Face Palm

That's the name given to the action of leaning the head forward slightly and resting it upon the opened palm of one's hand, usually with a quiet sigh of resignation lightly sprinkled with disgust. Sometimes it's done with more energy and a Simpsonian "D'oh!"

Either way, several events combined recently to create a swell face palm for folks who are of a mind to do so. Here they are. In a sermon last week, an Iranian cleric, Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi, opined that immodestly dressed women tempt young men to forgo their chastity and engage in illicit sex. As punishment for all that illicit sex, God sends earthquakes. Someone forgot to tell the cleric we already have Pat Robertson to say dumb things like that.

In response to this theological revelation, a number of women decided to demonstrate to Sedighi that he was mistaken. A Purdue genetics major named Jennifer McCreight blogged about his words and said that on Monday, April 26th, she would wear her "most cleavage-showing shirt" in defiance of their silliness. Before you could say "go viral," her post did and through Facebook and several other online avenues, the phenomenon of "boobquake" was born. Many women decided to follow her lead and defy the view that earthquakes were somehow their fault.

In the meantime, Sedighi's homeland Iran applied for and was granted a seat on the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. There were no viral videos or blog posts, no Facebook groups opposing it. Although I know a number of folks discount their objectivity, I linked to a Fox News story about the matter because typing "iran women's rights" into Yahoo! news showed only that and a couple of press releases. Typing the same phrase into the ABC News site where I found two stories about Boobquake brought back nothing about Iran's new four-year-term on the UN commission (It did return this, about Iran jailing four women's rights activists for writing online about women's rights in Iran).

The face palm comes in not only because news outlets spent more time and energy covering women who were uncovering than they did the UN decision, although that's a big one. Nor is it only because of the UN move itself -- although placing Iran on a commission that is supposed to oversee how UN members handle women's rights and advocate for equal treatment of women within those nations would make Kafka say, "That's a little out there for me." No, it's the whole idea that Boobquake mattered in any real way, and how a weird obsession with irrelevant protest gestures has somehow replaced meaningful action.

Does anyone think that any person who actually believed what Sedighi said was somehow persuaded of their wrong-headedness by the women who followed Ms. McCreight's lead? Does anyone think that the situation of women in Iran is at all helped by American and European women leaving a couple extra buttons undone? In my mind, to do so is to approach Sedighian levels of cluelessness. To do so and to say virtually nothing about Iran's election to the women's rights commission eclipses that and enters realms of cluelessness heretofore undreamt of by science.

But we get to laugh at those silly neanderthals with their silly medieval ideas, and we get to be brave and modern and put a thumb (or whatever) in the eye of their strait-laced moral worldview and we get to say "boobs" and be a little naughty in public and maybe even irritate some of our own more traditional-minded folks when women display definitive proof of their mammalian status. So yay!

Not that caring which thugocracy the UN allows to preen and pretend to legitimacy really matters either. Iran's unopposed election to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women is proof of only one thing. The United Nations has by now so dishonored the ideals of its founders that people who say it's irrelevant sound like nostalgists for the good old days. It's left relevance behind long ago and on its good days might hope to just be repugnant. The silence of civilized nations -- such as our own -- that allowed Iran to take its seat on the CSW without even calling for a vote is sickening.

Too harsh? I don't know -- the U.N. counts among its founding leaders a U.S. citizen who was named by President Truman to its first general assembly, who was the first chair of its Human Rights Commission,  who helped draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, who founded the US branch of the association that worked for the formation of the UN during World War II and who, because her name was Eleanor Roosevelt, would be subject to arrest in one of the newest CSW members for an immodest display of...ankle.