modesty of dress is very much a great equaliser between men and women, but unfortunately it’s become so politicised in recent years that any time you mention talk soon turns to burqa bans and oppression.

Yusuf, my apologies for the long comment.

This is offered in the spirit of Boyd Rice’s little quip: “I really don’t have much ill-will toward anyone these days; I just ignore the people that I dislike.”

I don’t ignore people like Bidisha, for she is so singularly eccentrically.. different, that ignoring her is not possible. Bidisha is an intelligent and articulate commentator, but she is an ideologue: a singular, particular, and somewhat eccentric one at that.

I could put things a bit differently, but then she would likely label me as a misogynist, if she cared to bother. Which, frankly, could hurt me a bit because I truly love women. But because I am genuinely not a misogynist, the sting would be superficial. Those women I do not love, or like, I’d rather just ignore them.

Her writings, which when I stumble on them I do not ignore, do provide opportunity. Some of what she writes is challenging and thought provoking, so I profit from their reading. Some of what she writes - on the other hand - is puerile, though artfully so, and one with less time on his or her hands could do well to simply ignore it.

Here is an interesting article, I like her honesty, in being lost in another culture with few referents. I have felt such things myself, as a guest among others. A certain mentality, however, does seep out from her words.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/the-comeback-kid-whatever-happened-to-fiesty-monomonikered-teenage-author-bidisha-789126.html

In any case, back to the article you were commenting on:

Bidisha contends that one can spot a woman-hater by their language, but the inverse also applies, so too one can spot a man-hater by the language they use. In her own words there lies a certain subtle discourse of shaming at work, and a creative re-framing and re-contextualization of words and concepts in a way as to benefit her perspective. She who names a beast masters that beast. Public writing of this sort is persuasive and propagandistic, irrespective of what side one is on. One seeks to persuade a reading public of certain points.

Not to class-bait where class-baiting is not due, though she is gender-baiting and thus opening up a worm can, but Bidisha’s privileges condition and influence her literary expression. I’ll leave this aside for a second. Having privileges is not criminal, but our privileges, or lack thereof, mold our perceptions of reality and this must never be forgotten

Hate: to accuse someone of hating a group, in today’s intellectual environment, is to lob a Molotov cocktail into the discourse. Because the one thing we cannot do, in post-modern polite discourses, characterized by a liberal respect for diversity, is to hate others.

This is, of course, unless those others who we hate lie outside the very terms of our larger collective discourse and meta-community. It is ok, under the current secular dispensation, to hate those whose beliefs are fundamentally at odds with a progressive and modern worldview. It is better yet to ignore them and pretend they do not exist. But beyond this, what of hate, within the framework of Anglosphere modern liberal diversity conscious society?

Hate: it is the ultimate sin in post-modern Anglosphere discourses. Hate, is an emotional state, and it is contextualized into an inner act of emotional violence. To accuse someone of hate is tantamount to accusing her of heresy, in a past age. To accuse a man of woman-hate, is to almost cast him out from the circle of polite humanity. A woman hating pig is explicitly not a human thing.

There are clear reasons women should avoid true women haters, for one they are prone towards violence towards those they hate, though it is to be noticed that the most hateful of the hateful simply scorn and ignore with incredible indifference. Hate is not the true opposite of love, rather total indifference is, for hate presupposes an emotional connection and engagement. I think that in some - and not all - contexts, the whole concept of a generic woman-hating betrays a mind uncomfortable with subtleties of human sentiment and behavior.

Here, the exceptional is cast as the norm. The idea that millions of men who love their daughters, wives, lovers and mothers, are somehow at the same time “woman-haters” is a fundamental absurdity characterizing post-modern gender discourses. Again, not to class-bait, but my wide experience has been that these sort of sentiments tumble out of mouths of people of incredible education and privilege. Normal folk just don’t go around talking like this.

I have noticed the most profound depths of women hating not from male misogynists, but rather from female misogynists. This is not exactly an open secret, though one may pretend to ignore it. Often women display an incredible malice towards each other in their discourses commensurate with, and even exceeding, the problematic discourses Bidisha has a problem with.

I believe that to some degree the token misogyny she has a problem with is incredibly petty. Here is a person [*] who saw fit to lambast male critics of Sex in the City 2 as misogynists.

Most people with a pulse admit it was a horrid and indulgent movie. I have intelligent female friends who liked it, but I view this as a vice commensurate with my liking obviously horrid male flicks. I liked Prince of Persia. It was a bad movie, so was Rambo. My enjoyment of tacky male action flicks would not cause me to shrink from the obvious fact that they suck.

Sex in the City 2 was a vapid movie, exercising a pernicious and corrosive influence on our culture[s] (British and American) in terms of the tacky and self-indulgent, consumption oriented, vapid, vacant, empty dating and social lifestyles it encourages. Somehow that male reviewers would notice the very same things many females noticed about the movie, but have the ill sense to articulate what we all know in public reviews, does not speak to their misogyny - it speaks to their naivete.

