Momus Kicks Ass Again

i read iMomus daily, but i haven't mentioned it on this blog. however, today's post, Susan Ciancolo, has a bit in it that resonates hard with me. Here's an excerpt:

I think this issue of safety in Japan is very much overlooked when people talk about the status of women here. Much is made by foreign observers of the problem of Japanese train gropers and the fetishistic mindset of many Japanese men, but the big picture is often overlooked: that this is an overwhelmingly safe place for women to walk about in. The very sexy and expressive way that Japanese women dress is a direct result of their sense of ease and security in public places. Safety and expressiveness go hand in hand. It's also important that Japan doesn't have the West's big race and poverty gaps. The New York assaults I mentioned were the result of one group of people feeling that acts of almost random violence in public places were justified by racial and economic injustice.

Since the gaps between rich and poor, black and white are being increased by the current US administration, American cities will only become more dangerous in the short term. That means less expressiveness on the part of the citizens of American cities; restrictions on liberty of movement, restrictions on women's freedom. It might also explain the sharky menace, the brooding aggressive mood I noticed in the foreign magazine section of ABC the other day: in stark contrast to their Japanese equivalents, American magazine covers featured images of men in black walking through sheets of flame carrying machine-guns, dark-helmeted heads with hard cold light reflected in their visors, menacing rappers oozing "don't mess with me" attitude.

The gentle imagery that Susan Ciancolo produces - delicate drawings of deer, plants, girls, clothes - could easily be found on a Japanese magazine cover (I bought a copy of Relax for Girls yesterday, a magazine which very much embraces this style). But it's getting increasingly hard to imagine it featured anywhere in an American magazine. Neither America's left nor its right wants girly girls or "girly men". In an unfortunate cultural pincer movement, the US left (in the shape of feminism and the ideology of equality of opportunity) has masculinized women just in time to co-incide with the right's masculinization of the streets and the world by sending in soldiers, increasing social tensions, upping hatred and resentment.

The paradox is that the more the US becomes an Israel-style security state, the less secure it becomes. You address security by working on its root causes - hatred, resentment, poverty - rather than filling your cities, and the world, with machine-gun-toting gooks. In a recent column for RealTokyo magazine, Maeda Keizo describes what it's like for a Japanese to visit New York now:

I'm in New York once again. Even though prepared to find security measures being drastically re-inforced since 9.11, the endless lines at the customs and the fingerprints and facial portraits they're taking of travellers don't exactly make entering the USA a nice adventure. Once in the city I find policemen with huge dogs all over the place, and although I understand that this is the price people have to pay for an almost impersonally clean subway and safety in everyday life, I have the feeling that it's a bit too much. Due to the watching eyes I'm constantly feeling in my neck I'm getting slightly depressed. But somehow the people I meet and the usual cafés I visit again this time help me clear up.

this resonates with me because it is such a nice upsumming of the "social anaconda" effect we are experiencing here, and it is a disturbing trend that seems to increase our similarity to socially restrictive countries such as Iran. consider what michelle bryant says in her review of Dr. Faegheh Shirazi's book The Veil Unveiled: The Hijab in Modern Culture:

Although the custom of veiling is typically associated with Islam, the practice actually outdates Islamic culture by thousands of years. Veiling and seclusion were marks of prestige and symbols of status in the Assyrian, Greco-Roman and Byzantine empires as well as in pre-Islamic Iran.

Throughout history the veil has been used to promote political agendas, to demonstrate political protest and even to show political support. For instance, when the French dominated Algeria, the women of Algeria substituted wearing the traditional white veil with wearing a black veil as a non-verbal form of protest.

Some countries, such as Iran, have gone from being unveiled to being veiled and back again. Shirazi's book The Veil Unveiled gives an account of the significance the veil has played in Iranian politics.

The Iranian women were forced to unveil to fit Reza Shah’s delusions of grandeur, and forced to reveil to fit Ayatollah Khomeini’s visions for true religion [...] Women in Iran during the Islamic revolution in 1978 were told by donning the veil they would fend off the assault of Western culture, and by sending their sons to fight the Iraqi army and becoming a martyr they would help save the Islamic Republic of Iran and support the defense of Islam. Ten years after the war with Iraq, she was told that by not veiling according to the guidelines of the clergy she would cause the downfall of the Islamic Republic. In Iranian politics, the veil has proved to be the most effective weapon of the rulers, secular and clerical.

During her yearly visits to Iran, Shirazi finds that the hijab is still a controversial topic conjuring many emotions. While conducting research for her book, Shirazi viewed graffiti plastered on the walls of houses and factories bordering the roadway. It conveyed slogans such as “Death to the improperly veiled woman" and "If unveiling is a sign of civilization, then animals must be the most civilized."

so, like in The Handmaid's Tale, we are slowly being consumed by fundamentalism, militarism and apocalypticism, all rolled into one, and the japanese stare at us like the lunatics we are, dressed as they want and free as we once dreamt of being. Is Iran our future, our rights lost as persons, as women, as intellectuals?