Sharia in Aceh, a mural in Sydney
Aceh is officially a horrible place to be a woman.
In Aceh today, it is a crime for two mature people of different sexes who are not married or related by blood to be together in an isolated place.
Ponder that carefully to see just how ridiculous and stultifying it is. Even if those two people have sex, that shouldn’t be a crime, The idea that they can’t even interact without a chaperone is a recipe for culture-wide idiocy.
In the course of their investigations, WH officials say, they sometimes force women and girls to submit to virginity exams, and in some cases, condition suspects’ release on their agreement to marry. Both practices violate international human rights law.
Forcing women and girls to submit to virginity exams is rape. Period. There’s no other word for it. Aceh makes adult interaction a crime and rape a tool of law enforcement.
Another Acehnese law requires that all Muslims in Aceh wear Islamic attire, defined as clothing that covers the aurat (for men, the area of the body from the knee to navel, and for women, the entire body with the exception of the hands, feet, and face)…
Which is all we need to know. Men are required to wear clothes between the waist and the knees, women are required to wear clothes all over apart from the face and hands. In a tropical climate.
Yet the Sydney Morning Herald (for one) sees the issue as one of women’s right to wear clothes all over as opposed to their right not to.
It has
become a lightning rod in the public debate about the right of Muslim women to wear the burqa, attracting protests, the censure of a mayor and messages of support from talkback radio.But now the Newtown mural of a woman in a full-face Muslim covering with a strike symbol over her face and the words ”Say No to the Burqa” is the subject of an anti-discrimination complaint.
Which is more fundamental? The right to wear a tent with a narrow slit for the eyes? Or the right not to? The right to frame the tent with a narrow slit for the eyes as a deprivation of rights, or the right to silence that framing? Which should trump which?
Well, this makes some sense, if you think about it from the perspective of our bodies having been designed by God.
Men’s bodies are pretty poorly designed from an engineering standpoint, but most of the visible defects are in the aurat region… The urinary tract getting double usage as a gamete delivery mechanism, and then for good measure putting it near the rectum (as Neil deGrasse Tyson asks, what kind of designer would put an amusement park next to a sewage dump?)… The appendix is near that region… The engineering blunder that is the testicles (“oh crap, this part of the machine I am building runs hotter than the rest and I can’t keep it cool enough… I know, I’ll just stick it in a bag and let it dangle off the side!”). And don’t even get God started on foreskins. Really. You’ll be there for awhile.
But now look at the mess He made of women’s bodies. You’ve got the same problems regarding orifice proximity and reuse… the pelvis is dangerously small for birthing given human cranial size… Unlike other mammals, where the bulky mammary glands (ooh joy, more dangly bits) are at least suspended vertically from a horizontal spine, in humans God left them pulling sideways and down on a vertical spine, virtually guaranteeing back problems for the well-endowed, and necessitating the use of a whole separate item of clothing to keep them supported… Not to mention those same glands have a high probability of turning cancerous, the bones have a tendency to undergo osteoporosis, and a whole litany of other problems…
It’s not that God hates women per se… it’s just that He hates the crappy design job he did, and he’s embarrassed. It’s only fair that it be covered up, so God isn’t constantly reminded what a hopelessly shitty engineer He is.
Make sense now?
James: are you proposing doG the not-quite intelligent designer? You do manage to make it all sound rather like a failed Eng101 project.
As for the body-bag (or most other things) why can’t great big grown-up people choose for themselves? Oh sorry – I know why don’t I?
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Skeptic South Africa, Ophelia Benson. Ophelia Benson said: Sharia in Aceh, a mural in Sydney http://dlvr.it/9cJdv […]
I still feel uncomfortable with the idea of banning a type of clothing, however when a state enforces a clothing style, especially one which is so oppressively sexist it is clear: this is unconscionable.
Radley Balko has been observing that the media are generally united as authoritarian. Even NPR and other “liberal” media will sneer at people standing up to authority figures so it shouldn’t be much surprise to see this sort of kowtowing in print. Good that there are people like OB who speak out for the people.
James, I liked your post. It is much within a theme I have asserted for years. That is, if God existed and was taking Engineering Analysis and Design I, a freshmen level course, and I was his professor… I’d have failed him and suggested he sought a new major, something less rigorous… Maybe religious apologetics where you can just make shit up…
That’s not a bug, it’s a feature.
