The Hewn Hair Rebellion

People, men women and children, are being shot dead on the streets of Iran. In riots, protests, and insurrection sparked by the murder of 22-year old Mahsa Amini, who was arrested on September 13^th for “faulty hijab use” by the Iranian morality police, and left custody in a deadly coma. Hijabs are burnt. Hair is cut. Rage is levied against an autocratic religious oppression. And though the regime has begun to lock down the Internet, and information is scarce, we know that streets are being bloodied by the Iranian regime’s stranglehold on a dissenting population.

And safely tucked away in their Nordic apartments and houses, support takes the form of sympathetic hair-clippings aired on social media, garnering views and likes and retweets like only thoughts and prayers can.

Which brings to mind a question: At what point does support for a foreign cause turn from encouragement to egocentric exhibitionism?

Cut hair in the comfort of the West, live on social media, does absolutely fuck all to stop a Revolutionary Guard bullet from cramming its way into the skull of an Iranian child. This much is undeniably true. But cutting your hair in support for Iranian feminism isn’t about making them bulletproof, you may say. Granted, but then what is it for? Putting international pressure on a religious regime already so sanctioned that it weren’t but three years since the last deadly popular uprising in the country, that time due to fuel prices? Do you really think the Ayatollah gives a single fig about TikTok videos from Scandinavia? Do you think our state department, under pressure from both the US and the international community to sanction the nuclear capable Middle Eastern country, will be significantly (or insignificantly) affected by your “well”-intentioned exhibitionism? Or is your exhibitionism supposed to make the loss of a loved daughter more palatable?

Maybe… however unlikely; maybe. Maybe your locks, felled in the safety of suburbia, in the comfort of your own home, instead of to a chorus of angry chants on bloodied streets, is the last straw that breaks the camel’s back. However unlikely that is to be the case.

But how else is a far flung git supposed to show support for foreign causes? If we do nothing, we’re blasted for arrogance and aloofness. If we commit, although from the comfort of our homes, we’re discredited as fickle exhibitionists. In an era of social media, how else do we fan righteous flames than through virtue signalling on the internet? Is it possible to meaningfully rage on the internet against the murder of a 22-year old woman who had the audacity to show a lock of hair on a subway station?

As of yet, we cannot guide a cruising lead pellet through the atmosphere to bury into the skull of autocratic despots, religious fanatic leaders, or zealous authoritarian regime guards, purely by the power of collective social media discourse. Which, I hazard to say, sounds like a Black Mirror episode, and might just be a good thing.

So, where do we draw the line between childish exhibitionism, and legitimate and constructive support for progressive social reform? Fuck if I know… but cutting your hair in front of your cell phone in the safety of your bathroom, three thousand metric miles away from your cause, is not the latter.

/Sebastian Lindberg 26/9-2022

Schoolyard Heroics at the Oscars

“Keep my wife’s name out of your fucking mouth!” with a side order of open-palmed physical assault, and suddenly the awards of an award ceremony becomes the least talked-about fallout from the Oscars.

And as is only natural in a country so enamoured with conflict and violence, the US split to continue the altercation after the show. Actors, actresses, pundits, and even politicians started taking sides, whether asked to by the media or decided to on their own to snatch a share of the hub-bub. The people in the wake are left talking about the propriety of jokes, the normalization of violence, and the egos produced by the celebrity film industry.

So let’s talk about gender roles for a bit, shall we, now that the US discourse and celebrity partisanship seem poised to send equality staggering backwards a few decades. What Will Smith seems to mean when he storms up on stage to “slap the shit out of” the hired roaster is that no one has the right to make jokes at the expense of his protectorate. His demesne. His domain. His woman. Even simply saying the name of “his” woman in a public setting is deemed worthy of corporal punishment, according to his later heckling.

Doesn’t this strike anyone else as a particularly medieval perspective on gender roles? That it’s somehow still a man’s duty to defend his precious Madonna from any and all slights. As if Will Smith was some deranged Don Quijote who demands that passersby submit their reverence at the Don’s lady’s feet on pain of punishment. Because while the rest of the attendants are free game for the hired comedian to make fun of, heavens forbid that a single reference rain upon the head of Smith’s property.

