cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/1476531
Archived version: https://archive.ph/r4ZKz
Archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20230815100118/https://www.euronews.com/culture/2023/08/14/muslim-women-harassed-at-northern-italian-beach-for-wearing-modest-clothing
Burkas need to go. Women should have equal rights to men. Modern interpretations of Islam don’t believe in equal rights and many women are forced to cover up. Fuck that.
I know it’s just an anecdote, but I’ve know quite a few Muslim women that prefer to wear it. I’ve also met many who don’t like to wear them. Is it really fair to ban it for the ones that actually choose to wear it?
Women choosing to dress conservatively isn’t exactly something foreign to Italians. Let’s not forget that nuns also wear very similar clothing and cover their hair. That’s not so different from a hijab.
Banning the burqa is limiting agency just as much as mandating it. Yeah, I think veiling etc. is honestly a stupid and ridiculously misogynistic custom, but I don’t think the fix is just another rule to limit women’s autonomy, but in a different way than before.
But we should ban leopard print clothing.
And mandate overalls. Just overalls. Nothing underneath.
hijabs are cute ngl, people are dumb
plus it gives you a great excuse to avoid washing your hair for a day or two while still looking snazzy
I’m happy to ban religious veils like nun hats (whatever they are called) and burkas/burqas as problematic religious symbols of misogyny. These religious relics are embedded deep into a culture and that part of the culture is misogynistic and discriminatory.
I don’t know, but I would bet many of the women that “prefer” wearing them prefer it because they believe they would be shunned otherwise from their support system. They “prefer” it in part because they don’t know anything different, and their own community has enforced it as soon as they went through puberty. What does it even mean to prefer something when you haven’t ever experienced not wearing it for an extended time without all your local support group shunning you? Is that really a preference?
But you can’t tell me these things are always comfortable. They look miserably uncomfortable in many situations and must cause a lot of undue heat and such. But the culture that forced these women to wear them runs deep. That part of culture needs to be eradicated.
We should also ban long hair.
I’m sure plenty of women only prefer to have long hair because they think they would be shunned or stan out if they cut it short.
I’m all for people getting to wear their hair like they want, but I’m confident that many women would actually prefer to wear their hair short, and so can’t be trusted to make that choice for themselves or express an honest opinion about it.
The first step in women’s liberation is making it clear that they lack agency and that other people know what’s best for them.
We’re all subject the cultural norms of the society that we live in. Particularly with religious norms, maintaining them can be coercive.
But that doesn’t mean that burkas, in and of themselves, are regressive.
Shouldn’t the goal be to create a space that is free of coercion so people can actually choose to wear it if they want to? Outright banning them is just enforcing a different cultural norm.
Why don’t you go talk to some Muslim women and actually seek their opinions on these things instead of just assuming what they want?
No, actually. If they’ve had to come to the West because the West keeps bombing the shit out of their homes, they owe the West jack shit. Whether or not the Islamic community wants to change some of its cultural practices to adapt to the West is for Muslims to decide and Muslims only.
This is just sexpat white saviorism 101 wrapped up with progressive language.
Internalized Sexism.
“The exact same conclusion as Islamophobic chuds, except I’m being feminist. Trust me.”
It’s possible to be right for the wrong reasons. Don’t let what “chuds” think define your moral code.
Chuds, like broken clocks, are occasionally correct. The key is that if you think you’re looking at a broken clock, you need to check that the clock is working.
We do that by looking at how we got to that conclusion that resembles a chud conclusion and examining the differences between our conclusion and theirs as well.
In this case, the user I was replying to clearly had not talked to many (or any) Muslim women and is simply assuming that women don’t like Islamic clothing because it looks uncomfortable. By that same reasoning, we should also ban neckties and high heels.
If the user got to the same conclusion as the chuds using such poor reasoning, I think it’s valid to point out that they might be chud adjacent.
The west is not some evil entity as you make them out to be. Sure, the west has done some bad shit, but it is far more progressive than many Islamic states that actively enforce misogyny.
It seems to be in vogue these days, especially with people that lean left, to shit on the US and the West. I find it unfortunate that so many privileged people in the west shit think it’s so cool to make their own culture out to be the aggressors and bad guys. They think that, by describing the west in a negative light, they can elevate themselves out of it or something.
I agree that banning shit is not a good idea, fundamentally, but when a culture brings in dumb shit, people should resist that dumb shit and adopt the good stuff. That’s the idea of a melting pot.
Most of the West by land area is built upon the graveyard of peoples slaughtered for their land and on the backs of people enslaved for their labor, but yeah that’s just “some bad shit”.
How about you Westoids deal with your own litany of unspeakable crimes against humanity by giving back your stolen lands and paying full restitution to the surviving descendants of your victims before you get on your high horse about how the Islamic world you’ve continuously bombed for the last two decades isn’t “progressive” enough.
Maybe people wouldn’t have to flee their homes and bring their “dumb shit” with them if you didn’t keep blowing their shit up.
Ah the classic stolen lands argument. You seem to think that the lands were widely populated with a dense civilization by people that had a concept of land ownership. You might be surprised to know that the americas were not densely populated in the slightest and most of the people who migrated to the americas through Siberia (the “natives,” who are actually just early migrants from the Middle East like all early Homo sapiens) don’t always have a concept of land ownership because they lived nomadic lives.
Your arguments are juvenile.
Ahh I see. So genocide is a-okay as long as the victims weren’t densely populated and didn’t think of land in line with the European sense of ownership.
Really, if they didn’t want to be brutally murdered, there should have been more of them and they should have created bits of paper saying who owned what land.
Makes sense.
Ah yes, we should liberate women by restricting their freedom to wear what they want to wear
the western white knight is here to let Muslim women know they don’t know what they’re doing because they’re small-minded and brainwashed
Also, weird how you bring up burqas under an article that doesn’t mention burqas. And you make it sound like only far-leftists are against a burqa ban when most liberals/moderates tend to be too.
High heels are actively and permanently injurious to the bodies of women in a way hijabs and burkas aren’t. I never see these “feminists” argue for the banning of high heels.
I wonder why
Who gives a shit what people wear? Just because you don’t like something doesn’t mean it should be banned. People like to cry about the nanny state and then go all in for regulating things that personally offend them yet ultimately cause no harm.
Devil’s advocate, but by that logic you’d be good with people wandering around with swastikas proudly displayed?
For my opinion, I don’t think banning clothing or telling women what to wear is the answer but religious items are definitely symbols of sometimes very sexist ideologies. I just wish true equality was achievable so these stupid conversations and laws didn’t exist. Honestly, I don’t spend a whole lot of time thinking about it, though.