The world still sucks. yes, I'm aware of that fact.

A post about Atefeh Rajabi Sahaaleh showed up on my feed on Reddit and here is the Wikipedia page. The short version is she was sentenced to death because a much older man raped her repeatedly over the course of three years when she was still a legal minor.

I stand by things I've said elsewhere on this site about finding the sexual objectification of women by Western men harmful to me and having been helped to get over that in part by being involved for a time with an Iranian man.

I don't pretend that all Iranian men are his moral equal. He was an uncommon man and if he still lives likely remains so.

To the best of my knowledge, I currently have no photos of me anywhere online and I've written about that in various places. 

I'm not Muslim but my current position is in line with Muslim sensibilities in part because a man from a Muslim country taught me to respect myself and not cater to this SHIT from Western society about how I'm obligated to try to be beautiful out in public and put that on display and then it's MY fault if someone rapes me for "being too beautiful to resist."

So I'm going to support what I'm saying about I'm not Muslim but here's stuff I've said about why there are no photos of me online and related information:

I'm no longer on Twitter, but this page remains live because I link to it from elsewhere:

By all accounts, I was beautiful in my youth. I was also sexually assaulted and sexually harassed and told it was my fault for how I looked. I choose to not have my face as my icon. I've thought a lot about it and I just don't want to engage with any of the cultural garbage concerning what a woman is supposed to look like. That's not a criticism of your choice to do so if you are using your face as your icon.

There's also a piece on my health site called Hollywood which says in part:

By all accounts, I was quite beautiful in my youth but I lived when I should have died in part because I was able to resist social pressure to cater to social standards of conventional beauty at all costs.

And it goes on to talk about my current inability to create a selfie I find satisfactory even though I generally feel okay about what I see in the mirror. 

My selfies no longer look like what I see in the mirror and I don't know why and don't care but in addition to not wanting to engage with the hip deep DOO DOO from all of planet Earth about women and how we are supposed to look, I still have my vanity and still have my self esteem and don't care to try to prove to a toxic world that there's nothing wrong with how I look knowing I can't currently outshine most people in the selfie department.

I'm also wanting to start a clothing line and perhaps I'm incredibly deluded but I still get feedback from random strangers who sometimes think I'm the older sister of my adult sons rather than their mother and I think I actually would make a good role model for what a healthy woman my age should look like.

But I'm fairly certain that planet Earth would BOO my clothing line into non-existence if I stupidly tried to use myself as a model for my clothing even though I strongly object to current marketing methods for women's clothing.

I object to putting gorgeous clothes on gorgeous 25 year old super models knowing people will buy that subconsciously wanting to look like HER when no outfit has any means to make them look like HER.

I agree with David Kibbe who felt the fashion and beauty industry makes women miserable and causes them to feel ugly instead of enhancing their lives and helping them feel good about themselves.

Anyway, obviously simply covering up your women doesn't magically cure your society of all ills. I'm sorry this happened to this young lady and my writing is not intended to in any way whitewash any of the bad things that do still go on in Muslim countries.

My writing is not intended to shoot down the concerns of women living in those countries who frequently deal with a vitamin D deficiency as a consequence of the expectation that they cover themselves completely in public.

I know Middle Eastern women often find Western culture freeing when they leave their world and go elsewhere much as I found exposure to other cultures and other values restorative in the aftermath of harms done to me in a manner that wrapped up the harm with specific aspects of Western culture.

I have no idea what my future policy on photos of me will be. Perhaps I'll win the lottery, hire a professional photographer and go nuts with plastering my image everywhere so long as it's FLATTERING images of me.

But please be aware of the following:

1. I am strongly anti rape and do not approve of the practice of blaming the rape victim for the actions of her abusers.

2. I do my best to write about ME and MY LIFE in hopes of casting light on what I think and why I think that because I seem to be coping better than average with the shitty hand life dealt me so I hope to in some way be helpful to others.

3. That's never ever ever intended to hand wave off real challenges other women are experiencing, whatever their culture or country of origin.

I desperately wish I lived in a world where this post wasn't something I felt I needed to write. Women are damned if we do, damned if we don't.

I would like to make clothes with a purpose of helping women with office jobs make their lives work in part by making clothes that's pretty but less sexualized than most of the SHIT sold in Western clothing stores where most brands could be relabeled Sluts R Us because covering up the cleavage to try to meet a business casual dress code is a case of "Good luck with that, sister!"

And then if it's on display because it's the only clothes you can find, obviously you deserve to be sexually harassed by coworkers, sexually assaulted, passed over for promotion because you are only a sex object etc ad nauseum.

And I wish wanting to dress for success and not be raped and murdered were not things that strike me as stupidly interrelated while knowing planet Earth will swear up and down I'm a crazy lady and this is not how things work.

Atefeh Rajabi Sahaaleh was guilty of being a pretty girl from a broken family who couldn't seem to adequately protect her from dirty old men and she paid an excessively high price for that. And my feeling is that's the crux of the problem for far too many women where no matter how covered up you are, if there's anything attractive about you, wolves show up and prey upon you and say it's your fault.

And it hurts careers too. 

And the fact that someone pointing out the connection between the trashy clothes we allow women and how badly we treat them is controversial and objectionable is why so many people use the phrase rape culture.

No clue if Middle Eastern women have a similar concept or phrase.