You’ve seen the routine. Some coiffed white conservative lady goes on cable information, all wide-eyed and sanctimonious, saying: “No less than right here we don’t pressure girls to put on burkas like they do in Iran!”
She delivers it like she’s courageously championing international girls’s rights. However let’s maintain it 100, she doesn’t give a rattling about Iranian girls and their oppression. She’s utilizing them as rhetorical props to justify American warmongering within the Center East and to close folks up about our rights right here in America.
From Candace Owens and Tomi Lahren to Laura Ingraham, Dana Loesch, to Fox Information panels, and the op-ed pages of locations just like the Federalist and the Washington Examiner, conservative pundits and columnists have made an entire style out of scolding folks on the left for supposedly ignoring the “actual” oppression of ladies pressured to put on hijabs or burkas in Iran. They routinely invoke Iranian girls’s state-enforced modesty as a rhetorical weapon to color U.S. girls as spoiled, ungrateful, and hypocritical for preventing for reproductive rights, equal pay, or freedom from sexual violence right here at residence.
It’s not solidarity. It’s not feminism. It’s a menace dressed up as concern. It’s: “Be pleased about the freedoms we haven’t taken away from you but. And don’t ask for extra.”
The identical loudmouths are utilizing a deflection tactic to close down criticism of their very own agenda, which goals to manage girls’s our bodies right here with its personal model of theocratic, patriarchal coverage.
Iranian girls are preventing actual oppression. Their authorities enforces obligatory hijab legal guidelines. Ladies may be harassed, crushed, or jailed for refusing to cowl their hair. The morality police killed Mahsa Amini in custody for an “improper” hijab, sparking mass protests below the rallying cry: Ladies, Life, Freedom. Ladies in Iran face authorized discrimination in divorce, baby custody, inheritance, and journey. A married lady wants her husband’s permission to get a passport. That is enforced with violence and intimidation.
However right here’s what these conservative pundits received’t admit: Iranian girls are not passive victims. They’re those main the resistance. They’re smuggling out footage of beatings. Burning their headscarves on the street. Organizing strikes. Risking arrest, torture, and demise to demand change. They don’t want a Fox Information panel to “communicate for them.” They don’t seem to be political pawns.
You’ll by no means see these TV pundits asking Congress to make asylum simpler for Iranian girls fleeing persecution. They’re not funding Iranian feminists. They’re not protesting U.S. sanctions that wreck Iran’s financial system whereas leaving the regime untouched. They’re not studying, quoting, or amplifying the phrases of precise Iranian girls risking their lives. As an alternative, they get on TV in tasteful blazers, furrow their brows, and say, “No less than right here you may costume the way you need!” whereas working time beyond regulation to be sure that received’t be true for lengthy.
As a result of let’s maintain it actual, these identical white conservative girls who cry crocodile tears for Iranian girls are busy constructing a Gilead right here at residence.
They cheerlead abortion bans with no exceptions for rape or incest. They again obligatory transvaginal ultrasounds. They need 10-year-old rape victims to hold forcible pregnancies. They defund Deliberate Parenthood and intercourse training. They name for banning contraception drugs. They assist guide bans on something that dares point out consent, sexuality, or LGBTQ existence. These aren’t simply “insurance policies.” They’re a imaginative and prescient of state-enforced feminine submission.
They don’t hate spiritual authoritarianism. They simply need to be those writing the commandments. That is the traditional con: “Don’t fear about abortion bans, pressured births, or states investigating miscarriages—at the very least you’re not pressured to put on a burka!” It’s emotional blackmail. It’s designed to make you are feeling ungrateful for wanting management over your personal physique. It’s the identical logic as an abusive accomplice saying, “You’re fortunate I don’t hit you tougher.”
White conservative girls have at all times been patriarchy’s center managers. They implement the foundations. Police the boundaries. Clarify away the violence. Smile prettily whereas they do it. They need to be the Wives in The Handmaid’s Story, doling out punishments and privileges, as long as they’re not the handmaids themselves. They usually’ll gladly level at Iranian girls’s pressured hijabs to distract you from the purple robes and bonnets they’re stitching for you right here.
This isn’t about empathy. It’s about management. It’s collapsing all Muslim girls right into a faceless stereotype of unvoiced oppression so American conservatives can really feel morally superior. It’s deflecting from the truth that they’re constructing their very own fundamentalist theocracy right here. It’s weaponizing another person’s oppression to justify your personal.
This isn’t new. It’s the oldest trick within the colonizer’s guide. British colonialists claimed they needed to “save” Indian girls from sati whereas ignoring homegrown Indian feminist actions and consolidating management over the subcontinent. French colonizers staged public unveilings of Algerian girls in “liberation” ceremonies whereas raping and torturing civilians. The U.S. justified conflict in Afghanistan as “saving girls” whereas propping up warlords who raped youngsters after which abandoning Afghan girls to the Taliban. It was by no means about saving girls. It was about controlling everybody.
Iranian girls aren’t ready for American conservatives to talk for them. They’re writing, organizing, and risking their lives. They’re publishing underground newspapers, making guerrilla artwork, posting footage of state violence. They’re demanding an finish to the Islamic Republic. They don’t want some senator’s spouse giving a speech about how unhappy their lives are. They want precise solidarity: amplifying their voices, supporting their proper to asylum, difficult U.S. sanctions that harm them, and demanding our authorities cease supporting dictators for oil. However most of all, acknowledge they lead their very own wrestle.
For those who’re going to invoke Iranian girls’s pressured modesty to disgrace American girls for demanding reproductive rights, you don’t care about freedom. You’re simply pissed you may’t get away with that degree of state-enforced faith right here but. You need American girls below your management. Your costume codes. Your pressured births. Your biblical regulation. You need to distract folks from the Gilead you’re constructing right here.
Ladies in all places deserve freedom. The liberty to put on a hijab or not. The liberty to decide on or refuse motherhood. The liberty to manage their our bodies. The liberty to say no to any man, priest, mullah, politician, or police officer who thinks he owns them. Iranian girls deserve that. American girls deserve that.
In case your feminism stops on the water’s edge, or solely reveals up while you need to disgrace somebody into shutting up about your insurance policies, it’s not feminism. It’s white Christian supremacist propaganda.
As a result of for those who care about freedom for ladies, you don’t get to choose and select which girls deserve it. And also you positive as hell don’t get to make use of another person’s oppression as your defend for sustaining your personal.
Dr. Stacey Patton is an award-winning journalist and creator of “Spare The Youngsters: Why Whupping Kids Received’t Save Black America” and the forthcoming “Strung Up: The Lynching of Black Kids In Jim Crow America.” Learn her Substack right here.
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