

Female Producers in Saudi Arabia: "Did you have to wear the black thing?" - garret
http://no-reservations-crew-blog.travelchannel.com/read/under-the-abbaya-female-producers-in-saudi-arabia

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marvin

      And you know how all of them responded to women in charge? Great. Actually, they were a lot more than great.
      They were about the most warm, wonderful, welcoming group of people that you could possibly imagine.
    

I've heard the opposite..not about Saudi Arabians, though. My mother was the
boss of an Iranian immigrant, and he was apparently completely unable to
respect instructions given by a woman. And we are not talking about burger-
flipping here, but pharmaceutical production.

This is an anecdote answered with an anecdote, but let's not put this whole
cultural difference under a chair. Women _aren't_ regarded as the professional
equals of men in all parts of the world. I'm not starting a gender debate
here; in some ways it is a pretty interesting difference. Especially if you
see that those Arabian cultures that are even more "different" (polygamy, for
instance) actually have a lot of similarities to promiscuous life in the
West..at least from the male's point of view. There are a lot of facts about
morale and life in these societies that doesn't come to light in any
politically correct discussion.

I wish I had a better skill for languages so I could go over there and see
these things first-hand...

~~~
blurry
I've experienced a bit of muslim culture first-hand and it's not even close to
the cutesy image you get from this article. The author sees herself as a
culturally sensitive critical thinker ("before you think I drank the
koolaid...") but she is far from it. Take her cliched argument about the
advantages of abbaya. If completely covering one's face and body is so
desirable, why are women, and only women, forced into it under the threat of
extreme corporal punishment and imprisonment? And how could she miss the fact
that not speaking unless spoken to and making sure to always look down (to
name just a couple things) is an integral part of wearing the garment?

Gender apartheid is just as cruel and ugly as race apartheid. Extolling the
virtues of full body cover for women is quite like saying that working cotton
fields is really good for blacks, what with all that fresh air and exercise.
Ignorant at best.

~~~
netcan
I often feel the same way when I here these sorts of arguments. But I think
you're off the mark.

 _Extolling the virtues of full body cover for women is quite like saying that
working cotton fields is really good for blacks, what with all that fresh air
and exercise._

You didn't get the majority of blacks to stand up & say that they feel cotton
fields are liberating & dignified. That is a major difference. In fact, women
in places where hijab is discouraged actively defend it. You can't respond
with the cliché brainwash argument either. Culture is always brainwash.

I think it's important to step back & draw the distinction between religious
conservatives demanding that the sun orbits the earth and some other
completely arbitrary cultural things.

Think about dress codes (especially for women) wherever you happen to be:
Dress in at least this much fabric. Cover up at least these areas. You _can_
do this. But it's inappropriate at the office, if you want to be taken
seriously. Some rules are relaxed in some places, like the minimum fabric
requirement at the beach. Some, like 'cover these areas are enforced by law.

I'm not saying that I agree with Saudi conventions or law. I am saying we need
to be careful of what we are criticising. A lot of cultural norms are always
arbitrary.

~~~
blurry
Ugh. Proponents of status quo always invoke tradition and use some
attractively pastoral but highly marginal examples to paint a white-washed
picture that's quite far from reality.

In reality, it's not about the clothes. Muslim men base forcing women to cover
up on "hard" facts of _exactly_ the "sun orbits the earth" variety. If you did
not think western, you would know that these men think of women as being both
naturally disabled (mentally _and_ physically) and inferior in the eyes of
Allah (intellectually _and_ morally). This goes far beyond mere decorum and is
not at all comparable to office wear vs. bikinis.

Case in point, a few years back I spent a month at an all-women resort in one
of the more liberal muslim countries. Once, I happened to swim in front of a
local man. To say that he was stunned would be an understatement. His eyes
bugged out, he lost his breath, and when he finally managed to speak, he was
stuttering. Turns out he quite literally thought that women are physically
unable to swim. It was as though he witnessed pigs fly.

What I am saying is, it's easy to take the cultural relativism position until
you consider where it leads. As just one example, this is what happens in
Saudi Arabia today during rape hearings. A man's testimony is considered fact
unless proven otherwise, similar to Western law. A woman's testimony however
is considered a presumption, based on these "facts" as loosely quoted from
actual Saudi law: women are emotional and as such incapable of sound
judgement, women do not participate in public life and as such incapable of
understanding what they merely observe, women are forgetful and as such their
words are unreliable, and finally, men are by God's will superior and
therefore dominate women by default.

So what do you think happens to rape victims when you frame it in those
"cultural" terms? By the way, if you think you know where I am going with
this, you are wrong - rape victims get sent to jail for the crime of being in
the company of a male non-relative in the first place. When you get down to
actual lives of actual people, it's not quite as conveniently multi-culti
anymore, is it?

So let's _not_ be careful of what we are criticizing. When a tradition is
practiced by a whole people, it's cultural norm. When it's forced on a
minority that's unable to defend itself - even if said minority has been
slowly beaten or acculturated into docile agreement - it's perfectly ok to say
it's asinine and just plain wrong.

~~~
wheels
I call BS too. I've been to the Middle East several times. Uhm, "Women can
swim!?" is about like one of those stories Europeans like to tell about
Americans not knowing if Europeans have refrigerators. I'm also assuming
you're referring to the Middle East from the tone, but let's not forget that
the countries with the largest Muslim populations are Indonesia and the
countries of the Indian subcontinent.

