Freedom?

 https://x.com/krisztinamaria/status/2094766989268947334?s=51&t=cLq01Oy84YkmYPZ-URIMYw

 "The niqab is feminism and freedom, they say. It comes back every single time. A Muslim voice steps into the debate and explains to us that the niqab and the headscarf are the woman's own choice. That she decides over her own body. That it is in fact feminism. And that the rest of us should stay well away from the subject, because we do not understand it. Usually it is a man saying it. So let us take it from the ground up. Not because the argument is strong, but because it has been repeated so many times that people have started to believe it. Freedom is not measured by what a person is allowed to do. Freedom is measured by what it costs to do the opposite. A choice is only free if both doors are open. One door leads to support from family, mosque and the entire community. The other leads to condemnation, loss of honour, loss of network and in some cases loss of safety. Then there are not two doors. There is one door and a warning. If you want to test it, it takes three seconds. Same woman. Same right to decide over her own body. She says: tomorrow I take the niqab off. I let my hair blow free. I wear a summer dress with bare arms and bare legs. Now ask the same men who defended her choice yesterday whether they defend it today. They do not. You know it. I know it. They know it themselves. And they do not even hide it. Go into any comment thread where this exact subject is being discussed. Not some other topic. This one. Covering, choice, freedom. And watch what happens the moment Western women are brought up. We are the contrast they need. We are called whores. Cheap. Without dignity. Women who have used their so-called freedom to make themselves available to anyone. That is written by the same men who, three comments earlier, explained that a woman decides over her own body. Read what is actually happening there. Her right to cover is being defended by degrading the women who do not. Both statements come from the same man, in the same thread, about the same question. If both choices were genuinely equal, one of them would not have to be dragged through the mud to defend the other. And while they write it, they stare. Every woman reading this has noticed. That is where the whole argument collapses. The right to choose is defended in one direction only. A right that runs one way is not a right. It is an order with a friendly explanation on the outside. Then comes the next move. She says herself that she chooses it. Who are you to contradict her? Think about what is actually being asked. If there is a price for taking the covering off, there is also a price for saying you were pressured into putting it on. The punishment lands on both statements. Her answer is therefore least reliable in exactly the situation where it is being used as final proof. You cannot elevate one answer to the status of truth while pretending it is a coincidence that only that answer is free to give. And there is something that runs deeper than what she dares say out loud. She was born into an ideology that places her sex beneath the man's from the very beginning. She was raised to believe that covering is what is best for her. That it protects her. That it is the very source of her dignity. She has heard it since before she could walk. I am not saying she is stupid. I am not saying she has no will of her own. I am saying that no human being can give free consent to something they have never seen a real alternative to. That applies to all of us. None of us chooses freely inside what we were taught to see as the condition of our own worth. And there is the truly uncomfortable part. When covering is tied to her dignity, the opposite choice is not merely forbidden. It is shameful. Nobody chooses freely between two options when one of them is defined as the loss of herself. '