When reading Susan Okin's argument, I was struck that there is more to say than she says here about the muddled and contradictory nature of thought about privacy and publicity in liberal and other political systems. This starting point bothers me. But in Western societies conservatism, social democracy, socialism, anarchism, and feminism, among other-isms, compete with liberalism for dominance. It's difficult to make strict sense of this privacy claim. In all cultures and according to all political ideologies, social norms govern household, kinship, and sexual relations.
Deviant behavior attracts a range of interpersonal, social, and even legal sanctions.
Publicity figures prominently in Okin's analysis at several points. First, there is the contrast between the public row about girls wearing headscarves in French schools, and the silent or quiet tolerance and subsequent intolerance of polygamy on the part of the French government. Mechanisms of administrative and bureaucratic discretion work in response to governmental imperatives, and may hardly be noticed, let alone debated, by citizens. That is, men's voices are audible and men's analyses and prescriptions are promulgated within the relevant culture and across cultural boundaries. Third, cultural practices and ideologies of gender have in many contexts to be publicly justified.