For @virgoanmaenad and other feminists, I’m sorry to report that OP is a textbook Islamophobe:
Replies in the post make clear that the other person in the conversation is explicitly talking about niqabis.
If you didn’t catch onto these strands at first, that’s fine - we can all use practice at parsing dogwhistles. The dogwhistles that make this Islamophobic, despite no mention of Islam itself in the post or screenshots, are
1) the connection between “thick, dark, heavy” fabric being self-evidently bad for women because it is dangerous in the heat. Wearing dark, loose fabric that covers the full body, including the face, is common practice for both men and women in the Middle East and Northern Africa as protection from the sun.
2) the belief that a woman with her body and face totally covered is inherently dangerous.
3) the contrast between “America” which never sees women in total cover and other places which presumably do.
The combination of these three points makes it clear that it is not simply religious female body covering or female face covering that troubles these posters, such as American nuns in their habits or a woman wearing a cross necklace under her N95 face mask and head scarf, since no one looks at a nun and immediately fears she may be carrying a knife. This is a specific combination of tropes that has been deployed and weaponized repeatedly against Muslim women.
I do agree with OP’s point that framing conversations about clothing around men’s approval/disapproval is not an effective way for feminists to continue the conversation. I also agree with the numerous Muslim feminist writers who have written about their own relationship(s) with hijab and have chosen to stop, start, or continue wearing it in their own lives. The misogynistic abuses of regimes like the Taliban or of individual men secure in patriarchy should be combatted, but as a feminist, I object to using those men’s abuses to erase women’s own intellectual and personal engagement with hijab.
To OP - while you are of course welcome to reply to this post with your own response in turn, I will probably not be responding, as this is a busy time of year for me and I prefer to be focusing on things offline. I did debate whether I wanted to make this addition at all, but as a teacher, respectfully, I thought it important to add this additional context.
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