Comments on: The following image appeared

By: aziz

aziz — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 00:22:57 +0000

LoA, good question! to be honest I think most of us men know others of our (nominal) gender yet to whom these descriptions apply all too well.

As a geek, it was particularly galling to know that it was precisely these men who attracted the most attention from the objects of their tyranny

at any rate, I am fine with being assumed to be a mindless animal, since as the father of two young daughters thats exactly the paranoia that I hope they develop towards all men to some degree. I figure that if i have some compelling reason to prove to someone of that paranoid mindset that I am not mindless, then I will be able to do so. If not, then its not a big deal.

By: Lawrence of Arabia

Lawrence of Arabia — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 21:34:54 +0000

just to take this from the other side for a moment..

i am curious why men don’t get insulted, being compared to flies…or to mindless animals that can’t resist raw meat…or to any of the other things to which men are compared and from which women need to be protected?

By: Willow

Willow — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 18:38:17 +0000

By Ursula Lindsay, no less. She was my editor at Cairo Magazine back in the day.

By: Fatemeh

Fatemeh — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 18:04:01 +0000

We discussed it here.

By: Muse

Muse — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 17:47:44 +0000

willow, i agree. i was pleasantly surprised by his response (which made me re-examine some of my prejudices). i think (hope) that more traditional scholars would have the same reaction.

By: Willow

Willow — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 17:37:57 +0000

Bless your husband’s tutor.

By: Muse

Muse — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 17:07:02 +0000

ahem, that should read “while wearing hijab” in Cairo.

one day i’ll make a comment without typos. one day.

By: Muse

Muse — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 17:00:58 +0000

My husband recently shared this image with his arabic tutor in Cairo, an imam of a masjid, to get his take on it. He called it “crude” and said it was misguided. He believes hijab is fard, but doesn’t see keeping men away as the point.

I wrote about being assaulted while where hijab in Cairo here.

You cannot fix the problem by focusing on the people that aren’t creating it.

By: Willow

Willow — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 16:06:14 +0000

To me the biggest hypocrisy is that even the suggestion that hijab will protect you from…ah, unzipped flies…is false. For the first two years I was in Egypt I ran around heavily veiled and got catcalled (sometimes worse) literally every 50 feet. I was so disenchanted that I switched to hijab espani (the ’spanish’ bun veil). And that was only out of duty.

To borrow a phrase from Barack Hussein, the whole gender system is broken in large swaths of the Muslim world. This suggestion that hijab will fix everything is like putting a bandaid over a crack in the Hoover Dam.

By: aziz

aziz — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 15:28:46 +0000

Does it occur to the creator of this image that the problem is not with candy, which is tasteful in the right context, but the nuisance of unzipped flies. Someone go find the fly swatter, please.

brilliant. bonus points for the pun about flies.