Going to a meeting today I was quite surprised to hear the SatNav in the taxi speaking French.
"You're French?" I asked the driver, (well I kind of exclaimed actually).
"Yes." He replied. "Blah blah blah?" (I didn't understand what he was saying but from the tone I figured he was asking me if I spoke it.
I told him "No", and couldn't help myself from saying the first thing that came to my mind, usually I think before I speak(!).
"You guys have just banned the burka." I said sitting behind him covered from head to toe.
"No, we didn't. Our Government did. There were many people against it. Me? I don't see the big deal about it. What's next? Banning the jeans I wear?"
"Hmm" I mused.
"You wear it for your husband?"
"No. I wore it even before I met him."
"I actually spoke to a governor in my country, I asked him why, he told me it's because of terrorism. I told him how many terrorists do you know that wore one? I was in Sham El Sheikh when the bombings took place there a few years ago. Those terrorists wore normal clothes, so what do we do? Ban normal clothes? I don't know the French are backwards. I don't like French culture. Then the man told me it's to prevent accidents because women who wear it, their vision is impaired, but really how many women that wear it have caused accidents? I tell you, none."
"Yes, I'm taking driving lessons, I can see perfectly fine." I said.
"Anyhow, you know at least you Women have principles. Me? I was married 20 years and she with somebody else. While I was working for my family, to support them she was with another man, 20 years. She was English. I can't trust English women, I don't trust them, never again."
"I'm really sorry to hear that." I really was.
"My children, they knew about it too, but they didn't tell me you know, cause' they didn't want the family to break up. I understand they were scared but I feel betrayed by them too you know, you can't trust English women."
He talked the rest of the way while I listened, about the French, about the English, about his ex -wife and about his children betraying him. I found myself wondering if his 5 children were all his, but I didn't dare voice my thoughts.
We arrived at my destination.
"Thirteen pounds," He exclaimed. "I'm so sorry about that, you know the English?" They over charge for everything. A short journey like this and it's so expensive. The English they can't be trusted."
I paid and thanked him and walked away feeling very sorry for a man who had lost faith in a whole society because of the actions of a few.
Tuesday, 27 July 2010
Saturday, 24 July 2010
Saturday, 17 July 2010
My New Best Friend
My new - human, alive now, other than family, not Muslim yet (May Allah guide Him), best friend is...
Wednesday, 14 July 2010
How not to liberate women
Restrictions on women wearing the veil in public life are as much a violation of their rights as is forcing them to wear a veil
Judith Sunderland
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 24 April 2010 11.00 BST
Muslim veiling is once again at the top of the news in Europe. Bans on full-face veils being considered or already in place, whether nationwide, at the municipal level, or applied in public buildings and transportation, undermine Muslim women's autonomy and religious freedom. Arguments put forward to support these bans fall into four categories, none of which stand up to serious scrutiny.
Banning the veil will liberate women.
Generalisations about women's oppression under the veil do a tremendous disservice to one of the basic tenets of gender equality: a woman's right to self-determination and autonomy. Restrictions on women wearing the veil in public life are as much a violation of the rights of women as is forcing them to wear a veil. Muslim teachers in Germany we interviewed said they wore the headscarf out of choice. Bans on headscarves in some German states have led many teachers to abandon their chosen profession, leading to loss of independence, social standing and financial wellbeing. It is clear that many Muslim women in Europe who cover themselves do so out of choice. For those who are coerced, general bans would limit, if not eliminate, their ability to seek advice and support. It may leave them trapped at home, further isolated from society. European governments need to support these women, with better access to education, justice and employment, rather than put them under more pressure.
The veil should be banned for security reasons.
A wholesale ban on the full Muslim veil is a disproportionate response to the legitimate need in a variety of situations to ascertain someone's identity. Airport cheques, school pick-ups, administrative dealings with state officers, cashing a cheque – these are all obvious examples. Appropriate, sensitive measures can be adopted to satisfy both the individual's right to manifest her religious beliefs and her duty to identify herself. In all the situations mentioned above, a woman wearing the full veil can be asked to take off her veil in private.
Bans on religious dress preserve secularism.
The principle of state neutrality requires state institutions to refrain from imposing any particular set of religious views, while at the same time allowing for free expression of religious beliefs within society. Bans that deny people the right to wear in public places a style of clothing linked to a particular religious faith undermine, rather than protect, this principle, by defining the public space as a zone in which no-one is permitted to manifest his or her religion.
Banning the veil is necessary for integration.
The fact that the children of immigrants and converts, as well as newer immigrants, wear the full-face veil in Europe undermines the argument that a ban is necessary for the purposes of integration. Integration policies that require newcomers to shed fundamental aspects of their identity are unlikely to succeed. Banning full-face veils is likely to restrict rather than enhance opportunities for these women to engage with society as a whole.
