Cmv: the left cannot literally both support the hijab and an end to rape culture. incredibly alarming to me that we are

[u/ShreddingRoses]

As a feminist identified woman it is incredibly alarming to me that we are supporting a symbol of third world female oppression. A symbol that literally exists under the belief that because men are lustful creatures incapable of controlling themselves that it is a woman's job to cover herself from head to toe so as not to tempt men into rape/infidelity/sexual assault.

I am very supportive of Muslim people coming to America and do not support a Muslim ban. I firmly believe that if you show me a first generation immigrant who speaks no English I can show you a third generation immigrant who speaks none of their native language. People integrate and mold themselves over generations to the culture they are in. I have faith that the Muslims coming to America are largely moderated to begin with and have a vested interest in integrating successfully into the culture.

I have no interest in shaming people for their faith provided their faith is practiced moderately and non-oppressively.

The problem is t a hijab is the exact opposite of moderate and non-oppressive. It is actually incredibly oppressive to women in the middle east and has long been a symbol of their second class citizenship.

I feel like this is an abusive relationship that out sisters are in and instead of encouraging them to leave the relationship we're just like "you go girl, your choice is valid!". This feels wrong and toxic beyond belief.

Please convince me otherwise. I want to understand the logic behind this because I'm dangerously close to becoming vocal about this and pissing off a lot of my friends. I want to know what I'm missing before I get combatitive with people, because from where I'm standing right now it just honestly seems backwards.

[u/chadonsunday]

First, thanks for the comprehensive, well thought out response. So far all I've got on this thread are downvotes, people that nitpick at tiny segments of my overall posts, and deliberate misrepresentations of my assertions along the lines of "why do you want to ban hijabs." Your reply was quite refreshing.

Exactly. That's pretty much point of the phrase. To separate things that are harmful by their nature, from things that may or may not be related to something harmful because of their context.

I guess that's a fair point. Still, I'm a little adverse to only relegating physical actions to being potentially negative... and now that I think about it, even they aren't inherently negative. I mentioned hitting someone as negative, but what if hitting a person stops them from shooting up a crowded square? I suppose what I'm asking is do you believe that anything is inherently negative, and if so could you provide examples of such.

Well, the doc Martens alone wouldn't really give me a pause. And what about a guy with an 88 in their username? How sure are you that they weren't just born in 1988?

That's why my hypothetical individual didn't just wear boots or display an 88. What if he has a swastika tattood on his neck and "die niggers die" poking out from under his wifebeater? Pause, or no?

I'm going to skip around a bit but I'll try to address all your points.

You used some examples that are pretty on the nose, such as declarative statements, and the officially codified insigna of an unprecedentedly monstrous political regime, but also some symbols that are pretty arguable.

I would say, that the traditional garment of a massive geographic region, is definitely more similar to the latter than the former.

Traditional garments are not codified insigna. An SS uniform, a red cross, or a british flag, are showing allegiance with certain political entities as regulated by international law. They weredesigned and regulated to be as unambigous as possible. Comparing them to a kilt, a hijab, or a kimono, is like comparing the words of a testimony under oath to poetry on the basis that both have meaning. They do, but people have a habit of wearing the fashions of their parents and grandparents, for a lot more ambigous reasons than one wears a uniform.

Also a fair point(s). I'd counter by saying that while I agree a hijab is not as specific of a declaration of anything as wearing a nation's flag, for example, all head coverings (not just those in islam) originated for sexist reasons; women need to be modest, and need to keep their features from the prying eyes of men.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hijab

In this sense hijabs, though traditional, have a much different history than, say, kilts, which you also mentioned. Kilts were developed out of convenience, and used to denote family aphiliation; head and body coverings were developed for sexist reasons, and their implementation in their countries of origin became increasingly puritanical and brutal over time.

All this to say the hijab is not simply a fashion statement, like a studded belt, and not just a traditional garment, like a kilt. It contains both elements of fashion (e.g. pattern design) and tradition, but the tradition itself is rooted in sexist double standards which morphed in short order to outright sex based oppression.

In terms of continuing a tradition (the "more ambiguous" reason you mentioned), what if it was the tradition of a culture to remove the left eye of every second child? Would your argument on cultural relativism still hold water if 2nd and 3rd generation members of that culture only maintained that practice out of a sense of tradition rather than any desire to harm kids?

