I hope you’ll indulge me as I write aloud. Turkey’s lifting of its ban on head scarves raises an interesting and complicated question, by no means limited to Turkey or to head scarves. To some, enforcing a ban against women wearing head scarves is about enforcing secularism, freedom and… oddly enough, tolerance, albeit in an intolerant and compulsory way. On the other hand, allowing women to do what they want with their heads, taking a more “my head scarf, my choice,” can be seen as a more tolerant position, but one that allows for (what some would deem) intolerant practices, such as covering your head. Of course, there is a difference between you covering your own head, and you being made to cover your head. Ultimately, I think, the case can be made that there are women who want to wear a head scarf, who aren’t victims, who don’t do it for men. In fact, many Muslim women are offended by the way Western feminists take on a cause which they may not understand, onto which they impose their own values, which may or may not be imperialist, Orientalizing etc. But it becomes more complicated when discussing practices such as clitorectomies as shown in the debate in the New York Times. Genital mutilation really does push the limits of cultural relativism arguments. Because unlike covering your hair, having your clitoris removed in a painful, unhealthy, and dangerous process, can be seen as a violation of more universal rights, such as the right to health, the right to be spared painful life threatening mutilations. When I bring this up, someone, actually, some male, will always say that I’m imposing my western ideals on other people who may not share them. So how about this as a test of whether or not something is relative or wrong? The second a woman risks her life in order to run away from something she fears and loathes, the cultural relativism argument no longer works. Yet culture is still relevant, of course, so I defer to Toston, the Senegal-based NGO, which uses grassroots and community organizing to effect change around genital mutilation, women’s rights, and development; and the Inter-African Committee on Traditional Practices, an NGO that will by celebrating February 6 as the International Day of Zero Tolerance to Female Genital Mutilation. For more about FGM, read here.