I get the knee-jerk reaction (even though it looks like Will’s was to laugh along until he sees his wife’s). It’s naught but natural to want to keep the people you care about out of harms way. But it’s difficult to argue that a joke (however off-colour it might or might-not be) made by a professional joker hired to professionally joke specifically at celebrity expense at an international award show is in any way dangerous. Dangerous to one’s ego, perhaps, but not in any tangible sense.

These kind of schoolyard heroics are redundant in a gender equal society. Because as far as I understood it, equality meant that women are expected to fight their own battles, non? Wasn’t that the whole point of female empowerment? That women no longer needed, or wanted, unhinged egomaniacs to “slap the shit out of” the hired entertainment for mentioning their names on stage.

Whether or not you like Chris Rock is irrelevant. Whether or not you think jokes about medical conditions is below the belt is irrelevant. All of it circumstantial and subjective. The real sick on display here is the fact that if Jada Pinkett Smith took offence to a joke on stage, then we should have seen her march up there and give Rock a five-finger broadside. But we didn’t. We saw her personal attack dog Willie do the dirty deed. Which is pretty misogynistic no matter which way you twist and turn it. Because Jada and Willie both, not to mention the celebrities who cry out in their support, have now projected to the fawning celebrity fandom that women aren’t capable of protecting their own names, but need men to do it for them.

/Sebastian Lindberg 29/3-2022

Take Your Baggage to the Theatre

Last week, I gave Japan shit as a nation for despicable and backwards attitudes on gender equality and sexuality. But, ’cause there’s like always a butt, my attack was based on a rather flimsy assertion; namely that you can judge a culture by the weight of its art. An assertion that is by no means indisputable.

So, can we really make sweeping generalizations on the state of affairs in a country, based solely on the merits of its produced art?

Most anthropologists take this for granted. Most of what archaeologists have to study is just the remnants of the culture that a world left behind. If it’s literature, temples, stories, paintings, or just a shard of pottery, we base our understandings of the world gone by based almost solely on the art left behind. Take ancient Greece as an example. A testosterone injection of marvellous men doing marvellous things, never minding the casual rape and debauchery that’s left in their wake. Sure, Heracles had to do some atoning after murdering his wife in a fit of rage… but for every quest of redemption, there are a hundred other stories of women getting the short end of the shaft. From being sacrificed to appease the vanity of their mothers, like Cassiopeia was, or being abducted so that the king of the underworld wouldn’t feel so lonely, like Persephone was. Or how Pandora, the original woman, was created as a punishment to man; for she was an alluring creature coveted by him, but with a mind of her own (for an independent and clever woman is such an evil to lay upon mankind, right?). Or why not ask Io how fair the Greek world was to women? How she got turned into a cow, jailed by a thousand-eyed giant, to being chased across the ancient world by the jealous matron of the Gods just because Zeus raped her.

So what? What do these stories tell us about Ancient Greece? Well, it certainly doesn’t sound very gender equal. It quite frankly sounds like it fucking sucked to be a woman. Potentially less so if you were a Spartan woman, but I digress… It is a moot point any way. Ancient Greece is no more. There is no way to tell how things really were. No other way than to digest the stories…

But we don’t have to stretch to archaeology to make my point. It is similarly no edgy take to blame the US cowboy fantasy and subsequent popular culture with the nation’s morbid fascination with The Gun. True, the US was born out of bloody revolution, but so were many other countries. But generations after generations of the population has been fed with the notion that any injustice can be corrected by any self-righteous Zardoz with naught but a determined mind and wielding the power of The Gun. Do you think that might be connected at all with the pervasive notion among the US population that civilians absolutely need a fully automatic military assault rifle to protect their private residences?

I think it just might…

Another example of cultural identity can be found if one compares the American movie industry with the Chinese one. In the first, it is almost always the lone hero that triumphs over adversity. Even if he (for it’s almost always a he) has a cadre of friends at his side, and the power of friendship was what got them through it in the end, it is often that one charismatic figure of defiance that collected all those friends. The collective isn’t the hero. Which is what you’d expect from an individualistic society like the American one. The flip side you can find in Chinese cinema, where the lone hero is often replaced with a menagerie of characters that succeed together as a collective. Which isn’t weird when you think about it; A capitalist nightmare state produces songs of lone heroes accomplishing great feats by their own power, and on the other side you have another nightmare state that’s still force-feeding its population with inflated notions that the collective is the mightiest machinery in the world.

