Saudi Arabia's morality queen

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This year's Miss Beautiful Morals, the Saudi 'inner beauty' contest, is nothing but a veiled celebration of female submission

'Spirit of compliance' – female submission is nothing to celebrate.
Photograph: Mahmud Hams/AFP/Getty Images

Meet Zainab al-Khatam, the winner of Saudi Arabia's second annual pageant celebrating "spiritual and filial beauty". Each contestant reportedly underwent training in "psychology, culture and law in Islam; family relations, public rights, social skills, health knowledge, volunteering ... as well as cosmetics".

Established last year by a Saudi women's organisation, and implying criticism of western beauty contests, the Miss Beautiful Morals competition focuses not outward appearances but on inner beauty, and the values that are often given less significance.

One of the founders, Khadra al-Mubarak, told al-Arabiya TV that the main objective was to redress this imbalance ... that women were increasingly beguiled by vacuous western values propagated by satellite TV, and that a celebration of virtue was long overdue.

But what, exactly, are these values? This year's winner is a blind 24-year-old woman who had managed to exhibit superlative "respect for her family, parents and society" – by staying at home after she had finished her studies, in order to take care of her family. She suffered in dignity and accepted her lot, her martyrdom becoming all the more poignant because of her disability. She is a stark contrast to another Saudi woman, Samar Badawi, who was sent to jail for disobeying her father.

The practice of celebrating self-immolation as the highest form of morality is endemic in some Arab societies and it has always struck me as a con – one that dupes women into compliance by elevating their submission into some form of virtue.

For example, "al-sutra" – an approbative term meaning to cover or conceal in order to preserve dignity – is one of the most highly prized and pernicious values in Sudanese society. It applies to both men and women and involves summoning up one's reserves of strength and endurance: one should not chase family debts too aggressively, or be impolite to imposing guests, or make a scene in front of strangers, or air the dirty laundry of an unhappy marriage.

But women wear the cloak of sutra more readily in order to prove their good breeding, and indeed compete in their own informal pageants after which the "winners" are selected. The prize may be marriage to an eligible bachelor who has heard through the female grapevine that the candidate dropped out of school to take care of her ailing mother, or gave away her inheritance to build her family a new home. It appears churlish not to honour these feats of selflessness, but sutra is disempowering and implants the spirit of compliance, ensuring that no matter how far afield the body travels, the mind is subjugated.

When I was growing up, the female role model I was encouraged to look up to and emulate was not some trailblazing example, but a middle-aged family friend who, as a wife and mother, had suffered the most and complained the least.

Her husband's brazen infidelity she bore in dignity, his squandering of money and their eventual impoverishment she tolerated with pride, even going out to work herself to make ends meet. Her sons' prodigality she contained, always composed and Sphinx-like in her poise – a paragon of virtue. Among wealthy women, she sometimes cynically exaggerated her poverty. Unlike others conned into suffering in silence in order to score social brownie points, she realised that in deliberately embracing her position, she transcended it.

This is by no means exclusive to Sudanese or Arab societies. It is a hallmark of conservatism and slavery to traditional values. Lady Chatterley and Out of Africa's Isak Dinesen were both ostracised for not maintaining a stiff upper lip, and there is a universal human regard for martyrdom and comely suffering victims.

But how about celebrating some volition? Some empowerment? It is not necessarily a binary situation. Zainab's disability did not necessarily oblige her to give up on having a role outside the home and living as independent a life as possible, as if that were somehow an immoral objection to God's will and a disrespect of Saudi values.

Zainab's morals may be beautiful, but society's reasons for celebrating them are very ugly indeed.

by: Nesrine Malik

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'Yes, women can' – Brazil's first 'presidenta' pledges gender equality

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Dilma Rousseff promises to fight for women's rights in election victory speech

Dilma Rousseff addresses supporters during her victory meeting in Brasilia.
Photograph: Marcelo Sayao/EPA

Exactly 60 years after the election of Brazil's first female MP, the country's first female president has promised to fight for women's rights with the battle cry: "Yes, women can."

Speaking after her historic election on Sunday night, Dilma Rousseff echoed US president Barack Obama's "Yes, we can" slogan, telling supporters: "Equal opportunities for men and women are an essential principle of democracy.

"I would like for fathers and mothers to look into their daughters' eyes today and tell them: 'Yes, women can.' I would like to register my first post-election commitment: to honour Brazilian women so that this unprecedented fact becomes a natural event."

Rousseff, 62, who was elected with 56% of the vote and became the eighth elected female president in Latin America and the Caribbean, will take office on 1 January. She added that she would fight for greater opportunities for women "in businesses, civil institutions … and in the whole of our society".

Brazil's incoming president is widely tipped to promote several women to government positions, among them Maria das Graças Foster, a director at Brazil's state-run energy company, Petrobras. Foster is rumoured to be in line either to take over as the company's chief executive or to head a ministry.

Marta Suplicy, São Paulo's former mayor and a woman that the local press call Rousseff's "first friend", was elected to Brazil's senate with more than 8m votes and will work closely with the new president.

Nilcéa Freire, the academic who led President Lula's special secretariat for women's policies, may also get a role.

Fátima Pacheco Jordão, a Brazilian sociologist, said Rousseff's allusion to the importance of women in democracy was a major advance that went beyond emotion and rhetoric.

"Most important in this feminist-tinged speech was that she described the advance of gender equality issues as one of the foundations of democracy," she said. "Never has a [Brazilian] president treated the gender question in this way."

Jordão said Rousseff's recognition of the "gender deficit" gave her hope that she would follow women-friendly policies such as those introduced by Chile's former president Michelle Bachelet, now head of UN Women.

"It is possible [Rousseff] may introduce specific policies that are better than Lula's without ever having promised them," she added.

