Time to Boycott French Toast, French Fries Again
That French "veil" law that we have been making fun of for ages has finally gone into effect and, predictably, it is going poorly: it looks as if 61 people (only 19 of them women) have been arrested today for demonstrating against it, for starters. (Most offensively, while you may be fined for covering your face in public, you may also be required to take classes in "French citizenship," which has got to be, at best, stultifying. Also, most stupidly, the police can't stop you on the street to ask you to remove your burqa or what-have-you: instead they are required to escort you to a police station. Now that's good planning!) Two other women have been "detained" (whatever that means!) and also so have their "male colleagues," who were presumably… not wearing burqas? And of course France considers this an incitement to "racial hatred." I understand that the French have a different idea of "being" French (now more legislated than ever!) than we do of "being" American but this is some serious idiocy.
Just sell your Carla Bruni cds instead.
You guys have obviously never been to my home province, Quebec. QUÉBEC AUX QUÉBÉCOIS!
Well, I agree with the banning and, hell, even of the criminalization of the burqa/variants thereof. I don't care if that makes me a bad cultural relativist. That shit is awful and unjustified, no matter how many times you want to throw the words "personhood," "culture," "freedom," or "personal choice." Societies have rules, deal.
Does this also apply to nun outfits as well? Societies most certainly have rules, the question is, are they good rules and is it worthwhile to enforce them?
yes, as well as to Mexican wrestling masks.
And I assume the police will be dragging off traditionally-minded brides.
Yes, because that's exactly the same thing and not at all an obtuse misrepresentation of what I'm saying.
Sorry, but this is a stupid and misguided law, without a doubt, and you're simply wrong. To begin with, this law has to be understood within the broader context of French immigration and racial policy–it is obviously motivated by xenophobia. But leaving that aside, I assume that your actual objection to this is based on a sense that veiling practices are sexist (because "societies have rules" is not an argument). As it happens, I agree with you. But you're wrong if you think that this law is going to do the first thing to improve things for Muslim women living in France. It will quite rightly be perceived by French Muslims as an attack on them, their culture, and their religion, rather than an effort to improve the lives of women. And consequently that will make any kind of good faith debate about sexism that much harder. If you doubt this, you should look at the history of the Soviet campaign against veiling in the Central Asian republics during the 1920s, which was pretty much an enormous fail at doing anything but provoking a lot of violence that mostly fell on women.
Halloween this year could get a little awkward.
Enter John Galliano with a Fall line that's veil-intensive.
I read about this on MSNBC.com this morning (here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42528909/), and what kind of alarmed me was that about 95% of the comments under the post voiced *support* for what France is doing:
http://world-news.newsvine.com/_news/2011/04/11/6449423-arrests-made-as-french-face-veil-ban-takes-effect#comments
Granted, I'm sure this partly due to Tea Party types swarming the comment boards as they are wont to do lately, but still … doesn't MSNBC.com tend to have liberal-skewing readership, generally? So where the hell are the comments voicing support of people having the freedom to wear whatever the hell they want?
This is a law that Sarkozy passed only because his popularity was flagging over the retirement age BS. It addresses a non-problem, seeing as less than 3% of French Muslim women wear the full face veil anyway. They have a different interpretation of freedom that skews more toward the secular than our own. The punishment for breaking this law is far greater for the man who forces his wife or relative to wear the burqa than for the woman herself. I think a burqa ban would see far more support in the US than we'd all like to admit so I'm not really comfortable with shitting on the French because they actually passed it.
I'm not a fan of any cultural norm that seems to implicitly assume the subservience or "asking-for-it-ness" of simply being female. Having said that, this strikes me as a terrible way to address the qualms Westerners rightfully have about those norms. This will have the perverse effect of turning a symbol of religious and cultural oppression into a rallying point of religious and cultural pride.
And women who can't veil won't be allowed out of the house at all, so there's that.