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Female Producers in Saudi Arabia: "Did you have to wear the black thing?"

50 points by garret 18y ago

evannyx 18y ago
why is this on HN?
- sounddust 18y ago
  The focus of Hacker News is going to be anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes a lot more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
  - biohacker42 18y ago
    I've always found the above troubling. It seems obvious to me anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity will quickly transform the site into interesting news, but not hacker news. Perhaps if it was a hacker's instead of one's?
    - sounddust 18y ago
      Perhaps, but I think that in general, people who search for things that satisfy their intellectual curiosity are very much overlapped with those who are hackers (even if their hacking is not necessarily applied to technology). As long as the content is interesting and the discussion is respectful and intellectual (which it currently is), then I think it's fine. If the quality of the site begins to degrade with popularity, then it can always be made more restrictive.
      - Silentio 18y ago
        I would agree with this. I wouldn't call myself a hacker in the traditional sense of the word. I dabble in HTML and CSS but other than that I'm not much of a programmer. I am here, however, because the articles that come up are interesting and the discourse that happens in the comments section is always high minded and interesting. Coming to visit Hacker News exclusively over a place like Reddit has been a breath of fresh air. I hope things like this article keep coming up alongside posts about hacking more specifically.
        coryrc 18y ago
        "things like this article" are exactly why reddit is no longer the way it once was. You will destroy HN with your wish.
        gaius 18y ago
        So flag it.
        pg 18y ago
        Not true. This article could easily have been on Reddit in the first year. What ruined Reddit was (a) an influx of 14 year olds, who (b) were allowed to continue to behave as they had on Digg or wherever else they came from.
        biohacker42 18y ago
        But wasn't the influx of 14 year olds driven by general interest articles, which very slowly got less interesting and more general? How could that slow boil be prevented?
        pg 18y ago
        I think the 14 year olds were attracted by a sense of lawlessness, most visible in the long, highly editorialized titles and the trollish comments. It wasn't so much general interest articles that signalled the decline of Reddit as partisan political ones. I.e. articles that didn't merely involve politics, but were instances of it.
        pg 18y ago
        BTW, let me add that by "14 year olds" I mean people who behave like 14 year olds. Actual 14 year olds are welcome here so long as we can't tell.
        LogicHoleFlaw 18y ago
    - a-priori 18y ago
      Unusual and interesting perspectives on the world's cultures in my mind definitely satisfy the criteria of intellectual curiousity.
    - pg 18y ago
      I've always found the above troubling. It's been the definition of on topic for about a year and a half, and the site's still fine, so it seems to work.
- theoneill 18y ago
  "Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or egregiously offtopic, you can flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did." http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - biohacker42 18y ago
    In his defense, I don't think he was suggesting it's either spam or egregiously off topic. What bothers curmudgeons like me and him is the gentle slope towards Everybody News.
    - michaelneale 18y ago
      I was worried about that over 6 months ago, and in that time it hasn't got worse then it was then, so heres hoping it stays that way ! (just a single data point, but its something !). Do you think it is "sliding" over time? Or are you just (rightly so) being vigilant ?
      - biohacker42 18y ago
        I do have a subtle feeling it's sliding but that's very likely just my paranoia.
    - Scriptor 18y ago
      Also, the title of the submission is poorly worded, suggesting that the Arab producers were asking the question.
deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
josefresco 18y ago
Great episode of No Reservations, and I was thrilled to see this behind-the-scenes look at the team behind the cameras.
marvin 18y ago
And you know how all of them responded to women in charge? Great. Actually, they were a lot more than great. They were about the most warm, wonderful, welcoming group of people that you could possibly imagine. I've heard the opposite..not about Saudi Arabians, though. My mother was the boss of an Iranian immigrant, and he was apparently completely unable to respect instructions given by a woman. And we are not talking about burger-flipping here, but pharmaceutical production. This is an anecdote answered with an anecdote, but let's not put this whole cultural difference under a chair. Women aren't regarded as the professional equals of men in all parts of the world. I'm not starting a gender debate here; in some ways it is a pretty interesting difference. Especially if you see that those Arabian cultures that are even more "different" (polygamy, for instance) actually have a lot of similarities to promiscuous life in the West..at least from the male's point of view. There are a lot of facts about morale and life in these societies that doesn't come to light in any politically correct discussion. I wish I had a better skill for languages so I could go over there and see these things first-hand...
- blurry 18y ago
  I've experienced a bit of muslim culture first-hand and it's not even close to the cutesy image you get from this article. The author sees herself as a culturally sensitive critical thinker ("before you think I drank the koolaid...") but she is far from it. Take her cliched argument about the advantages of abbaya. If completely covering one's face and body is so desirable, why are women, and only women, forced into it under the threat of extreme corporal punishment and imprisonment? And how could she miss the fact that not speaking unless spoken to and making sure to always look down (to name just a couple things) is an integral part of wearing the garment? Gender apartheid is just as cruel and ugly as race apartheid. Extolling the virtues of full body cover for women is quite like saying that working cotton fields is really good for blacks, what with all that fresh air and exercise. Ignorant at best.
  - michaelneale 18y ago
    >Gender apartheid is just as cruel and ugly as race apartheid. That nicely sums up my thoughts on it - thankyou !
dominik 18y ago
Something from the article worth quoting: "It's saving that kind of intimacy for those that are close to you, your friends and family, who have earned the privilege. For the first time, I saw that the abbaya may have a role in protecting women, and not as something simply designed to control them." Once upon a time, the same sort of idea existed in the West, in the lost art of modesty (buried alongside chivalry nowadays). The idea that not everyone need be exposed to everything. That some things are better saved and not sold. How many times in the United States do men look at women not as persons but as objects? Seeing not the woman as she is, but merely as she appears -- not respecting her as a person but instead consuming her as a visual image. Whether in Saudi Arabia or in the United States, the first principle to keep in mind involves respect for the human person as such -- man or woman.

