Saudi Students In US Seek Segregation By Gender On Facebook 353
Beetle B. writes "A 22,000-member group for Saudis studying in the US on the social networking website Facebook has been split into two groups, one for women and one for men. The split follows a request from the group's female members who wanted extra privacy. The separate page for Saudi women is a valid decision. We took it to fulfill the wishes of the Saudi women in the US. We have been contacted by a lot of women asking for their private group,' Majed Aleid, media chair of the 'Saudis in the US' group, told Arab News in a letter."
You can't free someone who doesn't want to be free (Score:4, Insightful)
Here's your burkha.
who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:You can't free someone who doesn't want to be f (Score:4, Insightful)
They want to avoid getting harrassed by male Saudis for not wearing the damn burkha, dumbass.
Re:You can't free someone who doesn't want to be f (Score:4, Insightful)
And why should you want to?
"Freeing somebody" does not work. Freedom implies, to a degree, independence. You can't be independent if someone else does the freeing for you.
Re:Facebook and Privacy (Score:5, Insightful)
At first it appears so, but in Facebook's eyes, they haven't got any more privacy than before. In fact, they have less... Facebook employees can still read the group (at least some of them, I'm sure) and now the group has clearly marked its advertising demographic. This is a major win for Facebook in every regard. Especially if people keep saying Facebook helped these people have more privacy.
O_o (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
Are Saudi women are prohibited by their religion/laws from creating FB groups?
Re:You can't free someone who doesn't want to be f (Score:4, Insightful)
I guess.
Here's your burkha.
Do you feel the same the way about every Christian denomination that imposes a dress code and other restrictions on their congregation???
Re:Personally (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Personally (Score:2, Insightful)
yet, appallingly, we are condoning and encouraging such a situation, as 'freedom'.
Re:You can't free someone who doesn't want to be f (Score:5, Insightful)
As a german happily living in a democratic and free Germany, I have to disagree. Most more recent "freeing" attempts may have been utter failures, but (proof by example) it is obviously possible to succeed.
Re:You can't free someone who doesn't want to be f (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes
Re:You can't free someone who doesn't want to be f (Score:2, Insightful)
What Christian denomination imposes anything beyond that which is normally covered in our "indecent exposure" laws or a reasonably normal restaurant?
Are you speaking of the Amish or Mennonites? They're stuck in the dark ages just like the Muslims, but at least they aren't violent about it.
Or are you talking about that freakshow cult, the Fundamentalist Mormons?
Re:You can't free someone who doesn't want to be f (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Personally (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, come on. Next you'll be saying that Christian fundamentalists will want to impose their will on women's reproductive rights, even if they're not Christian, and to start using that as an unofficial litmus test for who could be elected President!
Re:You can't free someone who doesn't want to be f (Score:4, Insightful)
From the fact that leaving certain bodily parts uncovered at all times is unhygenic (e.g. "No shirt, no shoes, no service"... and they don't mention shorts/underwear only because someone walking around with that part uncovered would violate indecent exposure law anyways).
From the fact that we'd prefer that most of the population not to expose certain things at certain times (let's face it, some of the people who walk around in spandex... ewww).
And then of course, it's not just "Christian" religions that do this kind of thing. Take a look over at Japan [japanvisitor.com] if you will.
Of course, the Japanese didn't have a hang-up about boobs the way the Xtians do. Then again, when you get to anthropological study, you can determine that a society covers up what it considers "indecent." You were busy attacking christians, when female genital mutilation [who.int] is amazingly common in Muslim society. And there can be NO purpose for the Burkha other than to dehumanize women by making them "unseen" in society.
Or maybe we should be a little clearer [blogspot.com]: A Burqa is a tool for dehumanizing the wearer. For making it difficult for them to have any individual interaction outside the home. This is not a bug, this is a feature. It depersonalizes women who wear it. It makes it difficult for them to work outside the home, to have a conversation with a stranger or to even be seen as an individual. And again, that is the entire point. Burqas are the product of a culture and religion in which women are not supposed to have any function outside the home. In which they are supposed to remain in Purdah, walled off inside the home.
Re:And if they don't (Score:5, Insightful)
It's completely reasonable that women might want to self-segregate under some circumstances. I can totally see why they might want to form a second, subgroup for the main Saudi's in America page to discuss how the issues are relevant to them specifically. On the other hand, segregating the main page is clearly a religiously influenced decision (whether it was driven by the women themselves or not). OP was trolling, but it's true that the type of Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia is *extremely* conservative and anti-female, and it's not parroting Fox News to say so. Like Christians, Muslim have a range of practice that are considered "Orthodox"; and just as some versions of Christianity are very sexist, so to are some versions of Islam. Tunisia, for instance, is completely different and very liberal in regard to relations between the sexes.
