Women Drivers

God, that’s so depressing.

In the US, similar fears about women and cars existed in the early 20th century. Obviously not quite as extreme, but fathers went nuts worrying that cars provided their daughters with a place outside their supervision where they could *gasp* have sex before marriage. During the ’20s, the KKK made a point of looking for young couples in backseats along the sides of roads, extending their punishment even to white men found despoiling the honor of innocent young women.
The current concern with internet chat rooms, though of a slightly different flavor (a larger concern with child molesters, to be specific), I think comes from the same general fear of a loss of control.

We choose our allies wisely…

“Driving by women leads to evil,” Munir al-Shahrani wrote in a letter to the editor of the Al-Watan daily.

If you dropped the words “by women” from the above sentence, you have the world’s present-day problems in a nutshell — everything from road rage to holy wars.

My simplistic, yet (hopefully) amusing observation.

Those of us who would like to see change in Saudi Arabia should take careful note of the driving license story. When the lid comes off a repressed society, what often surfaces first and most fiercely are the ancient prejudices of the people. When the British proles finally blew off steam at the end of the highly reactionary 18th Century, they didn’t attack the rich or the establishment. They attacked the long-mistreated English Papists in riots as horrendous as anything that was going on in Paris in the same era.

A revolution in Saudi Arabia would most likely take the form of religious fascism. By the same token, whatever revolutionary potential exists in the U.S. is on the right.

The advantage a woman driving alone would have is that she’s in a car, and can lock the doors and drive away from or run over anyone trying to attack her. As long as she doesn’t get out of the car, this negates men’s greater average strength and arm length.

Thus would-be assaulters and rapists would have to be in a car they wouldn’t mind risking severely damaging in the process of putting the woman driver’s car out of commission. Or would have to shoot at the car, which due to the risk to other people on the street I think even the most reactionary police and society would take exception to.

fergal
Please spare me your wild generalisations. Qaradawi is a fool (or worse). But people in charge of states are always of more consequence than people who aren’t. Qaradawi, to repeat, is a fool. But he’s not actually in charge of anything. It’s not him, personally, who pays the bills of the torturers, the killers, the anti-semites. Nor is it him who is indirectly linked with Al-Qaeda (as forces high up in the Saudi Government certainly are).

In any case, Qaradawi is not my problem because I am not responsible for him. My taxes are not used to subsidise quasi-legal arms deals with his (non-existent) government, as happens with the Saudis, nor, when he tortures British citizens (which he hasn’t done, to the best of my knowledge) does Tony Blair, hemm and haww and do nothing (as happened when the Saudis kidnapped and tortured innocent British citizens).

Words are nothing, deeds are everything.

Something I’ve wondered about is that over the next few decades, perhaps the women’s right to vote in Iraq with have strong reprecussions in surrounding states. Perhaps this is merely the beginning of the changes to come.

Sounds like Saudi Arabia has their own Phyllis Schalafy. How dare women think they might be real people!!

Big deal, Jet. Any woman born in Saudi Arabia is automatically better off then probably 95% of all women on the planet. I wish I could get all excited about them not being able to drive their Jaguars alone, but sorry, I can’t.

I am not aware of the Saudis practicing female mutilation, but they probably do routinely practice male genital mutilation, just like the Americans and others. Go to your local hospital and protest that atrocity.

And what murder and abuse are you talking about?

It’s good to have a home, Donna. A half of the world’s population live on less than $2/day. I suspect many of them would kill to be able to drive with their male relatives.

abb1 – Do you value your freedom so little, or do you just totally take it for granted?

I want to see that story in the press, accompanied by the picture of Shrub holding hands on a romantic walk with a Saudi Prince last week.

There have been several posts on this at a Saudi blog, recently: [1], [2], [3]

abb1, come on, give it a rest…

Besides, that’s the account of an American woman who moved to Saudi, and considers perverts men who chat her up in the supermarket, has her husband beat them and then calls the police on them. Of course you can’t help by sympathise with the men there.

I doubt everyone is in that situation even in Saudi Arabia.

If you don’t mind a serious, pedantic point, the rules for women, and ‘sanctions’ – official or DIY – for transgressing them, are the same as in Pakistani rural villages where they probably don’t see many Jaguars and where you won’t likely find women who freely embraced the local lifestyle, either.

And I’m not very fond of the use of women’s rights issues in Arab or Islamic countries as a prop for ideological ends that have little to do with real concerns for human or civil rights, but those rights are not predicated on a person’s wealth, and it’s entirely possible to be appalled at different kinds of inequalities at the same time – wether it’s the legal status of women, the economic differences within or between countries, or the treatment of domestic labourers (many of which, guess what, are women, too…).

abb1, I don’t think you could have made your point any clearer. Or more entertaining. Just wanted to boringly point out that there is a serious issue beneath it, tempting as it may be to overlook it.

(Actually, you could have quoted an even more charming bit from that blog, the involuntary irony in the description of the second driver:

He came from a more wealthy family that fell on hard times so his father paid a large amount of money to get him a sponsor here so he could get a job. You can tell he was privileged because he was so lazy and thought everything would be handed to him.)