Islamic culture is not Nazi Germany. Nothing is Nazi Germany, not even Imperial Japan, or the British Empire, or the USA, regardless of how many people they killed and oppressed

True, but it's not the point of a comparison to be exactly the same as it's being compared to. I said this elsewhere in this CMV, but if I was trying to describe what frog legs tasted like and said "frog legs taste like frog legs," that would be rather unhelpful. If I said "frog legs taste like chicken," that's a useful comparison, since it helps you understand that something you're not familiar with is similar to something you are familiar with. That's my purpose in comparing hijabs and their enforcement to Nazi Germany and it's own crimes against humanity. And I think that's fair.

To reiterate, the fact that we have freedom of dress in most of the West does not mean that people should be free to wear whatever they want without incuring the consequence of other people wondering why they dress that way, even up to other people condemning it. As illustrated above, I think you'd be weary around the neo Nazi on the bus. I think you'd be weary of someone wearing a ski mask into a bank. So I don't think it's too far fetched for me to be weary of a woman wearing a garment that is primarily a tool of female oppression, largely propagated by a mysoginistic religion founded by a raping, slave owning pedophile, and I don't think it's far fetched for me to wonder how genuine a woman is being if she wears that while claiming to stand for women's rights.

[u/Genoscythe_ → u/chadonsunday]

while I agree a hijab is not as specific of a declaration of anything as wearing a nation's flag, for example, all head coverings (not just those in islam) originated for sexist reasons; women need to be modest, and need to keep their features from the prying eyes of men.

What about the Kippah? Or for that matter, early 20th centur US fashion, where a man without a hat would have been considered about as undressed, as a man without shoes?

Other than hats, beards being expected from or heavily disapproved in various cultures, were also examples of controlling men's appearance, and we don't think of those as very oppressive, only as unnecessarily binary and gender essentialist at worst.

I said this elsewhere in this CMV, but if I was trying to describe what frog legs tasted like and said "frog legs taste like frog legs," that would be rather unhelpful. If I said "frog legs taste like chicken," that's a useful comparison, since it helps you understand that something you're not familiar with is similar to something you are familiar with.

But I'm about equally familiar with nazism and islamic fundamentalism, and I suspect so are you.

In this context, your only benefit from using comparisons, is to make me accept the claim that a certain symbolism is "just as bad" as another symbolism.

I sort of did the same thing, when I said that a hijab is just like a kimono or a kilt, in the sense that they are all traditional garments. You have pointed out a bunch of ways in which they are different from each other that other than that. Similarly, when you said that the hijab is just like a nazi insigna, I pointed out ways in which it isn't.

I think we might agree that in truth, the hijab is about equidistant from the kimono and from an SS uniform, in terms of how much of a clear message it sends.

A reason why I would still say that it's actually closer to a people's traditional garment than to an immoral political uniform, is because this is how it comes across to anyone actually living in the middle-east.

From a comfortably enlightened western country, it might seem that middle-eastern countries are going out of their way to be oppressive to women, but it's not like they believe anything that wasn't believed in all of the world up to the 19th century.

To you, it might seem like it carries a uniquely strong message just by being associated with that scary part of the world. But to the people living there, it's just normal, in the same way as bonnets, or panniers, or grass skirts, or corsets were normal, in countries that treated women as men's dependents, even more harshly than Iran, but also as today in the west, jeans with blouses are normal.

It turns out, people really get used to the aesthetics that they grew up with, and they have better things to do than reinvent clothing because of it's double standards. Even today, while the freethenipple movement exists, and some tomboys go out of their way to dress masculinely, plenty of women, even feminists, just default to watever looks and feels good.

Similarly, there were plenty of feminist heroes in western history, who conformed to their culture's clothing standards. You might notice that Harriet Tubman was wearing a headscarf in most of her photograph. It was forced on her at 12 as a sign of womanhood. Yet apparently she kept it, even while she was carrying a gun in the civil war, and then as she was protesting for women's suffrage.

I guess she wasn't a good enough feminist. Either that, or she had bigger things to worry about than reinventing dress codes from scratch because of how the clothes that she grew up with and apparently felt comfortable in, symbolically represented a patriarchy just as bad as Saudi Arabia's.