In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Now Tell Me More About What You’re Wearing

Ilyka Damen

Simultaneously fascinating and depressing short piece from BBC correspondent Frances Harrison on the challenges of reporting from Tehran. When she’s not seeking access to leaders who want to know if she’s “with Islam or with them,” she’s taking criticism for what’s really important: Her clothes.

One [viewer] called the BBC’s cable channel in Britain to complain that I was wearing a red headscarf on TV.

Apparently they feared it would affect my objectivity. It prompted a long debate online about my headscarf – interestingly not about what I had reported.

As Harrison goes on to mention, her headscarf wasn’t optional; failure to wear it in Iran is potentially punishable by a two-month jail term.

Commenters in the recent headscarf discussions have mentioned how easy it is to point to mandatory headscarf laws like Iran’s as an example of the oppression of women, and because Westerners do this all the time lately, I cannot blame the Muslims who remark that they’re sick and tired of hearing Westerners bemoan the veil. Picking on the veil is easy for Westerners to do.

What’s less easy for Westerners to do: Acknowledge that when we focus on appearances to the exclusion of what women have to tell us, we’re not being great friends to women either. Points to us for not jailing women for showing a little hair and for “letting” them out of the home to work as journalists, sure; but any fair evaluation of our behavior would also have to subtract a few points for our stubborn habit of disregarding women’s words and reducing them to a set of physical characteristics.

You can argue that the West still comes out ahead in that evaluation, but I don’t see how that precludes us from doing more, working harder to give women their due. If I’m a mile ahead of someone else in a race, but still have several more miles to go, should I quit running? Should I change direction and start running backwards? And then there’s the issue of how much control we really have over what other societies are doing or not doing in the first place: If a fellow racer’s annoying me, should I clothesline her? Would you cheer me if I did?

There’s more from the article, including the not-really-startling-to-anyone news that a woman is responsible for her husband’s background, and must guard herself against being unduly influenced by it:

Clothes aside, I have been attacked on blogs online for being married to an Iranian. Instead of giving me an insight into the culture apparently it discredits me in some way.

[…]

There are plenty of foreign journalists here married to Iranians, but they are men and nobody asks if the fact that they have Iranian wives make them less objective in their reporting.

Well, duh. Who listens to wives?

These hassles are, of course, in addition to the difficulties of being a Western journalist in Iran in the first place. Good for Ms. Harrison for her refusal to be intimidated by any of them.

20 thoughts on Now Tell Me More About What You’re Wearing

  1. It’s the toddler response. “Well, so and so did it too/first/worse”. I mean, having a better record on women’s rights than Saudi Arabia is not exactly something to be proud of. You don’t get a cookie for being less anti-Semitic than Hitler.

  2. Well, duh. Who listens to wives?

    This is a bit of a tangent, but a similar thing is apparent in academia. In a academic couple, people wonder all the time if the husband does his wife’s work. Nobody asks if she’s doing his.

  3. Wow. Thanks for the link to the story: how stupid for people to complain she’s wearing a bloody headscarf. Once again, what a woman wears is always more important than what she does.

    Commenters in the recent headscarf discussions have mentioned how easy it is to point to mandatory headscarf laws like Iran’s as an example of the oppression of women, and because Westerners do this all the time lately, I cannot blame the Muslims who remark that they’re sick and tired of hearing Westerners bemoan the veil. Picking on the veil is easy for Westerners to do.

    There is a difference, which you seem to be ignoring – I assume wilfully, since I can’t believe you’re ignorant of it – between the veil, or niqab, and the headscarf, or hiqab. There are good reasons to protest niqab, which is not even mandated by the Qu;ran: it’s purely cultural oppression of women. There is no good reason to protest hiqab, which does not render women faceless figures. Confusing the two, and pretending that this is the same issue, isn’t helpful to any discussion.

  4. What’s less easy for Westerners to do: Acknowledge that when we focus on appearances to the exclusion of what women have to tell us, we’re not being great friends to women either.

    THANK YOU.

    and of course that goes not just for hijab-wearers but those who may be closer to “home,” for some of us. The “sexbot” in the micromini and the skyscraper heels may be a MENSA candidate with a razor-sharp wit. Or not, but she may have some really interesting things to say anyway. Instead of endlessly wringing one’s hands about how such women “make us all look bad,” instead of worrying what “they” will think all the time, set a damn example, put aside your own personal shit about what she’s wearing for five minutes and -listen- to your sister. You might be pleasantly surprised.

