Shame on You: Shame Cartoons

As has been said numerous times, the veil doesn’t protect women from sexual harassment, which is about power and control, not sexuality. Let’s take Egypt as an example. The recent Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights (ECWR) study told us that in a country where over 80% of the women are veiled, 83% of women are harassed. During the Eid festivities in Egypt in 2006, mass sexual harassments went on downtown (video here), with hundreds of men sexually assaulting women.

What’s worse about the study (which surveyed 2,020 Egyptian men and women and 109 foreign women) is that 62% of Egyptian men surveyed admitted to harassment, and 53% blamed women for bringing it on. Sixty percent of the respondents (male and female) said that scantily clad women are more likely to be harassed though in reality 72% of the women who said they’d been harassed were veiled. But the worst part is the lack of understanding by Egyptian women that the harasser is a criminal and women had a right to dress as they pleased (read more about the study in Faith’s post here and about the “Respect yourself” campaign against sexual harassment in Egypt here.

According to the ECWR:

“[The cartoons] ignore [Egypt's] large Christian minority, promote wearing the veil for wrong reasons, objectify women, portray men as mindless insects, contradict statistics showing that women who wear a veil, even the full face veil, experience high levels of harassment, and contradict religion’s call for respect and personal responsibility for all.”

Harassment in Arabic is “tahroush”, but is referred to in colloquial Arabic as mu’aksa (”teasing”), which is a very light-hearted term that detracts from the seriousness of the situation.

Attaching religion to sexual harassment just fuels the harassers, giving them an excuse for their behavior and coerces women into dressing a certain way when they may not be fully convinced. The ‘blame the victim’ mentality is only compounded by shame cartoons, which absolve the harassers of any wrongdoing. (Mona El-Tahawy has a great post about shame here)

There are also many cartoons that compare veiled women to pearls (where the veil is their ‘protective covering’). These ads are particularly annoying because as we know, the veil does not necessarily offer ‘protection,’ which is a kind of a weak reason to veil in the first place. And that’s another thing these cartoons fail to realize—the desire to ‘cover’ is multifaceted, and is not necessarily related to religion.

For the cartoons that do realize women veil for other reasons, their reasoning is even worse: not only are they trying to brainwash women into believing they are at fault for sexual harassment—they don’t frame veiling as a religious duty. Instead, they say that ‘decent’ girls cover while ‘indecent’ girls don’t. If you take that to its logical conclusion: only ‘indecent’ girls get harassed.

Translation: Who is the happy one? The good woman: Fulfills all her obligations and recites the Qur’an; Vigilant about modesty and calls to God; Does lots of supplementary acts and listens to helpful tapes.

The ‘not good’ woman: Goes to the mall a lot; Wears short and tight [clothing]; Copies the infidels and watches satellite TV channels.

So, what is it about shame? Why are we trying to shame women?

The answer lies in the fact that for many cultures, especially Arab ones, ‘honor’ lies with women, whose reputation, behavior, virginity, and appearance becomes a benchmark for the respectability of a culture.

Arab cultures, for the most part, are ’shame’ rather than ‘guilt’ cultures, where the reactions and treatment of society mandates an individual’s behavior, rather than his or her personal feelings of right and wrong.

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