American Hijab: Girls, Clothes, and Shame

Capistrano Valley High School wants girls to know their bodies are a problem

Yesterday my daughter and I were discussing the book I Am Malala with a group of friends, mothers and teens who get together for an informal book club. Malala is the Pakistani teenager who survived being shot by the Taliban and went on to write this remarkable memoir. Her photo graces its cover, and I notice two things about it: first, she looks surprisingly unscathed. Second, although she fights for women's and girls' rights, she chooses to wear the hijab.

And so we began discussing the hijab, such a foreign piece of clothing to us supposedly enlightened westerners. Can you imagine having to cover your hair every time you leave the house? Why—because the filamentous biomaterial that sprouts from follicles in the human female scalp is so tantalizing a man simply won't be able to stop himself ravishing an uncovered woman on the spot? That is the purpose behind all cover-it-up policies, after all: females are solely responsible for all sexual behavior, but especially that of men. Men are thoughtless beasts who can't control themselves, such thinking says, so females do the controlling for them by staying under wraps. And if you end up stared at, harassed, fondled, raped? It's your fault, girl. We told you to cover it up.

The modesty movement has become more rigid over the past few decades, perhaps as a fundamentalist response to an increasingly secular world. This purity fetish became a sudden and shocking reality for my daughter and me when we visited the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem a few years ago with my husband's family. My father-in-law is from Nazareth and was showing us the sights of his homeland; although his family is Christian, showing us this important mosque seemed a natural part of the tour. For me and the kids, this was our first time in Israel and our first visit to a mosque. It did not go well. It was clear we females were unwelcome, in spite of the fact that my father-in-law and step-mother-in-law speak Arabic and know the culture. They'd been to Al Aqsa before, but not for a few years. We women were covered up sufficiently for how my in-laws remembered the place, but things had changed. The mosque guardians were marginally polite to us until the men left to tour the mosque and we three were left standing in the women's area. Then a mosque-bouncer came over and began berating my then-13-year-old daughter for having a tiny fraction of ankle showing. He was shouting at her as her grandmother tried to reason with him in Arabic. My daughter began crying. Another man came over, and the two began conferring via walkie-talkie with other men. The men looked at my daughter with barely disguised hatred, as if she were something shameful — something haram. We were told to leave. We stood outside under a tree for what felt like years until my son, my husband, and his father rejoined us; the walkie-talkie men followed us and stood nearby, glaring and muttering. My father-in-law, hearing our story, let loose with a quality rant in Arabic that had all the henchmen looking ashamedly at their shoes, but by then it was too late: Al Aqsa will always have a bad association for us.

Although Islam generally is the strictest about female dress, all Abrahamic religious texts extoll the virtue of modesty, and all assume women's bodies are a problem. Scripture insinuates that men are teetering on the edge of serial rape at all times and women should do everything possible to avoid tempting them. The Bible explicitly states that if a woman is raped, she is culpable and must be punished along with the rapist. To this day, women in many parts of the world who are raped are tried and convicted of adultery or extramarital sex; often they are the only ones punished for their own rapes.

Indonesian women protest a victim-blaming judge

We have mostly moved beyond this in the US, as evidenced by the fact that it's no longer acceptable in court to ask a rape victim what she was wearing. But as we were discussing this among our mom-daughter group, one of the teens pointed out something interesting: school dress codes. Most schools require girls to dress a certain way, covering up any potentially-tempting parts. And why do they do this? Because girl-flesh distracts boys; it turns good boys bad. This is the same mode of thinking that justifies the hijab, and we enlightened Americans, including those who find the hijab objectionable, don't even question it.

Don't believe me? A middle school in California banned tight pants for girls because "they distract the boys." In Minnesota, a high school principal sent an email to parents telling them to stop allowing their daughters to wear yoga pants, as their butts "can be highly distracting" to other students (read: boys). A kindergartner (!!) in Georgia who wore a skirt with leggings was forced to change into someone else's jeans after a school official determined the skirt "a distraction." A pair of teenagers in Cincinnati were prevented from attending prom because one of their dresses was not up to snuff: "they can have no curvature of the breasts showing," explained one official. What does that even mean? Does cleavage count? (Because that's the only curvature I saw.) Is there a boob-check at the door? Who conducts it? What century are we in, again?

Gathered back at our table, my daughter's friend explained what message girls get from school dress codes: "Basically, we're told to self-objectify," she said. "We have to stand in front of a mirror every morning and view ourselves as sexual objects, we have to think about how our clothes might be a problem." A problem for the boys, that is.

Is this really so different from the thinking behind the hijab?

From: reviveourhearts.com/radio/seeking-him/distraction/

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New Year's Special: Best Books of 2013

Happy New Year's Eve! Now that 2013 is in its final hours, I can safely say which books I loved best in the past 365 days. You may think you already know, thanks to the Cephalopod Coffeehouse, but the best book one has read in the previous month is quite a different thing than an overview of the Best Books of the Year, isn't it? Especially if you limit yourself only to books published that year.

