With the murder of Mahsa Amini and the subsequent Iranian protests taking the world by a storm, many people have spoken up not only against forced hijab but also against hijab bans, like those in France. Whenever an oppressive law is put in place that affects women, the explanation given is always that men want to control them. And in a way, that makes sense. It’s not hard to find men who want to control their wives, sisters, and even mothers. And while that’s not necessarily an incorrect interpretation of what’s happening, it’s also not the full picture.
I live in a conservative Arab country. I don’t think I have to mention the downsides to this, but an upside, if you could call it that, is a better understanding of misogyny. I like to think that the years of suffering have at least given me insight. And my conclusion is that the deeper problem in all of this, more than just control, is that in most cultures and ideologies women bear the burden of representing the beliefs of men more than the men themselves do.
Men in most places get to behave pretty much the same way. They wear the same clothes at the beach. No one tells them not travel, work, or seek an education. People tell them not to have sex but no one is really surprised when they do anyway, except their mothers. What defines the openness of a society is the role of women. The Victorian Era was so repressive that legend has it people covered the legs of their chairs to avoid provoking sexual thoughts. And yet, they had a terrible prostitution problem. What happened then is the same thing that happens in the Middle East now. Respectable women don’t have premarital sex, so respectable men just have it with someone else.
Women are the battleground of everyone’s conflicting beliefs. Muslim men believe in modesty, so they want their wives to cover up. The French hate Muslims, so they ban hijab. In both situations, women are the ones who end up struggling. It’s true that in many cases Muslim women are forced to cover by men (even though there are women who cover by choice), but bans on hijab don’t do anything to punish these men. They just further limit the freedom and access to education of the women who need it most. Even in the Arab world, there are beaches that ban hijabis, often because they don’t want conservative people making everyone in bikinis feel uncomfortable. But what’s the metric used for banning conservative men? How will they be marked in public?
This doesn’t just apply to the Middle East. Conservative Americans don’t want abortion, another issue that miraculously only applies to women. Whichever side of that debate you fall on, at the end of the day, women have to deal with either the consequences of getting pregnant or those of an abortion. Neither is easy, despite what some people like to pretend. People argue that if men could get pregnant, abortion would be legal tomorrow. But if the sins of men showed up on their own bodies instead of on women’s, the entire structure of our world would change.
The real measure of a man in the Arab world is not himself but his wife. A liberal man and a conservative man may appear exactly the same until you see the type of woman they’re willing to marry. And the more hypocritical the man is, the prouder he is of his culture and religion. If he were less proud, he wouldn’t bother clinging to values he consistently fails at. No one seems to realize they’re proud of something that has absolutely nothing to do with them. They are saved from being what they hate by women, whom they also hate.
I don’t mean to say there are no genuinely religious or conservative men. There definitely are. But they’ll never be the majority because it’s just too difficult for most people, male or female. Restrictive societies often end up encouraging people to do the opposite of what they preach. When nice girls aren’t supposed to have relationships with men, men end up being more promiscuous because they are forced to have casual sexual encounters if they want to have any at all. Women learn that the only way to survive is to lie. And few things threaten the sanctity of your marriage like barely knowing the person you’ve committed to spending your life with.
It’s only natural to fail in these circumstances. As Nathaniel Branden points out in The Six Pillars of Self Esteem, when the values you’re taught don’t allow you to be human, hypocrisy is the only way to survive. I don’t fault men for failing to live up to the ideals of our society. I fault them for expecting women to.
They want their women to do what they could not, as if that is their last chance. Maybe their ideals can still be realized then. On women, everything shows. Pregnancy, virginity, modesty. On men, almost nothing. So maybe, if she’s succeeded, somehow everyone else has too.
Maybe we should stop expecting women to represent anyone other than themselves. Or maybe we should look at the ways they really are a reflection of their men. It’s not their bodies. They don’t represent your purity. But their oppression represents your ignorance, their suffering your selfishness, their torture and murder your complete and utter failure as human beings.
Men do want to control women, but not usually for the sheer pleasure of it. They control women because it’s easier than controlling themselves. The behavior of women is not the problem. They are only a mirror held up to the rest of society, the hidden sins of everyone else made visible. If you don’t like what you see, change yourself.
Half-Blood Kuwaiti 