The divisive debate about full Muslim veiling reflects the complex issues – and passions – involved. International human rights law cannot answer all of the issues involved, but it can help frame a constructive conversation. It requires that any interference with rights must have a legitimate reason and be the least restrictive possible. It's fundamentally about the role of the state in matters relating to personal autonomy and religion, thought and conscience. Victims of coercion and abuse deserve assistance – but a ban is more likely to harm than help them. And the convictions of those who choose to wear the veil deserve consideration.
Judith Sunderland
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 24 April 2010 11.00 BST
Muslim veiling is once again at the top of the news in Europe. Bans on full-face veils being considered or already in place, whether nationwide, at the municipal level, or applied in public buildings and transportation, undermine Muslim women's autonomy and religious freedom. Arguments put forward to support these bans fall into four categories, none of which stand up to serious scrutiny.
Banning the veil will liberate women.
Generalisations about women's oppression under the veil do a tremendous disservice to one of the basic tenets of gender equality: a woman's right to self-determination and autonomy. Restrictions on women wearing the veil in public life are as much a violation of the rights of women as is forcing them to wear a veil. Muslim teachers in Germany we interviewed said they wore the headscarf out of choice. Bans on headscarves in some German states have led many teachers to abandon their chosen profession, leading to loss of independence, social standing and financial wellbeing. It is clear that many Muslim women in Europe who cover themselves do so out of choice. For those who are coerced, general bans would limit, if not eliminate, their ability to seek advice and support. It may leave them trapped at home, further isolated from society. European governments need to support these women, with better access to education, justice and employment, rather than put them under more pressure.
The veil should be banned for security reasons.
A wholesale ban on the full Muslim veil is a disproportionate response to the legitimate need in a variety of situations to ascertain someone's identity. Airport cheques, school pick-ups, administrative dealings with state officers, cashing a cheque – these are all obvious examples. Appropriate, sensitive measures can be adopted to satisfy both the individual's right to manifest her religious beliefs and her duty to identify herself. In all the situations mentioned above, a woman wearing the full veil can be asked to take off her veil in private.
Bans on religious dress preserve secularism.
The principle of state neutrality requires state institutions to refrain from imposing any particular set of religious views, while at the same time allowing for free expression of religious beliefs within society. Bans that deny people the right to wear in public places a style of clothing linked to a particular religious faith undermine, rather than protect, this principle, by defining the public space as a zone in which no-one is permitted to manifest his or her religion.
Banning the veil is necessary for integration.
The fact that the children of immigrants and converts, as well as newer immigrants, wear the full-face veil in Europe undermines the argument that a ban is necessary for the purposes of integration. Integration policies that require newcomers to shed fundamental aspects of their identity are unlikely to succeed. Banning full-face veils is likely to restrict rather than enhance opportunities for these women to engage with society as a whole.
The divisive debate about full Muslim veiling reflects the complex issues – and passions – involved. International human rights law cannot answer all of the issues involved, but it can help frame a constructive conversation. It requires that any interference with rights must have a legitimate reason and be the least restrictive possible. It's fundamentally about the role of the state in matters relating to personal autonomy and religion, thought and conscience. Victims of coercion and abuse deserve assistance – but a ban is more likely to harm than help them. And the convictions of those who choose to wear the veil deserve consideration.
Thursday, 8 July 2010
A new light on the harms of porn
Yusuf Smith
A few months ago I read a book called Living Dolls by Natasha Walter, who argued that the “new feminism” she thought was emerging in the 1990s had given way to a culture in which girls were being pressurised to be sexualised at younger and younger ages, with anyone resisting being seen as a prude, and that this culture is seen as liberating when it’s actually degrading. A new book is released this month entitled Pornland, by long-standing anti-porn activist Gail Dines, which argues that people’s sexuality is being changed forever by a culture of commercial porn in which acts which are extreme and unusual are promoted as normal, and which ruins intimacy and people’s relationships.
Dines was interviewed in the Guardian by Julie Bindel last Thursday; there is another interview with her here and you can find excerpts from it here.
I’m kind of lucky in that porn has never really interested me. I took one look at the pictures in a top-shelf magazine in the UK when I was a teenager, I think, and I found it so revolting that I just put it back and put it out of my mind. But it seems that what I saw was probably tame by today’s standards, with boys getting access to the stuff younger and younger, and expecting real women to replicate the sexual acts they find in it, and being shocked that they do not want to. The material depicts stuff which is not only degrading but stressful and painful for women’s bodies, and the video (rather than still) stuff often shows the man showering the woman with insults as he carries out his bizarre acts (really, I’m not describing them — you can follow any of the links above if you want to know).