Amazon's top 20 list: some overlap with mine

According to Goodreads, I read nearly 70 books in 2013. Wow. That amazes even me: I had no idea I was chewing through quite that many. So it is a pleasurable yet difficult exercise to sift through all of those in order to come up with a "best of" list. Thank goodness I do have Goodreads, else I'd never remember which books I read, much less what I thought of them. Thank you once again, Internet, for allowing me to store part of my brain in the cloud. (Clicking that link, by the way, ought to take you to my GR profile, in case you want to see any more of my reviews.)

Without further ado:

1. Tenth of December by George Saunders. A short story collection hailed by the New York Times as "the best book you'll read this year." They said that in January, so confident were they. They were also correct. Although one of the stories went totally over my head, the rest of them made up for it ... especially "Escape from Spiderhead," "Victory Lap," and "Semplica Girl Diaries." Very weird, very wonderful. Read this.

2. Life After Life by Kate Atkinson. A woman born in 20th-century England has to live her life over and over, slowly getting better at it through trial and error. It's Groundhog Day meets Downton Abbey meets the Book Thief. The concept is intriguing enough, but the writing is what really makes this book. Read the full review here.

3. Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I reviewed this for the CC on Friday. The story of a young Nigerian woman making her way in America, learning for the first time what "being black" means. (Hint: if someone asks you if you like watermelon, you are supposed to be offended since this is a racist question.)

L. Ron Hubbard and his thetans

4. Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief by Lawrence Wright. An exposé of the cult of Scientology. But not a salacious one, though the material is certainly there. Wright takes pains to be fair-minded and slightly clinical; the almost unbelievable story tells itself. Also, you will never want to watch a Tom Cruise movie again.

5. I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban by Malala Yousafzai. I read this for a neighborhood mom-daughter book club and was not expecting to like it nearly as much as I did. Malala is a remarkable young woman and her story is gripping. I also learned much about Pakistan and its tricky, triangulated relationship with the Taliban and the US.



6. The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman. Gaiman is always a pleasure to read, and this has been the most enjoyable book of his I've read so far. Short, slightly melancholy, a bit creepy, and (in the end) very sweet. It's like a mix of Christopher Moore and Stephen King, with a splash of Douglas Adams.

7. And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini. Hosseini is one of these authors whose books I will always read, no matter what. And this lovely novel did not disappoint. While Hosseini is good at characterization, his real strength lies in writing about place. I truly feel I've been on a journey when I finish one of his books. Not a bad companion to I Am Malala, come to think of it. (Though Hosseini delves more into the Taliban in previous books.)

8. MaddAddam by Margaret Atwood. The final of her Oryx & Crake trilogy (officially called the MaddAddam trilogy). While the middle book of this for-grown-ups dystopian series was my favorite of the three, this final installment did not let me down. Well, the very very ending was a slight letdown, but the overall experience was fun and (of course, it's Atwood) thought-provoking.

9. The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer. My first Wolitzer. This might be an interesting companion to The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner, as they both overlap in 1970s New York, and they are both about brilliant young people scrabbling their way up in a cold hard world. And yet the two novels, though both literary and highly acclaimed, have a very different flavor. Of the two, I preferred Wolitzer's: she is interested in character, where Kushner is more interested in ideas.

10. The Engagements by J. Courtney Sullivan. I recently reviewed this one as well. This book has a number of narrators and storylines, some of which left me pretty cold. But the very engaging (so to speak) storylines made up for the more boring ones. Interestingly, the one who has stuck with me is not one I really loved at the time. Let's just say I will never see the Big Gay New York Wedding in the same way again.

Now, if I had to make a list of "10 Best Books I've Read in 2013" without regard to publication date, the list would look a bit different. Not entirely different, but some favorites that were read, but not published, in the past year include Me Before You by Jojo Moyes (about a young woman who is caretaker for a handsome & miserable quadriplegic) Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel (second of her Henry VIII trilogy), The Dog Stars by Peter Heller (a pilot and his dog barely survive a bioweapon apocalypse), Jesus Land by Julia Scheeres (memoir of being sent to a Christian re-education camp in the D.R.), The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson (Pulitzer-Prize winning novel about life in North Korea) and Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo (investigative journalist's close examination of a Mumbai slum—won the National Book Award for nonfiction).

To complicate things further, I intend to read quite a few more books published in 2013, some of which will no doubt nudge out my current Top 10 list. I am reading The Golem and the Jinni right now, which you see pictured in that Amazon Top 20 list above. The Goldfinch, The Unwinding, and Allegiant are all on my "must read in 2014" list, too. So keep your eyes peeled for future Cephalopod Coffeehouse reviews of those titles.

Happy New Year! Be merry, be safe, and keep reading.