Brussels has been unlivable for women for years. Men who drag around shrouded female pieces of property create an intolerable environment for women who are not marked as any man’s property. Women talk about this among themselves but the media are indifferent. Female suffering never makes it to the front pages or TV news reports.
Today when it has become clear that Paris terrorists largely came there from Brussels, might we finally see a discussion of how life is for women in Molenbeek, one of Europe’s gang rape centers and, incidentally, the place where these terrorists resided?
Clarissa's Blog 
Wouldn’t mentioning the abysmal state of women and the “Men who drag around shrouded female pieces of property” there require that the Islamic connection also be noted? Dear me! That would be offensively “Islamophobic” — unless coupled with an assertion that those men are no more Islamic than the Islamic State.
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If we get into the issues of religious identifications, how will that be helpful to addressing the problem? I want to concentrate on the problems faced by women, and not find myself in the midst of a debate on literary criticism as to which holy book says what and how it can be interpreted. Isn’t the restriction on the freedoms of women in Western societies serious enough to merit attention by itself?
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In wanting to examine that one effect while ignoring the causes, you doubtless have lots of company.
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That’s the problem, I don’t. Nobody cares about the hardship this causes to women. Everybody wants to discuss anything else on the planet but this – the plight of immigrants, the complexities of Islam, the state of the economy, and the conversation always gets derailed.
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With dan miller here. I mean its very simply because of islam / muslim influence. If you have information otherwise I am open to hear it. Otherwise, if you are unwilling to identify the cause of the problem, you can’t fix the problem.
Just like the president not calling out radical islam. Most muslim’s aren’t radical, but most radicals that threaten to kill and impose harsh lifestyles claim to be of the islmamic faith. Failure to acknowledge that makes it impossible to deal with.
The absolute irony that conservatives who are widely mocked as not respecting women and minorities at home are the ones who are fighting for them abroad.. would be funny if it were not such a serious issue.
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“I mean its very simply because of islam / muslim influence. If you have information otherwise I am open to hear it.”
“Otherwise, if you are unwilling to identify the cause of the problem, you can’t fix the problem.”
“The absolute irony that conservatives who are widely mocked as not respecting women and minorities at home are the ones who are fighting for them abroad”
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“I have identified it many times over on this blog. Men from the regions that have not been touched by the great feminist revolution treat women as garbage. I don’t know how to word this any more clearly. I have not noticed any difference on the basis of what religion these men do or do not claim to practice.”
Thank you for putting this so succinctly.
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DWhat doesn’t follow is europe has obviously been touched by the feminist revolution that you claim is the key. But they have allowed radical islam to not be impeded in europe.. and then we see this backward slide. So unless you are saying more feminism somehow will defeat these backward folk I am curious what you tangibly suggest?
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“So unless you are saying more feminism somehow will defeat these backward folk I am curious what you tangibly suggest?”
For now, I’m not managing to create such a consensus among just a dozen people on this blog. Creating it on a larger scale seems an impossible feat at this moment. Half of the people just flatly refuse to accept that the problem exists, while another half tries to deviate the discussion to any other subject whatsoever: Islam, conservatism, partisan grievances, Obama, whether the hijab benefits its wearers or not, etc. Any mention of the discomfort this infringement on the freedom of women caused me personally tends to encounter either disbelief or indifference.
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No, the irony here is conservatives who want to repeal roe v wade, shut down abortion clinics, defund planned parenthood, who don’t care about wage differences between men and women, parental leave, adequate child care, or discrimination at the work place now SUDDENLY pretend to care about the rights of women. ‘How dare those brown savages mistreat women?? That’s my god given right, dammnit!’
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Clearly unhinged if you think conservatives are even remotely comparable in their views of women as strict fundamentalist islamists. Hard to debate when ideology can have you suggest they are similar in magnitude at all.. really unhinged.
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Lumping all Muslims together as radical jihadists (they are not) is bad, but lumping all conservatives together as radical women haters must be fun. As a secular, Agnostic conservative, I consider it a strange type of fun, but if it makes her happy, fine.
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Who is “her”, exactly? I don’t think that all conservatives hate women, especially given that my entire family in Canada votes conservative.
But I do insist that 3rd world countries have a horrible record of women’s rights.
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\ Who is “her”, exactly?
Clarissa, I think danmillerinpanama referred to SB. Dan, SB is a “he.” 🙂
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I hope it isn’t me because I’m very far removed from wanting to make this about US partisan warfare.
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Both hijab (hair (and maybe neck) covering) and niqab (face covering) are signalling devices by which muslim women inform men that it’s not worth harassing them.
Many muslim immigrants (since they bring their values with them) assume that local woman who don’t hair or face cover are unprotected by the men in their families (what savages!) and are therefore fair game for any sort of physical advancement up to rape.
