I personally see the hijab ban in the EU as liberating. Everyone will be equal from now on, and women will be liberated from oppressive religious standards. Thoughts?
just say you don’t like women wearing the hijab and get out of my asks
also, if your “equality” doesn’t see a hijabi as an equal unless she discards her traditions and culture to conform to the western ideal of the ‘good muslim’ then it’s not actually equality it’s just orientalism and islamophobia
Forcing women to dress a certain way is never liberating.
A woman choosing to wear or not wear something without interference is liberty.
Having a free choice is the point.
Hijab ban will lead to two things: Women who want to wear one are not gonna be allowed to wear one anymore, which is the opposite of freedom. Women who are not allowed to go out without one by an abuser will not be allowed to go out at all anymore.
This is not how to stop oppression.
precisely
women who have been coerced into wearing it (which is wrong, we can all agree on that), could be taken out of the public sphere almost entirely, which will limit her access to education, healthcare, and necessary government services - as well as curb any chances of future financial independence
on the opposite side, women who have been forced by the government to remove their hijab they freely chose to wear now have to choose between removing themselves from the public sphere or continuing to wear it and facing legal repercussion, fines, and even jail time. the other option is that they remove it when they do not wish to do so, which strips a woman of her choice and ability to privatize the parts of her body she does not wish to share with the world and forces her to erase her cultural and religious traditions in order to be deemed societally acceptable by a country that spent hundreds of years colonizing muslim countries and violently oppressing muslim women
and idk how to explain to you guys that none of these options are liberating
I truly do not get what’s so hard to understand about the notion that women should be allowed to decide for themselves which parts of their body they show in public.
Like, imagine that you, a hypothetical white woman from a traditionally Christian country, move to a country, perhaps in the tropics, where traditional clothing for women does not include a shirt or equivalent. And they say, “Oh, no, your culture’s custom is harmful to women. By requiring you to cover your breasts, they sexualize a part of the body that is really about motherhood. Feeding babies is a special form of power that women have, and your culture is taking away that power by making you cover up. Therefore, we are going to empower you by forbidding you to wear these oppressive garments, and making you bare your breasts in public like normal women do.”
I mean, what conclusions would you draw about the real reasons and meaning behind this law? For me, the one that springs to mind is, “They don’t want people like me in their country, and they’re doing this so that I’ll either go back where I came from, or at least hide and not take part in public life.” (Plus a side-order of, “Oh, and men are pushing this and pretending it’s about women’s freedom because they want to see tits.”)
Even if you agree that there’s something unwholesome about your culture’s obsession with seeing/not seeing breasts, you’re wildly unlikely to feel that banning shirts is the right way to go about changing it. (It’s quite likely that, even though you agree that women should be able to go topless if they want, it took you a while to get used to just how many of the women in your new home take advantage of that right, and how often they do so. And you still don’t personally feel comfortable going out like that.)
Even if you do like going without a shirt sometimes and would like to have more opportunities to do so, you probably won’t like having to make this change on someone else’s timetable.
Hell, even if you have already adopted the local dress voluntarily, having it forced on you is going to hit different–for one thing (and on top of the message it sends), how’s your Mom going to come visit you? She’s never gone out in public topless in her life, and she’s not going to start now.
Now, obviously, every instance that has occurred in real life has gone in the opposite direction from this hypothetical: historically, when white women appear in the tropics, the women who already live there are made to cover up. However, whether the pressure is to cover or to expose, it comes from the same place: what we are used to, about gender and what parts of the body should be shown*, is natural and correct; if they do something different, they should be shown the right way**.
(*As well as about everything else.)
(**Just as a side note, I kind of feel like making women take clothesoff, as a expression of cultural imperialism, is even worse than making them put more on–but that might just be the Puritan underpinnings of my culture showing.
America stripped the cultures away from all who came here in order to hammer them into the good little uniform consumers that were wanted.
The culture of America is one of endless consumption and breathtaking arrogance.
