Reposted from the thread on feminism:
 
 
In my youth women would not go out of doors without a scarf. But they did not make a political case out of it. Someone should do a cartoon of Mohamed and Fatima, with Fatima wearing curlers under her scarf. The point is, it is only an issue because there is compulsion involved. There is no other reason to affirm it as a 'right'. Let alone the veil. It is not up to the enslaved to endorse the condition of slavery. Do some women freely wear the scarf or veil? Is culture a right? If it is not spontaneous it is not inalienable. The earliest talk of right was about the right to self-defense. The point there was that no law can prevent it, and so it was taken as a demonstrable fact of natural law supreme over human laws and customs. Cultural constraints are not a natural and spontaneous expression of rights. A recent film on arranged marriages (I do not know its title) portrays an ex-patriot Indian community desperately clinging to social norms that are fading in India itself. Should their right to be sticks-in-the-mud be regarded as an inalienable right? Indigenous cultures should not be protected from the future, they should be provided the means to adapt to it in their own terms. Assimilation is a two way street, we adopt them as much as they us. The only crime is where it is unilateral and coercive. Absent that coercion and that implacable resistance to being influenced by the stranger, two way assimilation is the future for us all, not just those who feel they need to be protected from it, or from "them". Go to Iran and watch the girls push back their scarf when they think no one is looking, but quickly pull it over their hair when they think officials might be present, and then tell them it is their "right" to wear it. In France the scarf is outlawed in public schools. Does this go to far? Or do they have a point? After all, they don't allow visible Christian symbols either.

My comments on cultural victimhood will most likely not endear me to those who have long-espoused the principles of equality and may have even supported such fractious notions as affirmative action in the interest of correcting past unfairness. I too, once espoused such idealism and worked in a civil rights organization for many years, as has been mentioned before. However, over time, the best intentions of affirmative action were gradually eroded by the fact that minorities and women came to see advantages to being disadvantaged. Being cultural victims could be turned into an asset of sorts and opportunities would flow from what had heretofore been a hopeless sea of quicksand. Almost everyone began to recognize what was happening and respected leaders of disadvantaged groups repudiated affirmative action and other such artificial mechanisms. AA is probably now clinically dead, though the corpse may still retain some vestige of residual warmth. In his closing remark, Professor Taylor wondered what "talk of cultures of victimhood might really come to". Let me suggest this much: maybe, just maybe, they may clear away some of the cobwebs and allow us to assess the results of our best intentions with 20/20 hindsight. Yes, sometimes truth hurts.

When did the term "victimhood" come into being? What's wrong with the standard English term "victimization"?
"Victimhood" by definition suggests that "victims" are milking their condition and making undue demands. It's a shaming term which is designed to put victims on the defensive. "Victimhood" reflects contempt for victims.
 
 

In honor societies, individuals (men) kept up their honor by reacting to affront, insults, infringement of rights without anyone else's input help roughness. For the most part respect societies exist where the principle of law is frail. In honor societies, individuals ensured themselves, their families, and property through having a notoriety for quick savagery. Amid the nineteenth century, most Western social orders started the ethical move toward pride societies in which all nationals were lawfully enriched with equivalent rights. In such social orders, persons, property, and rights are protected by plan of action to outsiders, ordinarily courts, police, et cetera, that, if fundamental, wield roughness on their benefit. Respect societies rehearse resistance and are a great deal more quiet than honor societies.thesis writing service

Modulo a Nietzchean rejection of there being anything proper to a victim,  an illegitimate victim would be one not truly victimised.   This implies a judgement of whether or not there has been an actual tort, to dip into legal  language.  Roughly speaking, those on the Right used to generally claim that the victims in whose interest the Left spoke were not true victims because the supposèd injuries done them were either due them by virtue of their failings ('The poor are lazy. ')  or represent the natural and inevitable consequences of the way society, if not the entire Universe, is set-up ('Blacks/women/infidels are naturally unsuited to lead, so in a well-ordered world they will naturally have to defer to whites/men/{the One True Church}.'). Those on the Left,  roughly again,  see false victimhood in members of formerly dominant classes of people constructing their new lack of acknowledged superiority as a form of injury.