The views of women within various Islamic cultures varies widely and in some
cases are quite disturbing, but the four countries with the largest Muslim
populations (Indonesia, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh) have all had female
presidents / prime ministers. There are other odd data points like women's
suffrage having reached Iran a decade before Switzerland (1963 vs. 1973).

~~~
blurry
Nothing is as dangerous as half truths so let's look at what really happened
as far your example of female leadership in Muslim countries.

Yes, at first glance 3 of the 4 countries in your example (Indonesia, Pakistan
and Bangladesh) have "elected" a female as president/prime minister. However,
without exception these women were the daughters or widows of the previous
heads of state. Their appointments represent the feudal tradition of
inheriting power by family relation rather than popular vote as you are
implying.

The 4th country, India, is an even worse example. Not only muslims are a
minority in India (a quick lookup tells me between 15% and 20%), prior to the
elections the muslim-indian leadership demanded that the female candidate be
disqualified because she made some sort of a statement against veils.

~~~
wheels
Given that the US has frequently, and recently, elected children of previous
presidents, and that the only serious contender for a female president was the
wife of a former one, I think it hardly fair to discount other countries
elected leaders on those grounds alone.

As for feudal traditions, all of those countries had been European colonies
for about a century prior to organizing under their current systems. In the
case of Indonesia, their first female president began 34 years after her
father left office and after three other presidents were in office. She then
lost the elections after three years in office. That hardly sounds "feudal".

And yes, Muslims are a minority in India. I assumed anyone reading this thread
was aware of that.

My point is this: if these countries are one way or another electing female
leadership, then it indicates that the issue of the views on women in those
societies is more multidimensional than you're painting it. At the very least
it's not consistent across the range from Western Africa to Eastern Asia. The
problems are real, but they're best addressed when approached through
examining the situations in their complexity, rather than trying to reduce
them to a single wacky-sane spectrum.

This thread typifies why I think politics should be kept off of HN. It just
degenerates into this sort of stuff where everyone's regurgitating what they
already believe and on the whole the net amount of respect for one another
goes down.

~~~
yters
"We can't criticize them b/c we do something loosely similar" is a bad
argument to make. Really, we should criticize both cultures.

Also, topics that are traditionally hard to discuss online should be discussed
more here. It is mostly on HN where I've seen people make an effort to
understand both sides.

~~~
netcan
I do not think this thread is a good example.

------
dominik
Something from the article worth quoting: "It's saving that kind of intimacy
for those that are close to you, your friends and family, who have earned the
privilege. For the first time, I saw that the abbaya may have a role in
protecting women, and not as something simply designed to control them."

Once upon a time, the same sort of idea existed in the West, in the lost art
of modesty (buried alongside chivalry nowadays). The idea that not everyone
need be exposed to everything. That some things are better saved and not sold.

How many times in the United States do men look at women not as persons but as
objects? Seeing not the woman as she is, but merely as she appears -- not
respecting her as a person but instead consuming her as a visual image.

Whether in Saudi Arabia or in the United States, the first principle to keep
in mind involves respect for the human person as such -- man or woman.

------
josefresco
Great episode of No Reservations, and I was thrilled to see this behind-the-
scenes look at the team behind the cameras.

------
evannyx
why is this on HN?

~~~
sounddust
_The focus of Hacker News is going to be anything that good hackers would find
interesting. That includes a lot more than hacking and startups. If you had to
reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's
intellectual curiosity._

~~~
biohacker42
I've always found the above troubling.

It seems obvious to me _anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity_
will quickly transform the site into interesting news, but not _hacker_ news.

Perhaps if it was _a hacker's_ instead of _one's_?

~~~
sounddust
Perhaps, but I think that in general, people who search for things that
satisfy their intellectual curiosity are very much overlapped with those who
are hackers (even if their hacking is not necessarily applied to technology).

As long as the content is interesting and the discussion is respectful and
intellectual (which it currently is), then I think it's fine. If the quality
of the site begins to degrade with popularity, then it can always be made more
restrictive.

~~~
Silentio
I would agree with this. I wouldn't call myself a hacker in the traditional
sense of the word. I dabble in HTML and CSS but other than that I'm not much
of a programmer. I am here, however, because the articles that come up are
interesting and the discourse that happens in the comments section is always
high minded and interesting.

Coming to visit Hacker News exclusively over a place like Reddit has been a
breath of fresh air. I hope things like this article keep coming up alongside
posts about hacking more specifically.

~~~
coryrc
"things like this article" are exactly why reddit is no longer the way it once
was. You will destroy HN with your wish.

~~~
pg
Not true. This article could easily have been on Reddit in the first year.

What ruined Reddit was (a) an influx of 14 year olds, who (b) were allowed to
continue to behave as they had on Digg or wherever else they came from.

~~~
biohacker42
But wasn't the influx of 14 year olds driven by general interest articles,
which very slowly got less interesting and more general?

How could that slow boil be prevented?

~~~
pg
I think the 14 year olds were attracted by a sense of lawlessness, most
visible in the long, highly editorialized titles and the trollish comments.

It wasn't so much general interest articles that signalled the decline of
Reddit as partisan political ones. I.e. articles that didn't merely involve
politics, but were instances of it.

~~~
pg
BTW, let me add that by "14 year olds" I mean people who behave like 14 year
olds. Actual 14 year olds are welcome here so long as we can't tell.

~~~
LogicHoleFlaw
For the record, I was 15 when I started reading Slashdot.

It's easy to say that the ideas and hackerdom I found there significantly
changed the course of my life.

Here's to today's 14- and 15-year olds!

