Egypt’s top Islamic authority defended women’s rights to wear trousers in public following a high profile court case in neighboring Sudan were women were flogged for dressing in pants, the local press reported Wednesday.

Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa said in response to a question during a public lecture that trousers covering women’s bodies are permitted, though they should be loose and not see through. He specified that “stretch” pants were in particular unacceptable.

Other than that, feel free to join in with the rest of the modern women and wear long, loose, shapeless, flowing pants.

Oh, wait. That’s only women in yoga classes.

Or wearing pajamas.

But hey, you go, girls! Wear that modern hijab and feel liberated!

Appealing to a powerful Saudi prince, an 8-year-old girl asked why she was not allowed to play sports in school like boys. She got an unexpected response: The prince said he hoped government schools for girls would allow playing fields.

And how cool is this? The AP is taking this mealy-mouthed, patronizing anti-feminist pap and pushing it like it’s the equivalent of America’s Title IX.

The stand taken by Prince Khaled al-Faisal, governor of the holy city of Mecca and one of the most senior second-generation members of the royal family, on the controversial issue is the strongest official endorsement so far of women’s sports and a sign the government may be tilting toward opening up on that front.

And exactly why is it such obvious bullshit? Because in the next breath, the AP reports this:

Physical education classes are banned in state-run girls schools in conservative Saudi Arabia. Saudi female athletes are not allowed to participate in the Olympics. Women’s games and marathons have been canceled when the powerful clergy get wind of them. And some clerics even argue that running and jumping can damage a woman’s hymen and ruin her chances of getting married.

“Conservative”? Ronald Reagan was a conservative. A better description of Saudi Arabia would be “feudal.” Except I’m pretty sure that women had more rights in feudal Europe than they have in modern Saudi Arabia. And lest you think that the prince was suggesting any form of equality for women, think again:

According to local newspapers, the 8-year-old girl told Khaled: “I ask myself why is it that only boys can play sports and have courts while we girls don’t have anything?”

“I hope to see sports courts for girls inside girls’ schools,” the prince responded, according to Al-Hayat newspaper.

He said if this were to happen, it will be in coordination with the Education Ministry and “according to certain mechanisms that take into consideration women’s privacy in this country.”

Yes, the fabled privacy excuse. Because given half the chance, women in Muslim lands won’t throw off the shackles of repression and try to live normal lives. Oh, wait. Yes, they will (cf: Afghanistan, Iraq).

But when you live with medieval freaks like these, well, your choices are limited:

A statement issued by three senior clerics last month lashed out at Saudis who demand the opening of more gyms for women, saying such a move would “open the doors wide for spreading decadence.”

“It is well-known that only women with no shame will go to these clubs,” said the statement signed by clerics Abdul-Rahman al-Barrack, Abdul-Aziz al-Rajihi and Abdullah bin Jibrin.

In a recent column in Al-Watan newspaper, Sheik Abdullah al-Mani, an adviser at the royal court, said virgins should think twice before engaging in sports.

“Soccer or basketball require running and jumping and these could damage (a woman’s) the hymen,” he wrote. “If she marries, her husband will … think that her hymen was destroyed as a result of an (immoral) action.”

“He will either divorce her or lose confidence in her chastity,” he added.

But sure, let’s respect their culture and traditions. Because practices like these simply cry out for respect.

Shyeah.

A woman clad in a red T-shirt plays an Iranian drum in a Tehran park as her teenage daughter dances nearby, her hair flowing in the air.

Anywhere else in Iran they would risk being stopped by the police and possibly arrested. Here, in the first female-only park in the Islamic country’s capital, a dozen women in summer garb have gathered on the grass to watch and applaud.

“We’re having great fun without men,” Setareh Sabzevari, 40, said.

Mothers’ Heaven opened in May as a place where women can cast off their Islamic headscarves and dress to enjoy the sun, jog and play without offending anyone. Embraced by many visitors, the park has also sparked concern it may encourage segregation after a decade in which women gained more freedom to interact with men and participate in sports in public — albeit with their hair and bodies fully covered.

Such initiatives are “positive as long as women have the freedom to choose,” said Rosa Gharachorloo, assistant professor in human and women’s rights at Tehran’s Azad University. “I just would not want this to turn into a law or to become the norm. What if it extends to public libraries or cinemas?”

Yeah, what if? Why, the next thing you know, boys and girls will be dancing together, and after that, well, it’s–trouble! Right here in River City!

Tell me again how free women are under Islamic law. Because I’m still not getting it.

They are practical solutions that respect religious beliefs and are in line with the Islamic Republic’s laws, said Mahmood Maniei, a spokesman and adviser to the mayor’s office for Tehran’s third district, where the park is located.

“Would you prefer doing sports in an Islamic coat or without?” he said. “This is not about segregation. It’s giving women equal opportunities in the city.”