The whole purpose of the gamete delivery mechanism is to ejaculate semen far enough that the sperm cells are able to swim the rest of the way on their own. The delivery mechanism fails if the exit is blocked by a plug of dried semen from the last time around. So a flushing mechanism is absolutely necessary. Rather than reinventing the wheel, it is a much better design to make use of the existing urinary tract for this purpose.
I am reminded of this every time I forget to pee soon after, um, getting it on.
Is there anything that would strike more fear in a young girl’s heart than some leering government pervert saying “Now is the time for your virginity exam”?
Yes but the mural isn’t about banning, it’s about saying no.
I completely agree. I just mentioned that because we’ve occasionally had some other minor disagreements and I wanted to emphasize that I’m absolutely behind you on this one. I think that people should speak up for what they believe in and murals are a good, creative example of this and it’s the state’s role to protect, not suppress, this sort of speech. If the speech is calling for violence or is libellous then it should be blocked but simply because some people find it offensive? Absolutely not – the best forms of protest and the most important speeches are, almost by definition, those which will offend people.
I think the people who call it racist are idiots who are trying to play the wounded victim in order to deflect criticism. (Just like criticisms of the Israeli government aren’t necessarily anti-Semitic.)
The mural reads “Say no to burqas” but that is embedded in the standard international red “no” signal (circle backslash) that the action symbolized is legally prohibited. The combined — and obvious — implication is that the artist wants viewers of his art to support the legal banning of burqas, or even perhaps banning people who wear burqas. If he instead wanted to support those Muslim women who desire to be free of the burqa, he needed to think a little harder.
True. It is a very queasy image, for that reason. But then it’s also a very queasy garment. It’s as if it were designed to deflect resistance away from clerics and other male enforcers onto the women who are bundled into the damn things.
But you’re right about the image. Good point.
Even a legal prohibition on the wearing of burqas is often motivated by a desire to support women who wish to be free of burqas. But it is often difficult to decide what someone’s true motivations are, either for banning burqas or for wearing them.
I can see at least 4 possible reasons for wearing them:
(1) Women who honestly desire to wear them, would do so in the absence of any social coercion, and would do so in any social environment.
(2) Women who honestly desire to wear them, but only to (partially) shield them from groping and harassment in an overwhelmingly misogynistic Muslim world. They would discard them if they lived in a less patriarchal society and had the freedom to do so.
(3) Women who honestly desire to wear them, but only because they have been brainwashed into thinking it is the right thing to do. If they were raised in a society where men and women were viewed as equals, they would not choose to wear them.
(4) Women who don’t want to wear burqas and only wear them because they are forced to do so.
Out of the supposed 1.5 billion Muslims in the world today, I think the number of women in category (1) could probably be counted on the fingers of one hand, although of course it is not possible to prove this. One possible way of estimating the number is to count the number of men in the world who freely choose to wear a burqa.
The numbers in category (3) are probably inflated by a hazing mentality and the common practice of throwing good money after bad. In other words, if I’ve been suffocating in this thing for 30 years, it must be the right thing to do, and that little slut over there had damned well better cover up too.
In the unlikely event that any of you had missed it, here is Bill Maher’s Burqa Fashion Show:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIpdC0o3mdM
I can’t wait for Bill’s Beauty Pageant, featuring burqa “empowered” and clitorectomised women of the liberated “Muslim World” :)
Hey, I’m just glad we don’t have cloacas any more.
Come to think of it, if we did, there might not be so much nonsense about homosexuality in the world today. If men and women both had the same all-purpose opening, calling homosexuality “unnatural” doesn’t fly very well.
This argument could even be useful in certain contexts. Consider the following dialogue:
Fred Phelps: “Buggery is a vile abomination!”
Innocent bystander: “Hey dude, we’re just following the time-honored traditions of our forefathers. And we’re talking hundreds of millions of years of tradition, not some paltry six thousand years!”
Fred: Pop! [not the spoken word, but the sound of an eyeball exploding in an apoplectic fit]
Two issues always come to my mind when this question comes up:
1) How can any democracy possibly formulate and enforce a law which bans burkas (or niqabs)?
2) Almost everyone here is agreeing that it would be much better for girls/women not wear burkas in public. But, there are 2 ways to decrease the number of Muslim women who appear in public wearing burkas. One way is for the Muslim women to stop wearing burkas when they go out in public. Unfortunately, the other is for Muslim women to stop going out in public.
Hamilton Jacobi: the sexual ambiguity of the cloaca may facilitate homosexuality among penguins, since there’s no way to tell they’re doing it wrong.
Somebody commented somewhere that a burqa is actually pretty handy for sneaking out to retrieve the newspaper from the driveway without bothering to get dressed.
