Bill Maher Called Out Gender Apartheid. Here's What He Got Wrong

This is hiding under your nose-rings too.

The original title of my book was The American Burka. That’s because there’s a point in my story, just after 9/11 when I realized my Gothard-approved denim jumper was the American version of the burka, and that Christian Fundamentalist women were just as abused, objectified, marginalized, and subjugated as women in the countries we vilified for their Muslim faith. It wasn’t a Muslim problem; it was a fundamentalist patriarchal problem. But the title didn’t age well as the conversation around Islam changed over the next two decades, and my book needed a title that spoke more clearly into the broad heart of that life.

A Well-Trained Wife is what the Christian Patriarchy wants women to be—and that’s all they want them to be.

Bill Maher called out Gender Apartheid in his show.

Right now hundreds of millions of women are treated worse than second-class citizens. When you mandate that one category of human beings don't even have the right to show their face, that's apartheid, and it goes on in a lot of countries. For the last couple years women in Iran have been saying take this hijab and shove it—because in 2022 a young woman named Masah Amini was arrested for wearing her mandatory hijab incorrectly and then died in police custody—and now security forces have killed over 500 people protesting her death.

Amnesty International says that Iranian authorities are waging a war on women that subject them to constant surveillance beatings sexual violence and detention. Yasmine Muhammad is a human rights activist who got married off to a Muslim man with fundamentalist views about women, not exactly uncommon in the Muslim world. He forced her to wear the niqab all the time, including once beating her because she took her hijab off at home because the apartment had a window through which people might see in. This was in Vancouver!

Here's what Yasmine said about veiling:

‘It just suppresses your Humanity entirely. It's like a portable sensory deprivation chamber and you are no longer connected to humanity. You can't see properly, you can't hear properly, you can't speak properly. People can't see you—you can only see them. Just little things passing people on the street and just making eye contact and smiling—that's gone. You're no longer part of this world and so you very quickly just shrivel up into nothing under there.’

This is happening right now right under your nose rings and it's not just the clothes:

• 15 countries in the Middle East including Gaza have laws that require women to obey their husbands (laws not just Harrison Butker's opinion)

• and those societies also have guardianship laws which means a woman needs permission from her husband to work, travel, leave the house, go to school, get medical attention

• Honor killings where women are murdered by their own fathers and/or brothers happen so frequently that they can't even have an accurate account of how many

• there are no laws against sexual harassment in the workplace and many have no laws against domestic violence or spousal rape

• 20 countries have marry-your-rapist laws

• multiple societies have laws about what jobs women can and can't do

• 30 countries practice female genital mutilation and

• 650 million women alive today were married as children

Maher’s segment on Gender Apartheid was aimed at kids protesting on college campuses, and he urged them to consider this the issue of their time.

Kids, if you really want to change the world and not just tie up Monday morning traffic, this is the apartheid issue that desperately needs your attention. Gender apartheid is what should be the social justice issue of your time. Every woman should be free, but in reality, it's not an issue at all for one reason: the people who are doing it aren't white.

And that’s a tremendous danger, right there. The idea that gender apartheid is a brown (or any racial distinction) is to only see a binary. It’s to distance us as Americans and pretend it isn’t happening here every day. I’m not talking about American women who choose (or are forced) to cover with a niqab or burka. I’m talking about fundamentalist laws that deny our rights and freedoms, rendering us invisible and hidden, less human than male counterparts.

• We have laws and socialized pressure in America for women to submit to and obey their husbands

• We have guardianship attitudes and a Stay-At-Home-Daughter movement that requires girls to skip college, stay home until marriage, and serve their fathers.

  Cait West
  ’s recent memoir, Rift, is a great testament

• We have deadly domestic violence in this country; women who are killed by spouses or driven to suicide by their abuse: A recent example flying every red flag for this is Mica Miller

• We do not have an Equal Rights Amendment in America and marital rape IS a problem in Christian marriages. I share this in my memoir, A Well-Trained Wife, and also recommend the work of Sheila Gregoire

• Republicans are changing marriage laws in America, resisting age limits, which will mean under-age girls are forced to marry their patriarchal rapists

• We have a Christian society that has deeply embedded rules about jobs women can and can’t do

• While we may not perform physical genital mutilation in America, we do deny gynecological healthcare, restrict sex education that keeps women safe, and shame ordinary and healthy development that results in psychological mutilation. Start listening to stories of Christian women who’ve never had sex for pleasure or experienced an orgasm and the conversation on mutilation widens

• Underage marriage is a rising problem here. You can include American women in that nasty statistic

I wish Maher was right, that the people doing this aren’t white. It would mean the problems are regional, limited, or less than. But the truth is, the people doing this cross the world. There are fundamentalist Christian missions the world over. To the kids Maher was addressing—this is happening in their communities, right now, at home.

Gender Apartheid is one word for it. Evangelical Christian culture is another.

Trad wife life is rising in popularity. Here’s a bunch of posts on what trad wife life is really like.