Naomi Wolf’s Feminism: Burqas Are Beautiful!
September 2, 2009 / 1:49 pm • By Dr. Melissa ClouthierNaomi Wolf defended the Muslim veil. This is something I wrote about a couple weeks ago amidst some controversy because I feel that the face covering specifically is wrong for the reasons Phylllis Chesler mentions here:
I know that writers don’t often choose the titles of their articles but your article led your editor to title the piece: “Behind the Veil Lives a Thriving Muslim Sexuality.” I do not want to repeat what I’ve already written but your article asks whether “we in the West (are not) radically misinterpreting Muslim sexual mores?” And, you write that the “Western interpretation of veiling as repression of women and of their sexuality….is not so, (but is rather) rooted in a strong sense of public versus private…what is due to God and what is due to one’s husband.”
This does not sound like a feminist indictment of female genital mutilation, forced veiling, forced illiteracy, forced arranged child marriage, polygamy, normalized daughter- and wife-beating, honor killings, or the torture and murder of so many people, both women and men, in Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Sudan, Somalia and Algeria, by Islamists paramilitary forces and by the Islamic government.
You ask that I publish your piece. Indeed, I have already “published” your piece by linking to it in my blog. It is embedded in the piece. Check it out for yourself.
Naomi: Both your generation and my much earlier generation of feminists have failed a universal vision of women’s human rights; most have become multi-cultural relativists and politically correct leftists. Such feminists have been more concerned with the rights of formerly colonized Muslim men than with the rights of formerly colonized and still colonized Muslim women. And, they view America and often Israel as the Evil Empires par excellence and give a free pass to Muslim tyranny.
I have stood almost alone and have been condemned by many for telling the truth about Islamic gender and religious apartheid, and about Israel, anti-Semitism, jihad, and America.
Post-modern feminists are loath to condemn real injustices towards Muslim women. They prefer whitewashing with pap like this from Wolf:
“Many Muslim women I spoke with did not feel at all subjugated by the chador or the headscarf. On the contrary, they felt liberated from what they experienced as the intrusive, commodifying, basely sexualizing Western gaze. … Many women said something like this: …’how tiring it can be to be on display all the time. When I wear my headscarf or chador, people relate to me as an individual, not an object; I feel respected.’ This may not be expressed in a traditional Western feminist set of images, but it is a recognizably Western feminist set of feelings.”
Here’s what I wrote August 19:
It would make sense that Feminists would oppose burqas because they are a tool of oppression for women: that is, burqas are specifically made to make a woman persona non grata. A burqa’s very purpose is to hide the woman and make her invisible as an individual. She is just not there.
But feminists, and liberals in general support the burqa. The woman has a “right to choose”.
But Phyllis points out that is nonsense:
Most Muslim girls and women are not given a choice about wearing the chador, burqa, abaya, niqab, jilbab, or hijab (headscarf), and those who resist are beaten, threatened with death, arrested, caned or lashed, jailed, or honor murdered by their own families. Is Wolfe thoroughly unfamiliar with the news coming out of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan on these very subjects? Has she forgotten the tragic, fiery deaths of those schoolgirls in Saudi Arabia who, in trying to flee their burning schoolhouse, were improperly veiled and who were beaten back by the all-powerful Saudi Morality Police?
And this reality is what feminists don’t want to see. They wish to excuse sexist, abusive, raping, and murderous behavior inherent in much of Islamic practice because to be against it would be a tacit approval of Western standards and that simply would not do. It would require a moral choice that would undermine their own criticism of their own patriarchal culture that has long since ceased to be abusive to women. Again, Phyllis says:
Wolf presents the West as anti-woman because it treats women as sex objects. Am I happy about pornography and prostitution in the West? Hell no and, unlike Wolf, I’ve fought against them–but to portray these vices as a “Western” evil, and one that the Islamic world opposes, is sheer madness.
It is well known that the Arabs and Muslims kept and still keep sex slaves–they are very involved in the global trafficking in girls and women and frequent prostitutes on every continent. You will find pornography magazines in every princely tent–those for boys as well as for girls. I am told that the Saudis fly in fresh planeloads of Parisian prostitutes every week. Perhaps they veil them before they conduct their all-night and all-day orgies. Or, perhaps they view them as natural, “infidel” prey.
Naomi Wolf and her American feminist ilk are spoiled rotten grown women who seem to have lost the ability to spot true oppression when it’s right in front of their faces. The burqa has been effective on them, too, evidently. They don’t see the individual under the cover, either. They see their own desires to be judged purely by their brains and accomplishments and long for a way to have their physical imperfections hidden. They see a burqa as a useful feminist tool to achieve that end. What they don’t see is that by being visually invisible, burqa clad women become literally invisible in society, as a cohesive force, as women.
The Feminist’s own callous disregard for the covered and abused women as individuals demonstrates why burqas are an abomination. Perhaps if they saw the bruised, beaten, bleeding, burnt bodies of these women, the torment of women suffering under radical Islam, under the burqa, would be real to them.
