When Conservatism Turns Selective: A Response to a Misguided Narrative on Women and Modernity

Morocco World

26-07-2025

There's nothing inherently wrong with being a conservative. Some of the most thoughtful voices in history have leaned on tradition not to resist change, but to ask deeper questions about its consequences. But there's a line, and that line is crossed when conservatism becomes a selective moral judgment, especially when it turns women into scapegoats for the discomforts of a shifting world.
In a recent televised debate, Professor Dr. Mohammed Talal Lahlou, a researcher and trainer in islamic financial capital and a self-proclaimed defender of conservative values, argued that gender equality is the reason women today are unhappy, referencing a study conducted by a researcher from the University of Michigan with no methodological framing, and no intellectual caution. The tone was confident, the claim bold, but the reasoning was hollow.
When Data Becomes a Crutch, Not a Compass
Throwing statistics into a discussion without context or analytical depth is not a sign of intellectual rigor, it's a form of rhetorical short-cutting. Professor Lahlou cited percentages as if they were self-evident truths, without addressing critical variables such as economic shifts, unpaid labor, gendered social expectations, or mental health stigma. He never asked why these women might report unhappiness, and more importantly, he never questioned men's roles in the systems that shape that unhappiness.
He didn't mention the erosion of male responsibility, the abandonment of shared roles within families, or the economic pressures that force women into double and triple shifts. His conservatism lacked introspection, it was structured to diagnose, not to understand.
The study by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers
Conducted in the United States between the 1970s and the 2000s, it highlights a counterintuitive phenomenon: despite objective progress in rights, education, and professional integration, the reported happiness level of American women declined, reversing the historically favorable trend compared to men. This paradox, often instrumentalized in conservative discourse, cannot, however, be applied to the Moroccan context of 2025 without falling into a simplistic and anachronistic interpretation. The two historical, social, and cultural realities are radically different. In the United States, women experienced empowerment within an individualistic, post-industrial society, marked by relatively protective laws. In Morocco, by contrast, the proclaimed equality faces structural resistance, persistent patriarchal norms, and a glaring gap between legal texts and social practices, especially in rural areas. Invoking Stevenson's study to disparage equality or to blame it for women's malaise in a country where such equality remains largely unfinished thus constitutes a methodological and intellectual misunderstanding. It amounts to ignoring cultural specificities, asymmetries in access to rights, and above all the mental load that Moroccan women continue to bear alone in the name of progress they are asked to embody without ever being fully supported.
Not All Conservatism Is Created Equal
To be fair, not all conservative thought is simplistic or unfair. There are intellectual conservatives who interrogate social transformations with honesty, who challenge liberal ideologies without defaulting to misogyny. But what we saw in this exchange was a rigid and outdated posture, cloaked in academic vocabulary and framed through selective outrage.
A Word on the Other Voice in the Room
Interestingly, and tellingly, his opponent Professor Ahmed Assid a progressive, secular thinker with whom many might disagree ideologically, demonstrated a far more robust approach to debate. He didn't manipulate numbers. He didn't speculate recklessly. He grounded his views in lived experience, in analysis, and in argumentation. Whether one agrees with his positions or not, one cannot ignore that his discourse respected the rules of honest thinking.
He embodied what debate should be: not a battle of slogans, but an exchange of ideas. And in contrast, the professor's reliance on moral absolutism and cherry-picked data felt shallow, and frankly, desperate.
Professors Should Think, Not Preach
The role of a professor is not to present ideological convictions as if they were objective facts. It is to engage with nuance, to welcome complexity, and to accept the uncomfortable parts of the truth even when they challenge personal or cultural convictions.
What we witnessed instead was the use of academic authority to moralize, to generalize, and to repackage old anxieties as empirical wisdom. But the burden of unhappiness does not lie in equality, it lies in the resistance to completing it.
Women are not in crisis because they are equal. They are exhausted because they are still asked to carry the weight of equality alone, while many social systems and many men continue to operate as if nothing has changed.
This isn't about rejecting conservatism. It's about rejecting intellectual shortcuts disguised as values.
Because true intellectual integrity, no matter the ideology is never afraid of the full picture. Tags: ConservatismGenderModernityWomen in Morocco