The two biggest problems with it is that it removes elements such as tenderness and intimacy from sexual relationships, and that it forms an addiction that causes men to lie and to neglect their duties to their families so as to pursue their addiction. As with so many chemical addictions, they often find that what they start out on loses its thrill, so they move onto harder stuff, often involving children. Mary Ann Layden of the University of Pennsylvania related, in a speech at Capitol Hill last month, that she had known a man who had worked for years to build a career in a given field, and then secured an interview for a “dream job”, but in the even didn’t attend because he was too busy surfing porn sites on the Internet. Another was a police officer who was jailed for viewing child porn on his work computer; he lost his marriage and could no longer see his children.
A few years ago Muslim Matters had some posts on Muslim men’s addiction to this stuff. Of course, viewing this stuff is completely against Islam, but one supposes that these same men married their wives on the basis that they were chaste and not the sort of women they’d find in these videos. As is so often the case, the brothers expect the women to be utterly pure and devoted while they are anything but. I don’t want to imply that all Muslim women are super-pure and other women are sluts, and most non-Muslim women wouldn’t want to be seen dead in these productions either, but when an ostensibly religious Muslim man, married to a woman of a similar stripe, expects her to perform similarly to the females he sees in porn videos, there is likely to be conflict, to say the least.
Dines herself is not anti-sex or, I suspect, against erotic material being available — Bindel compares her to Andrea Dworkin, commonly accused of being a militant man-hating prude when she was in fact married to a man and, in her writings on porn, distinguished between genuinely erotic and “thanatic”, or destructive, pornography which depicted the degradation of women. After all, porn depicting children is already illegal in most places, and many men have been prosecuted for downloading the material, which is footage of child abuse. The material discussed here depicts adults, but it is often readily available to younger and younger boys, who themselves learn about sex through it and end up thinking what they see there is normal when it isn’t. The things depicted are acted out and the females are being paid, but the acts are meant to look like assaults.
There are a couple of aspects of Dines’s critique of porn culture I don’t agree with. One is her emphasis on hair removal as a product of this culture; she claims that none of the female students she meets keep their pubic hair, as its removal is now the norm, thanks to porn culture. That all of them remove their hair I don’t quite believe anyway, but they were introduced to America through a salon run by several Brazilian sisters and were known of in Brazil before that on account of the skimpy bikinis worn on beaches there. Even so, it’s a fashion and surely not all the women who do it are directly influenced by porn. It was the norm in the Muslim world long before it became popular here. There is quite a generational difference here, with the older generation considering that hair is what distinguishes women from little girls, while a lot of younger women disagree.
A second issue is the use of the term “patriarchy” as a lazy synonym for male domination, as in:
“To think that so many men hate women to the degree that they can get aroused by such vile images is quite profound,” says Dines. “Pornography is the perfect propaganda piece for patriarchy. In nothing else is their hatred of us quite as clear.”
Patriarchy actually connotes a society in which men protect women, not simply allow any Tom, Dick or Harry to exploit them. Most fathers would be outraged, or at least profoundly sad, at the thought of their daughters performing in this way, even if they were getting paid for it and when the family and parental authority in this country was stronger, pornography was less readily available and much less extreme than it is now. A society in which men are free to abuse and exploit women and girls may be many things, but this does not make it patriarchal.
I had heard of the problems with widely-available porn before, but reading these interviews with Dines really shocked me in terms of what these things consisted of and the fact that people who view it come to consider the things depicted as normal. Unfortunately, attempts to curb this material in the USA have been struck down under the First Amendment, and there is only so much we can do when such a big population has decided that it cannot control such material, but we can pass legislation against such material here and should not be afraid to. Of course, education is an important tool here as well — for young people, so that boys know that this is harmful and unreal, and that parents know that they should keep tabs on what their children are seeing online, and know how to. Dines’ is a welcome voice on this issue, calm and measured and less influenced by personal trauma than Dworkin was, and one hopes that her book opens people’s eyes to how damaging this trend is.
A few months ago I read a book called Living Dolls by Natasha Walter, who argued that the “new feminism” she thought was emerging in the 1990s had given way to a culture in which girls were being pressurised to be sexualised at younger and younger ages, with anyone resisting being seen as a prude, and that this culture is seen as liberating when it’s actually degrading. A new book is released this month entitled Pornland, by long-standing anti-porn activist Gail Dines, which argues that people’s sexuality is being changed forever by a culture of commercial porn in which acts which are extreme and unusual are promoted as normal, and which ruins intimacy and people’s relationships.