That’s….not really true. Because it’s literally impossible to have a group of humans and not have a culture. But is hard to see your culture from the inside. And, yes, there are negative things about American culture. I mean obviously. But after spending >year outside the US, here are some things I noticed about our culture:
We are casually generous. “I’m going to the store, you need anything?” Does not carry a requirement of paying us back. The other Americans in my program thought nothing of buying one of our British friends a soda or something, whereas when our British friends got each other a drink or something they paid each other back. And if you’re in trouble, Americans will literally offer you the shirt off their back. Or - in the case of one Brit I had a conversation with - a job to a stranger who needed it.
America is brightly colored. I don’t know how else to phrase it. Europe isn’t drab but like the US like brightness, light, and color. It’s the first thing I noticed when I got home - everything was more saturated.
We are genuinely curious. We aren’t always as polite about it as we should be, but usually if we’re asking about your culture, it comes from a good place.
We genuinely love cars. I’m not saying this is a good or bad trait, just that it’s part of our culture. We like to drive a lot more than people in Europe.
We are diverse. I was walking home with one of the other Americans and we were chatting like idk…a couple weeks after we’d met and she was like “ok I don’t want to be weird or anything but like….is it just me or is it SO WHITE here??”. We agreed that, yeah, it was but that y’know…White people came from somewhere and the uk is one of those places. But when I was gone I really missed seeing faces that looked nothing like mine. There are, of course, other ethnicities in the UK but compared to the us where literally half the population isn’t white, it’s definitely a striking difference. And as a consequence of this, our food is way more diverse. We didn’t strip these things from their cultures. The vast majority of restaurants that have, say, Chinese, or Thai, or sushi, or Indian, are run by people who immigrated here, brought their culture here, and adapted to the goods available to them in their new country. That is a natural, normal process and a long-existing part of human migration. And because we have so many more cultures here, we are lucky to be able to take part in what they share with us. It isn’t always a benign process but it’s just wrong to say that it’s always about “us” stealing from “them”.
We talk about our problems. IE, we’re very self-critical. We aren’t always good but we spend a lot of time looking at our culture and our country, breaking it down into pieces, and examining those pieces. We argue about how to make them better. A lot of times we suck at it but at least we’re having the conversation and the argument.
We hate authority. It doesn’t matter what your politics are, chances are you dislike and distrust the govt. we’re rebellious and few things make us more pleased than giving the man the finger or seeing someone else do it. British people protest - I literally saw an anti-Brexit protest march by my window - but they plan a time, politely show up and politely voice their displeasure, and then go home after cleaning up behind themselves. Americans? We fucking RIOT. Part of the entire point of the mall in DC is to yell at the govt every time we don’t like what they’re doing. We hate that we need a permit to do it. We’re always looking for new and creative ways to question authority. I think this is why it bothers a lot of us when people from other countries are like “why don’t you do something about _______”. Like, we’re trying. Trust me, we’re trying.
Idk that’s just some random stuff I noticed after living somewhere else for awhile.
yes!!! other things:
- Americans smile a lot. Europeans can tell the American in the room just because the American will auto-smile at random passerby. smiling is a greeting as much as “hello” is, and it’s a way of talking. when i talk to American friends, i’m nearly always smiling slightly and my tone rises and falls constantly. my European colleagues do not smile nearly as much, and have much flatter speaking tones.
- Americans are ultra-casual. after you graduate from school, everyone is going to introduce themselves by their first names. actually, sometimes even in college, professors will do that. Euro and Asian colleagues tell me that in their home countries, professors act like gods and it’s very difficult to disagree with them. one side effect of the casualness also plays into friendliness; Americans are what Europeans consider friendly on a very frivolous surface level, and colleagues of mine have been confused by strangers who they thought spoke to them like friends, but it’s just the American attitude of being casual toward everyone. a German colleague told me that even the notoriously “rude” parts of this country, like the Northeast, are still “friendlier” toward strangers than most of Europe.
