You now see women in offices everywhere, and several senior officials whispered to me how often the same conservatives who decry women in the workplace quietly lobby them to get their daughters into good schools or jobs.
.. I spent an evening with Mohammed bin Salman at his office, and he wore me out. With staccato energy bursts, he laid out in detail his plans. His main projects are an online government dashboard that will transparently display the goals of each ministry, with monthly K.P.I.s — key performance indicators — for which each minister will be held accountable. His idea is to get the whole country engaged in government performance. Ministers tell you: Since Mohammed arrived, big decisions that took two years to make now happen in two weeks.
.. But this will all be tricky. Saudi workers pay no income tax. “Our society does not accept taxes; [citizens] are not used to them,” said Mohammed. So the fact that the government may be increasing taxes in some way, shape or form could have political ramifications: Will the leaders hear declarations of “no taxation without representation”?
The ‘Shidduch Crisis’ Has Led to an Orthodox Obsession with Female Beauty
The boy turns back to the driver: “But don’t you agree, sir, that if you have the most precious diamond in the world, you keep it wrapped up? You don’t take it to the streets to show the entire world?”
The girl gasps silently — she is taken backwards in time, back to the apologetics they taught in 7th grade, again and again, bas melech, kol kvoda pnima, a princess’s honor is all inside, a divine jewel to be kept hidden…
But before she can respond, the driver presses the brakes. He turns around and faces the yeshiva boy, and says slowly, his voice shaking with rage: “Listen to me, boy. This is not an object you’re talking about. This is a living, breathing human being.”
.. “I need a gorgeous girl,” one older businessman tells me over the phone, his intonations straight out of the ultra-Orthodox yeshiva. I say that I may have a young woman for him, it might be worth a date. Then I think it over again and say, actually, I’m so sorry, I just realized that she’s not for you, sorry, never mind, I will think of someone else.
He is offended. He’s already seen her picture — he is struck by her beauty. “But why? Why isn’t she for me?”
I sigh and finally admit: “She’s looking for an erudite, a Harvard boy, someone really intellectual, worldly…”
“That’s not fair,” he objects. I am not allowed to judge, he says.
“So, let me get this straight,” I fire back. “Your demands for a gorgeous girl must be met, yet her demands for an intellectual mean nothing? Why is that any more harsh?”
.. I am told — here, it’s not uncommon for a young man to refuse to go out with a girl because he heard that she was once overweight in high school.
.. So when I am told constantly, that the religious world protects women from being objectified, by omitting their images — that this reflects some “essential community value” of appreciating women’s inner beauty over externals, I can’t help but laugh at how out of touch this is from reality.
.. Today’s religious woman is caught between two extreme worlds — a religious world which offers only contradictions, which tells us that our beauty is key to happiness in life yet we should also hide ourselves lest we attract attention, and a secular world which seems to equate liberty with exhibitionism.
.. I am reminded of Daisy Buchanan’s haunting words about her own small daughter: ”I hope she’ll be a fool — that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”
.. And it is evident on social media today, on Instagram feeds and private Facebook and WhatsApp groups — where religious women are creating their own alternative media, a place where their faces can exist.
I recommend that the leadership remain ahead of the game.
Sojourner Truth: Ain’t I a Woman?
That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ar’n’t I a woman?
Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ar’n’t I a woman?
I could work as much and eat as much as a man – when I could get it – and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman?
I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?
Review: ‘Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’
Ms. Carmon does a fine job of showing how shrewd Justice Ginsburg was as a women’s rights lawyer, deliberately taking on male plaintiffs who had been disenfranchised in their caregiver roles. Through a discreet back door, she established a meaningful body of law that said neither men’s nor women’s rights should be determined or limited by sex.
.. In 1993, she gave a famous(one might say notorious) lecture that decried Roe v. Wade because the decision “invited no dialogue with legislators,” but wiped out, in a single stroke, every state’s abortion law.
Ms. Carmon mentions this lecture. But as the book winds down, she does not so much as remark upon — much less reckon with — the idea that Justice Ginsburg’s belief in incrementalism might live in tension with her recent votes on marriage equality, which invalidated many state laws and made no overtures to state legislatures at all.