From time immemorial, men have been awed and terrified by the power of women's sexuality. Only the woman could create new life and men have always felt helpless to withstand the sexual allure of the all-powerful woman. Many primitive cultures developed coming of age rituals which were designed to minimize the power of women and allow boys to become initiated as men without the threat of losing their strength and power to the more powerful woman.
These kinds of attitudes persist even in our enlightened and sophisticated culture, where athletes are often expected to avoid sex before a big match, for example, to prevent them being drained by a sexual encounter.
Religions traditionally have supported carefully delineated roles for men and women, both to protect women in reality, and to protect men from the knowledge of their fundamental shortcomings in the most important arena, that is, of creating the next generation.
Judaism and Christianity have evolved in their approach to the relationship between men and women and have struggled to make accommodations for equality between the sexes.
Islam conspicuously lags behind and in their most overt expressions of Sharia and traditional Islam, as depicted in the rules and regulations promulgated by their most revered Imams, reveal the terror of female sexuality that civilized man has worked hard to ameliorate.
The BBC reports on a new magazine which is threatening to shake up the status quo:
Heated row at Indonesian Playboy
The launch of a version of Playboy magazine in Indonesia has sparked a heated reaction in the world's most-populous Muslim nation.
Muslim leaders condemned the publication as "moral terrorism" that destroyed the nation's way of life.
But some readers were unimpressed by the toned-down content. One radio caller said he had been deceived as there were no nude women.
In their terror of the power of women's sexuality, Islam has done everything it can to minimize the possibilities for women to live lives free of shackles. The barbaric practice of female circumcision, also known as female genital mutilation, is expressly designed to prevent the woman from enjoying sex. Neo-neocon describes some of the intense pressure that perpetuates this practice, in her post on Women and the perpetuation of female genital mutilation:
If you think of each girl who is born as a commodity that only gains worth when married, and if sexual activity prior to marriage (and intact genitalia) would make her unmarriageable, then the entire family--men and women both--will do everything in their power to stop that.
Who comes first, women or men, in perpetuating this endeavor? I don't think there can possibly be an answer; the two are intertwined. But there is no question that it is the cultural demand (expressed as a male demand) for a chaste and sexually tractable wife that's driving it, and the perception that female circumcision is an excellent way to accomplish this.
Note the express depiction of a woman as an object (commodity) designed to please the man. She is not treated as a full human being, able to live a full unencumbered life, a value which in the west we hold as self-evident.
Dr. Sanity recently wrote about an interview, helpfully translated by MEMRI, in which a prominent Egyptian Professor from Al-Azahar University, Dr. Muhammad Wahdan, revealed the disturbing degree of preoccupation with women's bodies and their sexuality that lies at the core of the insecure Arab male:
If there was ever in history a better example of the paranoid fear of female sexuality, I can't think of it. I don't pretend to be an expert on Islam, but it appears to me that much of Muslim culture (particularly in the Middle East) has evolved into a structure for the sole purpose of containing female sexuality. This containment has not only become a key aspect of the worship of their god; but it also is a key factor in individual personality development; as well as the main pollutant of all social interactions.
The men of Islam are obsessed with sex beyond even the wildest imaginings of the Western male's mind. And the obsession is far from healthy.
So frequently do we joke about men's preoccupation with sex and female body parts in the West, that we have failed to notice that the Muslim world is literally consumed by female sexuality and with their fear of it. It is ironic that both Muslim men and women are under the mistaken impression that Western society is oversexualized compared to them, when in fact, it is practically impossible to be more obsessed with sexual matters than they are in Muslim communities.
As I have mentioned in the past, in a personal communication from a Saudi young man, I was told that men his age (in his late teens at the time) were spending all their time surfing the Internet for porn. In their daily life they had no opportunity to see a girl's leg or face, let alone her body, and their hunger was insatiable.
Victorian England proved that hiding a woman's body does not prevent men from having sexual fantasies and feelings; the mere sight of an ankle was enough to be scandalous. In many Islamic enclaves in Europe, young women who are not fully shrouded are held to be "asking" for gang rape by those young men who are seen to have no ability to control their sexual impulses. Dymphna reports on I Could Scream from time to time and recently described the cases of two Muslim women, from Iran, threatened with death for the crime of defending themselves from rape or worse; of course if they had been successfully raped, they could still be legally executed for that, as well.
Civilization depends on being able to contain the sexual and aggressive impulses of its young men. Judaism and Christianity both help young men civilize themselves by offering an external buttress, in the various religious rules and admonitions, which the healthiest can internalize and use to allow them to enter into healthy, co-equal relationships with the important women in their lives. It is certainly possible to enter into healthy relationships without needing religion, but religion helps (despite some of the traditional aspects of all religions which often appear too rigid.)
Islam, as depicted by its proponents, has taken the position that the ideal way to civilize men is to allow Islamic men to express their sexual and aggressive impulses freely toward all unprotected women and all men who are not Muslims. This mandates that Islam be expansionary (though there are other reasons, economic and religious, especially, which work in the same direction) and makes the escalation of the ongoing clash between Islam and the West inevitable unless the West militarily and politically defeats Islam, or Islam reforms.
Thus we end up with the Islamic reaction to the mildest form of celebration of the female body, a Playboy with no nudity at all: This magazine is "moral terrorism" which will destroy Islam and where are the naked pictures?
Until Islam can reconcile this conflict within itself, there can be no peace and no resolution of this war.
Reports like this make me wonder how much time we have.
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