[* I almost wrote ‘a woman’ before my inner misogyny brake stopped me - thank Allah]

Not every man, who one may try to label as a “woman hater,” even hates all women. Thus generically calling him “woman-hater” is specious. Many dyed in the wool misogynists are quite fond of their moms, at least. In fact often their moms encourage a more general woman-hating by pointing out that the [insert crude word Bidisha justly rails against] he is dealing with are simply unworthy of him. Many a mother has helped produce a misogynist or two. Either by her actions or by her words. What is happening is that a particular person may typically hate many women, outside of his mom or sisters anyway, and/or the female gender in the abstract.

I find this sad and regrettable, but no more, or less, than hating men in general.

Misogyny’s shadow is misandry, and vice versa, and we tend to notice what is inside of ourselves. Our concerns, fears, and obsessions mold the way we see the world, and influence what in reality we simply filter out and do not see.

That said, many of the terms she points to reveal an incredible coarseness of discourse when it comes to referring to women. It is a sad world in which the only way to attack vile, crude, and vulgar discourses about particular women is to label those in the discourse as haters of women. I’ve no doubt some are, but some may only happen to hate a particular woman, who is the target of his scorn.

An example of this principle: I have a friend who was once married to a woman of incredibly vile malice. She evidently was prone to occasionally using the word nig-er over the phone when angry at a particular black person. She doesn’t hate all black people, of course, only the ones who cut her off in traffic.

In her defense her hate is a diffuse and equal opportunity one, and she finds scorn with many people, including - especially - her own whites. She is coarse, and vulgar - though not without her charms, including a rather wicked sense of humor. She likes many Black people more than many white people, upon whom she heaps even more scorn. Someone who didn’t know her well would assume she was a racist (and racism would have been the lest of her faults) she sincerely wasn’t racist, just very coarse in expressing a more general and fundamental hate of humanity in general.

Perhaps many of the men the author overheard were the same, simply coarse potty mouths with a tendency to hate specific women in their lives and to express this hate in vile terms. Would it make her feel better if they expressed their hate in more sublimated terms?

An obsession with regimenting a polite public discourse at all times is school-marmish. I use the term schoolmarm at my own risk, lest I be labeled a misogynist. I wish a polite gender neutral term expressing the sense of schoolmarm exists. It does not, so I am forced to call schoolmarmic obsessions schoolmarmish.

Bidisha is not a milquetoast, her words can have a simmering fire and energy behind them. However Bidisha wishes for a public discourse of milquetoasts, constantly on guard lest their verbal slips reveal some latent hate in their heart, one supposes, and their tongues snipped. The Bidisha’s of the world possibly generate more real misogyny than they stem.

One other thing to note, is that she’s defining the terms of woman hating based on her own criteria, the idea that by the simple fact of a man living in a household in which a woman does the majority of the housework such a man is a woman hater, is inchoate, particular, and a bit silly. She isn’t privy to the division of labor in that household, perhaps the man in that household performs work contributing to that household that equalizes things. How many men fall and break their backs shoveling snow or leaves off rooftops?

She is an ideologue and a sloppy thinker, I’ve no doubt she would condemn me as a misogynist for this sentiment. However the women in my life, from my mother on down, certainly do not see things in this way.

She or he who defines the terms of a discourse controls the discourse. The ability to imply that one hates an entire gender, simply because such a one does not perform a certain portion of domestic labor, is so specious

I would be the first to admit that many men are lazy when it comes to domestic matters. Of course someone as privileged as Bidisha, and let’s face it, hers is a background somewhat steeped in privilege, would be blithely unconscious of the fact that in working class households, at least, men work hard. In my consulting work I do provide services to manufacturing companies, in the course of my career I’ve seen how hard a lot of guys work in factories. While in school, I also had the opportunity to work several hard jobs to pay my way through school.

Guys work hard. Now I think it’s unfair if both partners work equally hard outside the home, and then one partner works harder inside of the home. But the matter should be examined for its nuances, if a man and woman both work outside of the home, and the man simply expects to be served all night long at home, then clearly something is unjust here.

Re-contextualizing the discourse into one of hatred however, is disingenuous. Though brilliantly so. To say that a man is a woman hater for an act of insufferable laziness (it’s not difficult to wash dishes or pick up after ourselves gentlemen) is to logically imply that he hates his wife, which is to buff our a lens into a man’s heart. Somewhat uncharitable

I doubt Bidisha has ever had to a serious job in her life, it’s possible that many men out there beyond the literary circles in which she floats simply put in an equal amount of labor as their spouses do, in highly dangerous and repetitive trauma inducing work 9 hours a day and are too tired to wash dishes.

