Allowing women drivers will doom us all

[wautd]

You can't make this shit up

Allowing women drivers in Saudi Arabia will be 'end of virginity'

Allowing women drivers in Saudi Arabia will tempt them into sex, promote pornography and create more homosexuals, according to some conservative Muslim scholars.

Academics at the Majlis al-Ifta' al-A'ala, which is Saudi Arabia's highest religious council, said the relaxation of the rules would inevitably lead to “no more virgins”.

Saudi Arabia is the only country in the world where women are banned from driving.

The academics, working in conjunction with Kamal Subhi, a former professor at the conservative King Fahd University, produced the conclusions in a report for the country's legislative assembly, the Shura Council.

It warned that allowing women to drive would "provoke a surge in prostitution, pornography, homosexuality and divorce".

Within 10 years of the ban being lifted, it claimed, there would be "no more virgins" in the Islamic kingdom.

It pointed out that "moral decline" could already be seen in those other Muslim countries in which women are allowed to drive.

In the report Prof Subhi described sitting in a coffee shop in an unnamed Arab state where "all the women were looking at me".

"One made a gesture that made it clear that she was available,” he said. “This is what happens when women are allowed to drive.”

Women caught driving in Saudi face corporal punishment.

In September, Shaima Jastaniya, 34, a Saudi woman, was sentenced to 10 lashes with a whip after being caught driving in Jeddah.

There has been strong protest in the country about the sentence, which was later overturned by King Abdullah, and about the law generally but resistance to reform remains strong among the traditionally conservative royal family and clerics.

The Saudi government is currently considering a proposal to ban women – already forced to cover up most of their body in public – from even displaying their eyes, if they are judged too “tempting”.

[KhorneFlakes]

As usual, the crazier Muslims demonstrate their prudishness and closet misogyny. Hell, I can hear the dread, that raw fear that women drivers will somehow kill babies and destroy the Earth or something.

At times the things crazies will say has been among the most entertaining things I've ever heard.

But seriously, this is dumb. As if that wasn't obvious. Let's just hope that this actually doesn't pass, hmm?

[Lusankya]

I find it hilarious that this guy thinks that all the women in that coffee shop were looking at him. Who does he think he is, anyway? Brad Pitt?

[Grumman]

Allowing women drivers in Saudi Arabia will tempt them into sex, promote pornography and create more homosexuals, according to some conservative Muslim scholars.

So what they're saying is that allowing women to drive means more lesbian porn?

...and this is the downside?

[Serafina]

Because women are obviously not meant to have their own sexuality. If they did, you'd have to respect it, and that would mean that you can't have sex with them anytime you want.*

*Of course you have to respect the person the woman belongs to, namely her father, and marry her first.

[Raw Shark]

I find it hilarious that this guy thinks that all the women in that coffee shop were looking at him. Who does he think he is, anyway? Brad Pitt?

Yeah, that was my first reaction: He's like a homophobe in front of a gay bar with the, "OMFG, I can't go in there! They all want me!" Dare to dream, pal.

I'd like to hear more about this apparently-unambiguous availability-clarifying gesture, also... did she repeatedly insert an index finger into a ring made of her other index finger and thumb while making bold eye contact and inquisitively arching an eyebrow?

[Feil]

Well, they're right about the results of women driving. Being mobile means more freedom, which means more chances for sexual agency. More sexual agency means more sex, more sex means more sex with women because some women like other women. And if you can't drive to a porn studio, you can't make a porn. If you can escape your husband without getting arrested for driving and then savagely beaten by government thugs, you have a better chance of getting a divorce. If women are slaves whose purpose in existence is to get raped by their husbands until they get pregnant and bear him children, and absolutely guarantee that any children born are his, it makes sense to keep them from driving. The problem is that the academics referenced are evil, not that they're stupid.

[Number Theoretic]

*Of course you have to respect the person the woman belongs to, namely her father, and marry her first.

But before you marry her, you'll have to date her father or her brother. And if they approve of you, you are free to go.

[Mayabird]

I'd like to hear more about this apparently-unambiguous availability-clarifying gesture, also... did she repeatedly insert an index finger into a ring made of her other index finger and thumb while making bold eye contact and inquisitively arching an eyebrow?

What she probably did, from reading about other incidents like this, is that she was smiling while looking somewhat generally in his direction instead of casting her eyes down and looking sad and beaten-down. A smile, clearly, means that she wants him, and couldn't possibly mean anything else, like "wow, this tea is really good" or "the weather is nice today" or "my best friend is coming back tonight for a visit" or any number of other reasons why people might possibly feel good enough to smile. Nope, clearly she wanted to hump the angry heavily-bearded seventy-to-eighty year old.

When I say 'incidents' I mean things like women in other Muslim countries working at McDonalds and nearly getting raped because they smiled at some guy (a requirement as part of their job, which they need in order for their family to not starve) and they interpreted this smile as obviously meaning sex so the guy attacked them. It's messed up.

[MarshalPurnell]

From most accounts Saudi Arabia is positively saturated with situational homosexuality due to the strict segregation of the sexes, encouraged by the rather ambiguous Arab cultural attitudes toward pederasty. If young men and women had more opportunities to meet in a social context free of direct supervision of family and attack by the religious police, I suspect there would be significantly less homosexual behavior in the kingdom. There might be more self-proclaimed or exclusive homosexuals, but the creation of heterosexual erotic outlets would reduce the overall number of homosexual encounters (and for that matter, Al Qaeda recruitment) to some considerable degree.

