What the ?

I just read the article ZahraJ posted in her ilog about Iran rolling back women’s rights. All other issues aside, what I fail to understand is how locking up women helps anyone.

Women have been considered a liability for centuries. Since we’re generally smaller than men of our own race, I can understand that women are more likely to be attacked--who the hell actually picks on someone his own size, right? What that translates into, however, has changed. In a number of places, an assault on a woman may well signify the end of the family because of the tangled issue of ’honor’.

Now, to me, what that seems to mean is that since there is no way for a man to know for sure that any children produced are biologically his, and since he’s the one with the property-name-honor-family to pass on, he needs to lock the woman up and make sure no other man has access to her. If it turns out that some man has had access, be it simply a chance meeting at the well when she went to collect water or whatever random example you can think of, she’s suspect. Because, of course, she has no wit or brain or personality or concept of right and wrong and all that. She’s just a thing.

This is compounded by the fact that women are seldom asked what they want--their function is to grow old enough to breed, and then be given over to whoever their fathers choose so that they can get on with their god-given duty. Maybe the men (and women) that do this to their daughters realize that a person treated as such might very well have no compunction about running away from this. Maybe this is why, despite the confidence they show in their ’system’ and way of life, they feel compelled to police their female chattel. If it’s such a great system, why would you need to be so retentive about it?

Besides, what would these women run away to?

All this is then dressed up in tradition and religion and what not. I doubt people really know why the whole keep-the-woman-hidden thing is such a big deal; it just is and that’s good enough for them.

But, in places where women are not limited to a single function, where they are economic entities in their own right, why should this honor business apply? Is it because we still, deep down, function according to this basic biological principle--even though women are no longer necessarilly bound by it--and by cultural extension, buy into the concept of the ’untainted woman’?

Women are, for the most part, an untapped resource. We need workers, yet we deliberately do everything we can to immobilize half of our potential work force. As someone once put it, doing that is akin to ’shooting yourself in the foot while being chased by a steam-roller’. But I suppose our illustrious leaders will realize that only when they’re being ground under that steam-roller.