June 08, 2007
Women's Lives
I am off to my annual Psychomotor Group for the weekend.
I am also at the cusp of perhaps, maybe, we'll see, almost, getting a little space of my own which I am trying not to jinx by mentioning, except in passing. I am very busy watching my projections as I step over this new threshold.
For those reasons, I'm sloshing something together to transfix you while I'm gone. It's about women, oppression and freedom.
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Megan Stack an L.A. Times reporter gives us a fascinating glimpse of operating from behind the veil in Saudi Arabia. Evidently it isn't something that one can slip in and out of easily.
I was ready to cope, or so I thought. I arrived with a protective smirk in tow, planning to thicken the walls around myself. I'd report a few stories, and go home. I had no inkling that Saudi Arabia, the experience of being a woman there, would stick to me, follow me home on the plane and shadow me through my days, tainting the way I perceived men and women everywhere.......he sleeves, the length of it, always felt foreign, at first. But it never took long to work its alchemy, to plant the insecurity. After a day or two, the notion of appearing without the robe felt shocking. Stripped of the layers of curve-smothering cloth, my ordinary clothes suddenly felt revealing, even garish. To me, the abaya implied that a woman's body is a distraction and an interruption, a thing that must be hidden from view lest it haul the society into vice and disarray. The simple act of wearing the robe implanted that self-consciousness by osmosis.
In stark contrast, right on it's synchronistic little heels, emerged psychologist and journalist, Ellen de Bruin's study of women's lives out from under oppression in Holland.
"It has to do with personal freedom," said de Bruin, whose work, sure enough, is titled "Dutch Women Don't Get Depressed." "Personal choice is key: in the Netherlands people are free to choose their life partners, their religion, their sexuality, we are free to use soft drugs here, we can pretty much say anything we like. The Netherlands is a very free country.".....We are seen as very tough," de Bruin said in a recent conversation in Amsterdam, before cycling off to a class in runway walking to learn how to balance in high heels. "We don't know how to dress and we are not very hospitable - if you come round to our house at dinnertime you get sent away." Clothing is geared more to the weather than seduction. "We do everything by bike, which is why we don't dress very elegantly," de Bruin said. And, with a highly developed sense of equality between the sexes, "we are bossy to our men."
Photo note: Naxi women, who live in a matriarchal society in Lijaing, China. One of them doesn't look too happy, but it's probably hard to be a matriarch under an oppressive regime.
Posted by Dakota at June 8, 2007 06:26 PM