A custom that they have every right to maintain, as it is a religion, and freedom of religion is an essential part of secular freedom.
You may have a problem with religions and the idea of God, but that is entirely irrelevant in determining whether these women are oppressed. It is also oppression to tell someone that they are not allowed to practice their chosen religion.
You have also indicated a problem with Islam, acting like a violent sect taints the entire religion. You don’t get to take away the rights of those who are not violent simply because the violent ones have the same practice.
You actually had some argument early on, but you lost it with this animosity towards religion indicating your real problem is just that people believe in God. Newsflash: you’re the minority in that regard.
Refer to anyone’s god as a “sky fairy”, and there is no reason for anyone to listen to what you have to say.
Your responses have turned into attacks on first Islam, then the concept of a God, and then on religion itself. None of these are relevant to the question at hand.
How can you discuss whether a particular practice by people who believe in a god is oppressive when you think the concept of believing in a god is oppressive?
It’s as if we were talking about whether there is misogyny in hip hop, and you came in and your argument was that hip hop itself is bad and people shouldn’t listen to it. Some of the people who sing it are criminals, so that makes it bad music.
Your opinion on God, Islam, and religion is irrelevant to the question at hand, which is whether the practice of wearing a particular piece of clothing is oppressive.
Well, gosh, I guess that I’ll have to stop saying in this thread that religious people should have their rights taken from them.
Oh, wait–I never did that in the first place.
That particular example makes so little sense I’m going to take the risky bet of guessing you’re not Catholic. You’ve got no idea of what a devotional item even is in general terms, nor what a Rosary is (either type of them).
I wouldn’t be so quick to call a belief a personal choice–beliefs are very largely based on the environment that you are raised in–if you spend your life being told that a certain is an absolute truth and that to question that truth is fundamentally wrong, you weren’t exactly presented with the choice to believe that.
You might not have been presented with a choice, but humans are a questioning and curious lot, though not uniformly so. Also no matter how tightly you try to control people, ideas seep in anyway and “crack the cake of custom.” For instance, there are LDS women who are fighting for changes in how their church treats women who have been raped–this despite the fact most of them were raised in an just the sort of circumstances you describe. I agree there are forces that compel people to conform, but they are neither uniform nor absolute.
I am actually a Catholic (so, you lose ;)), at least in so far as I was born into a Catholic family, went to communion and was confirmed. My family are all basically Catholics, and my wife’s family are also Catholics. I haven’t been a practicing Catholic in…oh, let’s say 40 years now (I’m being generous so folks won’t think I’m TOO old). I haven’t been to church except for funerals for at least a decade, maybe 2 at this point. I can’t recall. So, you are right…I’m not a Catholic but you need to put the ‘anymore’ part on. But that sentence (which, I admit was poorly constructed) wasn’t supposed to be just about Catholics, but religions in general.
Anyway, let me shift this a bit. A lot of folks in this thread seem to be saying that it’s not oppression for people to basically be indoctrinated into their religion or culture such that they feel it’s their choice to choose to wear or do things that the religion and their societies say they should/must. It’s still their choice, right? I wonder if we push that to the extreme if folks would feel the same. Off the top of my head, I’d say sexual orientation would be something that would push things to that extreme. So…is it ok if people are indoctrinated in their religion and feel that a homosexual orientation is wrong, a ‘sin’ or whatever? Are people who have and suppress those sorts of feelings or desires ‘oppressed’ because they are doing it to conform with what they have been indoctrinated to believe? What if they are pressured by their friends, family or neighbors to conform to that standard? What if they choose, seemingly freely (same as choosing to wear a burka) to suppress those things because that’s how things should be (how God or the gods or their friends or family think and say it should be)? Is that ok?
I get that telling people what to wear or what not to wear is also oppression. But I think that the reverse is (or can also be) the case, that indoctrination kind of makes free choice wrt dress a difficult thing, especially in societies where it’s expected for you to toe the line. Like I said earlier, this is a tough one…it’s not cut and dried. Myself, I think that folks should be allowed to wear what they want, even if that means that, yes, some women (or men) who choose to wear stuff like what are being discussed (or similar things in other religions) are oppressed. I also think that there is more to this than just what is on the surface.
I have read accounts from women in oppressive Islamic societies who take offense to Westerners imposing their mores and values on them. Yes, they want more freedoms and rights, but they want those things on their own terms, not on an American concept that is fraught with its own problems.
The message they hear isn’t “You should do what you want to do as an intelligent liberated woman.” No, the message that comes across is “Show your hair! Show your skin! Show your body! Screw your sense of modesty and be a sex object like ‘our’ women are!”
Even if hijab-wearing women are being coerced, so what? Trying to shame women for what they believe is a choice made of free will isn’t going to do anything but make them (and their menfolk) dig in their heels. I know if I had to listen to a Westerner explain to me how my hijab is oppressing me, when I hear horror stories about Western women being scolded for “dressing like a slut” after being sexually harassed or raped, my eyes would roll so hard they would probably roll right out of my head. This would happen even more so if the Westerner was someone who had voted for the pussy grabber-in-chief.
