The city of Brussels plans a new law that will fine people for insulting people on the street, be these racist, sexist, homophobic or any other kind of insults. The fines will range from 75 to 250 Euros and will be issued directly by police officers much like a parking ticket. The law is to a large extent a response to a film by Sofie Peeters entitled “Femme de la Rue” — “Woman of the Street” — where she recorded on a hidden camera the daily verbal insults she is subjected to just by walking around the district of Brussels in which she lives. The film hit a nerve and women not just in Brussels but elsewhere in Belgium and France hit the twittersphere to testify on how Peeters's experience reflects the reality of life for women going about their daily business. What is also unfortunately true is that in nine cases out of ten the men insulting women, calling them “slut”, “whore”, and other such insults are of immigrant origin, or to put in simply Muslim Arab men. When friends tell me such stories, and I hear them daily, of being insulted just for wearing a skirt or a dress, of the man who stares at a woman lasciviously and then makes unwelcome advances, of the harassment pretty and not so pretty girls get from men who seem to think any woman walking on the street is game, and when with a sigh they tell me, almost apologetically, that it was an Arab man who insulted them, my knee jerk reaction is to consider them racists. I tell them that White men insult women too and that it's just that if an Arab man does this they notice it more. It is that old stalwart characteristic of racism: minorities stand out and so when they do something we notice them, if you have your handbag snatched by a White man you do not start looking at all White men with suspicion, but if a Black man snatches your handbag you start to associate his skin color with the crime committed by just one member of that racial minority. Or to put it in another way, they have a belief that Arab immigrants in France and Belgium have denigrating attitudes toward women and when one member of that community acts in accordance with that belief, it reinforces that belief. Had a White man called them “slut” as they passed him on the street, they wouldn't have noticed his skin color, but if one man with dark skin and a North African accent calls them “slut”, they remember his ethnicity and automatically assume that there is something in his cultural education that makes him disrespectful to women. But this morning I asked myself what if it were true? What if there was indeed something cultural about these insults? Consider for a moment the hijab or the abaya or the niqab, or any such body covering, surely the main thought underpinning its raison d'être is that a woman who is not covered up, a woman who displays her legs, or her arms, of her shoulders to men in the street is asking to be looked at lasciviously, by not protecting her modesty she is sending a signal to all men that she is a woman of low morals, is it not? No, it is not, but it could be. It is the flip side of the coin. Women who veil their bodies do so out of religious conviction, it confers upon them both a religious identity and a sense of respectability among their own kind. A woman who wears the hijab also wears a tag that says to men: I hide my body so that it does not become an object of your desire, I am not available to you, you must respect me. But does this mean the reverse is true for women who do not wear it? Education. Education. Education. All women should be respected regardless of whether they wear a niqab or walk the streets in a mini-skirt, a dress is just a dress, not a symbol of a woman's sexual habits. Why is that so hard to understand? Are men so fickle that just the sight of an ankle has them lose all their self-control? Surely not. Are men such animals that the mere sight of a pretty girl has them salivating with uncontrollable desire? Surely not. Men are intelligent creatures and if they disrespect women because they show an inch of flesh or have an attractive curve to their body shape or a swing in their step, it is because they have been educated to disrespect women and not because of some inane biological reaction. It comes from the mind not the body, it is the mind that decides a woman must be a whore if she has the audacity to walk down a street in Brussels wearing a dress, and minds can be educated.
— Imane Kurdi is a Saudi writer on European affairs. She can be reached at [email protected]