Dines was interviewed in the Guardian by Julie Bindel last Thursday; there is another interview with her here and you can find excerpts from it here.
I’m kind of lucky in that porn has never really interested me. I took one look at the pictures in a top-shelf magazine in the UK when I was a teenager, I think, and I found it so revolting that I just put it back and put it out of my mind. But it seems that what I saw was probably tame by today’s standards, with boys getting access to the stuff younger and younger, and expecting real women to replicate the sexual acts they find in it, and being shocked that they do not want to. The material depicts stuff which is not only degrading but stressful and painful for women’s bodies, and the video (rather than still) stuff often shows the man showering the woman with insults as he carries out his bizarre acts (really, I’m not describing them — you can follow any of the links above if you want to know).
The two biggest problems with it is that it removes elements such as tenderness and intimacy from sexual relationships, and that it forms an addiction that causes men to lie and to neglect their duties to their families so as to pursue their addiction. As with so many chemical addictions, they often find that what they start out on loses its thrill, so they move onto harder stuff, often involving children. Mary Ann Layden of the University of Pennsylvania related, in a speech at Capitol Hill last month, that she had known a man who had worked for years to build a career in a given field, and then secured an interview for a “dream job”, but in the even didn’t attend because he was too busy surfing porn sites on the Internet. Another was a police officer who was jailed for viewing child porn on his work computer; he lost his marriage and could no longer see his children.
A few years ago Muslim Matters had some posts on Muslim men’s addiction to this stuff. Of course, viewing this stuff is completely against Islam, but one supposes that these same men married their wives on the basis that they were chaste and not the sort of women they’d find in these videos. As is so often the case, the brothers expect the women to be utterly pure and devoted while they are anything but. I don’t want to imply that all Muslim women are super-pure and other women are sluts, and most non-Muslim women wouldn’t want to be seen dead in these productions either, but when an ostensibly religious Muslim man, married to a woman of a similar stripe, expects her to perform similarly to the females he sees in porn videos, there is likely to be conflict, to say the least.
Dines herself is not anti-sex or, I suspect, against erotic material being available — Bindel compares her to Andrea Dworkin, commonly accused of being a militant man-hating prude when she was in fact married to a man and, in her writings on porn, distinguished between genuinely erotic and “thanatic”, or destructive, pornography which depicted the degradation of women. After all, porn depicting children is already illegal in most places, and many men have been prosecuted for downloading the material, which is footage of child abuse. The material discussed here depicts adults, but it is often readily available to younger and younger boys, who themselves learn about sex through it and end up thinking what they see there is normal when it isn’t. The things depicted are acted out and the females are being paid, but the acts are meant to look like assaults.
There are a couple of aspects of Dines’s critique of porn culture I don’t agree with. One is her emphasis on hair removal as a product of this culture; she claims that none of the female students she meets keep their pubic hair, as its removal is now the norm, thanks to porn culture. That all of them remove their hair I don’t quite believe anyway, but they were introduced to America through a salon run by several Brazilian sisters and were known of in Brazil before that on account of the skimpy bikinis worn on beaches there. Even so, it’s a fashion and surely not all the women who do it are directly influenced by porn. It was the norm in the Muslim world long before it became popular here. There is quite a generational difference here, with the older generation considering that hair is what distinguishes women from little girls, while a lot of younger women disagree.
A second issue is the use of the term “patriarchy” as a lazy synonym for male domination, as in:
“To think that so many men hate women to the degree that they can get aroused by such vile images is quite profound,” says Dines. “Pornography is the perfect propaganda piece for patriarchy. In nothing else is their hatred of us quite as clear.”
Patriarchy actually connotes a society in which men protect women, not simply allow any Tom, Dick or Harry to exploit them. Most fathers would be outraged, or at least profoundly sad, at the thought of their daughters performing in this way, even if they were getting paid for it and when the family and parental authority in this country was stronger, pornography was less readily available and much less extreme than it is now. A society in which men are free to abuse and exploit women and girls may be many things, but this does not make it patriarchal.
I had heard of the problems with widely-available porn before, but reading these interviews with Dines really shocked me in terms of what these things consisted of and the fact that people who view it come to consider the things depicted as normal. Unfortunately, attempts to curb this material in the USA have been struck down under the First Amendment, and there is only so much we can do when such a big population has decided that it cannot control such material, but we can pass legislation against such material here and should not be afraid to. Of course, education is an important tool here as well — for young people, so that boys know that this is harmful and unreal, and that parents know that they should keep tabs on what their children are seeing online, and know how to. Dines’ is a welcome voice on this issue, calm and measured and less influenced by personal trauma than Dworkin was, and one hopes that her book opens people’s eyes to how damaging this trend is.
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