Sociologist Nayereh Tavakoli said she was concerned that some activities women had already gained acceptance for could “again be viewed as abnormal.”

“This is giving opportunities, but it’s not giving equal opportunities,” she said. “Equal would mean that they would have similar access to any park in the city.”

Yes, but that won’t fit into the Islamic laws of Iran. Or Saudi Arabia. Or Kuwait. Or Egypt. Or Pakistan. Or—well, you get the idea.

Exit quote:

“Every Iranian woman dreams of being able to walk under the sky like this,” said the 22-year-old design graduate in a pink tank top and a miniskirt, who came for a tanning session.

Really? Well, dreaming doesn’t do squat. Rights, once removed, are never again given freely. They must be taken, usually by force. Until the average Iranian is truly unhappy with his or her lot, nothing will change.

Here’s the funniest part of the article:

The declared aim of the Women’s University is to promote women’s education in the kingdom, improve the situation of Saudi women and make them a more integral part of Saudi Arabia’s development.

The reason it’s so funny? Men can’t teach. And women can’t drive.

Saudi Arabia practices a strict form of Sunni Islam called Wahhabism, and men and women are for the most part segregated. In universities, male lecturers cannot stand in front of a classroom of women, so teaching is done through a screen or a phone line, which can pose technical problems.

But yes, people like Jimmy Carter should totally go after Israeli “apartheid,” and ignore utterly the sexism of much of the Muslim world.

The next phase of feminism must circle back and reappropriate the ancient persona of the mother — without losing career ambition or power of assertion. Betty Friedan, who had first attacked the cult of postwar domesticity, had long warned second-wave feminists such as Gloria Steinem about the damaging exclusion of homemakers from their value system. The animus of liberal feminists toward religion must also end (I am speaking as an atheist). Feminism must reexamine all of its assumptions, including its death grip on abortion, if it wishes to survive.

The hysterical emotionalism and eruptions of amoral malice at the arrival of Sarah Palin exposed the weaknesses and limitations of current feminism. But I am convinced that Palin’s bracing mix of male and female voices, as well as her grounding in frontier grit and audacity, will prove to be a galvanizing influence on aspiring Democratic women politicians too, from the municipal level on up. Palin has shown a brand-new way of defining female ambition — without losing femininity, spontaneity or humor. She’s no pre-programmed wonk of the backstage Hillary Clinton school; she’s pugnacious and self-created, the product of no educational or political elite — which is why her outsider style has been so hard for media lemmings to comprehend. And by the way, I think Tina Fey’s witty impersonations of Palin have been fabulous. But while Fey has nailed Palin’s cadences and charm, she can’t capture the energy, which is a force of nature.

As I keep ending my podcasts: Amen, Sister Suffragette. And that’s a Gilmore-ism, which was a show that featured not one, not two, not three, but four strong female major characters, and endless strong female minor characters, without emasculating the men on the show.

The pundits are telling us that angry would-be Hillary voters won’t vote for Palin. The pundits are wrong. They will vote for Palin, and they are moving to the right for this election—the polls keep coming up McCain, after having been Obama, Obama, Obama. It’s not just a post-convention bounce. It is the excitement that having a female candidate is engendering (pardon the pun).

Those of you who don’t get it simply aren’t going to get it. It’s the same reaction I get when I try to explain the difference between Judaism the religion, and Judaism the culture. If you don’t get it, I am wasting my time trying to explain the differences. But let me try once more.

Year after year after year, women watch as the leaders of this nation, the leaders of corporations, and the leaders of the world all look pretty much the same: They’re men. There are precious few women in world leadership positions. And it’s not because we haven’t been out there for the past forty years. The feminist revolution has been around for long enough for women to be in leadership positions. And yet—we are not. And part of that reason is that the old boys’ network does exist. Nancy Pelosi is Speaker of the House. Name the last powerful woman in the Senate or House of Representatives whose name isn’t Clinton. Tell me what happened to Geraldine Ferraro after her run for VP. Tell me how many women are serving in the Senate now.

Sixteen.

How many women Senators have there been?

Thirty-five.

How many women Presidential candidates? Vice-Presidential candidates?

Governors?

Twenty-nine.

How many women have been the heads of the DNC or RNC? Secretaries of State? Ambassadors to important countries? Chiefs of Staff?

There has been a dearth of female leadership in this nation, but there has not been a dearth of women on leadership tracks to choose from—in spite of the constant refrain that is so. It’s almost like the same old stupid “Gee, where are all the women political bloggers?” discussion that gets rolled out every time some idiot wants to troll for links. We’re here. But that glass ceiling exists. It’s not our imagination. I work for a company that only has a female executive because they bought a company with a woman president. In 2008, I work for a company that had no women executives at all. Not. One. So do not tell me that women are simply imagining the barriers that still exist for women in the corporate and government structures. It’s pretty easily proven by the numbers.

