminist world view.
Anyhow the Muslim women I’ve grown up with and encountered in my life are healthy, emotionally stable and take the roles of Wife/Mother seriously. As such they are not neurotically obsessed with their physical appearance and neither do they grow bitter at age 40 like Western women (who blame their dysfunction on “patriarchy” again). They raise healthy kids and are a source of emotional strength for their husbands.
Oh and they all wear the Hijab and are proud to do so.
[...] it’s actually a pretty common defensive tactic. I see it all the time. In the burqa wars–and in fact in pretty much any clusterfuck involving Amanda–it was “You’re [...]