Inequality

I've been reading, for my Modern Political Thought class, a book titled Is Multiculturalism Bad For Women?. It features a twenty-page essay by Susan Okin, essentially arguing that one particular kind of multiculturalism (the kind that wants to allow certain Groups rights to do things that others don't get to do) runs contrary to feminism. One person's reply and critique involved a considerable amount of the following kind of logic: "veils aren't specifically designed to restrict women's sexuality, they're part of a broader system for regulating and restricting the community's sexuality." That's ridiculous, and it reveals, I think, one of the dangers of a focus on inequality: there are, strictly speaking, two ways to remove it.

There's actually something similar in this argument to another kind of silly argument: some people, in responding to the accusation that George Bush or Dick Cheney are war criminals, will bring up Hitler, and then say that the Bushies weren't as bad as Hitler. In other words, in response to "X is bad," you say "Y is worse." It doesn't work that way. If I make a double bogey, the fact that I might've made a ten doesn't help me any (unless I'm in a one-on-one competition and my opponent did make a ten). If two people both murder people, but one of them does so somewhat more gruesomely, that doesn't excuse the other one. There can be objective standards of Bad, and things can cross them.

The argument about veils being about sexuality in general and not just women's sexuality is, in a sense, even worse. It's not saying, "Yes, I did X, and X was bad, but that other guy did Y and that was even worse." It's saying, "Yes, I did X, and X was bad, but I also did Y which was also bad." Specifically, "Yes, we're restricting women's sexuality, but it's okay because we're also restricting men's sexuality." That doesn't work, does it? If so, then if that kind of equality is our only criterion the best policy would be to kill everyone and everything, because then they'd all be equally dead. When people talk about income inequality, what they really mean is poverty and/or the phenomenon of poverty in a prosperous society (and possibly also the obscenity of giant mansions in a country that had noticeable poverty). This fact motivates John Rawls' difference principle, the idea that any inequality in distribution of so-called primary goods must exist for the benefit of the least well off member of society.

This is also part of how I respond to some of the stuff from my Environment & Society class about environmental justice. For instance, we looked at a website that broke down various forms of pollution by certain demographic categories, such as black and white, and discovered, not stunningly, that the traditionally disadvantaged group tends to have the worse side of things environmentally. But the solution surely isn't to say, okay, let's build power plants in rich white neighborhoods now; it's to say, okay, let's try to reduce pollution overall, and maybe focus first on removing pollution in areas where it is worst (which, if the main hypothesis of the environmental justice movement is correct, will happen to be minority neighborhoods).

Applying this idea to the original context, the proper response to this defense of veiling is that, if feminism objects to the restriction of women's sexuality, it must also object to a restriction of sexuality in general (and, in fairness, ought also object to restrictions solely of male sexuality). And, accordingly, if one finds convincing a feminist opposition to limitations placed on female sexuality, one must also reject any systemic regulation of sexuality in general.