I don’t think this works at all - essentially every human society has produced expectations for how people dress.
I’d say it becomes oppressive when punishment is imposed on those who don’t wear it. And not informal “punishment”, such as people making critical comments - I think it has to be something formal and statutory.
I would say that most cultural norms are at least a little oppressive to at least a few people. So I guess hijabs are, too. But I’m not going to get excited about societies that pressure women to wear a hijab, because I don’t think it’s any more oppressive than any number of societal norms in our society that we mostly ignore. And it seems like a silly thing to put emotional energy into. You want to help oppressed Muslim women? Pressure Saudi Arabia to let women drive, or heck, pressure lots of middle-eastern countries to let women travel without the permission of a male relative. That’s a hell of a lot more oppressive than a head scarf.
I don’t think Muslim women in America are any more oppressed than any other group of women. There might be some families that are oppressive to their womenfolk, but the oppression that matters isn’t about wearing a hijab or not.
At work yesterday (substitute teaching at a high school), I saw a number of girls wearing hijabs, and I had this thread in mind. I noticed that, other than the hijabs themselves, most of the girls were dressed in basically the same way as their classmates. The only difference I saw was that the girls in the hijabs were wearing shirts long enough to cover the tops of their leggings (which is technically required by the dress code, but usually ignored), but that many of the other girls weren’t. I’d expect that, if this were really a matter of oppression, that the oppressors would also be opposed to the girls dressing like the infidels, particularly in garments like skin-tight leggings.
Full disclosure first : I am a first generation immigrant from India. I was born in a Hindu family, went to school in an all boys Catholic school from pre-K all through high school and I currently lean towards my own brand of atheism. I have friends and family from different religions.
One of my friends is a Muslim lady (also an immigrant from India) who went to college in the US and a prominent social worker very successful in her work.
She carriers a Burqa in her car and says she wears it only when she enters the premises of the mosque because it is mandatory. She also sends her daughter to the “school” in the mosque. Her daughter comes home and says that the mullah says that your mother is “sinning” by working and that she is destined for hell (the Mullah says other things to her little girl too that she then has to deprogram).
So anyways, her reasoning for the Burqa and such things is that if she doesn’t wear it, she will be driven out of her community and the community (especially the Mullah) makes it a point to make life hell for outcasts. Her community is pretty strong and their reach extends beyond US. For example, if she disobeyed, her family in India or Middle East or Canada can be made an outcast. So she doesn’t make a big deal about it.
In a lot of ways, there are elements of the Stockholm syndrome too and I can her passing on her burqa habits to her child too.
Nothing wrong with it as long as it’s done of your own accord (yes, even because you grew up that way). When it’s* forced* on you, that’s a problem, no matter what it is, makeup, whatever.
I think equally important is what you didn’t see i.e.Muslims boys standing out of the crowd because of their attire or grooming details.
A common lament from Muslims girls is that Muslim boys have it so easier than them because the girls have to adjust between two worlds (the world they are in and the world in the mind of their family/community). As if being a teenager in high school is not tough enough.
The complicated part is that the same social norm can be oppressive or liberating in different circumstances. E.g., it’s oppressive for Muslim women to be shamed or forced into wearing hijab when they don’t want to. But it can be liberating for Muslim women to choose to wear hijab instead of feeling that they have to “pass” as non-Muslim in order to avoid Islamophobic bigotry.
Likewise, it’s oppressive to assume that African-Americans must have “weird” or “funny” given names, often involving urban legends about a name arising from a stupid misunderstanding of an ordinary word. But it can be liberating for African-Americans to deliberately reclaim the tradition of inventing unusual or African-derived names instead of just accepting white-majority cultural assumptions of what an “appropriate” name ought to be.
As with many other cultural phenomena, it can be difficult for outsiders to determine when a particular social norm is oppressive and when it’s not. Generally, when I hear Muslim women complaining about being required to wear hijab, it makes sense to infer that that social norm is being imposed on them oppressively. And when I hear independent, liberal Muslim women defending the right to wear hijab (like the young German Muslim lawyer I once talked with about her successful lawsuit against rules banning headscarf-wearing in court), it makes sense to infer that it’s not.
Yes, it is weird how progressives push against “the patriarchy” forcing women to dress/act in certain ways (including looking down on women who “choose” to follow the standards of that culture, including Quiverful women) but eat it up like ice cream when it comes from Islamic society. Do you see feminists celebrating this?
Well yeah, in societies where a particular cultural norm is universal or nearly so, if it isn’t oppressive then it’s just, you know, normal.
Likewise, there’s nothing particularly liberating about, say, men wearing pants in US society. It can indeed be oppressive to insist that men must wear pants, given that many men in at least some situations would prefer to wear skirts.
But for the overwhelming majority of men who routinely wear pants and are fine with it, there’s nothing liberating about it. What would we say, “Congratulations on your courage in bravely choosing to make the same utterly normal and expected clothing choice that all the men around you have made”? [shrug emoji]