My lifetime too! I once dated a guy (briefly, because he started dating one of my close friends after that. 🤣) who was born in Iran before the Islamic revolution there. His dad was actually an American, but his mom was a native Iranian, and she fled without permission (the story is rather dramatic) to get away from religious fanatics who wanted to control everything about her — keep her in hijabs, require her to have permission for men to travel, limit her education, etc.
What a lovely woman she was. Like her husband, she ended up teaching at a university in Boston. He was a scientist, she was a musician, a very fine harpist.
Her son visited Iran a couple times while I knew him, but she was afraid too go back knowing how women are treated there.
Ironically, the wife of the president of Iran gave a speech at the UN the other day praising the cultural values of her nation, even as she wore black from head to toe, with only her eyes showing, even as she acknowledged she needed her husband's permission to go to university.
She claimed that that's a good thing, that Iranian people simply have different cultural values, that we should respect them because they value family so highly.
Of course, every decent, thinking person knows that's bullshit. Any society that requires women to cover themselves up from head to toe and requires them to have permission from men to do anything is a sick, depraved culture.
Could that happen here? Evangelical Christians make an enormous deal out of how women are to be subject to men. They say men are meant to be leaders come and women are meant to be supporters and followers.
And they're not kidding. At all. Evangelical women spread that sexist bullshit just like the wife of the president of Iran spreads sexist bullshit.
I get so tired of people talking as if cultural values are neutral, that if people are used to believing and behaving in a certain way, then that's just the way it is.
I call bullshit.
If a culture makes women less than men, gives women fewer opportunities, requires them to have permission for men to do things, then that is a sick culture that we should all work together to change.
But right now in the United States, our biggest worry is how fast we are regressing. Fringe religious fanatics are loud and powerful right now.
And it's really scary.