  5. Jesurgislac, if you’re going to be in the business of nitpicking Jill’s word choice as an authority on veiling practices, please start spelling “hijab” right. I’ve been assuming this was a typo for your last handful of comments, but I can’t imagine it is, now and it’s not helpful to the discussion to mix up terms this way, either.

    In general with lots of folks, I see a lot of problem with bad transliteration of Arabic online. Everyone wants to put an extraneous ‘u’ after every ‘q’, for one. Just because it’s a loanword from a foreign language doesn’t mean, especially if it’s the subject of our argument, that we shouldn’t put in enough respectful effort to get terms right. There’s different schools, sure–do you put in a ‘q’ or an accented ‘k’ for the qaf? do you distinguish between the different glottal stops?–but ‘j’ and ‘q’ aren’t interchangeable, apostrophes (Qur’an, for example) indicate an actual consonant that changes the meaning of the word if it’s present or not, and ‘q’ and ‘qu’ are very different.

    It’s one thing to see people always misspell ‘Gandhi,’ say, even though I’m told ‘ghandi’ means ‘idiot;’ or to mistype, or to misspell stuff in our own language; it’s another to consistently substitute a wrong word for a right one because you can’t bother to look it up or imitate the other places you see it written.

  7. Hi… I’m a new reader to this blog (found it through Eteraz’s blog), and I find it very interesting… I’m a (very) young Canadian Muslimah, trying to learn more about the world, ‘specially about different ideologies and groups and so on.
    Anyhoo, I want to learn more about feminism… I’m afraid I don’t know much about it, actually. Well, I reckon I have a faint idea about it, but I don’t know specifics, and I’d like to find out more, especially about feminist stances on certain subjects, and on big issues in general.
    Anyway, yeah… I look forward to reading more on this blog, and learning from it, too! 🙂

    -AnonyMouse

  9. If a reporter’s wearing a headscarf because the gov’t of Iran insists that she do, what else is she doing that she wouldn’t be inclined to, of her own accord?

  10. little light, thanks for the Arabic tips–I know I got the apostrophe wrong in “Qur’an” in one or another of these threads somewhere. I’ll try to get it right in the future.

    Confusing the two, and pretending that this is the same issue, isn’t helpful to any discussion.

    Jill got to this already, but you know what else isn’t helpful? Deliberately missing the point. So here it is: In Iran, Harrison’s main source of controversy and criticism stemmed from her reporting and her alleged/suspected pro-West bias; she was–

    attacked nightly for a week on Iranian TV in February because I said more than 100,000 people had come out to mark the anniversary of the Iranian revolution. The government said the crowd was three million and claimed I had scandalously underestimated the numbers.

    Meanwhile, back in the UK, the main source of criticism and controversy was over her headscarf.

    There are too many other negatives to being a woman in Iran for me to say I’d prefer it, but what I took from the article was something Jill covered in her last post on the general subject of veiling–which, yes, I know, is not automatically inclusive of or synonymous with “headscarf,” or “modesty,” or “burka,” or “niqab”–and that is, that I can see how young Muslim women might well choose to practice some form of head or face covering, if they felt it afforded them the chance to have people focus on what they have to say rather than on what they look like. Or:

    We have to create a society in which women will feel safe in public spaces, regardless of what they’re wearing. But until we successfully do that, women will cope.

    And this obsession with a woman’s appearance being something the West has not learned to get over itself, we are poor preachers on the subject. That was and remains my chief point, with my secondary point being to express some admiration for Ms. Harrison and her work in trying circumstances.

  11. If a reporter’s wearing a headscarf because the gov’t of Iran insists that she do, what else is she doing that she wouldn’t be inclined to, of her own accord?

    I know! I know! Pick me! I know this one:

    HATING OUR FREEDOMS.

  14. Hi, AnonyMouse!

    You’ll probably be pleased to know that there’s a really excellent body of work on feminism from a specifically Muslim perspective, that you might get a lot out of. That aside, this is a great community, and I hope you find what you’re looking for here.

  15. Not what I meant and certainly not what I think.

    When network anchors started wearing flag pins, that meant something. Non-Muslim reporters wearing head scarves means something.

  17. I thought it meant she didn’t want to spend a coupla months in an Iranian jail, but now I’m not so sure.

    You will, of course, recall all the television newscasters we sent to Guantanamo Bay for failing to wear flag pins.

  19. I’ve been mispelling hijab, and doing so consistently?

    That’s really, really very embarrassing for me. Sorry. My bad.

    It doesn’t change the point I was trying to make, though:

    That there is a big difference between women wearing a headscarf and women wearing a facemask or veil. Objecting to people trying to confuse the two, or objecting to people who try to equate objections to one with objections to another, isn’t “nitpicking” – it’s an important issue.

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