In short, choice to form a self-segregated group to discuss women's issues is a perfectly reasonable idea. A forced split of all men and women on the main page into separate groups is a symptom of what's wrong with Saudi Arabia from a human rights perspective. Even if the drive to segregate was from the women, you can see how this is a problem based on the reason.
There are a significant number of girls who do not yet feel confident enough to share their points of view and opinions in the same domain as men. In my opinion they need some time to adjust
In other words, these women have been beat down enough that they literally can't respond to a man in a disagreeable manner. So they want to segregate, as "training wheels". However since th whole site is segregated, I fail to see what they can do after they've "adjusted" to practice their new found confidence.
Re:And if they don't (Score:4, Insightful)
Please unplug the fox news feed from your cerebral cortex, often its the women that want segregation. I know, I know, you can't fathom why the women would ever want to have a social life of their own without god's gift to women, i.e. men.
On the contrary, I think we all can fully understand why Middle East Women would like to keep Middle East Men away from them.
Re:You can't free someone who doesn't want to be f (Score:5, Insightful)
Yet even most aboriginal societies have some form of bodily covering - even if it's just loincloths.
Re:What is being free isn't the same everywhere (Score:4, Insightful)
Been there, done that back in my 20s. It's weird for maybe 15 minutes, but then it's no big deal. Also, on a nude beach, more than any other place, you really learn how the media has skewed our expectations of what most people look like nude. :-\
Re:You can't free someone who doesn't want to be f (Score:4, Insightful)
It might seem like women are repressing themselves, but that's simply not the case.
Women in sexually repressive societies are almost always one of the major vectors of repression.
But here's the thing: a woman telling another woman she must wear a burka is just as repressive as a man telling a woman she must wear a burka.
See, the thing that matters is that the two women involved--and I know this is a difficult concept so please bear with me--ARE DIFFERENT PEOPLE.
Only a gibbering idiot would suggest that it's ok to repress someone if they happen to belong to the same socially-constructed abstract category as you.
It would make no more sense to say, "It's ok for women to repress other women" than it would to say, "It's ok for humans to repress other humans." The reification of one particular abstract category does nothing but announce the political agenda of the reifier. It adds nothing but noise to the discourse.
Yeah, right. (Score:4, Insightful)
Note that the person saying that the women want this is a man. Typical.
For many young Saudi women, an education in the US is their one time of freedom in life. Some years ago, I was chatting with a Saudi woman about to finish Stanford, and she mentioned that she was going to drive across the United States, then fly back to Saudi Arabia from the East Coast. I asked her why the long drive, and she said it was the only time in her life she'd be allowed to do something like that. (In Saudi Arabia, women aren't allowed to drive.)
I like the red-state solution to this problem. Someone at a Texas company wrote that an Islamic female co-worker was being harassed by an Islamic male employee who just assumed that, since he was male. he had the right to her if he wanted. So the Texan took the woman to a shooting range and taught her how to use a 9mm pistol. "You taught her how to shoot?" the annoying guy said when he found out about this. "Yes, and she's good at it, too". No more problems.
Re:You can't free someone who doesn't want to be f (Score:4, Insightful)
Democracy and personal freedoms often go hand in hand, but you don't strictly need one to have the other. There are a few non-democratic countries in the world which, nonetheless, provide a high degree of personal freedoms.
Re:You can't free someone who doesn't want to be f (Score:5, Insightful)
You're right. People in the West really have deluded themselves into thinking that they don't have an arbitrary culture, it's everyone else that does. Of course you cover your penis, testicles, vagina and anus: that's just natural! Of course only women cover their breasts, unless on a beach in France or on spring break in Mexico - that's reasonable and natural! But that women should have their hair covered - well, that's repression! Oh, and men will need to shave for at least the first 10 to 15 years of their careers if they want to be taken seriously in the corporate world - that's just normal... etc.
In fact, many of the things we take as conventional have "repressive" origins, but we've integrated them into everyday life as simple conventions and habits of basic modesty. That so many people don't understand how this could possibly be the case for Muslims is discouraging.
There are many spheres of life, too, where women do better when they segregate themselves from men. Because of the tendency of boys to monopolize attention and resources in K-8 math and sciences education, girls do much better in those subjects when taught in all-girl environments. Unsurprisingly, then, a disproportionate number of women scientists and engineers went to all-girl schools: the shocker is that there are more women (by percentage) studying engineering in the Arab world than in the US! (Recognizing the reality of discrimination in the job markets in those countries, however: most come to Europe or the US to work.)