I live in a beach town in Southern California where the sight of women wearing headscarves is so commonplace as to be unremarkable. I continue to wonder what they think of my scantily clad compatriots. Otherwise my reactions have evolved from “You really ought to be wearing a visor, since your face is unprotected” to “At least you’re getting some Vitamin D.”
The rationale behind banning the burqa is largely identical to that mandating school uniforms: banning distinctions deemed harmful. It’s a hard argument because it contains antithetical elements, liberation through enforced conformity. My high school’s dress code required girls to wear dresses or skirts; as often as not they wore bikinis underneath, which ought to have obviated the temptation to peek.
bad Jim,
I would say that it was obviously the opposite. More a liberation from conformity, in this case the burka is conformity and religion is conformity. These women are not expressing their individuality or showing off their rich diverse culture, they’re mentally and consequently physically enslaved.
Islam perverts the western ideas of liberty, by justifying itself in terms of liberty. People in the west have liberty, therefore are free to wear what they want. Islam is the complete opposite, but liberals defend Islam because they mistakenly conclude that religion is yet another liberty that people are free to express, as if it’s some kind of expression of individuality.
I think we need to rethink political liberalism or promote a form of rational liberalism, where illiberalism is not simply allowed to erode and destroy liberalism. Liberalism as it currently stands is easily destroyed by the trojan horses of unreason and unfreedom.
OB, partly off-topic, but this is gist for your mill, I think. (It’s a report on “Islamophobia” in Britain.)
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/andrewgilligan/100066569/islamic-extremism-is-this-the-years-most-embarrassing-academic-report/
Well, I think Indonesia before long, if these religious thugs are allowed their way too much, will have to be dropped as my stock example of a rather nicer Muslim society…
Of course, one damned foolish thing the Indonesians did (I think I’m right in saying this) was to enshrine in their constitution that citizens have to belong, or officially characterise themselves as belonging, to some (monotheistic and with a sacred text only) religion or other; you cannot, so I understand, classify yourself as an atheist. Stick religion in your constitution, and the religious will atart trying to take charge.
You notice how it is women again that are being forced into the submissive position. Not only are they the ones required to wear more clothing they are also the ones being subjected to virginity tests.
I’ve got an idea and it comes from the horrible practise of female genital mutilation. There is already a form of male genital mutilation (circumcision) but I propose that we do a 180 degree turn on this. Instead of getting rid of the foreskin it should be forced up over the top of the penis and sewn closed with only a small exit for the expelling of urine.
Sounds gruesome doesn’t it but just think of the benefits. Not only would men as well as women be subjected to a painful type of genital mutilation (thereby giving those men who think that it is perfectly okay for women to undergo this treatment a taste of just what it’s like) but it would make sex very painful for men as well. This would help to cut down the number of rapes as men would no longer wish to subject themselves to this pain, it would help to put an end to people trafficking as men, who would no longer be so obsessed by sex, would no longer want prostitution and it would help with subjecting men to virginity tests as well (the stretched foreskin would have to be broken to allow for full penetrative sex).
Okay, yes, this is a stupid idea and very silly but I just get so frustrated when I read articles like this that I want, somehow, to subject these men (and it is always men) to the same kind of humiliation and pain that they put women through.
“you cannot, so I understand, classify yourself as an atheist”
Somewhat worse, you must be classified as a Muslim, Protestant or Catholic Christian, Hindu, theistic Buddhist, or religious Confucianist (the latter being rather troubled by anti-Chinese sentiment). Otherwise, you are not recognized by the government in any documents (IDs, birth and marriage certificates, etc.). Monotheistic oaths are also required for all government offices, and “heretical” religions (as loosely judged by the relevant local community), proselytizers, and blasphemers are very easy to prosecute.
So yeah, the “religious freedom” there is pretty limited.
True dat. I feel a little queasy every time I even hear the word “cloaca”.
@Shaker …… That was terrific. And Islamophillic !!
Urgh – thanks for that link, Stephen. Not really OT at all.
Here in America, TSA violates everyone equally. We must truly be enlightened.
This misogyny is spreading all around the globe. Civilisation is trasnmitted largely by women, but when women are erased, hidden and locked away, the trasmission of civilisation becomes impossible and you end up with Somalia, Waziristan and Afganistan.
When you suppress women, you ultimately supress all of the refinement, the culture and the compassion so neccessary for civilised life.
We’re entering a new dark age.
I think so too. There seems to be no rationality going on within politics or the media. I feel that some drastic change is necessary to get some kind of common sense back.