50 points by garret 18y ago

evannyx 18y ago

why is this on HN?

sounddust 18y ago
The focus of Hacker News is going to be anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes a lot more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
- biohacker42 18y ago
  I've always found the above troubling. It seems obvious to me anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity will quickly transform the site into interesting news, but not hacker news. Perhaps if it was a hacker's instead of one's?
  - sounddust 18y ago
    Perhaps, but I think that in general, people who search for things that satisfy their intellectual curiosity are very much overlapped with those who are hackers (even if their hacking is not necessarily applied to technology). As long as the content is interesting and the discussion is respectful and intellectual (which it currently is), then I think it's fine. If the quality of the site begins to degrade with popularity, then it can always be made more restrictive.
    - Silentio 18y ago
      I would agree with this. I wouldn't call myself a hacker in the traditional sense of the word. I dabble in HTML and CSS but other than that I'm not much of a programmer. I am here, however, because the articles that come up are interesting and the discourse that happens in the comments section is always high minded and interesting. Coming to visit Hacker News exclusively over a place like Reddit has been a breath of fresh air. I hope things like this article keep coming up alongside posts about hacking more specifically.
      - coryrc 18y ago
        "things like this article" are exactly why reddit is no longer the way it once was. You will destroy HN with your wish.
        gaius 18y ago
        So flag it.
        pg 18y ago
        Not true. This article could easily have been on Reddit in the first year. What ruined Reddit was (a) an influx of 14 year olds, who (b) were allowed to continue to behave as they had on Digg or wherever else they came from.
        biohacker42 18y ago
        But wasn't the influx of 14 year olds driven by general interest articles, which very slowly got less interesting and more general? How could that slow boil be prevented?
        pg 18y ago
        I think the 14 year olds were attracted by a sense of lawlessness, most visible in the long, highly editorialized titles and the trollish comments. It wasn't so much general interest articles that signalled the decline of Reddit as partisan political ones. I.e. articles that didn't merely involve politics, but were instances of it.
        pg 18y ago
        BTW, let me add that by "14 year olds" I mean people who behave like 14 year olds. Actual 14 year olds are welcome here so long as we can't tell.
        LogicHoleFlaw 18y ago
  - a-priori 18y ago
    Unusual and interesting perspectives on the world's cultures in my mind definitely satisfy the criteria of intellectual curiousity.
  - pg 18y ago
    I've always found the above troubling. It's been the definition of on topic for about a year and a half, and the site's still fine, so it seems to work.
theoneill 18y ago
"Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or egregiously offtopic, you can flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did." http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- biohacker42 18y ago
  In his defense, I don't think he was suggesting it's either spam or egregiously off topic. What bothers curmudgeons like me and him is the gentle slope towards Everybody News.
  - michaelneale 18y ago
    I was worried about that over 6 months ago, and in that time it hasn't got worse then it was then, so heres hoping it stays that way ! (just a single data point, but its something !). Do you think it is "sliding" over time? Or are you just (rightly so) being vigilant ?
    - biohacker42 18y ago
      I do have a subtle feeling it's sliding but that's very likely just my paranoia.
  - Scriptor 18y ago
    Also, the title of the submission is poorly worded, suggesting that the Arab producers were asking the question.

