Comments

1
yeah, the gendarmes tasked with enforcing this stupid law are JUST LIKE the Basiji in Iran.

face it, Muslim women: your religion is medieval, misogynist, and you're making excuses for it. you're embracing oppression and calling it Feminism. Allah does not give a flying fuck if you are "modest" in your dress. regressive Muslim men do.
3
Definitely true: men must not tell women what to wear unless man has truly great taste in which case she'd be a fool not to take his advice.
4
@1:

We could say exactly the same thing about Christianity.
5
@1: How nice of you to explain to all those poor ignorant Muslim women that they're complicit in their own oppression by choosing of their own free will to dress a certain way.
*tips fedora*
6
@1

Preach it brother!. Muslim women totally need your strong voice.
7
Consider me firmly in the anti-religion camp. But it's obvious that, like the War on Drugs, trying to enforce a ban on religious symbols can only cause more problems than it might solve. "Burkini" bans are even stupider than D.A.R.E. and likely to cause worse unintended consequences. The Soviet Union tried to ban religion, but like bacteria that evolves to become antibiotic-resistant, religion only grew more resilient and virulent under suppression. A different approach is needed.

Consider me firmly in the pro-immodesty camp, as someone who enjoys hanging out at the nude beach. But fuck the hypocrisy of men who claim that they're trying to "help" "oppressed" women by forcing them to reveal more of their skin in public. They're as disgustingly stupid as men who claim to be anti-abortion but try to outlaw birth control. Their only motivation is controlling women's sexuality.
8
@4: and I often do. the 3 Abrahamic Monotheisms are the same patriarchal, sex-negative religion.
9
@4 Yes we could. So would you agree Islam needs a reformation?

@5 is it free will if they we're indoctrinated from birth and forced to wear it under punishment of sometimes stoning?

It isn't so much telling people what to wear, it's upholding our, in this instance, superior culture. In 2016 we need to see your face if you want to enjoy polite society.
10
@1- Just because someone is wrong about religions (as I see it, that means having one) doesn't mean the government has the right to force them to change a behavior which isn't harming anyone. The the antithesis of genuine liberalism to force people to dress a certain way just as much as it is to force them to only speak a certain way.
11
@9- No one in France is getting stone for anything, but women are getting coerced by armed men into taking off their clothes in public. "It isn't so much telling people what to wear..." IT IS LITERALLY TELLING PEOPLE WHAT TO WEAR. Our culture isn't superior if we're banning outfits just like theirs is.
12
@1: How are they different?
15
@10: I said it was a stupid law. France's nationalism is showing.

@12: the enthusiasm gap. you think the gendarmes are pumped about it? the Basiji are. the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice are.

@14: pretty sure I've expressed similar sentiments over the Hasidim harassing secular women on buses in their Jerusalem neighborhoods. are Ashkenazy Jews "brown" or "swarthy"?
16
so where'd my calm and well-reasoned responses to @10, 12, & 14 go?

objecting to the false-equivalence of mohammad matter's quote is not the same as supporting this unenforceable, stupid law that would be laughed out of court in America.
17
oh, there it is. wtf.
18
@15: The ones on my mother's side are definitely swarthy. She and one of my sisters have that Mediterranean complexion, you know? (On my dad's side we're Litvak, so all of those relatives mostly look like Celts.)
20
@11 You don't know what happens in Muslim communities in France to women who show their hair in public and don't pretend you do. You sanctimonious sycophant.

This issue is why you wanna-be liberals lose so goddamn always. You're afraid to stand up for liberal/secular thinking in the name of "tolerance".

These burka, burkini, hijab is a relic of what should be the past and it is a symbol of men's dominion over women.

And for all you "Christianity is just as bad," apologists. It was, it changed, still not good enough. Anyone worshiping an imaginary friend in 2016 should be laughed out of any debate. You're free to believe whatever crazy shit you want, but not if you want to participate with the rest of the intelligent world.
21
Well, I am all for the day that men are free to uncover women on beaches. Now THIS is progress.
22
@ 19 You should be an islamophobe too, and a christianophobe and jewishophobe or whatever you want to call it. Religion is not healthy. Indoctrinating children before the age of reason is wrong.
24
Holy fuck, the way that liberals whiteknight for Islam is exactly the same as a woman sticking up for her abusive husband.

By all means, keep up the good fight cheerleading for the most retrograde religion on Earth. Don't want to be on the Wrong Side of History ™ right?
25
The last paragraph of this piece is a completely non-sensical leap of social faith and non-sequitors. The moral seems to be that men should stop body shaming women and/or telling them how to dress. I couldn't agree more, and no doubt the vast majority of those who read the story feel the same way. But, it's more complex and difficult than that.

The burkini ban was of course stupid and ill-advised but is a symbol of Islam, and Islam isn't very well regarded in Western European at the moment. If the woman being searched on the beach had instead been a guy in full Jihadi John garb the reaction would have been exactly the the same. People are angry, frustrated and scared, but no, we shouldn't ban harmless religious symbols.

