Women can choose to wear a hijab, just like women can choose to be a stay at home parent, out of their free will. But pressuring them one way or the other is cringe.
Choosing to wear a hijab is totally cool, as long as it’s not because of a religion.
Religion uses coercion and indoctrination to control people.
It doesn’t matter if it’s state sanctioned or not: the social contract imposed by religion is violence. It doesn’t matter if it’s the government threatening jail time or your friends threatening social isolation. It’s coercive.
And you can’t distinguish between those who do it willingly and those who are forced: so a civil society can permit neither.
I grew up in a sect that I like to often describe as Beer Drinkin’ Christianity because it’s really chill about most things including homosexuality and gender. It wasn’t until I had grown out of it and basically gone full agnostic that I really realized how coercive even my version of religion had been. I could go on and on but the funniest thing to me was realizing during an Abnormal Psychology 101 course in college that my Church Camp basically used every last technique they listed for brain washing. It was a fun camp and not scary in any way but yet extremely manipulative in a subversive way.
I similarly left Christianity from a far more fundamentalist sect and yes: the coercion is significant on all levels. It’s scary once you realize what’s been going on.
It’s an incredibly controlling form of human culture and not given its due wariness.
