Sex and the Islamic Girl
I wrote this over at Blair’s but I thought I’d share it with my three or four readers (all of whom came over from there anyway but never mind). The subject is an article on sex repression in the Muslim world:
I am wondering if both our societies’ real problems stem from the contemporary fad for “truth” - i.e., the fear of being called a “hypocrite.” In the past a certain amount of hypocrisy, though never acknowledged out loud, smoothed societal paths and made it possible for most people to get along. There was still plenty of “repression” and people with uncontrollable gonads or an inability to manage their time (and thus unable to have affairs discreetly and efficiently) suffered, but the public wasn’t slapped in the face with trashy public sex 24/7 either. Of course that is just the West—in a sense the Islamic world always seems to have been a kind of delicate hothouse culture that couldn’t stand exposure to anything alien. (I am not sure that the article writer’s claim that Islam had a more “open-minded” past is true.) But the whole situation just makes me think of the old saying “good fences make good neighbors.” In other words, there are things we really don’t need to know about each other.
But getting back to the “truth” fad—I guess this comes from the rise of psychology and psychoanalysis. This “science” was supposed to aid us in understanding human nature, but if you ask me the most hidebound medieval theologian—even the simplest medieval baker or farmer—had a better understanding of human nature than today’s average person with a brain confounded by several decades of psychiatrist-speak. No one before Freud would have even thought of using the word “repressed” to speak of a well-behaved human being, but we have learned that someone who can’t control their “urges” is a “free spirit.” Never mind that the constant need to have Great! Sex! at all times has left a generation of people haggard, wounded, and unable to relate to the opposite sex except as an enemy—the man in his apartment with his Xbox and internet porn sites and the woman in hers with her dvd of The Notebook, a tub of Haagen-Dazs French Vanilla, and a box of issues to wipe away her lonely (and angry) tears. But she’s on the Pill, just in case.
And that’s just us. The Muslim world seems to be trying to lean in the other direction. We have too much sex? Well, they’ll counter that with so much oppression that they’ll immolate themselves on the rack of insanity rather than be like us. The funny thing is, we and they are both reacting to the same thing: fear of sex and relations between the sexes. We try to defuse the power of sexual attraction by making the act commonplace, trite, and eventually, boring; they try to defuse it by punishing anyone who tries to get some outside of the strict confines of their increasingly intricate rules.
(PS: that is a great opening line by the way, right up there with Florence King’s first line in her first article for National Review: “Americans are so emotionally fragile that soon we will have to be carried around in plastic bubbles and fed with an eye-dropper.”)
Given the priorities of our self-appointed Cultural Arbiters, hypocrisy is now the single cardinal sin: you can have whatever loathsome habits you like, so long as you’re open and up-front about them. This perhaps explains their fondness for the likes of Stalin.
There’s a scene in my favorite novel (Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle) in which two of the children of an eccentric writer try to cure his seemingly-intractable block by locking him in a tower. Cassandra has some sort of buyer’s remorse for the idea:
——
“Oh, Thomas, have we done something insane?”
“Not a bit,” said Thomas cheerfully. “You know, even the change of atmosphere may be enough to help him.”
“But to lock him in - and it used to be a dungeon! To imprison one’s father!”
“Well, that’s the whole idea, isn’t it? Not that I set quite as much store on the psycho stuff as you do. Personally, I think knowing he won’t be let out until he’s done some work is almost more important.”
“That’s nonsense,” I said. “If it doesn’t come right psychologically - from the depths of father - it won’t come right at all. You can’t trammel the creative mind.”
“Why not?” said Thomas. “His creative mind’s been untrammelled for years without doing a hand’s-turn. Let’s see what trammelling does for it.”
—–
I believe this is the middle-20th-century British equivalent of “Free spirit, my ass.”
Comment by CGHill - October 21, 2006 10:30 am
I must find that book. I can’t believe I missed reading that when I read everything else British that I could glom onto.
Comment by andrea - October 21, 2006 1:55 pm
Oh y God, you’re gonna kil me, but your “GREAT! Sex!” got me, so it’s your fault I’m offtrack anyway. We were just watching a movie that shall remain unnamed and there was a joke ~
“Hey, did you hear about the Viagra shipment that was hijacked?”
“No! Do they know who did it?”
“No names yet, but they’re looking for hardened criminals!”
I’d check the Villages first.
Comment by tree hugging sister - October 21, 2006 10:33 pm
Bah-dum-bum!
Comment by andrea - October 21, 2006 10:51 pm
This article makes me thank God that I’m a happliy married Catholic guy.
Comment by Tony - October 23, 2006 1:07 pm