Despite excitement over the election of Brazil's first "presidenta", most senior cabinet posts will still be occupied by men. "The proportion of women in politics in Brazil is very limited, worse than many Latin American countries and several in Africa," said Jordão, pointing out that Rousseff's campaign had focused on continuity not gender issues.

Whereas Obama's campaign slogan had been "Yes, we can", Jordão said Rousseff's could have been: "Yes – it's under control."

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The Arab myth of western women

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When I wrote last month about western stereotypes of Arab men, several commenters, including WeAreTheWorld, suggested that Arab stereotypes of western women would also be worth exploring.

Just as Arab men are stereotyped and pigeonholed in the west, western women hover somewhere between myth and fantasy in the Arab world. "We're loose, obsessed with sex, batter our men, are bad mothers, and can't cook," my wife joked, summing up pithily some common Arab prejudices.

Like the traditional orientalist image of the harem, Arab views of the contemporary western woman are also highly sexualised. In fact, many Arab men, particularly those with little contact with the west, have this fantasy of western women that comes straight out of Playboy magazine or the grainy images of pirate pornos.

In this view, western women are oversexed, promiscuous and have revolving doors in their knickers. "A typical Egyptian male is a firm believer that any western woman is an easy catch and would not mind at all having sex with complete strangers," observes Ahmed, an old college friend.

This can lead to hassle and harassment for western women travelling or living in Egypt and some other Arab countries, although in places like Yemen men will either just stare or the western woman will become invisible like the local women, as my wife found while travelling alone through the country. Of course, given the potent mix of sexual repression, poverty, ignorance, the growing disappearance of the traditional model of respect for women and the failure to replace it with a modern equivalent, you don't have to be western to be harassed on the streets.

Some men will hit on western women out of the conviction Ahmed described, while others who understand the west better will do so out of simple opportunism, hoping that they will "get lucky" with a woman from a society where sex does not carry the same heavy restriction for her as it does for her Arab sisters. In fact, some men want the best of both worlds: a bit of fun with western women, then settling down with a traditional local woman.

Another form of opportunism is the allure of escape. "I think sometimes it's not the western woman who's so attractive, as the lure of her passport. It sometimes seems to spell freedom," observes Angela, a Jerusalem-based acquaintance.

Among certain men, this myth of the western Aphrodite is complemented by another delusion: that western women find the men in their own countries too emasculated and weak and so prefer a "real man". In fact, some blokes I've met entertain the belief that Egyptian men have a good reputation among western women for their virility and sexual prowess.

This misperception is reinforced in their minds by the fact that some women do come to Egypt for sexual tourism or get caught up in whirlwind relationships filled with old-fashioned romance, expressions of undying love, passion and charm. "He swept me off my feet with his sweet words, compliments, attentive gestures, romance, and warmth," said one European woman who got drawn to a charmer with a darker side.

So, which Arabs have the most negative views of western women? Well, probably those from the most conservative societies. "From my personal experience, the worst Arab men I found were the ones from Saudi Arabia," a journalist with a leading Portuguese newspaper told me. "They think that all foreign women are prostitutes and they try to treat them like that."

What is behind this belief that western women are somehow sex-crazed? Part of it relates to the conservative Arab fixation on women's sexuality in general. According to this outlook, women's sexual appetites are so insatiable that, if they are left to their own devices, they turn into uncontrollable nymphomaniacs and temptresses luring men to crash into the rocks of lust.

As every woman is carrying a volatile sex bomb that will explode upon contact with freedom, in Arab societies where women have entered the workforce en masse and reached the highest academic and professional echelons, they have often done so by emphasising their "virtuousness", that their independence hasn't made them "bad women".

A similar phenomenon is occurring in other modernising patriarchal societies, such as India. Even in the west, the pioneering women in academia and the professions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries often lived like nuns.

It should be pointed out that many religious Arabs, including women, do not believe that Arab women are oppressed, but that they enjoy a different, and superior, kind of liberty. In an interesting turning of the tables, conservatives are reciprocating the western interest in the position of Arab and Muslim women by examining the "oppressed" status of the western woman.

In an apparent bid to answer the charges of western orientalism, the Saudi-based conservative Islamic thinktank, al-Medinah Centre for the Study of Orientalism, which has developed its own brand of "occidentalism", has a section dedicated to western women. Another conservative Islamic site targeted at women asks "who will end the injustice against western women?"

"How can they [the west] demand the ending of what they see as injustice against Saudi women, when their own women are drowning in seas of injustice?" asks the author, pointing, paralleling his western counterparts, to the prevalence of domestic violence and rape in the west – as well as pointing to questionable surveys which show that the majority of western women actually wish to return to the home.

by: Khaled Diab

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Woman Fired for Large Breasts

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A woman claims that she was fired from her position at a health care facility over the size of her breasts. This newest claim has enraged a nation of feminists who are standing up and hoping to fight back against such discrimination. However, the situation may be more complicated than first glance. Still, the case is in the hands of famed muckraker Gloria Allred who plans to spread the news about her clients treatment at the hands of her male managers.

Amy Blakely claims that she was told that the size of her breasts was a distraction to the male employees at the center. Furthermore, she was informed that the men could not and would not concentrate during meetings because their gaze went directly to her sizable breasts.

Blakely then claims that she was sexually harassed on a daily basis followed by a performance review that said she was too “sensuous” to continue being effective in her current position. She then said that she was fired as a direct result of her breast size.

Blakely took her case to Allred who is known for being a champion for women who have been wronged by the system. It did not take long before Allred had fired off a lawsuit and a rather nasty letter to the company.

The company has responded saying that there is no truth to the claims made by Blakely through Allred and that they will fight against the allegations once their lawyer has had a chance to review the case.

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