A Ban on Mini-Skirts and Pseudo-Liberals

This sad news from Sri Lanka made me wonder how soon we will see protests against the corrupting presence of mini-skirts on the streets of North-American cities from Sri Lankan immigrant communities:

Sri Lanka was mulling a ban on miniskirts following complaints, prompting the government to set up a panel to prepare a dress code for public places in the conservative country, officials said. “There are individuals and groups representing religious and cultural interests, who have written to us raising concerns that this kind of (mini) dress would corrupt our culture,” minister T B Ekanayake was quoted as saying by the Lakbima news daily.

After a mid-schooler in Canada was allowed to carry a dagger to school because it was ruled a part of his national costume while fundamentalist Muslim and Jewish women lobbied (and almost won) for pregnant women to be prevented from bringing their husbands to secular birth preparation classes in Montreal, I will not be surprised to see any government of a Western country entertain its own ban on "corrupting" women's clothes as a gesture of appeasement to some immigrant community which considers women to be less than human.

If quasi-liberals continue with their tradition of condescending "tolerance" towards each cannibalistic and savage tradition out there, their efforts, coupled with those of our own home-grown woman-haters, will bring something like this to happen here, too. Of course, I am not disputing the right of Sri Lankan people to engage in any kind of barbarity towards the women of their country. I am, however, hoping to preserve the very small oasis of female liberation that came into existence in a very small portion of the world's territory.

In a gesture of a contemptuous dismissal of other cultures, we are schooled by certain groups of pseudo-progressives never to question any of the practices those other cultures engage in. As I said many times before, such an attitude does not signal respect for the Other. Just the opposite. A refusal to question, to judge, to pronounce opinions stems from a profound conviction that representatives of other cultures are not as human as we are. Hence, they don't deserve to be judged according to the same standards as we judge ourselves.

Nothing annoys me more than this quasi-liberal fear of expressing opinions about any group these very pseudo-liberals have labeled (offensively, too!) "disadvantaged." Of course, their self-esteem issues require that every group other than their own be considered disadvantaged. How much that view is shared by the "disadvantaged" and the "underprivileged" themselves is unimportant to such quasi-liberals. All they are interested in is to police everybody who dares to pronounce that the practice of female genital mutilation is barbaric, that a niqab is not liberating to women, and that if we are to respect the Sri Lankans' right to treat their women as less than human, we should insist that when Sri Lankans - or anybody else - come to our feminist countries, they should respect our view of gender roles just as much.