Why ultra-Orthodox men wearing ‘modesty glasses’ is a fabulous idea
A Haredi man gazing at the Jerusalem skyline. Photo by Olivier Fitoussi
If you step into the extremist ultra-Orthodox mindset for a moment, there is indeed a problem – haredi men must move around in the world to a certain extent – if only to travel to and from yeshiva and run their errands. But in this wider world there are women. Let’s accept the premise that any glimpse of any woman awakens base instincts that they have absolutely no control over. It’s an absurd premise, but I’ll accept it for the sake of argument.
By Allison Kaplan Sommer
At first it sounded like just another distasteful manifestation of extremism among ultra-Orthodox Jews. Modesty glasses.
Just when we thought things couldn’t get more ridiculous, we learned that the latest trend for those men who will do anything to avoid any contact with women, lest they awaken forbidden sexual urges, are stickers that they can plaster onto their eyeglasses. According to the Associated Press:
The ultra-Orthodox community’s unofficial “modesty patrols” are selling glasses with special blur-inducing stickers on their lenses. The glasses provide clear vision for up to a few meters so as not to impede movement, but anything beyond that gets blurry – including women. It’s not known how many have been sold.
For men forced to venture outside their insular communities, hoods and shields that block peripheral vision are also being offered.
The glasses are going for the “modest” price of $6.
Naturally, since the story falls into the category of ‘what will those nutty Israelis do next,’ it has been spread wide, in media outlets as diverse as National Public Radio which called it “a novel solution to an age-old conflict” (inaccurate, since the extreme modesty obsession is a recent development) to a newspaper in North Carolina which said the report was “so crazy that you might think the story is a joke.”
At first, a modern woman’s knee-jerk reaction to news of the glasses is to reflexively protest against it vociferously. Just like gender-segregated buses, the removal of women’s images from billboards, the blurring of little girl’s faces in Purim ads, signs requiring women to dress ‘modestly’ in certain neighborhoods, keeping their voices off of radio broadcasts, and forcing women to switch seats on airplanes so as not to sit next to the men, it all appears to be part of the same package that oppresses women by putting them in the category of ‘forbidden fruit’ that cannot be seen or heard on any way.
But then I decided to rethink the issue.