deleted 18y ago

[deleted]

josefresco 18y ago

Great episode of No Reservations, and I was thrilled to see this behind-the-scenes look at the team behind the cameras.

marvin 18y ago

And you know how all of them responded to women in charge? Great. Actually, they were a lot more than great. They were about the most warm, wonderful, welcoming group of people that you could possibly imagine. I've heard the opposite..not about Saudi Arabians, though. My mother was the boss of an Iranian immigrant, and he was apparently completely unable to respect instructions given by a woman. And we are not talking about burger-flipping here, but pharmaceutical production. This is an anecdote answered with an anecdote, but let's not put this whole cultural difference under a chair. Women aren't regarded as the professional equals of men in all parts of the world. I'm not starting a gender debate here; in some ways it is a pretty interesting difference. Especially if you see that those Arabian cultures that are even more "different" (polygamy, for instance) actually have a lot of similarities to promiscuous life in the West..at least from the male's point of view. There are a lot of facts about morale and life in these societies that doesn't come to light in any politically correct discussion. I wish I had a better skill for languages so I could go over there and see these things first-hand...

blurry 18y ago
I've experienced a bit of muslim culture first-hand and it's not even close to the cutesy image you get from this article. The author sees herself as a culturally sensitive critical thinker ("before you think I drank the koolaid...") but she is far from it. Take her cliched argument about the advantages of abbaya. If completely covering one's face and body is so desirable, why are women, and only women, forced into it under the threat of extreme corporal punishment and imprisonment? And how could she miss the fact that not speaking unless spoken to and making sure to always look down (to name just a couple things) is an integral part of wearing the garment? Gender apartheid is just as cruel and ugly as race apartheid. Extolling the virtues of full body cover for women is quite like saying that working cotton fields is really good for blacks, what with all that fresh air and exercise. Ignorant at best.
- michaelneale 18y ago
  >Gender apartheid is just as cruel and ugly as race apartheid. That nicely sums up my thoughts on it - thankyou !

dominik 18y ago

Something from the article worth quoting: "It's saving that kind of intimacy for those that are close to you, your friends and family, who have earned the privilege. For the first time, I saw that the abbaya may have a role in protecting women, and not as something simply designed to control them." Once upon a time, the same sort of idea existed in the West, in the lost art of modesty (buried alongside chivalry nowadays). The idea that not everyone need be exposed to everything. That some things are better saved and not sold. How many times in the United States do men look at women not as persons but as objects? Seeing not the woman as she is, but merely as she appears -- not respecting her as a person but instead consuming her as a visual image. Whether in Saudi Arabia or in the United States, the first principle to keep in mind involves respect for the human person as such -- man or woman.