Since no one goes around burning down muslim houses after incidents of molestation or rape of local Belgian women they assume that local men don’t care what happens to these loose local women and see no reason to change just because some media (that they can’t necessarily read if they wanted to… and they don’t) are making a fuss.
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Wow, so there is actually a male person in the world who understands how this works. I had lost all hope of ever getting this through to men because the resistance is overwhelming.
Women discuss this among themselves A LOT. But it’s impossible to bring the problem out into the open.
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to you and cliff: what do you suggest doing?
The standard conservative answer is simply do not give into islamic culture / sharia law (informal or formal) and stop letting those who won’t integrate into society in, and deny citizenship and deport those who you rightly say have made life a living hell. Its actually not very hard ONCE you accept that is the answer.
Open to suggestions on what to do, but it seems primarily a lack of will…
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It’s part of the collective mentality (the default order of human societies). (nb collective here is not political but cultural, the primacy of extended family structures over individuals)
Westerners mostly don’t understand it because they’ve moved beyond it toward individualized mentalities. Part of the individualized mentality is a kind of autism in not being able to imagine other value systems anymore than ostriches can imagine flight.
But the places the covered up women are from are still stuck firmly within it* and exist in an eternal state of low grade warfare between “us” (our group, good people, people you have to behave well around and act honorably toward) and “them” (people who aren’t us, and who are therefore enemies who can never be fully trusted and who are fair game for any kind of exploitation that can be gotten away with).
It should be noted that this is also situational and so when (for example) a bunch of Moroccans arrive in Belgium, former enemies are now part of “us”.
Clan, caste, tribe it’s all the same thing and hijab is an emblem of collective morality in which everyone (not just women) belongs to a clearly defined group or they don’t exist and have no moral standing.
*as is much of Latin America, that might be a good part of why you react so badly to being there, the sexism is a symptom of the collective morality rampant there.
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“are signalling devices by which muslim women inform men that it’s not worth harassing them.”
And these signalling devices don’t work anyway. Women who dress this way still get harassed. If the surrounding culture encourages mistreatment of women, they’ll get mistreated no matter how much of them is covered up.
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Signalling systems don’t always have to work well to be maintained and desperately clung to. The most fervent proponents of hijab, it should be noted, are in the west where women don’t face the same level of harassment (so it’s easier for them to make the connection).
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“Signalling systems don’t always have to work well to be maintained and desperately clung to. ”
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Exactly. A hijab is not an anti-rape device.
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“And these signalling devices don’t work anyway. Women who dress this way still get harassed. ”
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“only to hear the triumphant “Hah! So you DO want to make these women happy against their will.””
Clarissa, I’m writing with complete honesty when I say that I don’t know what you’re talking about. You misread the intention of my remark, which wasn’t aimed at scoring some triumphant point about forcing people to be happy against their will.
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“Clarissa, I’m writing with complete honesty when I say that I don’t know what you’re talking about. You misread the intention of my remark, which wasn’t aimed at scoring some triumphant point about forcing people to be happy against their will.”
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I think I see – but my point wasn’t limited to hijab wearers. I’ve heard idiotic commentary from people of different cultural backgrounds about how the solution to street harassment is for women to just dress more modestly. They ignore the way the larger culture treats women in favor of looking at whether a woman’s ankles or knees are revealed, or how much of her collarbone, or how much of her face, etc. That pisses me off too.
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‘Race realists’ like, danmiller or matt here are only to happy to answer ‘Moooslims’ as the leading cause of all ills that ail western societies. That’s not really an answer, though. Spell it out for us here. Now that you’ve identified the cause (congratulations btw!), what should be done about those muslims?
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Once again, all that innuendo.
“Open to suggestions on what to do, but it seems primarily a lack of will…”
Lack of will to do what exactly?
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“Clearly unhinged if you think conservatives are even remotely comparable..”
Clearly you have a problem with reading comprehension if that is the point you think I was trying to make.
Speaking of unhinged, let us examine this again:
“The absolute irony that conservatives who are widely mocked as not respecting women and minorities at home are the ones who are fighting for them abroad”
This is what neocons actually believe. Self-deception is a bottomless pit. 🙂
Ladies, don’t you know the invasion of Iraq was carried out to advance women’s rights? I can only imagine the neocons in the state department drawing up the plans for the invasion while humming the words to ‘The things we do for love’. 😀
“You lay your bets and then you pay the price
The things we do for love, the things we do for love..
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“Clarissa, I think danmillerinpanama referred to SB. Dan, SB is a “he.””
Oh, Dan The Dumb knows that. He’s a child who still thinks that calling someone a girl is some sort of insult.
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“Men from the regions that have not been touched by the great feminist revolution”
Which feminist revolution?
And is it possible that there’s something else going on? Anglophone and Scandinavian and some other countries don’t have much tradition of street harassment of women (not that things were perfect of course, far from it but that wasn’t a particular part of the oppression).