Of course you can make societal generalisations based on the media that a nation exudes. In many Bollywood epics, like Padmaavat as an off-the-cuff example, it is the great Muslim horde that’s the nemesis of the people; a chilling echo of the racially charged hatred being performed at an administrative level in India right now. Or how villains in Hollywood movies for a long time were either Russian, British, or later Middle Eastern. And you can easily tell what kind of nation produced the movie ”Force Majeure” (2014), a Swedish film that questioned the notions of masculinity in civil society.

Yes; you can say a lot about a culture based on what art comes out of it. Just as social norms are shaped from art, so is art shaped by social norms. An ever gobbling Ouroboros where one inevitably feeds and influences the other. But it isn’t an unbreakable cycle, however. There are ways to subvert either to influence the other. Art and society are both iterative processes, even if they’re inexorably bound to each other. Change one, and you stand a good chance to also change the other.

And there are many pervasive values, or lack thereofs, that we sorely need to change. Racism, sexism, glorified violence… all can be tempered and shaped, even at the national level. All one has to do is stand up. Maybe not reward gun porn with your attention to the same extent you always have. Maybe let loose a cry of protest whenever your Muslim villains are portrayed like one-dimensional monsters. And even make a stand and call out a skeevy status quo in your favourite animated media. And never, ever, accept the excuse that the fly in your art is cultural, and thus somehow unassailable. For culture isn’t immutable. Nor should it be.

/Sebastian Lindberg 11/5-2020

A Hijab State of Mind

I think that it could be a good idea to legislate against wearing a hijab, khimar, shayla or niqab (or the burqa and chador for that matter).

And this is where, in a theatre production, there would be a pause in the delivery. To let the notion sink in. To let the audience come to grips with what’s been said. To let them find their emotional response. Be it cultural anger, religious outrage, or racist glee.

And to let the deliverer get comfortable with the very hot potato they’ve just picked up.

The permittance of the hijab (and the other derivates) has been a hotly debated subject in western countries for years. Usually espoused by racists and nationalists as a method of forcefully integrating an immigrant population into the general cultural zeitgeist. Alternatively to take a stance against an ethnic group to make the country in question an even more hostile and uninviting environment to the Muslim demography. And as such, the subject has become stigmatized by Islamophobia.

Which is a shame. It usually is. Just like when a subcontinental good luck charm became the symbol of ethnic cleansing, or a Norse symbol of justice became the logo for Nordic xenophobia.

You gotta hate it when that happens…

So, if it’s not out of racism or a phobia for foreign cultures, what’s my problem with a head scarf?

I usually don’t like litigation. I usually don’t care for nation states deciding what I (or anyone else) can and cannot do. And I certainly don’t take a supportive stance on clothing regulation in general. So what’s so different now?

Well, to get to my point, we should examine why people wear the hijab. Why women wear the hijab. There are many reasons, if you ask around. Some may say that it’s a religious thing. Some, that it’s a cultural thing. An ethnic thing. An identity thing. Or simply that they’d catch absolute hell from parents, family, or friends, if they didn’t. Some, we know, might even risk their lives if they didn’t wear it.

And yet, many more, may just not have thought much about it at all. It’s just how they dress. How someone like them is supposed to dress.

There’s a long laundry list of reasons why people wear the hijab (which is the most common Muslim garb in western countries, and will thusly act as a conceptual stand-in for all of them in this piece). All of which can be traced, in essence, to one source: The Quran.

The Quran states in a dozen or so verses that it is important to preserve the modesty of mankind. Not just women, but men as well. Modesty is a key virtue. And in preserving it, one should cover themselves as to not show one’s beauty. Scholars are in disagreement about just how, or who, the guidelines are meant for. Some say this was just a house rule for the Prophet’s personal harem. But Surah An-Nur 31:24 makes perhaps the clearest case for the general female population to cover themselves up:

“And tell the believing women to reduce [some] of their vision and guard their private parts and not expose their adornment except that which [necessarily] appears thereof and to wrap [a portion of] their head-covers over their chests and not expose their adornment except to their husbands, their fathers, their husbands’ fathers, their sons, their husbands’ sons, their brothers, their brothers’ sons, their sisters’ sons, their women, that which their right hands possess, or those male attendants having no physical desire, or children who are not yet aware of the private aspects of women. And let them not stamp their feet to make known what they conceal of their adornment. And turn to Allah in repentance, all of you, O believers, that you might succeed.”

