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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   26707 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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What about Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Kuwait, etc?

It's seems more like tfr correlates with being a poor, unstable, agrarian shithole than it does with patriarchy.

Iran is a victim of its own highly successful population control policy.

Iran has a flourishing feminist movement, see the huge protests last year and in 2017 over hijab-wearing. True, the state does suppress feminism in Iran but their suppression efforts clearly aren't sufficient. Plus there's a very substantial presence of women in higher education:

Enrollment of women in universities jumped from 3% in 1977 to 67% in 2015, according to the World Bank statistics.

UAE and Kuwait have all kinds of weirdness with regard to demographics because of the large non-citizen population. Plus UAE, Saudi Arabia and so on apparently rank rather highly in these gender equality statistics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_Inequality_Index

I would not classify Iran or even Saudi Arabia as an actual patriarchy like Afghanistan. True, the real patriarchies tend to be poor, unstable agrarian shitholes today.

It's also surprisingly irreligious. Especially for a nominal theocracy, which I suppose explains in part the insecurity of its ruling elite.

I know quite a few Iranian immigrants. One is a practicing Muslim, goes to mosque, etc.

All the others, as best I can tell, are non-religious. They also all drink alcohol and the women don't cover their hair. So Muslim cultural norms didn't stick.

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