The wild claim made by Sheikh Saleh bin Saad al-Lohaidan is so absurd, all we can do is make a joke of it and hope it goes away
Naomi McAuliffe, theguardian.com
If you want to stop a child doing something, sometimes you have to lie to them. Don’t want them to stand on the seats on a train? Eventually you will tell them that the train guard will throw them off if they don’t stop. It was an evil genius parent who first told their child that the music playing from the ice-cream van means they are out of ice-cream. Now it seems that Sheikh Saleh bin Saad al-Lohaidan has tried to apply this logic to the women of Saudi Arabia.
The ruling elite have run out of reasons to stop women from driving cars in the kingdom and so have resorted to the “kiddie lie”; driving harms women’s ovaries. He used his best authoritative parental voice, claimed that there was medical evidence of this and then walked away whistling hoping no one would realise how ridiculous it sounded.
Women not being able to drive in Saudi Arabia is ridiculous. They are not officially banned, but they are not able to get a driving licence, and can be prosecuted and imprisoned for driving without a licence or participating in the protests that women have organised there against the ban. But ridiculous behaviours need ridiculous justifications.
The Vatican didn’t want people to use condoms so propagated the myththat HIV can pass through tiny holes in them. Polio vaccinations in Nigeria have been called a western plot to make people infertile. Men were told that they would have to start helping with raising their children when women got the vote. OK, that last one was true.
In general, religious zealots are not the most clued-up on current sexual health advice. People like Sheikh Lohaidan and Todd Akin in the US, who when he was a congressman claimed that women couldn’t get pregnant from “legitimate rape” because “the female body has ways to try to shut the whole thing down”, seem to take fertility and sex information from idiot 13-year-olds. The ones at school who used to state with considerable authority that you couldn’t get pregnant if you did it standing up, you could get pregnant by French kissing, or you would catch Aids from the toilet seats in the gym.
In Saudi Arabia, women have also been restricted from sport and exercise because they could break their hymen and thus lose their virginity. Defining virginity by a broken hymen rather than, you know, having sex, manages incredibly to separate sex from virginity. Your hymen can break for a hundred different reasons; exercise, riding in a car over cobbles, walking. If these things are to become the definition of sexual intercourse then Pamela Stephenson Connolly’s column is about to become a whole lot more weird.
And what do men need to worry about affecting their junk? If women can’t drive, surely men can’t ride bikes. Men need to keep their testicles cool and roaming free in order to maintain healthy sperm production. This would imply banning men from cycling, wearing tight trousers, jockstraps, horse riding, and putting buckets of fried chicken between their legs when they’re eating from them. Some of those things should certainly be discouraged but effectively banning hipsters is probably going too far.
Saudi Arabia does seem to be loosening up a bit. Women can now ride bikes and exercise under restrictions. They can only cycle for recreational purposes not for transportation, which will be comically hard to police. “And where are we off to madam?” “Nowhere officer, honest.” Women have also been sworn in to the shura council, the consultative body that advises the government. It is believed that many of these changes have come about because of the embarrassment that many in the Saudi government feel at how these restrictions are viewed by the international community.
So these restrictions should be shown up and ridiculed for what they are. If they are to treat women like children then the international community should humiliate authoritarian governments in return.
If social conservatives want to control their populations, and women in particular, then they are going to continue to look ridiculous. We can all play our part by pointing and laughing at them. Because they are responsible for the severe human rights abuses within that country, and because the women of Saudi Arabia deserve, like all women in the world, to be subjected to hilarious jokes about how they can’t parallel park.
Link for this article:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/30/saudi-cleric-driving-damages-ovaries