Sixteen women senators. Women make up half the population of the United States, but only sixteen percent of the Senate. Granted, representation isn’t a one-for-one deal, but it’s effing 2008, not 1978. We’ve been in politics for long enough to have better representation than that.

So now perhaps you begin to see why Sarah Palin is so exciting to ALL women, not just women whose politics already agree with her. Even the women who hate her are secretly glad to see a woman on the ticket for the highest office in the land.

Women are going to vote for McCain for various reasons. But a fair amount of women are going to vote for him because he put a woman on the ticket. If you think that’s tokenism, if you think that’s patronizing, if you think it’s hollow symbolism, you haven’t been paying much attention to what most women feel.

We want to see Sarah Palin succeed, because it will move us forward in ways equally as important as Barck Obama’s candidacy has moved African Americans forward.

It ain’t tokenism. It’s about effing time.

MEPs want TV regulators in the EU to set guidelines which would see the end of anything deemed to portray women as sex objects or reinforce gender stereotypes.

[...] The new rules come in a report by the EU’s women’s rights committee.

Swedish MEP Eva-Britt Svensson urged Britain and other members to use existing equality, sexism and discrimination laws to control advertising.

She wants regulatory bodies set up to monitor ads and introduce a “zero-tolerance” policy against “sexist insults or degrading images”.

[...] Swedish MEP Eva-Britt Svensson urged Britain and other members to use existing equality, sexism and discrimination laws to control advertising.

She wants regulatory bodies set up to monitor ads and introduce a “zero-tolerance” policy against “sexist insults or degrading images”.

Ms Svensson said: “Gender stereotyping in advertising straitjackets women, men, girls and boys by restricting individuals to predetermined and artificial roles that are often degrading, humiliating and dumbed down for both sexes.”

To be fair, it’s probably just the yapping of an annoying woman bureaucrat in the world’s most annoying bureaucracy. The European Union is a frightening thing to behold, George Orwell’s 1984 practically come to life, and a sample of the nanny state that America must never allow (yes, I’m looking at you, Obama and Democrats).

I’ll have to do a little research, but I’m dying to know what the EU’s women’s rights committee has to say about the Islamic misogynists in Europe’s midst, and the practices of forced marriages and the like.

This is pure Rush Limbaugh material. My gut tells me that this suggestion will go nowhere. Unless the EU determines that Israeli companies are behind the sexist advertising. Then, look out. It’ll be adopted in a heartbeat.

For the post-1960s, post-socialist left, the single most important breakthrough has been the alliance between modern feminism and the sexual revolution. This was far from inevitable. Up until around 1960, attempts at sexual liberation were resisted by most educated women. In the wake of the success of Playboy and other mass-circulation pornographic magazines in the 1950s, men were depicted as the initiators and main beneficiaries of sexual liberation, women as intolerant of promiscuity as well as potential victims of predatory “liberated” men.

With the introduction of the Pill around 1960, things abruptly began to change. Fears of overpopulation legitimated a contraceptive ethic throughout middle-class society in North America, Europe, Japan, and the Soviet bloc.

[...] The fact that the Pill was taken only by women gave them a greater feeling of control over their sexual activity and eroded their social and psychological resistance to premarital sex. “No fault” divorce, a term borrowed from the field of auto insurance, in reality amounted to unilateral divorce and began to undermine the idea of marriage as a binding mutual contract oriented toward the procreation and nurturing of children. Contrary to nearly every prediction, the ubiquity of far more reliable methods of contraception and the growing ideological separation of sex from reproduction, coincided with a huge increase in unwed pregnancies.

So let’s see. Jeffrey Bell says that prior to the 1960s, women were prim, proper, and properly in fear of repercussions of sex outside “proper” channels, a.k.a., the marriage bed. Prior to the 1960s, the fear of overpopulation stopped educated women (note the elitism of the thought that uneducated women are too stupid to care about the earth having too many people on it) from having premarital sex. Prior to the 1960s, women didn’t do things like, say, have affairs with married men, have sex with their fiancé before marriage (or six-month-after-the-honeymoon babies, no, that never occurred before the 1960s), sex in high school (shyeah, right), sex with unmarried men, or, well, I guess “educated” women simply didn’t have sex until the clock struck twelve on the wedding night. At least, in Jeffrey Bell’s world, that’s what happened.

Then along came The Pill, that awful, awful object that suddenly turned educated women from virtuous, moral, guardians of chastity (or frigid bitches, depending on the point of view of the disappointed suitor) into wanton whores, just like those uneducated masses who never gave a thought to the consequences of having sex. It destroyed the idea of marriage, because let’s face it, prior to 1960, no one ever had sex outside of marriage. And it gave people an excuse to have children out of wedlock. It’s almost as if the devil himself took hold of those virtuous, educated women, forced The Pill down their throats, and then waited for the aphrodisiac effect of being to have sex without pregnancy.

