A critical female Saudi voice

Thanks to improvements in communication technology, we are nowadays able to inform ourselves more easily about distant societies. I believe this wonderful development is a huge opportunity for all of us to get rid of our prejudices. However, as it can be quite demanding to actively engage in a continuous act of broadening the horizon, sometimes this prejudice-obliterating information needs to be provided by others - let us call them Prejudice Terminators for the sake of originality. (I surely would not dare to call myself a Prejudice Terminator, but I do admit that I occasionally make an effort to show 'the other side' of some situation, as I will do now)

In most parts of the world, including the Arab world, the image of the Saudi woman is not very cheerful. Most people think of Saudi women as submissive beings with no ability to speak. This may indeed be true for some women - and this may obviously be true for women in other parts of the world as well - but let us not stick to that part of reality and start looking around us for those other pictures the reality is offering.

While surfing on the fascinating waves of the blog ocean, I hit on this remarkable youtube film. It is a fragment of an Arabic talk show about whether women should appear on television (at least the first part of it, the second part is about brainwashing in Saudi Arabia). The charming but critical lady is Buthayna Nasser, a Saudi newscaster. The talk show was on LBC, a Lebanese television station.