Arab women are becoming a dangerous phenomenon. And they are spreading
and causing so much mischief these days!! In Kuwait, for instance, they
won big in the recent elections. For the first time in the history of
the country, four women were elected to the parliament, thus ending a
fifty year-old- male monopoly over politics. The victory of Rola
Dashti, Salwa al-Jassar, Aseel al-Awadi, and Massouma al-Mubarak is
impressive considering that women in Kuwait won the right to vote and
run for office only in 2005.
The win is also impressive in light of the fact that Kuwaiti salafi
Islamists demanded that people boycott women candidates, arguing (if you can
call it that) that voting for women is a sin in Islam since the prophet
supposedly said that no nation will prosper if it is led by women. I
don't know if the people concluded they knew their Islamic history
better than the benighted salafis, or that they just decided to take
their chances with poverty, disease, and eternal damnation. The result,
however, is known: they voted the women in and the salafis out.
But those who live in dread of mischievous women--i.e. women who refuse
to stay in their "right" place--could not have missed this news item
about the "Boyats." The term "Boyat" is an Arabization of "boy" and it
is coined by some
women who prefer to assume a masculine appearance and behavior. It's
the Gulfi version of "Butch."
Frankly, it's hard for anyone to miss the screaming headline in Al Quds al Arabi
warning that the phenomenon of "masculine" women is "sweeping" the Gulf
region. And how could we miss that it's a "dangerous" phenomenon with
sentences like this: (my literal translation)
"Despite the absence of official numbers, social experts and the media
warn of the danger of the spread of this phenomenon and are ringing the
bell of danger, while society and psychological experts warn of the
danger of the spread of this phenomenon."
Get it? The "Boyats," or the "fourth sex" as the media calls them, are
dangerous and "spreading!!" So dangerous, in fact, that they have been
raised as a national problem in the Bahraini Parliament and have
been the victims of a year-long public "education" campaign in the
Emirates called: "Excuse me! I'm a Girl." The campaign, part of an initiative by the Ministry of Education called "Together Towards a
Society Free of Deviance," seeks (what else?) to warn the Boyats about
the danger of their behavior and to teach them how to protect and cure
themselves from this "illness."
So they have workshops to teach women how to be girlie girls, probably
using push-up bras and Haifa Wehbe videos as
instructional material. I wonder if they would start doing what the
American police not long ago did: raiding public places and arresting
women who do not have at least three "womanly" items on them as proof
of their "natural" gender identity. Isn't it funny how something we are
told is always "natural"--like being a
girl or boy--requires the intervention of lofty institutions like family,
state, and police to uphold it?
But neither workshops nor police will stop mischievous women,
like the victorious Kuwaiti Parliamentarians and the Kuwaiti Boyats, from exposing the lies about women's "natural" place.
And, yes, they are dangerous! Beautifully so!
