Female like me
Megan Stack of the LA Times spent nearly four years as a reporter in Saudi Arabia. In that time, whenever in public, her appearance and conduct was governed by the medieval, misogynistic sharia code of Islamic law. Needless to say, she found it infuriating. A view from behind the veil:
THE hem of my heavy Islamic cloak trailed over floors that glistened like ice. I walked faster, my eyes fixed on a familiar, green icon. I hadn't seen a Starbucks in months, but there it was, tucked into a corner of a fancy shopping mall in the Saudi capital. After all those bitter little cups of sludgy Arabic coffee, here at last was an improbable snippet of home — caffeinated, comforting, American.
I wandered into the shop, filling my lungs with the rich wafts of coffee. The man behind the counter gave me a bemused look; his eyes flickered. I asked for a latte. He shrugged, the milk steamer whined, and he handed over the brimming paper cup. I turned my back on his uneasy face.
Crossing the cafe, I felt the hard stares of Saudi men. A few of them stopped talking as I walked by and watched me pass. Them, too, I ignored. Finally, coffee in hand, I sank into the sumptuous lap of an overstuffed armchair.
"Excuse me," hissed the voice in my ear. "You can't sit here." The man from the counter had appeared at my elbow. He was glaring.
"Excuse me?" I blinked a few times.
"Emmm," he drew his discomfort into a long syllable, his brows knitted. "You cannot stay here."
"What? Uh … why?"
Then he said it: "Men only."
He didn't tell me what I would learn later: Starbucks had another, unmarked door around back that led to a smaller espresso bar, and a handful of tables smothered by curtains. That was the "family" section. As a woman, that's where I belonged. I had no right to mix with male customers or sit in plain view of passing shoppers. Like the segregated South of a bygone United States, today's Saudi Arabia shunts half the population into separate, inferior and usually invisible spaces.
Disgusting. And almost as sickening is the silence of the Western Left, particularly so-called feminists, who've stayed largely quiet about the abuse of women in Islamic societies. They said nothing about the liberation of the millions of women who suffered under the Taliban's regime of gender apartheid, and they were mute when millions of Iraqi women voted in their first free elections to choose a parliament that guarantees a minimum of 25% of the seats to women. And, whether from a knee-jerk multiculturalism that forbids criticism of another society as "racism" or "imperialism," or from a desperate need to avoid any semblance of approving George W. Bush's actions, they stay dumb about the segregation of women, which is little different from what Black Americans experienced under Jim Crow.
Experience's like Stack's happen every day, and tens of millions of women live their whole lives under such barbarism. Forgive me for being openly judgmental and chauvinist, but for all its faults, Western Civilization is infinitely preferable to this.
(hat tip: PJM)
LINKS: More from Roger L. Simon, who comments on the unctuous hypocrisy of Starbuck's. Also Little Green Footballs, Captain's Quarters, and Advice Goddess.
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