In Saudi Arabia, women and men disagree over whether a law banning men from working in lingerie stores should be enforced. Sawt al Nisaa, a women's advocacy group, is poised to begin a boycott of lingerie stores who refuse to enforce teh law, which was designed to bring more women into the workforce. Market forces as well as convention complicate the issue : women, particularly Saudi women, are expensive to hire; foreign men provide the cheapest source of labor. On the other hand, Islam allegedly forbids men and women from mixing. However, women leave the house to shop anyway, meeting men throughout the mall (or wherever they are shopping). The critiques of the law continue.
What's curious to me about this situation is not so much the disagreement over the relative merits of having women working in lingerie stores. First, it's the dramatic distortion of market forces at work here. Why does the government see fit to mandate, through law, the gender of lingerie stores’ employees? It seems the government here is a middleman: the boycott will negatively affect the lingerie stores’ business, so the stores should hire women because that is what their female customers want. Inserting a legal decree into the equation means that customers have to go through the government to express their preferences as consumers. Why would the government want anything to do with this transaction? (Of course, we don't know whose brother/cousin/uncle owns the vertically integrated lingerie company that dominates the industry – which could complicate the government/business relationship).
Second, I think it's interesting that this women's advocacy group has chosen the law – and by proxy, the government – as a vehicle for acheiving their goals. The presence of this law at all is one indication – among many others in Saudi Arabia – that the government is the only game in town, so naturally individuals and groups with grievances would go there to see them addressed. One has to wonder, though, to what extent going to government for answers to issues like this one compounds the executive domination of life in the Kingdom. Does it create a political culture of a nanny state/daddy state/ Big Brother state? Is it at all fair to even say that with respect to the work of women, who have typically not been represented among those groups squabbling for their issues to be addressed through government patronage? Is it a wise strategy for women to use the state to get what they want?
Toby Craig Jones, professor of history at Rutgers addresses the centralization (i.e. governmentization) of Saudi politics in his article The Clerics, the Sahwa and the Saudi State:
Liberal and Islamist reformers are distinguished by the content of their political visions and the strategies they embrace to achieve them. Khalid al-Dakhil, professor of political sociology at King Saud University in Riyadh, wrote in the Arab Reform Bulletin that the liberals “assume from the start that the Saudi monarchy is legitimate and reflective of the social and political reality and history of Saudi society. Thus, it provides a badly needed framework for maintaining national unity.” Since January, when 104 petitioners submitted the letter, “A Vision for the Nation and Its Future,” to Crown Prince Abdallah, the liberals have consistently sought change from above. Fundamentally, they see themselves and the regime as allies in a campaign against radical forces in the country. Al-Dakhil claims that the main point of contention between them is the government's refusal to address social inequity in Saudi Arabia. He wrote recently that “when the government responds [to crises], it does so by trying to maintain old values and institutions, such as by appeasing the most radical and narrow-minded `ulama and preachers. In this sense, the threat to the Saudi state comes not only from the spread of religious radicalism, but also from the government's response to this radicalism.”
So, the ethical calculus for reformers is somewhat complicated.