“If a man has the vote and his wife does not, the man is likely to be thinking of his wife and children as well as himself when he votes;”

You have absolutely no idea what a person is thinking. He may be thinking of his wife when casting his vote; he may not be thinking of his wife when casting his vote. Irrespective of whether Saudi men actually do think of their wives when voting that still does not justify Saudi women being denied the basic human right to be able to vote. It is their country too and what goes on, politically, in their country effects them too as well as their children. 

Your blog is filled with excuses and down playing of the abuse and mistreatment of millions of women and little girls across the world.

No one likes to be ‘dominated’ and to have their life dictated to them by someone else who has self appointed their self as an authority. The best relationships are based on equality and partnership - not dominating and subordination.

“not all women would have to be bullied into letting their husbands win the bread while they kept house and looked after the children, particularly if they had friends, they played with their own children and other people’s, and spent at least part of the day at friends’ houses chatting over a coffee (or whatever they drank back then) and did a bit of work on the side to raise a bit of extra money. Some might think that was more fulfilling than working down a coalmine, and a lot less dangerous, because much male work is not powerful or fulfilling, but tedious, physically draining and hazardous, and even though giving birth itself has its risks, women do not do that every day of their lives.” This was clearly typed by a person who hasn’t the faintest idea of what it is like to spend every day and night looking after the house and the children.

Men often forget that women, who live in countries where they are ‘allowed’ to work, have often held down many jobs before becoming Mothers and Housewives. Working is, by far, easier than being a housewife.

When you work, you get days off, breaks during your shift, holidays, you have a certain amount of hours you will work in a day/night and when you are finished, you can relax etc. If you are unwell, you can even ‘ring in sick’ in the morning. You also earn a salary and have social interaction with your work colleagues etc.

A ‘housewife’ or ‘stay-at-home’ Mother can’t do/does not get any of the things that I have mentioned above. 

Looking after children, especially babies and the house is a 24 hour job. If a woman hasn’t been to bed for three days because the baby wouldn’t sleep etc., or the children were unwell, or she has a rip roaring case of tonsillitis (for example) she can’t ring in sick in the morning. She can’t ask her children to spend all day cooking, cleaning, washing & ironing the laundry for her. She can’t ask them to wash, dress and feed themselves and she can’t ask them to sit up all night feeding the baby. Men often forget, that most babies will not sleep through the night until at least a year old. While most of you are snoring in bed, your wives will have been up the entire night breast/bottle feeding the baby and then will have to spend the entire day doing housework and looking after any other children she may have without any sleep.

Your belief that housewives spend most of the day drinking coffee with friends is laughable. Presumably, while this is going on, the ‘magic fairies’ are back at home doing all of the washing, cooking, dusting, cleaning and ironing etc., for her?

Many housewives end up being exhausted, sleep deprived and isolated from friends and family which leads to them becoming lonely and depressed. Many housewives also become financially controlled by their husbands and can lead lives in absolute poverty and misery too.

Those who are ‘allowed’ to work often seek a part time job. So not only are these women looking after the house, the children, but are also holding down a job too. 

And men have the nerve to complain about having to hold down one job which they will be paid for and which they also get perks and other fringe benefits that are denied to housewives..

Reading through your blog, however, you have mentioned one or two things which I find odd, for example:

“and even though giving birth itself has its risks, women do not do that every day of their lives.”

I’m sorry, but this is massively ignorant and spoken by someone who clearly has a flippant attitude towards the suffering of women during childbirth. Childbirth is excruciatingly painful and is not easy.

It has been Scientifically proven that men could not cope with the suffering and pain during natural childbirth by observing males suffering from kidney stones. It’s the closest men will ever come to understanding what natural childbirth feels like - only difference is the average kidney stone is only the size of a small pebble which you don’t push through your pelvis. Where as, the average baby weighs between 7-10 lbs and is pushed through the pelvis. Some women even fracture their pelvis during delivery. Female genitals are far more enriched with nerve endings than male genitals too.

As a former nurse, I have witnessed men screaming, crying and begging for pain relief after only a couple of hours when suffering from kidney stones. Now imagine if that pebble sized kidney stone weighed the same as a baby? Now imagine being like that for two, three or even four days. Not every woman is fortunate enough to be offered pain relief, and even those who do receive it have normally spent a long period of time in severe pain before they reached that point. However, millions of women, and sadly, children (Yemen girls) go through hours/days of natural unanesthetized childbirth every year. 1 in 4 women in Afghanistan, for example, die in agony in childbirth every year.

So, you may have the flippant attitude of, “ women do not do that every day of their lives,” but that’s easy for you to say when it is not you who will have to spend X amount of hours/days in agony and suffering.

Which is why the only time a woman should ever have a baby is when she is sexually mature adult and is both mentally & physically prepared for nine months of pregnancy and childbirth.

Fathers often take all the credit for the birth of ‘their’ children for simply imparting sperm nine months before the baby was even born, but in fact it is 95% the Mother. The imparting of sperm is on an equal footing as the Mother providing an ovum. However, without the ovum, without the Mother nurturing the child in her womb for nine months through the back pain, pelvic pain, vomiting etc, without her going through the agony of childbirth, without her going through sleep deprivation and exhaustion of 24 hour breast/bottle feeding etc., there would be no baby. 

Perhaps if men dropped their flippant attitude towards childbirth and actually appreciated what women go through in order to give them children, more women would be willing to have a child?

“In the long distant past there were peaceful matriarchal societies”

-This has never been substantiated and the most popular theories have been discredited, the entire idea has fallen out of favour and remained so since the mid-eighties.

“and it has been shown that it was women who invented tools and mathematics”

That’s just a straight up falsehood.

Just one correction for you and I suppose for the authors, the Madinah school fire in Saudi is being mentioned as an example of placing religious dogma over women lives. That would be fie if the story were actually true. IT IS NOT, th way it has been reported is just inuendo and half truths.

A cursory amount of research by the authors would have found out the story was based on poor journalism and then inflated by the willing western press in to the utter horror story we, even I believed. Whats interesting about that story is how readily we all bought it, supose it is a damining indictment on the image of Saudi.