Liz Jones is.
Jones is a fashion editor for the Daily Mail in the UK and that either means she is a big deal or she thinks she is a big deal. I’m not up on the taxonomy of pop doyennes in the UK so I plead ignorance. I also admit that I only discovered her a few weeks ago and was profoundly angered and saddened, all at the same time, when I read her essay about how gross it is to eat like a normal human being and how she can’t wait to return to her habit of starving herself to fashionable, morally superior emaciation and osteoporosis. (Lest you think I jest, go read it yourself.) Either way, for this stirring work of journalism, Jones was so “moved by the plight of Lubna Hussein, a Sudanese woman who faces 40 lashes for wearing trousers in public…” that she “decided to spend a week enveloped in what she [Hussein] should have been wearing.”
Jones then takes to the London Streets and her daily life in a burqa in the spirit of sympathy and openness with an open heart and mind, literally putting herself in the shoes (ok not really, she ends up risking purdah by wearing flipflops which show toe cleavage but you get my point) of women who wear burqas. It is not disengenuous at all. Not at all.
What’s our first clue that Jones is really, truly sincere and open to the experience? Oh my darlings, she writes about being “unaccountably afraid” to put on the burqa. Well, that’s not prejudicial language at all and it certainly doesn’t start the essay off with a good dose of hysteria. Nooooooo.
And come on. It is fabric – a lot of it, to be sure, but I’m not generally terrified by bits of black cotton, and as a fashion editor, I’m guessing that Jones is accustomed to dealing with – and even wearing! – textiles on a semi-regular basis, possibly even without hyperventilating.
Actually that’s not even the first overwrought bit. Let’s think about how she structures the piece. In the beginning, she’s moved by the plight of a Sudanese Muslim woman who will be whipped for not wearing a burqa. Liz is a clever chess player. In one move, she’s set herself up as a righteous liberal, liberated Western woman appropriately appalled at an evil, oppressive, southern, Muslim regime. Excellent. In the same move, she aligns herself with the poor, downtrodden, oppressed Muslim women. Most excellent. We’re not dealing in easy emotional archetypes about the West and the (scary, terrorist, Muslim) Rest, at all.
Hey. I will admit it. I’m an uber-liberal, white western feminist. I’m ideologically predisposed to worry about the burqa and what it represents. But I’m also worried that burqa-bashing is just another excuse to paint Muslims – specifically, Muslim men – as patriarchal fanatics, whom, if they can oppress their mothers and wives and daughters so tyranically, surely have no compunctions about flying planes into towers. All of them. They’re just like that.
So. The foreshadowing is there. This is not going to be a piece where she discovers anything or questions any of her assumptions. This results of this little experiment – ‘burqa tourism’ - were in far before Liz Jones got all dressed up and hit the streets.
And what exactly were her conclusions? Darling, I’m so glad you asked. Aside from dismissing the complaints of racism and poor treatment by actual Muslim women who wear burqas in London – she finds that in fact everyone is really kind and sympathetic to the clumsy and visibly oppressed except of course the token Arabic man who ‘shouts abuse’ at her – will those nasty brown immigrant Muslim men ever stop? – Jones discovers that she now understands marginalisation and objectification and it is so much worse for Muslim women than non-Muslim women. Non-Muslim women (including Jones, in an earlier piece called “What’s Really Oppressing Women Isn’t the Burka, It’s Their Breasts“) think they are oppressed because they are objectified on the basis of appearance (and breasts) and sexuality, but baby, that’s not the half of it.
Never mind that actual Muslim women who choose – and some women say that they do – to wear the burqa make the same argument.
Nope. Put all that aside, because the piece ends with Jones’ final pronouncement: “I find it disgusting that we allow British schoolgirls to be treated in this way.”
I’m skeptical. Methinks that the initially righteous sympathetic identification with Lubna Hussein was a front. Arguably, the real issue was always: should Muslims living in the UK be allowed to wear the burqa because hot damn it really irritates me? and isn’t it already enough that we’re allowing them to be brown?
Here’s an idea for her next piece. Ms Jones should paint herself brown and go and live with a somali family in the some appalling temporary accommodation in the east end of London. Let’s say a one bedroomed flat in Plaistow with two families living there. Then she should try and live for a week facing daily abuse from people as they try and live on £50 a week unable to work as the Home Office fuck around with their asylum application. Maybe then she’d begin to have a notion of their oppressive lives! I hate the Daily Mail!
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Hi Kelly,
This is another outstanding posting, and I did follow some of the hyperlinks to the world of Liz Jones’ stupidity. I love her week-by-week analysis of her intake. Why, oh why, didn’t she do a weekly analysis of whenever she took a dump?
I love her statement that when it comes to wearing the burqa, she felt like a racehorse. Nice simile. Didn’t know that racehorses wore burqas. Doesn’t that, like, interfere with their ability to run fast?
So Jones feels like she really knows what it’s like to be marginalized after ONE week of wearing a burka in England? That’s like me (I’m Jewish) saying that I know what the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe felt because I wore a yellow star in America for a week.
As a fellow feminist and as a breast cancer survivor whose had a double mastectomy with reconstruction, I’m very breast-sensitive. I get sick and tired of watching shows and seeing magazine covers about boob jobs. Then again, women do this to themselves, too. Women AND men do this to women. All I know is that the media doesn’t focus a thumbnail as much about male parts as female parts.
All I can say is Liz Jones doesn’t know squat. But you already knew that.
Thanks for the insightful posting.
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Excellent, insightful posting. You were spot on with your points on the featherbrained Liz Jones.
I love the part where she says she felt like a racehorse in that burqa.
Nice simile from a dimwit. I didn’t know racehorses wore burquas. Doesn’t that, like, interfere with their ability to run a race?
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A Little Tour by the Religious Voyeur: I’m Fasting for Ramadan
I’m scared to admit it – which, by my internal code of ethics, means that I must do so, immediately – but I’m fasting. I’m worried that my Fat Acceptance Friends will frown and sigh. I promise, it has nothing to do with weight loss, promoting disordered eating, or body hatred. No, it is way worse than that. Last week I blog-slapped Liz Jones for her sojourn into burqa tourism, but now I’m travelling that same path. Indeed, my darlings, I’m roadtripping on a little highway called called ‘cultural appropriation’ and also doing a little off-roading through …
[Reply]
A Little Tour by the Religious Voyeur: I’m Fasting for Ramadan
I’m scared to admit it – which, by my internal code of ethics, means that I must do so, immediately – but I’m fasting. I’m worried that my Fat Acceptance Friends will frown and sigh. I promise, it has nothing to do with weight loss, promoting disordered eating, or body hatred. No, it is way worse than that. Last week I blog-slapped Liz Jones for her sojourn into burqa tourism, but now I’m travelling that same path. Indeed, my darlings, I’m roadtripping on a little highway called called ‘cultural appropriation’ and also doing a little off-roading through …
[Reply]
A Little Tour by the Religious Voyeur: I’m Fasting for Ramadan
I’m scared to admit it – which, by my internal code of ethics, means that I must do so, immediately – but I’m fasting. I’m worried that my Fat Acceptance friends will frown and sigh. I promise, it has nothing to do with weight loss, promoting disordered eating, or body hatred. No, it is way worse than that. Last week I blog-slapped Liz Jones for her sojourn into burqa tourism, but now I’m travelling that same path. Indeed, my darlings, I’m roadtripping on a little highway called called ‘cultural appropriation’ and also doing a little off-roading through …
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