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Halima Aden makes history as the first model to wear a hijab and burkini for Sports Illustrated Swimsuit: https://t.co/8WFD4hHmiH. pic.twitter.com/OsBthnjoLY — Sports Illustrated Swimsuit (@SI_Swimsuit) April 29, 2019

At home I was taught that, and nine years old, I needed to wear a hijab to protect myself from men who wanted to molest me.

From my society, I learned that’s called victim-blaming.

At home I was taught that good, pure, clean girls wore hijab and filthy, loose, despicable girls did not.

From my society, I learned that was called slut-shaming.

Given the choice between those two worlds, I eventually chose to break free.

That decision almost cost me my life and my daughter’s life.

I’m grateful that unlike Aqsa Parvez, a teenager from Mississauga, my family were not able to follow through on the threat to kill me for removing my hijab.

I was able to escape with my daughter.

But where have I escaped to? I have escaped to the upside down.

The society that that I fled to seems to have been a mirage.

Instead, I find myself in a world where the very things I escaped from are being fetishized by western corporations like Gap, Mattel, Nike and now, most recently, on Sports Illustrated.

Why are we suddenly celebrating religious modesty culture? Isn’t that the very thing feminists have been fighting against for centuries? How is it now suddenly something positive?

There is a general lunacy in the free western world celebrating religiously prescribed clothing, but a specific lunacy in the Swimsuit Edition of Sports Illustrated doing it.

Imagine if that were an Amish woman in her prairie dress and bonnet … it’s beyond parody.

But you never see Mormon underwear on the Victoria’s Secret runway. You never see any other religious clothing being fetishized like the hijab and to such a nonsensical degree.