Word: womening
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Many Americans find such a prohibition distasteful. Their first argument has been that some women, for all we know, really do want to appear so garbed in public. They feel that it’s just as tyrannical for a non-Muslim majority to force Muslim women not to wear the burka as it is for Muslim men to force Muslim women to wear...
...contrast, some French anti-burkists argue that wearing the burka could be a safety hazard while driving at rush hour on crowded highways, for example. Likewise, if the burka remains legal, hardened non-Muslim criminals disguised as Muslim women could then be able to commit any number of crimes with great impunity. (Apparently, one such crime has already occurred.) Others have argued that because the French state outlaws walking down the street in the full monty, why can’t it outlaw its exact opposite? Yet another and more interesting argument has to with feminism and human rights...
...American sensibility, the issue has to be seen from the point of view of individual rights: If women want to wear this cloak, they have a perfect right to do so, even in eyes of those Americans who are most hostile to foreign ways of living. It matters not whether these women wear the burka in public or in private, because their “rights” are the same. However, public space in the French scheme of things is not just a non-private and therefore public space by virtue of default. It’s a universalist...
Well, in my head, I know that Muslim women should everywhere be allowed to wear the burka. Of course, some will surely do so because they are victims of unpleasant patriarchalism. But then again, in Western culture also, many fathers drive their daughters to distraction and many domineering men drive uncertain women to drink and despair, but we’ve learned to live with many such injustices and inequalities...
Wanting to wear the burka seems to me to be a self-inflicted wound that I just can’t accept. In this symbolic matter, the French tradition seems to me to be for France, at least, the more plausible alternative: for France, and eventually, for all women everywhere...