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The one that started in the aftermath of WWI and culminated in the 1970s. The problem is, these things don’t happen without long and hard work of women’s organizations. And you’ve seen what Western feminism has devolved into. Safe spaces, microaggressions, silly blabbering about privilege and choices. They can’t even name the problem, let alone do something about it. I’m sure you can see how few women appear in this thread. Women prefer to enact a public spectacle of feeling sorry for the immigrant to look like obedient good girls.
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” And you’ve seen what Western feminism has devolved into. Safe spaces, microaggressions, silly blabbering about privilege and choices”
For me, western feminism is as dead as the Shaker movement. It achieved a lot of its achievable goals but got sidetracked into trivial nonsense rather than go where it was needed most – which was to take on patriarchial non-western cultures (often against the expressed wishes of women from those cultures – don’t forget that feminists never had broad support among American women even as it was improving their lives). I’d also mention taking on patriarchial Orthodox Judaism which it’s a shame they didn’t since so many feminists were Jewish but all movements have their blind spots…..
Almost all westerners who call themselves feminists now are craven cowards, afraid of being called racist or colonialist or privileged.
I don’t have much opinion on hijab (besides thinking it generally looks ugly but if women want to uglify themselves then why not) niqab (face covering) is nothing but primitive savagery (or worse, respect for primitive savagery). What feminist is willing to say this out loud in public now?
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Absolutely right on, sir. I try to consider myself a feminist but all this crap about privilege and safe spaces and microaggressions is completely irrelevant to most people and it is cowardly to not go after these ass backwards folks who treat women like shit. No wonder many women don’t call themselves feminists, look how nuts most of them are.
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Me. 🙂 I’m willing to say it out loud. 🙂 I agree with what you say, and unfortunately until women get over the teary-eyed, sentimental need to feel sorry for “these poor men”, nothing is going to change. For that to happen, the situation needs to get a lot worse. Otherwise it’s too easy for too many not to notice.
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I literally don’t care if this is Islamophobic or anti-feminist, the entire mentality behind covering your face to go out in public is deeply weird. It’s not like you haven’t mastered object permanence, (“If I can’t see them they can’t see me and I know because they leave alone”) or you’re a parrot. People have faces and we shouldn’t cater to this “need” not to see women’s faces in order for some dudes to function like adults and not entitled middle schoolers.
Bluntly speaking we can’t have a functioning modern society if 50% of the people are unpersons in public. When do people shroud their faces usually? Robbers and terrorists of all stripes hide their faces; this is cross cultural.
I was at a party yesterday, and people were wondering how kids find their mothers in the marketplace find their mothers if they’re completely shrouded and all wearing the same thing.
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“covering your face to go out in public is deeply weird”
For what it’s worth I’ve known a couple of muslim women who find it profoundly alienating and bizarre.
One co-worker (who describes herself as a believing muslim) was on a trip to an English university a couple of years ago and freaked out at having to deal with women in burkas (it was totally unknown in her country until Saudi missionaries spent a lot of time and money trying to popularize it).
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And I know quite a few Western feminists who sigh about the liberating potential of a burqa because it will free them from the deeply patriarchal need to look nice at all times. Not that they look all that nice, to be quite honest, but still they’d like a burqa.
I once sat through a whole class hour of enthusiastic burqa-praising by the female professor and female students while male students and I were stewing with boredom and exasperation.
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“Bluntly speaking we can’t have a functioning modern society if 50% of the people are unpersons in public. When do people shroud their faces usually? Robbers and terrorists of all stripes hide their faces; this is cross cultural.”
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The part I struggle with is that I, personally, am not offended by people wearing hijab/niqab. So I struggle to argue that they not be allowed in public spheres.
I am deeply offended by being ogled, harassed, and condescended to in the street or office and I want the issue to which certain immigrants are prone to get fucking acknowledged!
I’ve said this forever, but sexism and tech is singled out as being sexist because it has so many immigrants from eastern Europe and India.
Another problem is that many women and men I know have not traveled internationally at all and cannot make the connection that women in many other countries besides Saudi Arabia are treated like trash. Many educated people don’t know how hellish it is for a woman to go to Cuba or Egypt alone.
Secondly, men don’t get how awful it is to get constantly harassed in the street if things don’t escalate to violence. ‘hurr hurr I would love to get that much attention’.
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These two things are inextricably linked. A burqa signals that a woman is “clean” and to be left alone. Lack of burqa signals that a woman is “dirty” and is to be hassled. When we say that this kind of classification of women is ok, we subscribe to everything else that’s happening.
Everything else you say, I agree with. Great point about tech industry.
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Yes, we can discuss Brussels.
http://www.politico.eu/article/belgium-failed-state-security-services-molenbeek-terrorism/
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Wow, a great article! Thank you. People, do read it. Belgium is scarily similar to Quebec: the indifferent, lazy police, the idiotic linguistic obsessions that overshadow everything else, the push to attract immigrants nobody knows how to accommodate, insane taxes. This is totally like Quebec!!
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