Scanner : saudi arabia

How to Survive The Recession: Marry a Saudi

Emily Farris — Mon, 11 May 2009 20:17:00 GMT

Single ladies with shopping problems (in the house!): get a ring on it—just make sure said ring comes from a Saudi man if you have any hope of surviving this recession.

A judge in Saudi Arabia has said that it's okay for a man to slap his wife if she spends lavishly on things like clothing.

"If a person gives 1,200 Saudi riyals ($320) to his wife and she spends 900 riyals ($240) to purchase an abaya (head-to-toe robe) from a brand shop and if her husband slaps her on the face as a reaction to her action, she deserves that punishment," Judge Hamad Al-Razine was quoted as saying by the English-language Arab News newspaper on Sunday.

Luckily, because Al Razine's comments were made out of court (they were made at a conference on domestic violence!) they have no influence over the law, but this can't be good news for Saudi women who are still fighting for the right to vote, drive and participate freely in their nation's politics.

(And, yes, we know not all Saudi men will slap their wives for shopping too much.)

[CSNnews: Saudi Judge Says Men Have Right to Slap Wives over Lavish Spending]

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Congratulations, Miss Beautiful... Morals

Brian Fairbanks — Wed, 06 May 2009 23:28:00 GMT

They don't allow women to drive; they barely allow them to breathe without permission. So, it should come as no surprise that the only "pageants" held in Saudi Arabia involve women who are basically invisible, covered until to the eyeballs in black fabric (in 120-degree temperature land, to boot.) Of course, these pageants are not about beauty... unless you consider rigid conservative "morals" beautiful.

Meet Miss Beautiful Morals! She's hot as hell... under all that heavy material.

Actually, this is the judge of the Miss Beautiful Morals pageant... but no matter.

By the way, the candidates will not be judged on their looks-- they'll be ranked based on their devotion to their parents. So, if my parents wanted to sell me out to an 80-year-old man or demanded I marry my first cousin, who is a serial murderer who spits on children in the street, I would be disqualified? That's what IndyStar tells us:

"The idea of the pageant is to measure the contestants' commitment to Islamic morals... It's an alternative to the calls for decadence in the other beauty contests that only take into account a woman's body and looks," said pageant founder Khadra al-Mubarak.

"The winner won't necessarily be pretty," she added. "We care about the beauty of the soul and the morals."

So after the pageant opens Saturday, the nearly 200 contestants will spend the next 10 weeks attending classes and being quizzed on themes including "Discovering your inner strength," "The making of leaders" and "Mom, paradise is at your feet" - a saying attributed to Islam's Prophet Muhammad to underline that respect for parents is among the faith's most important tenets.

Pageant hopefuls will also spend a day at a country house with their mothers, where they will be observed by female judges and graded on how they interact with their mothers, al-Mubarak said. Since the pageant is not televised and no men are involved, contestants can take off the veils and black figure-hiding abayas they always wear in public.

So, they'll be judged on how they look in private, although they can't look that way in public? Something seems a bit off about that, but whatever-- the whole thing is a disaster as is, due to the total mockery of human decency that is Saudi Arabia. [Update: If you are upset that I am attacking a country for its indecency, then you need to read this.]

And one more thing: until Miss Beautiful Morals took the country by storm in 2008, "the only pageants were for goats, sheep, camels and other animals, aimed at encouraging livestock breeding." Meanwhile, did you hear that Afghanistan isolated its lone pig (yes, there's only one in the entire country, we swear) for fear everyone would get swine flu.

Ah, God bless Islam. [Which is a joke.]

More on Saudi Arabia here and Afghanistan here.

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Brian Fairbanks — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 13:14:00 GMT

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While You Were Sleeping: It's A Lipstick Jungle Out There

Brian Fairbanks — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 13:10:00 GMT

Women in Saudi Arabia are going to other countries to shop for lingerie because of the male store employees. In other news, Saudi Arabia allows lingerie.

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Brian Fairbanks — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 14:08:00 GMT

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Iranian Kids Like Sex Too

Scanner Matt — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 20:10:00 GMT

Iran’s Islamic legal code outlaws premarital sex, sex outside of marriage and abortion (sound familiar? we’re not even going to bring up gay sex here), but the law is no match for a young person’s quest to get it on.

A recent survey reports the number of sexually active unwed Iranians is on the rise “… more than one in four men aged 19 to 29 had experienced sex before marriage”

The survey also revealed that the average marrying age had risen to 40 for men and 35 for women, a blow to the government's goal of promoting marriage to shore up society's Islamic foundations.

So why the increase in sexual activity and the feet-dragging to married life?

Many blame economic circumstances for their failure to marry, citing high inflation, unemployment and a housing shortage along with cultural traditions that expect brides' families to provide dowries and husbands to commit themselves to mehrieh, an agreed cash gift.

How do you say, “make love not war” in Persian?

Hojatoleslam Ghasem Ebrahimipour, a sociologist, told Shabestan news agency that the trend was due to the availability of premarital sex, and feminism among educated women. "When a woman is educated and has an income, she does not want to accept masculine domination through marriage," he said.

The Guardian has the full story.

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While You Were Sleeping: Kirsten Dunst Off the Deep End

Brian Fairbanks — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 15:49:00 GMT

A very lame-looking Jim Carrey movie based on a superior autobiography opened with a mere $18 million.

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Why is Saudi Arabia forcing an eight-year-old girl to remain married to a fifty-eight-year-old man?

And Kirsten Dunst is, according to the Superficial, trying "to fill the void left by Tara Reid," who recently checked into rehab.

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No Legal Remedies for "Upskirting" and "Downblousing"

Scanner Matt — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 18:37:00 GMT

Technology definitely progresses faster than the law and the perves are taking advantage of the loop holes. Snapping a picture with a cell phone up a woman's skirt ("upskirting" ) or down her blouse ("downblousing") has become a world craze. Japan now requires cellphone cameras to come with a shutter sound to announce a picture is being taken.

Salon reports:

A keyword search for "upskirt" on the photo-sharing site Flickr turns up 36,368 hits. One user has taken 48 candid shots of women's stockinged rears walking up stairs in the Paris Metro subway station. The vast majority of these photos, however, are not upskirts at all, but close-ups of women's body parts taken in public places like the subway, parks and street corners. Some Flickr members specialize in these types of shots, many with a particular area of expertise: breasts, bums, nipple slips, whale tails (the top of a thong peeking over the waist of a woman's pants), camel toes, legs or feet. Amazingly, one user has amassed 1,455 photos of disembodied, hastily framed shots taken with a cellphone camera of various body parts -- feet, breasts, butt and legs -- that could belong to any woman, really.

This is creepy and unsettling stuff that has yet to be resolved by U. S. lawmakers.

The question of where to draw a line between artistic street photography and fetishistic candids that reduce a woman to her toe cleavage is like that ever-unreliable definition of pornography: I know it when I see it. John Morris, general counsel for the Center for Democracy & Technology, puts the reality simply: "If you don't want to be photographed walking the street, don't walk down the street -- it's a public street."

It's a tough issue to define while respecting art and first amendment rights, but seriously, they can't figure out a better way to defend the privacy of an individual than, "don't walk down the street... " What are we, in Saudi Arabia?

In the meantime, watch out for the new cellphone sex operators.

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