“When I see a woman wearing a burka, I don’t try to ‘other’ her. The reverse. I try to imagine myself in her shoes. All the rest of my family are in casual shorts and T-shirts and flip-flops, but I’m a faceless, unidentifiable ghost in a suffocating black shroud. On the beach, my man in skimpy Speedos (OK, please no) me in hot dark fabric from head to toe, having to eat an ice cream by posting the pudding into my mouth from under a flap beneath my chin.
It happens to be what a lot of people think when they see a woman in a burka, but coming from a former holder of one of the great offices of state, and not a comedian, his words failed the political-correctness stress test. Is that a crime?
They accused him of dehumanising women, completely missing the main point which is that the burka/niqab dehumanises women. They do not express individuality, they suppress it.
what the full-face veil wearer conveys is that she is subscribing to a ‘toxic patriarchy controlling women’.
These countries (that ban the burka) are not imposing a ban – they are lifting one on the rights of women to feel the sun on their skin, the water on their bodies, and for their children to see their mothers’ full faces in the street. They are lifting a ban on the rights of women to be seen without the fear their brothers and husbands and uncles will object that they are ‘dishonouring’ them in some way.”
