I'D HONESTLY RATHER WEAR AN ANKLE MONITOR THAN A FITBIT. 🤓
Watch your morning coffee if you keep reading while you drink it. You risk blowing it all over the screen.
This post is freely available on the internet this week. Under my own name and face.
A woman writes that she'd honestly rather wear a niqab than stilettos.
I had to read it twice. Then three times. Then four. I couldn't understand what I was reading. "It must be satire, Thomas. No one who's been through the Danish education system can stand that thoroughly on their head and still think?"
It turns out you can. It's serious, passionately serious even, written with that particular warmth in the voice you only have when you're completely certain you've just said something brave.
The argument goes like this - the brave woman does actually cover her own face sometimes. In winter. With a scarf. Because she can't be bothered to freeze around the cheeks.
And thus the circle is complete - the Danish February and fourteen hundred years of bone-hard strict Islamic jurisprudence maintained by the sword are now the same phenomenon.
The weather has become imam. The cold has become caliphate. And somewhere in Riyadh sits a learned man discovering to his great surprise that his entire theology can be replaced by a fresh northwesterly wind.
From there follows that move many of you by now know so well you can hum along to its little melody -
There are women who are forced to wear the niqab, and she supports their struggle a hundred percent. BUT there are also women who are forced to wear stilettos - sometimes by employers! *gulp* - and she also supports their struggle a hundred percent.
Everything is supported a hundred percent. It's the new currency - percentages of support, paid out in both directions simultaneously, so the accounts always balance and no one ever has to choose anything.
And so those two struggles stand there, side by side, as equal pillars in the Temple of Freedom. One struggle takes place in a consultation response to the Working Environment Authority and concerns whether a receptionist may switch to flat shoes after lunch. The other takes place in Tehran, where women burn their headscarves and are beaten to death at the end of a rope in a crane for it. If not at point-blank range.
But pressure is pressure, as they say in her circles.
Just as both a mosquito bite and a shark bite are technically animal bites.
Because that's what the intersectional idiot calculator can do - it can make everything weigh the same. A demand from a middle manager at a travel agency and a demand from the world's most tightly strung cosmological theology, a family, a mosque, a cousin with loose hands, an entire normative system with sanctions ranging from social exclusion to what is worse - both are now called "pressure on women's choices", and there's nothing more to discuss.
The machine has no unit of weight. It can only count, not weigh. And you could continue in the same vein, because the game is actually wonderfully easy once you've learned the rule.
"I'd honestly rather wear an ankle monitor than a Fitbit - both just register my steps."
"Rather gulag than team building in Jutland - both are involuntary stays with group activities far from home."
"Rather house arrest than working from home, it's the same address."
"Rather Soviet censorship than a tone of voice guide."
"Rather taste judge with sword than critic with stars."
Try it yourself at home, it can go on all weekend, and the logic holds just as well all the way down.
And then there's the ending, which is the post's finest moment - greetings from one of the feminist activists who bathed topless in DGI City almost twenty years ago. Precisely for the right to decide for herself. You can tell it's meant as the trump card, and in a way it is - just not quite as intended.
Because there it stands, the entire arc, drawn up in a single life - a woman who once removed fabric to show that her body wasn't a problem, and who twenty years later defends the piece of fabric whose entire theological premise is that her body is PRECISELY not just the problem - but THE whole problem - a temptation that must be wrapped away for men's sake, a face that must be extinguished in public space like a lamp that disturbs.
From the right to show herself as God created Her - to the defence of the duty to disappear. Twenty years' journey, and she apparently hasn't noticed she changed trains along the way.
Because it was never the same struggle. Because the choice she speaks so warmly of only exists in one direction. In Denmark you can choose the niqab, write a post about it and get hearts from people standing on their heads in the comment section. In the countries where the niqab comes from, you cannot choose it away - there the sentence "my body is my choice" isn't a statement, it's a crime.
It's not the same choice.
It's not even the same word.
Only where the chain has been removed can one think of wearing it as jewellery.
Happy Friday friends, and remember -
Rather forced burqa than the Health Authority's advice to use factor 50 sunscreen. Both just protect the skin from the sun.
🤓😉❤️
