The women's movement learned a lot about multiculturalism during the 70s and 80s: that white women weren't necessarily welcome to prescribe behavior to women in other cultures. In Sex and Destiny, Germaine Greer reported that when she interviewed them, Arab women told her they like the veil, and their lives, and aren't interested in becoming like men. She described lives that sounded very full and happy, despite the restrictions, lives that made the hardship of dying for full personhood seem somewhat beside the point. Granted, it's a coopted existence, where your love for your family becomes your focus as well as the prison that keeps you in your private world. But think of the parallel: be a good, obedient girl and nothing will go wrong. Only bad girls get lashings, stonings, beheadings. It's easier to relinquish control to those who love you and protect you, than it is to give up everything, even your children, your parents, your home, your income, your life, for a freedom that may be short lived indeed. It's a lot to ask, but it's the "good" who must be taught to identify with and empathize with the "bad" in order for a women's movement to mean anything.

Postmodernist feminists took Greer's admonishment to heart, and nowadays you'll find few white women in the American feminist movement willing to tell a woman from another culture how she should live her life. It's terrible that women are killed for having sex, or can get lashings for driving or being with someone she's not related to, and we as a country should speak out about all such things (and we do, in places like Afghanistan, Sudan and Nigeria-- see the pattern?) It's echoed in America's unwillingness to truly confront our national blame-the-victim policies on domestic violence and rape, and the still-rigid roles that really plague both sexes, although women moreso.

Despite those failings, through the relentless broadcasting of our culture and values via Cartoon Network, CNN, and I Love Lucy reruns, we do provide a model, and the material and psychological incentive, for liberation, and if women want to fight and die as our foremothers once did to be considered full human beings, we will, as a nation, sometimes find a way to help; but you can't save someone who doesn't want to be saved.

American women are complicit in their own oppression, to a great degree, and so are Arab women. It's not easy to let go of the safety of traditional roles. It's dangerous for women anywhere, and the rewards aren't necessarily clear. Women aren't truly equal here. We just have a better shot at it.

When Czarina Hilarovna and her puppet-president husband were in the white-house, American Femunists were all over Islamic oppression of women like stink on dog-shit.

The Femunist movement's sudden disinterest in Islamic abuse of women is of substantially more recent vintage, and pretty much dates to the day "W" declared war on Saddam Insane.

The current Femunist zeitgeist is very simple: ANYTHING which in any way, shape, form, sort or kind even gives the appearance of supporting "W's" Mid-East policies is strictly anathema, no matter what it might be, P E R I O D; and any "sister" who strays from the flock and actually denounces fundamentaist Islamic whack-a-do abuse of women is to be excommunicated immediately for "supporting" Bush.

There's a really good word for this sort of thing: "Hypocrite".

Why don't you women talk to Muslim women who like Islam- NOT Ayaan Hirsi Ali who works for Bush and his Neo Con cabal.

The Muslim world is full of oppression from the top down. Its not just women. Muslim regimes like the Saudis are brought to power by the British.

I cook, clean, take care of the kids, AND pay all the family expenses. What does my wife have to do? Don't cheat on me. That includes not bringing men into the house, or even being close to men not of her family.

As for her showing her body to other men, she first has to answer to GOD. MEN do not dictate women's dress code, like Hew Heffner. As her husband, If I see cleavage, or backside, I will say: hey honey, I see this or that. And she will go Oh GOD!

What is the crime done? She should be able to be alone with other men? Is that a right? Or she should be able to show her buxom body in public? Go find another husband who likes that.

As for the Saudi incident, America can hardly fathom that issue. Most Muslims don't. Driving is a necessity. But maybe the judges were vindicitive just like American judges are when they throw the book at poor black men.