You’ve seen the routine. Some coiffed white conservative girl goes on cable information, all wide-eyed and sanctimonious, saying: “No less than right here we don’t pressure ladies to put on burkas like they do in Iran!”
She delivers it like she’s courageously championing international ladies’s rights. However let’s hold it 100, she doesn’t give a rattling about Iranian ladies and their oppression. She’s utilizing them as rhetorical props to justify American warmongering within the Center East and to close individuals up about our rights right here in America.
From Candace Owens and Tomi Lahren to Laura Ingraham, Dana Loesch, to Fox Information panels, and the op-ed pages of locations just like the Federalist and the Washington Examiner, conservative pundits and columnists have made a complete style out of scolding individuals on the left for supposedly ignoring the “actual” oppression of ladies pressured to put on hijabs or burkas in Iran. They routinely invoke Iranian ladies’s state-enforced modesty as a rhetorical weapon to color U.S. ladies as spoiled, ungrateful, and hypocritical for combating for reproductive rights, equal pay, or freedom from sexual violence right here at residence.
It’s not solidarity. It’s not feminism. It’s a menace dressed up as concern. It’s: “Be pleased about the freedoms we haven’t taken away from you but. And don’t ask for extra.”
The identical loudmouths are utilizing a deflection tactic to close down criticism of their very own agenda, which goals to manage ladies’s our bodies right here with its personal model of theocratic, patriarchal coverage.
Iranian ladies are combating actual oppression. Their authorities enforces obligatory hijab legal guidelines. Ladies could be harassed, crushed, or jailed for refusing to cowl their hair. The morality police killed Mahsa Amini in custody for an “improper” hijab, sparking mass protests below the rallying cry: Ladies, Life, Freedom. Ladies in Iran face authorized discrimination in divorce, little one custody, inheritance, and journey. A married girl wants her husband’s permission to get a passport. That is enforced with violence and intimidation.
However right here’s what these conservative pundits received’t admit: Iranian ladies will not be passive victims. They’re those main the resistance. They’re smuggling out footage of beatings. Burning their headscarves on the street. Organizing strikes. Risking arrest, torture, and demise to demand change. They don’t want a Fox Information panel to “communicate for them.” They don’t seem to be political pawns.
You’ll by no means see these TV pundits asking Congress to make asylum simpler for Iranian ladies fleeing persecution. They’re not funding Iranian feminists. They’re not protesting U.S. sanctions that wreck Iran’s economic system whereas leaving the regime untouched. They’re not studying, quoting, or amplifying the phrases of precise Iranian ladies risking their lives. As an alternative, they get on TV in tasteful blazers, furrow their brows, and say “No less than right here you may costume the way you need!” whereas working additional time to guarantee that received’t be true for lengthy.
As a result of let’s hold it actual, these similar white conservative ladies who cry crocodile tears for Iranian ladies are busy constructing a Gilead right here at residence.
They cheerlead abortion bans with no exceptions for rape or incest. They again necessary transvaginal ultrasounds. They need 10-year-old rape victims pressured to hold pregnancies. They defund Deliberate Parenthood and intercourse training. They name for banning contraception capsules. They help ebook bans on something that dares point out consent, sexuality, or LGBTQ existence. These aren’t simply “insurance policies.” They’re a imaginative and prescient of state-enforced feminine submission.
They don’t hate spiritual authoritarianism. They simply wish to be those writing the commandments. That is the basic con: “Don’t fear about abortion bans, pressured births, or states investigating miscarriages—no less than you’re not pressured to put on a burka!” It’s emotional blackmail. It’s designed to make you are feeling ungrateful for wanting management over your individual physique. It’s the identical logic as an abusive associate saying, “You’re fortunate I don’t hit you more durable.”
White conservative ladies have all the time been patriarchy’s center managers. They implement the foundations. Police the boundaries. Clarify away the violence. Smile prettily whereas they do it. They wish to be the Wives in The Handmaid’s Story, doling out punishments and privileges, as long as they’re not the handmaids themselves. They usually’ll gladly level at Iranian ladies’s pressured hijabs to distract you from the crimson robes and bonnets they’re stitching for you right here.
This isn’t about empathy. It’s about management. It’s collapsing all Muslim ladies right into a faceless stereotype of unvoiced oppression so American conservatives can really feel morally superior. It’s deflecting from the truth that they’re constructing their very own fundamentalist theocracy right here. It’s weaponizing another person’s oppression to justify your individual.
This isn’t new. It’s the oldest trick within the colonizer’s ebook. British colonialists claimed they needed to “save” Indian ladies from sati whereas ignoring homegrown Indian feminist actions and consolidating management over the subcontinent. French colonizers staged public unveilings of Algerian ladies in “liberation” ceremonies whereas raping and torturing civilians. The U.S. justified conflict in Afghanistan as “saving ladies” whereas propping up warlords who raped kids after which abandoning Afghan ladies to the Taliban. It was by no means about saving ladies. It was about controlling everybody.
Iranian ladies aren’t ready for American conservatives to talk for them. They’re writing, organizing, and risking their lives. They’re publishing underground newspapers, making guerrilla artwork, posting footage of state violence. They’re demanding an finish to the Islamic Republic. They don’t want some senator’s spouse giving a speech about how unhappy their lives are. They want precise solidarity: amplifying their voices, supporting their proper to asylum, difficult U.S. sanctions that harm them, and demanding our authorities cease supporting dictators for oil. However most of all, acknowledge they lead their very own battle.
In the event you’re going to invoke Iranian ladies’s pressured modesty to disgrace American ladies for demanding reproductive rights, you don’t care about freedom. You’re simply pissed you may’t get away with that stage of state-enforced faith right here but. You need American ladies below your management. Your costume codes. Your pressured births. Your biblical legislation. You wish to distract individuals from the Gilead you’re constructing right here.
Ladies in every single place deserve freedom. The liberty to put on a hijab or not. The liberty to decide on or refuse motherhood. The liberty to manage their our bodies. The liberty to say no to any man, priest, mullah, politician, or police officer who thinks he owns them. Iranian ladies deserve that. American ladies deserve that.
In case your feminism stops on the water’s edge, or solely reveals up while you wish to disgrace somebody into shutting up about your insurance policies, it’s not feminism. It’s white Christian supremacist propaganda.
As a result of if you happen to care about freedom for ladies, you don’t get to select and select which ladies deserve it. And also you certain as hell don’t get to make use of another person’s oppression as your defend for sustaining your individual.
Dr. Stacey Patton is an award-winning journalist and writer of “Spare The Children: Why Whupping Youngsters Received’t Save Black America” and the forthcoming “Strung Up: The Lynching of Black Youngsters In Jim Crow America.” Learn her Substack right here.
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