- building on what @kyidil said about “Americans love cars”–ROAD TRIPS. road trips are such a staple of American culture. Americans are much chiller about driving long distances than typical for Europeans, and cross-country road trips are a staple of American media, often considered almost a rite of passage.
- and yes, Americans often have a much deeper-seated distrust of authority than Europeans. it often doesn’t look like it, especially due to the Trump phenomenon, but even that’s a type of backlash against authority. it also doesn’t express itself well; our government has eroded a lot of freedoms that Americans are relatively unaware of, but mostly in the realm of privacy. for both good and for bad, the particular form of the American obsession with freedom comes very much in a “don’t tell me how to live MY life” way–regardless of enforcement. ie, i have a strong sense from growing up in this country that if everyone knew they were spied on all the time, but the government actually did nothing with that information, that would be fine. on the flip side, if the government set “how to live your life” laws in place but didn’t check up on anyone or enforce it, Americans would be rioting in the streets. basically, it’s a libertarian streak that runs through the entire political spectrum.
ADDITIONALLY, it’s difficult to talk about a monolithic American culture because our entire nation is nearly as big as the entire continent of Europe, so it might be more fair to talk about regional cultures. (for example, the note about diversity being part of American culture strikes me as a very regional thing, and very urban.) but it’s ridiculous to say that America has no culture when each regional culture is, definitionally, an American culture. as the person above me said, it can be hard to notice your own culture until you move elsewhere, but then you notice it hard. i moved from the Northeastern megalopolis to Colorado–different areas, different cultures, but both are American cultures. i guarantee any American that if they left the country entirely and went to live in another country for a while, they would start to realize what pieces of culture they no longer encountered, both in quintessentially “American” things and in quintessentially “my region of America” things.
Adding to the point of “distrust in authority” and “we love cars” is, if you combine the two you get something that is *incredibly* American: we value independence.
Obviously this can have super negative consequences, but I’m talking about it here as a neutral thing that is simply a huge part of our culture. It’s the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” and “the American Dream of working your own way up the class ladder” and they come from how our goddamn country was founded in the first place.
It’s why we have the reaction against authority of “you can’t tell me what to do”, it’s a big part of our car obsession because it means we have the ability to get from A to B ourselves, and it’s why we all walk around unfamiliar places like we’re prepared for the apocalypse even in our own country.
It’s the mentality of “well if no one else is going to do it I guess I will” which extends to offering help, being friendly, taking initiative, speaking out against something you disagree with, etc. Again, this can all lead to some truly horrendous results (not asking for help when you need it, shaming others who want or need community support, shouting down other voices that don’t represent your own experience, etc) but it is nevertheless something that is very American.
I ask anyone living in America who doesn’t think America has a culture (which, as said above, is not actually possible any more than it’s possible for a single person to “not have an accent”) to just… go to a different part of America. It’s very regional. Spend some time in Albuquerque and New Orleans and Cascadia and the Smoky Mountains. The Outer Banks. Kotzebue. Realizing it’s not homogeneous can help highlight the traits that are shared.
(…speaking here as someone who did not grow up in the US and for whom college here was major culture shock.)
One of the primary differences between twitter and tumblr is that twitter gets sick of memes very quickly. Like there was a meme around using red flags and within less than 24 hours I always already seeing tweets like “this meme is old and over done” meanwhile here on tumblr were still dragging that poor colour theory hospital post
we have all agreed, as a whole, that making sense is overrated, underfunded, wrongly taxed, misfiled, and quite possibly a bit offensive, and I respect that
I never know what to say in these but I do know that I always want to know more about the people I follow so I'm gonna actually fill this in. My name is Tali. Hi nice to meat you. I'm 24. I have a BA in Archaeology. I was planning on actually using it for something but life got a little complicated. For a year I worked at a high end florist. I know all the flowers. Currently I’m a software engineer at a large company and it looks like that’s gonna be my future. I’m in quite a few fandoms and they're always changing so its pointless to list them all. Feel free to message me any time I'm happy to talk.
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