What this passage of the Muslim holy text portrays is, basically, how to avoid the male gaze. And not to jiggle their tits? Which, I guess, was very forward thinking by 600 BCE standards?

But there’s an important note to make. Notice how the woman should hide herself away from the male gaze, except from her family. And extended family. Where her husband, her husband’s brothers, father, male cousins, you get the theme here, should have free reign to gaze however they see fit. Suddenly, this remarkable armour against the male gaze becomes not a tool for the woman, but a tool for all the men in her life.

It says that her body, her beauty, is not hers to command. It is for the men close to her to command. To hide or flaunt as they see fit. This tool to avoid harassment turns also into a tool of control. Of domination.

And before any of you get started; no! This sort of misogynistic bullshit is not exclusive to Islam! Plenty of religions have old passages that are absolutely abhorrent by modern standards, not the least of which Judaism or Christianity. Take a look at Deuteronomy 22:28-29 (where a rapist can buy his victim to avoid punishment), First Timothy 1:9 (where women should dress modestly, not braid their hair, or wear jewelry), Proverbs 23:27-28 (where we are warned about whores’ ”deep ditches” and strange women’s ”narrow pits”), or just Peter 3:1 (where wives are told to subject themselves to their husbands).

It is almost as if organized religions are afraid of women and want to instil control over them with any means necessary…

Which should bring us back to the hijab, designed and legitimized as a way to control a woman’s body, and why legislation against it might not be a bad idea.

As previously mentioned, I am as a general rule against legislating away individual freedoms. And creating laws that would prevent people from wearing certain garments is particularly draconian in my point of view. It is not the place of the State to decide what I wear, or indeed if I chose to wear anything at all! Fuck ’em – Not their call to make.

But what we have here is a particularly seedy problem. If a woman’s reasons to wear a hijab is that she fears retribution, acid attack, being shipped off, beaten, killed, demeaned, exiled from her family, or just scorned, then that’s unacceptable. Just plain and simple unacceptable. Then she lives under a tyranny that needs to be ripped up by the root in any liberal society.

But what if she wants to wear the hijab? What if she wants, of her own accord, to follow a religion’s misogynistic tenets? What if she identifies with the head scarf, and considers that piece of clothing as fundamental to her being as someone might consider their hair or eyes? What if the woman considers the hijab a part of her culture? Her heritage and ancestry? Or what if, as was recently related to me, that the hijab is a comfort? A protection against an ever more judgemental and jeering world? What then? Would it not be wrong to forcefully take that part of her away?

Yes. Yes it would be. But let’s flip that around on its head. The hijab is a symbol of subjugation. It is intended to take away a woman’s power over her own body. That much is clear from the Quran. It is also undeniable that many women wear covers not by their own choice, but by someone else’s. Most often a man’s. So even if you wear the garment, not as an obligation or shackle, you do in some sense legitimize its intended function. You legitimize domination, tyranny, misogyny. You show to the world, to the women that suffer the hijab on pain of punishment, that it’s okay. That it’s right that women should hide themselves away. Or that men should hide away “their” women. Right now, in this time of human civilization, a person that wears a hijab by their own choice, communicates, whether intended or not, to the world that women should be hidden away. That modesty and subjugation is the correct path for a woman to live.

And that is not a very good message…

It could be fine, you know? Many many years ago, Christian countries legislated against selling off your daughters for a few pennies, or that rapists could get away with their dirty deed by paying off the woman’s father. And Christianity is still alive today. Christian culture is still alive today. For good or ill. Islam will not suddenly die off just because it relents a little bit in its draconian control of its female demographic. Syrian, or Egyptian, or Iraqi, or whatever’s culture will not just die off if it lets its women soar free. Free of shackles of divinely mandated modesty or subjugation. Free of masculine domination.

But people are a fearful bunch. They fear change. And they are very protective of what they consider their culture, or identity, or their rights. Even if those imagined rights include something so distasteful as owning their wives and daughters. Which is where legislation can step in. For governments, or cultures, to decide to put their feet down and say; “that boat don’t float here”.

And I, for one, do not think that the cultural and religious subjugation of women is a boat that deserves to float in a just society.

/Sebastian Lindberg 26/11-2019