Female Producers in Saudi Arabia: "Did you have to wear the black thing?"

http://no-reservations-crew-blog.travelchannel.com/read/under-the-abbaya-female-producers-in-saudi-arabia

by garret • 17 years ago

50 49 17 years ago

no-reservations-crew-blog.travelchannel.com

evannyx• 17 years ago

why is this on HN?

sounddust2• 17 years ago

The focus of Hacker News is going to be anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes a lot more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

biohacker425• 17 years ago

I've always found the above troubling.

It seems obvious to me anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity will quickly transform the site into interesting news, but not hacker news.

Perhaps if it was a hacker's instead of one's?

theoneill• 17 years ago

"Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or egregiously offtopic, you can flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did."

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

biohacker425• 17 years ago

In his defense, I don't think he was suggesting it's either spam or egregiously off topic.

What bothers curmudgeons like me and him is the gentle slope towards Everybody News.

josefresco• 17 years ago

Great episode of No Reservations, and I was thrilled to see this behind-the-scenes look at the team behind the cameras.

marvin• 17 years ago

  And you know how all of them responded to women in charge? Great. Actually, they were a lot more than great.
  They were about the most warm, wonderful, welcoming group of people that you could possibly imagine.

I've heard the opposite..not about Saudi Arabians, though. My mother was the boss of an Iranian immigrant, and he was apparently completely unable to respect instructions given by a woman. And we are not talking about burger-flipping here, but pharmaceutical production.

This is an anecdote answered with an anecdote, but let's not put this whole cultural difference under a chair. Women aren't regarded as the professional equals of men in all parts of the world. I'm not starting a gender debate here; in some ways it is a pretty interesting difference. Especially if you see that those Arabian cultures that are even more "different" (polygamy, for instance) actually have a lot of similarities to promiscuous life in the West..at least from the male's point of view. There are a lot of facts about morale and life in these societies that doesn't come to light in any politically correct discussion.

I wish I had a better skill for languages so I could go over there and see these things first-hand...

blurry4• 17 years ago

I've experienced a bit of muslim culture first-hand and it's not even close to the cutesy image you get from this article. The author sees herself as a culturally sensitive critical thinker ("before you think I drank the koolaid...") but she is far from it. Take her cliched argument about the advantages of abbaya. If completely covering one's face and body is so desirable, why are women, and only women, forced into it under the threat of extreme corporal punishment and imprisonment? And how could she miss the fact that not speaking unless spoken to and making sure to always look down (to name just a couple things) is an integral part of wearing the garment?

Gender apartheid is just as cruel and ugly as race apartheid. Extolling the virtues of full body cover for women is quite like saying that working cotton fields is really good for blacks, what with all that fresh air and exercise. Ignorant at best.

michaelneale2• 17 years ago

>Gender apartheid is just as cruel and ugly as race apartheid.

That nicely sums up my thoughts on it - thankyou !

netcan8• 17 years ago

I often feel the same way when I here these sorts of arguments. But I think you're off the mark.

Extolling the virtues of full body cover for women is quite like saying that working cotton fields is really good for blacks, what with all that fresh air and exercise.

You didn't get the majority of blacks to stand up & say that they feel cotton fields are liberating & dignified. That is a major difference. In fact, women in places where hijab is discouraged actively defend it. You can't respond with the cliché brainwash argument either. Culture is always brainwash.

I think it's important to step back & draw the distinction between religious conservatives demanding that the sun orbits the earth and some other completely arbitrary cultural things.

Think about dress codes (especially for women) wherever you happen to be: Dress in at least this much fabric. Cover up at least these areas. You can do this. But it's inappropriate at the office, if you want to be taken seriously. Some rules are relaxed in some places, like the minimum fabric requirement at the beach. Some, like 'cover these areas are enforced by law.

I'm not saying that I agree with Saudi conventions or law. I am saying we need to be careful of what we are criticising. A lot of cultural norms are always arbitrary.

yters2• 17 years ago

Abbayas are also good for men to hide in. One of the terrorist leaders during the Algerian insurgency often used an abbaya to sneak around. No one stopped him because they thought he was just a Muslim woman (couldn't see any facial features), who have no leadership roles in the culture.

rw• 17 years ago

You said "polygamy", don't you mean polygyny?

wheels4• 17 years ago

"I don't know about Saudi Arabians, but I knew this Iranian guy..."

Is about the cultural equivalent of saying:

"I don't know about the British, but I knew this French guy..."

Except probably more different. And that's just culturally. Politically Saudi Arabia is an order of magnitude more oppressive than Iran and women's rights are also similarly incomparable.

dominik• 17 years ago

Something from the article worth quoting: "It's saving that kind of intimacy for those that are close to you, your friends and family, who have earned the privilege. For the first time, I saw that the abbaya may have a role in protecting women, and not as something simply designed to control them."

Once upon a time, the same sort of idea existed in the West, in the lost art of modesty (buried alongside chivalry nowadays). The idea that not everyone need be exposed to everything. That some things are better saved and not sold.

How many times in the United States do men look at women not as persons but as objects? Seeing not the woman as she is, but merely as she appears -- not respecting her as a person but instead consuming her as a visual image.

Whether in Saudi Arabia or in the United States, the first principle to keep in mind involves respect for the human person as such -- man or woman.

Female Producers in Saudi Arabia: "Did you have to wear the black thing?"

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