On Sunday, The Washington Post displayed the liberal media's emotional attachment to poor, misunderstood Islam, and how Western objections to its rigidity are "vulgar" and "condescending." Art and architecture critic Philip Kennicott celebrated an exhibit at the National Museum of Women in the Arts displaying photography by women from Iran and the Arab world. The show is "provocative," but not progressive enough:
It’s sadly typical of contemporary museums that they don’t dare own the best of what they do, and titles such as this play down an exceptional show, which touches on politics, gender, sexuality, cultural identity and critical issues of war, colonialism and oppression. Women from this region are both exceptionally privileged and cursed to be at the nexus of so many fissures of modern life: Cursed because it is dangerous, exhausting and too often dehumanizing, and privileged because it gives them radical insight and destabilizing power. The photos in “She Who Tells a Story” use multiple strategies to undermine complacency, patriarchy, hierarchy and imperialism.
In exploring five themes in the exhibit, Kennicott and the Post devoted an entire page to a series of pictures called "Mother, Daughter, Doll," where these two females and a doll change outfits from a fairly Westernized approach to the full niqab with a veiled slot for eyes. Don't comment, since our position is so backwards:
The Western, liberal position is often that women should have the freedom to wear it, or not wear it, as is their wont, uncoerced by social, political or family pressures, no matter how subtle. Yet even that laissez-faire approach can seem condescending, and the response comes back: The veil, which inspires so much vulgar anti-Islamic rhetoric, isn’t a subject on which outsiders should comment. So there is a philosophical standoff that precedes and preempts any conversation about the veil before it can get started.
Could we imagine the Post taking this approach to Catholics or evangelicals? "This isn't a subject on which outsiders should comment"? That would be seen as a bad joke. Speaking of bad jokes, one set of photographs mocks soldiers by inserting feminine themes. "Emasculating Violence" was the headline describing the images of Nermine Hammam:
Several of the brightly colored photographs depict young Egyptian soldiers, photographed by Hammam during the 18-day Egyptian revolution of 2011, then digitally edited into picture-postcard landscapes full of flowers, green grass and tourist views of exotic places. They are feminized in the process, their youth becomes epicene and their boredom reads as sensual lassitude. Displaced from the site of a bloody, contentious clash of political wills, the young men live for a moment in a candy land of androgyny, their guns merely props, the tanks they surmount reduced to a stage setting.
That would sound like where the Washington Post tastemakers want to live, in a "candy land of androgyny."