The fact that the Pill was taken only by women gave them a greater feeling of control over their sexual activity and eroded their social and psychological resistance to premarital sex.

Spare me from the sexist, condescending ignorance of men like Bell. It isn’t the fact that the Pill is taken only by women that gives women a “feeling” of control over their sexual activity. Taking the Pill does give women control—over their reproductive ability. It does give women control over their sexual activity. It allows women to decide how many children they want, and when they’d like to have them. It eroded our “social and psychological resistance to premarital sex”? Really? It didn’t become popular because men and women are at the height of their sexual activity in their teens and twenties, and women didn’t necessarily wanted to start families that young anymore if they didn’t have to? Are you sure about that?

The thing that bothers me the most about conservative analysis of feminism is how they put all the blame for sexuality on the women’s shoulders, and utterly ignore that part of the formula which requires a male partner in order to achieve potential childbirth. If society’s mores are so important, why aren’t men refusing to have sex with the wicked women who ingest the Pill and want to go for it?

Funny how that never seems to come up in these discussions. Men refusing to have premarital sex because they don’t want to have children, or because it’s socially unacceptable. But it’s not socially unacceptable for men, really. Only for women. Is anyone blaming the boy that got Bristol Palin pregnant, or are they all, as always, thinking it was her fault for having unprotected sex with him?

Put the blame for the changing of social mores square on the shoulders where it belongs: On both genders, right and left. The right is no more moral than the left. How many times have you heard conservative men utter a variant of this: “I loved going to protests in the sixties/seventies/eighties. You could always get laid if you told chicks you were against the war/Reagan/nukes.”

These same men are now blaming the “moral breakdown of society” on the women they had sex with, while not taking any responsibility for their part in that partnership. The hypocrisy factor is so high here, I can’t even quantify it. This is why I will always be a feminist. And I will never consider that word an insult.

Sarah Palin is a feminist, too, and a conservative. How much you want to bet that she and Todd didn’t wait until the wedding night? But let’s blame that on Sarah’s eroded social and psychological resistance to premarital sex due to women taking the Pill starting in the 1960s. Because Jeffrey Bell says so, that’s why.

Any idiot can get a blog on DKos. And this ridiculous accusation is proof that many idiots do.

Oh, wait. That was Andrew Sullivan’s link.

Here’s the Daily Kos moron’s blog.

These unerring detectives have Photographic! Evidence! that will shock you!!

And they’ve been slammed to the mat by—facts.

Unless Bristol was pregnant for fourteen months, the baby is Sarah Palin’s. And it’s been confirmed by Kos Kiddie “Red Pen”:

Unless someone has counter evidence, we can drop this crap now. Yes, there are still some interesting questions, such as why she flew to Dallas and back when she was this pregnant, and why the Alaska Airlines crewmembers insisted that she was not visibly pregnant on the flight. Nevertheless, until this photo is debunked, we look stupid pushing this rumor.

That is all.

Morons. Sexist, misogynist sons of bitches. STUPID sexist, misogynist sons of bitches.

Way to prove how progessive you are, lefties. Way to keep women wanting to vote for your candidate. Just keep on slamming Sarah at every opportunity, sinking lower and lower as you go, and you will drive me firmly into the arms of the right. You’ve already lost me for two Presidential elections. That’s right, you lost a feminist who was a lifelong Democratic voter. At this rate, you will never get me back.

Update: Sarah Palin’s daughter is pregnant. Doesn’t change a word I wrote in this post.

“If 18 million votes is not enough, what does it take in the Democratic Party to get a woman on the ticket?”

Time was, when the two top candidates were in a statistical tie, no one was “anointed.” They fought it out on the floor of the convention, and then the loser became the VP candidate.

Then again, this is also the fault of the arcane rules the Dems chose so that they could take the choice away from the voters and put it back into career politicians’ hands (read: Superdelegates). One person, one vote? Not for them.

What people don’t understand when they fling around the easy label of “identity politics” is that like it or not, identity politics exist. When we see the sexist and misogynist comments on blogs and online news sites, we tend to get angry. It’s something that comes up every single time. I have never seen a discussion on any kind of women’s issue that doesn’t devolve into sexism and/or misogyny. Or, worst of all, the pretense that white males are being discriminated against as much as, if not more than, women and minorities. Shyeah. How many white male Senators are there again? How many female and minority candidates for VP and president have there been again?

But I’m getting off the point. The point is, the choice of Sarah Palin as McCain’s VP underlines the perception that women were slighted, yet again, by the Democrats. And that isn’t really what the Democrats want.

As I said, I was going to vote for McCain anyway. The addition of Palin has made me want to pay attention for the rest of the campaign. And the reaction from the Democrats and progressives?

Despicable.