Topic: Ranting
A few bits from today's Age:
So this is why the night sky has been so gorgeous lately . . . I have three evening classes that finish well after dark, and all this week as I've left uni, I've seen the crescent moon hanging low in the western sky, with a cascade of bright stars around it. It's captivating - I'm lucky I haven't walked into any lampposts while staring at the sky.
I'm really curious about why the writer/editor of this story chose to focus on the one "star" (it's really Venus) that, in conjunction with the moon, purportedly "resemble[s] the star and crescent of Islam", because myself, I never once looked at the sky this week and thought, "that looks Islamic". So I'm not entirely sure what's going on there.
There has been a recent debate around Muslim girls wearing hijab to school. I'm not at all sure how I feel about the hijab. Actually, it's one of those rare issues that I almost feel I'm not entitled to have an opinion on, because I have absolutely no experience with anything comparable. So I found Liz Conor's op-ed piece on the hijab, Western women's dress, and the male gaze very interesting. Conor sounds as conflicted about the hijab as I feel, and there aren't any easy conclusions drawn in her essay.
I would really love to have more time to sit here and think through this essay and my response to it. Particularly my response to Conor's observation that "[she] found it a relief to hit my later 30s and come out from under the scrutinising gaze that many men level at young women in public." That really resonates with me. At the same time that I resent the implication that women bear responsibility for men's sexual response to their dress, I've definitely made a conscious decision to adopt relatively modest dress myself, and part of that decision was driven by my need to feel like I might be able to have some control over how I am perceived and responded to by others.
I remember that one of my most unexpected responses to Egypt when I visited a few years ago was the sense of relief that came from not being bombarded with sexualized images of women in public advertising. (That, of course, was balanced against an elevated level of attention directed toward me, personally, but when you've been a tourist in enough places, you start to get accustomed to that. For example, I didn't feel like I was under any more scrutiny in Cairo than in Istanbul, which I found felt more "Western", but where I was still identifiably not local. A certain level of attention is just to be expected when you're a tourist.) What really struck me was that I hadn't realized until then how much time I spend in public looking at images of women and cringing inside. I'm cringing now -- I've got so much emotion wrapped up in questions of choice, attention and modesty that I don't know that I can write rationally or coherently about them right now, when I'm deeply sleep deprived and totally pressed for time.
So, I think I may just leave this for the time being and maybe come back to it again in the future. Sorry to abandon this post unconcluded, but I'm suddenly very aware of the fact that I really really really need to get some more work done today if I'm going to retain any sort of grip on my life. I probably should leave this post in the "draft" file, but I really wanted to point out Conor's article and say something about while its fresh in my mind. I'm just sorry it didn't work out better. I promise more coherence in my next post.
*takes deep breath, burrows into massive stack of books*