This Islamic garment is a symbol of oppression for a variety of mostly
straightforward reasons, and as such is morally reprehensible. What I
just said shouldn’t be controversial at all to uphold, were it not for
the raging storm of political correctness that has swept through our
culture lately. So I’m not going to go through the ideological reasons
of how and why the burqa sucks, because to me it’s so trivial. Plus I
don’t even invoke any of that when I see a woman in a burqa: the silent
war of cultures, the sickening throwback to a savage era of female
subjugation to men, etc…
My immediate reaction whenever I spot a burqa-girl comes as an intimate
shocking shudder down my spine. What an awkward and obtrusive image! It
ironically generates the same kind of silent tension in common social
settings as would the presence of a completely naked person sitting next
to you in the bus, or nonchalantly walking into a bank or a restaurant.
Whether one tries to mingle with people while naked or hermetically
covered from head to toe, the absurd contrast to what everyone else is
wearing screams out loud at the crucial subtleties we commonly take for
granted in the spectrum of human relations.
Our clothes keep us warm, seal off and protect our most delicate body
parts from environmental damage, conceal our genitals and breasts so as
to not rub in everyone’s faces our crude sexual attractiveness or lack
there of, but also allow us to invent a public identity through a
personalized combination of designs, accessories, and possibly symbols
and slogans. So our clothes enhance our individuality but it’sour face that
forms the epicenter of our public persona: we cognitively anchor the
representation of anyone’s personality to that person’s unique facial
features. We are prone to recognize faces out of random mixes of objects
whenever possible, so our brains are primed for this. The face takes up
a disproportionately large chunk of our mental representation of human
beings as children’s drawings illustrate. Eye contact and facial
expressions play an important role in how we relate to others during
conversations and even in how we warm up to strangers.
The
burqa is a monstrous device because it effectively shaves off the most
basic and accessible dimension of identity: the face. The woman hiding
underneath it is dehumanized in the eyes of her beholders: she is
reduced to an indeterminate object of unspecified form and features. A
horse can hide under a burqa, or a clown, or a monkey, or a coffin, or a
thief, or a ghost, or a mummy, or a giant noodle. Not only does the
burqa erase the wearer’s most human and recognizable trait, her face,
but it also razes to the ground all other external symbols of identity:
the distinctive combinations of clothing items, styles, accessories,
jewelry… How can I empathize with someone in a burqa if all I see is a
monochromatic faceless shapeless bag? The wearer is practically
interchangeable with anyone else wearing a burqa. There is zero
potential for deep or subtle interpersonal relations through such a
discomforting barrier. It’s alienating on a human level to be the one
who is fully open and exposed while your interlocutor is hiding behind
an opaque veil. This makes any kind of interaction with burqa-girls
intrinsically awkward.
The burqa has also a perverse X factor that elicits laser beams out of my eyes: in
its underhanded way it’s so self-righteously slutty! The entire
rationale for it is that you need to fully cover every square inch of
your face and body lest any random male passerby spontaneously breaks
down and starts to compulsively drool (or worse) all over you. You
really think you’re such hot shit that it’s a big deal whether anyone
can see your hair or face?
Nobody cares! Nobody is aroused by your stupid hair! Get over it!
Not only does wearing the burqa imply an overly sexualized sense of
self, but it also silently spells out a moral condemnation of all women
who do not abide by such anal and self-demeaning standards of “modesty”.
If your standards for socially proper attire are so far removed from
the norm that you are practically living in your own moral planet, and
that planet is collapsing into a black hole under its own warped field
of ‘judgmentality’, there will be a point where the principle of general cultural relativity breaks
down in an asymmetric fashion: As viewed from the PC planet, your style
is kind of weird and no fun, but perfectly equivalent to whatever
they’ve got over there, and while they might not go out of their way to
bond with you for one politically correct excuse or another, you must
surely be a great girl underneathand the PC
crowd wishes you all the best in life. As viewed from your planet,
however, the PC crowd is roaming with lustful immodest sluts who seduce
every male in their path by flaunting their face and hair, and are so
going to burn in hell for it.
The burqa is eerie, alienating, judgmental, demeaning, dehumanizing, and is calling everyone else a whore.
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