Are there any symbols that should be out-lawed? Like the swastika or the Confederate flag? One broadly accepted idea and it's symbol may meet that threshold. It allows men to buy and marry infants, and consummate the marriage at age 9, gives men the right to beat a wife for disagreeing with him about anything, practices wide spread genital mutilation, requires four male witnesses to convict someone of rape, in a court where women aren't allowed to testify, or it's forbidden to be around any man outside of the immediate family, where women are seen as inferior and impure and must be covered up and hidden on the rare occasions when they're even allowed out of the house. The mind boggles.

A recent Pew survey showed that in the majority of the countries where this idea festers, the majority of their citizens also support making it the law of the land. Sharia got a 99% thumbs up in Afghanistan. And it's a far greater threat to the hundreds of millions of women around the world who are the current and potential victims of this stupid idea, more than any old French fuddy-duddys will ever be. And I will never understand how any feminist or progressive can defend a stylized version of a garment invented solely for the purpose of shaming, abusing and demeaning women, even if it is legal.
27
@20- It's against the law to assault a woman for not wearing a burka, why should it be lawful for the police to force a woman to stop wearing one? And what does it accomplish to make women with abusive families have to stay home? Exactly what do you think banning the burkina does FOR Muslim women in France?
28
@20- Oh BTW, what's your first language? You make really interesting grammar errors.
29
@23 Great, straight to the name calling. It's cool when no nothings like you pull out the bigot card when they clearly have no idea what that word means. Really helps my point of about wanna-be liberals.

@27 I have never said I support this law in France. Only i understand why they're doing it and am using that as a way to further point out how ridiculous religious beliefs are and chastise the wanna-be liberals with zero critical thinking skills are as well.. Frankly, I think this law, like so many others, is a huge government overreach and it waste's law enforcement's valuable time.
30
@15: I disagree. The gendarmes forced her to strip in public. That's some Game of Thrones shit. Pretty much the definition of zealotry.
31


Why do "feminists" support hijab?
32
Also @23 I'm pretty sure religious fanatics are more welcome at Trump rallies than I am. But I'm sure that line of yours has gotten quite the laugh among you and your identical friends.
33
@29- Speaking wastes of time and effort, I won`t bother with your insipid trolling ever again.

@31- Feminists support a woman's right to choose her own clothing.
34
@33 Got it. Anyone who doesn't agree with you is trolling. Step out of the bubble sometime and form your own opinions. Or don't.

I would like to point out that neither you nor Germansausage even once tried reason against what I have written. Just name calling and bunkering down in the safe space of your own camp.
35
My objection to the article is that it blithely dismisses the whole sad story as just another case of men body shaming women and telling them what to wear, even though the garments many Moslem women are forced to wear are specifically designed to do exactly that - shame, hide, control, demean. It's like saying that slaves looked good in chains. And a lazy shallow take on the whole mess.
36
@35 A lot of the garments secular Western women wear come from a history of male control, shame, and objectification. Why do we have to cover our nipples but men don't? Why do we wear high heels? Why do so many women feel that they need to wear makeup in order to go outside? These are not inherently bad things. The difference is choice. I can choose to wear makeup, to wear high heels. I can choose to wear a burka. And if anyone attempts to shame me for those choice, they can fuck right off.
37
@ Sydney. I agree. But I think you're willfully ignoring how indoctrination works. What's at stake here is whether or not religious beliefs conflict with secular values? Answer they do, in a big way. And when does raising kids according to your religious beliefs become abuse? Where were you on the fanatics in Oregon who denied medicine to their children? Or when Germany banned circumcision? At what age does it become the childs CHOICE? And should forcing your outdated and demonstrably wrong opinions about the world on to a child before this age count as abuse?
38
@37: False equivalency.
Refusing to take advantage of the livesaving techniques of modern medicine IS "outdated and demonstrably wrong". There is no such objective judgment to be made about clothing. What is the harm done to a Muslim woman who wears traditionally modest clothing, or to a Jewish man who never goes out without wearing a kippah and a tallit katan?
Now, it is certainly harmful to live in a society that mandates either of those. But that harm is the result of society imposing its collective will on some of the most personal freedoms of the individual, rather than intrinsic to the garments mandated.
39
Sydney: If 'wear these clothes or you will beaten and/or killed' is a choice, I suppose you're right. And that's the choice hundreds of millions of women around the world face every day. But this story isn't about women's rights or sexism anyway; it's about the growing xenophobia in Western Europe, religious freedom and bigotry. And the tortured logic and irony of framing it as just another example of stupid sexism completely misses those broader and far more complex and difficult questions. And those are far more real than the infinitesimally small possibility that some man will be stupid enough to criticize your shoes or makeup any time in the near future. And those are the things that I choose to think about and discuss instead.

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