Gender equality in Saudi, rugby and BBC

Female emancipation in Saudi, yay. Shame it only comes with male permission.

Saudi women might have celebrated last Monday when it was announced they have only four more years to wait until they are allowed to vote in municipal elections. Their celebrations may well have been tempered, however, by knowing they will require permission to do so from a male relative. At news of their pending emancipation, some women may even have danced in the streets, so long as their father, brother, uncle or son was handy to escort them outside since Saudi women are only allowed out in public accompanied by a male family member. For similar reasons, the good news could not have led to a spontaneous gathering of women at each other’s houses, unless a male relative drove them there, because women are not allowed to drive.

It is therefore hard to share the common view that the edict on voting, issued by King Abdullah, “underscores the king’s reformist stature”, as one analyst was quoted as saying. Well, perhaps it does underscore that, but it all depends on your definition of “reformist”. It mightn’t have been the enlightenment that has led to this pronouncement from the king, but the sight and sound of repressive regimes toppling around the Arab world. The Arab spring has arrived in some parts of the Middle East and North Africa, but in Saudi Arabia it seems to be only one minute past the midwinter solstice.

Watching more rugby in the past four weeks than I have in the past four years has reminded me just what a ridiculous game it is. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy being a spectator – I’m liking it immensely – but in every game I watch I repeatedly wince, gasp and cover my eyes as a scrum collapses or opposing forwards smash into a ruck. I’m genuinely surprised there have been no broken noses, fractures or brain injuries on my watch. Since I am old enough to be the mother of almost all the players, that may be the lens through which I watch the games. The maternal instinct is never to be underestimated and is the reason many kids play soccer, rather than rugby. I once took a taxi in Christchurch with a driver whose son played for the Crusaders and who hadn’t seen him play a single match since high school. She simply could not bear to watch. Rugby really is a very peculiar game, and that’s before you even begin to contemplate the shape of the ball. Still, as a diversion from the potential implosion of the global financial system, the Rugby World Cup is a very welcome distraction, even if only slightly less bloody.

Along with its excellent news service and its standard-setting in the pronunciation of English, the BBC has produced some wonderful comedies, which, presumably, is where the suggestion to drop the terms BC and AD comes from. The BBC’s ethics department is suggesting broadcasters might instead like to use the “religiously neutral” CE (Common Era) and BCE (Before Common Era) to replace BC (Before Christ) and AD (Anno Domini – in the year of our Lord). The terms BC and AD are, admittedly, a little confusing, given that Jesus was apparently born in around 6BC, and AD is frequently thought to mean “after (Christ’s) death”, which would leave the 30-odd years of his life outside the calendar altogether. But let’s not get precious about it all. Then we would have to rename, for example, Thursday – Thor’s day, after the Norse god of thunder and lightning – and March – after Mars, the Roman god of war. And that’s just for starters. Taken to the extreme, we would end up with a dating system the equivalent of Esperanto, the made-up politically neutral language (that only about 10,000 people in the world speak fluently). There has to be a fixed point for the calendar and AD and BC have stood the test of time. You don’t have to be a Christian to find them useful. After all, we could, here in New Zealand, rewrite the calendar based on the putative year Maui fished up the North Island, but here’s my suggestion: let’s not.