[Simon_Jester]

I get the feeling that the segregated sexes in Saudi Arabia cause another set of problems too- Saudi men grow up with very little direct knowledge of how to interact with women in any meaningful sense. How do they think? What kinds of things make them happy, or unhappy? The average Saudi man does not know- he probably hears people tell him that all women are lust-crazed lascivious temptresses more often than the sees actual women, as distinct from "people swathed in burlap sacks and forbidden to speak to me."

So instead of knowing these things on the level that all but the most clueless social-freakazoid people in the West know them, the average Saudi has little or no idea. Which makes misogyny much easier to set up as an institution, if I'm right. The average Saudi man would wind up with misconceptions about women as profound as a deeply clueless and awkward man in the West. Something like "she's smiling in my general direction" translating as a sincere belief that "she wants to have sex with me right now" would then be par for the course. I'm sure we can imagine the sort of person likely to think that in Western society, and the first obvious question ask such a person is necessarily "have you ever spoken to a woman for more than one minute in your life?"

And the Saudi man who is laboring under these misconceptions about gender and women would go about his life expecting to be able to enforce his expectations as if they were objective facts. Because women in Saudi Arabia do not have rights and are stuck going along with whatever the men want.

[Zed]

It should be noted that some of the women promoting female driving are using the exact inverse of the argument - if women don't require male drivers, they won't have to rely on men to get anywhere and hence will have less opportunities for adultery.

Also, there is doubt about the royal pardon for the woman mentioned in the article. The 'pardon' was communicated by a nephew's Twitter account, as far as I recall.

[Justforfun000]

Islamic extremists seem to be getting a lot of press lately...there was a story recently about another nutbar who suggested women should be banned from grocery shopping items like bananas and cucumbers because it would give them impure sexual thoughts.

Of course it's preaching to the choir here...but I just wish we could wake these morons up from their medieval idiocy and actually start living like we're in the 21st century.

[Chirios]

Islamic extremists seem to be getting a lot of press lately...there was a story recently about another nutbar who suggested women should be banned from grocery shopping items like bananas and cucumbers because it would give them impure sexual thoughts.

Of course it's preaching to the choir here...but I just wish we could wake these morons up from their medieval idiocy and actually start living like we're in the 21st century.

Not even close to the dumbest thing Saudi clerics have written in the past dude. Boys shouldn't get taught by female teachers, apparently, because they'll get so sexually frustrated that they'll fail in school, fail in life generally, track down their female teachers and murder them and their families.

[Malagar]

Well, they're right about the results of women driving. Being mobile means more freedom, which means more chances for sexual agency. More sexual agency means more sex, more sex means more sex with women because some women like other women. And if you can't drive to a porn studio, you can't make a porn. If you can escape your husband without getting arrested for driving and then savagely beaten by government thugs, you have a better chance of getting a divorce. If women are slaves whose purpose in existence is to get raped by their husbands until they get pregnant and bear him children, and absolutely guarantee that any children born are his, it makes sense to keep them from driving. The problem is that the academics referenced are evil, not that they're stupid.

Did you miss the part that said that they would run out of virgins within a decade?

[someone_else]

Did you miss the part that said that they would run out of virgins within a decade?

That's true. (true-ish, the number of virgins will decrease significantly). More freedom (also) means more sex. That's one of the goals of younger people, you know. By giving the other half of the young population access to cars you double the chances of X meeting Y.

Not that any encounter should end with sex (although I'd surely like it ), but the amount of such occurrences would double at least.

[Stark]

Since this reaction is a fear of social change and social change is arguably the point of the change in policy, why is anyone surprised? All kinds of social changes are resisted on similar fear-based grounds all around the world.

The old guy likes the way things are, and when he goes places things are different he is uncomfortable and doesn't like it. This is *hardly* unusual. The only contention is that the changes he fears are actually positives... even if they aren't for him.

[Malagar]

Did you miss the part that said that they would run out of virgins within a decade?

That's true. (true-ish, the number of virgins will decrease significantly). More freedom (also) means more sex. That's one of the goals of younger people, you know. By giving the other half of the young population access to cars you double the chances of X meeting Y.

Not that any encounter should end with sex (although I'd surely like it ), but the amount of such occurrences would double at least.

True, but that is still a far cry from everyone having sex.

[Simon_Jester]

Islamic extremists seem to be getting a lot of press lately...there was a story recently about another nutbar who suggested women should be banned from grocery shopping items like bananas and cucumbers because it would give them impure sexual thoughts.

Of course it's preaching to the choir here...but I just wish we could wake these morons up from their medieval idiocy and actually start living like we're in the 21st century.

Much of this idiocy isn't even medieval- in medieval times people were too busy with things like subsistence farming and barbarian invasions to waste time and energy on ridiculously extensive segregation of the sexes and outlawing cucumbers because they might remind women of penises. The fundamentalist portions of the Muslim world have gotten harsher about that in the past few centuries, really- in many cases going to extreme lengths to invent misogynistic doctrines to legislate women out of the public community.

They seem, consciously or subconsciously, to know that this is a source of strength and a way for them to maintain the necessary level of collective madness for their fanaticism to pass unopposed.