I have little sympathy for middle class and upper class guys who may well be too lazy to pick up a share of housework. But this is a small sliver of the populace.

Bidisha’s parents were university lecturers. Somehow I suspect hers is a life steeped in some degree of privilege that isolates her to some degree from many

I know very little of her background, but I would also suggest that something in her ethnic background’s appropriate.

Not to stoop to stereotypes but having met and befriended a few Indian feminists, from somewhat privileged backgrounds, involving dual professional parents, I have come to suspect certain factors in their culture. Perhaps a cultural tendencies within Hindu masculinity, translated into a post-modern Western context, may pre-dispose male partners in a dual professional and established household to really act like insufferably spoiled grown children. I believe that a real thread of misogyny does seem to run through some aspects of Indian culture, and I believe that this may predispose her to look upon what is really, at worse, male laziness and often outside of class circles in which she had the privilege of floating, what may very well be male exhaustion.

As a bachelor, I admit my perspectives on domestic matters are somewhat abstract. I will offer this, however. I typically come home too mentally exhausted to do a good deal of my own housework in my flat, and really all that I do is intellectual work now.

When I was younger and working 2 “real” jobs often I would come home both physically and mentally exhausted. I spent a good deal of my 20s cleaning factory ceiling tiles from a 50 foot lift, 3rd shift, and either bagging groceries or serving tables or bussing tables or washing dishes 2nd shift, while attending lectures and classes in the morning and early afternoon. Having left a somewhat spotty university career behind(half conscious due to exhaustion) I spent most of the daytime as an over-worked IT analyst, and part time shifts after work in restaurants bussing tables or serving tables.

If, in that period, I happened to be married, god forbid, to Bidisha or a woman like her [thankfully an impossibility, though in some ways she is attractive] and she remotely suggested that I was a misogynist for coming home and not lifting a finger after working 40 hours handling computer end users, and 20 hours serving food to absolute ingrates, then my patience would have been sorely tried and I suspect that our ill starred and inauspicious union would have been terminated, likely by me, rather swiftly.

This is not exceptional, I’ve known many guys working 60-80 hours a week.

That said, at the time that I was closest to ever being engaged, I was very careful to do the dishes of my intended’s and her parents - being potential in-laws, when guests in their house. This was to honor them, in gratitude. Also my family taught me that, somehow, women appreciate a man’s sincere doing some labor.

Note that in some cultures this is a bit of a faux pas, doing your potential (or actual) in-law’s dishes. this said, I reflect on the independent’s article on Bidisha’s Italy adventures. Being open to the social norms in a different social context is important. It involves not projecting one’s own crap onto things, but being receptive to what others consider proper.

This is something Bidisha also should consider, I’ve known women who preferred doing most domestic work for their male partner. These women, strangely, saw this as an act of love and if it was appreciated by their partner they preferred this state. To have insisted on a more “equal” division of labor would have seemed unnatural to these women.

It is good to be sensitive to human differences.

Again, sorry for the length. Brevity is not one of my virtues, and I have many vices, may Allah forgive our faults. Kamal S.´s last [type] ..Review- Roxana Shirazi’s The Last Living Slut- Born in Iran- Bred Backstage

@george,

obviously, as a muslim, i am supportive of islamic norms of female dress.in my comment,however, i was referring to women in general and was suggesting that women avoid those styles which draw attention to those body parts which have been subject to excessive sexualisation and our loaded with meaning in this society. attraction is natural and not something that can be eliminated by dress.

Salaams:

I am in my 60s (white) and we use “girl” language all the time.

I also work in a women’s prison and we are not allowed to refer to the inmates as “girls.” It is considered offensive. We call them “ladies.” lol Safiyyah´s last [type] ..how to get free Qurans to burn on Burn Quran Day

i changed my name back to aicha..the comment didn’t come through so i’ll just copy and paste what i wrote before..

salams,

i have a friend who is a muslim chaplain at a women’s prison in the north of england. she told me that the prisoners where she is based referred to her,and i would suppose all other staff/volunteers as “miss.” which,in the uk at least is a slightly old fashioned term, still in use, employed by british school children when speaking to their female teachers.

i think that the word in itself is not the problem but the way in which it is said and the accompanying body language.

alot of older english people use the term “coloured” when referring to non-whites. it’s not considered a very pc expression these days but to many of the people who do use it do so thinking it to be a polite term..and infact at one point it was considered the preferred polite term.

the same goes for other racial terms. as a a youngster i used to boil with rage to hear of people talking about the “p*ki shop” but i;ve since realised that inappropriate as the term is, it wasn’t really done with malice. it’s use in working class white communities was more a way to distinguish one neighbour from another.. but it’s obvious use by those on the far right tarred misguded and insular, though largely well intentioned people as being racist.

Sorry, sentence should read:

family WHO are…. Maryam´s last [type] ..A Muslim Woman In Britain