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Why doesn't "what if the roles were reversed" ever work? I mean it works for me. I actually am convinced when people bring up that argument. But it never works when conservatives say it to progressives.
Why I'm bringing this up is that recently Abdul El-Sayed's wife appeared on stage wearing something not dissimilar to an outfit from "Handmaid's Tale".
https://x.com/FedPoasting/status/2118389760070725932
What if the roles were reversed? What if Mike Pence or Mitt Romney or J.D. Vance of Pete Hegseth showed up like this?
I have a hard time explaining why this line of reasoning just does not land at all with progressives. To me it seems like a slam dunk. What am I missing? And is there a conservative equivalent to this, i.e. a meta role reversal where conservatives are the one being hypocrites?
There’s a reflexive connotation to the image of a hijabi in popular culture that is informed by dozens or hundreds of media encounters where a woman wearing a hijab is more likely to be socially-accepted, respected, and competent. So it becomes second nature that when you see it, you think “socially-validated”, good, normal. The role reversal hypothetical uses a different cognitive process that requires energy and independent thinking. Why do that, when you can just outsource your beliefs to the social authorities by absorbing what the media of the social authorities implicitly teaches? So a lot of people just do that.
I do not buy that she “wants” to wear a hijab. Where are all the American women who are raised without one, and then realize that they want to wear one, if wanting to wear one were an organic desire? No; she was raised to wear it by fear of hellfire or promise of heaven, with a side of social exclusion and social propaganda, which she still believes. Maybe this is good, or maybe this is bad, but it’s no different than how a Handmaid would be raised to don the Azorean hold, or how an Afghan girl would be led to wear a complete niqab. ”Wear this or Abdul will beat you” is a a primitive understanding of the patriarchy in action.
A woman draped in an American flag firing a full auto AR from the back of a red ford pickup truck. The connotation to this is very wholesome. It would be different if it’s Middle Eastern themed.
I had a thought sort of like yours some years ago, when I read that the actress playing the lead in Handmaid’s Tale was part of a real cult IRL that kidnaps and exploits and controls people. I took this insight to Reddit: “can you guys believe the protagonist in the Handmaid’s Tale is a Scientologist?” Post deleted. Making fun of a fictitious Christian cult is easy, taking on a real cult could be litigiously expensive.
As an aside I think veils are completely awesome. I’m okay with putting both genders in veils so that we can waste less money and time on appearance. Imagine going weeks at a time never having to care about your appearance to a neurotic degree, and what that would do for the mental health of girls? And it’s a “free” intervention, essentially.
At this level of analysis, I'm not sure that anyone "wants" to do anything that they were socialized into growing up.
Do Western women "want" to shave their legs, or did they watch their mom do it growing up, get taught how to do it as they were growing up, and get treated like gross social pariahs the one or two times they forgot to shave in the high school locker rooms, and got male attention when they shaved their legs and wore something that showed it off? It might not be hellfire, but men and women get socialized into the idea that hairy legs on women are somehow "unhygenic", when nobody thinks this about hairy male legs. Most people just uncritically adopt the standards of dress and grooming of their culture, and have very little interest in rocking the boat.
It is the difference between autonomy (self-rule) and heteronomy (rule by others). Diogenes might be the extreme end of autonomy, a person who so thoroughly questions society's rules and expectations that he lives out of an old wine tub, does strange philosophical stunts, masturbates in public, bites people, eats in the agora (the horror!), and he does it all while thinking that he's better than the fawning sycophants who abandon all dignity to beg for power and prestige from someone else, the sheeple who uncritically follow society's rules and norms, and even the rulers who cannot be happy with the palaces and lands that they already have.
Our age is arguably an age of heteronomy. There have always been people who uncritically follow the social norms of society, but the internet has enabled a world where new loyalty tests can be beamed out and adopted in an instant. You get the microtrends of fast fashion, where women buy cheap shit they'll only wear once because it looks cute and is trending. You get a euphemism treadmill that is faster than it ever was in the TV, radio or printing press eras, so fast that it starts to look like madness to people who don't keep up with it.
There are degrees of "being socialized into" and I'd argue that "people think it gross and may ostracize you" is lower on the scale than "people tell you you are going to Hell, and might beat you for it".
There must be some kind of natural experiment that could distinguish the effects of those socialization styles. I'm almost certain that the former style has a bigger influence in society: social hierarchy and sexual competition are massive drivers of behavior.
The latter also includes the former. They don't just beat you and otherwise treat you fine, social ostracism comes with that in addition.
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