Let me start with a quick note about Burkas.

What people never note about the Burka is that it isn’t only to hide the woman from other men, it is also to hide the woman from her own husband. The structure of desire as has been discussed in several discussions here (Valentine's day in the Girard Household, Desire is always a desire of the desire of the other, and The Spark of Love to name a few) is that desire is for the desire of the other. To put it simply, men desire what other men desire. Thus if you have a beautiful woman and other men desire her, you will move to desire her even more. Your desire of your own wife depends on her being a desirable woman. (See linked discussions for further details on this matter.)  

  Why does Islam, and most religions for that matter, fear a wife being desired by her husband? Because, as John Stevenson remarks in post quoting “Own the meaning of a man’s life and you own his heart.” Women and desire is a danger to the structure of control which religions want to achieve over the believers. This is true not only about religions but in many organizations of control. Women are dangerous because if men fall in love with them, if they desire them, their heart is not in the right place; the meaning of their life is not decided by the powers above but by the woman. (The Hebrew Bible for example has a whole chapter of the danger of women as seducers).

There are many reasons why men put women down, from needing a mirror which shows them at twice their size as Virginia Wolf says, to many mentioned in the linked discussion, but this point significantly separates the question of women and that of minorities. The existence of women in the workplace and in the world is a danger to structure of control which men built. (Gay men may pose a similar threat but there are also important differences.)

I wanted to write this post for a long time only I wasn’t sure how to make it a forward leaning post instead of a descriptive one. Yesterday I read an intelligent woman clearly explaining how a ban on Burqa’s is bad which showed, for me, the depth of the enslaved accepting and rationalizing their own enslavement. Treating the Burka as some kind of religious artifact, similar perhaps to wearing a Yarmulke or a Turban is ridiculous. This has been, lengthily, discussed in the Burka discussion and I won’t repeat the discussion but I will note that a mass religion demands of women to be invisible in the world. This invisibility is also, as in the discussion on supermodels , an impediment to thinking as thinking involves (outside) feedback. It involves a conversation.

(In the article in favor of allowing burkas the woman actually said: “But in today’s Europe women can dress more or less as they please; there is no reason for the burden to religious liberty that the ban involves.” This is hilariously false. Women can almost never wear what they please. Nor can men for that matter, but so much more than women can. (e.g. see discussion on What should an academic wear). Are Burka’s like Wearing high heels (and post)? There might be some similarities but it is all in the quantity of submission (men have their own version of high heels) and effacement.

The effacement of women has taken many shapes, from men’s clubs to many other means of simply not seeing women. This has somewhat changed and women are part of the fabric of society, and yet a platonic conversation is still not a simple matter, as women are well aware of. Not after high school. How do we make it happen?

I’ll describe in a later post some of the problems of such a conversation but I don’t want this post to be too long, and I also wanted first to start a conversation about these issues.