Screeds
Tuesday, September 28, 2004
Bikinis And Burq’as
September 25, 2002
A blogger by the name of Aziz Poonwalla has touched off a firestorm with the following comment:
Actually, the bikini is as much a tool of female oppression as the Saudi burka.
If you’d like to see that comment in its original context, click the link above. Well, the Blogosphere was all over Poonwalla like a cheap suit in about five seconds, but the amount of light shed by the ensuing exchanges was far inferior to the heat and noise. The usually more sensible Steven Den Beste has celebrated the bikini as a tool which might aid us in liberating the Arab / Muslim world from its patriarchal psychoses. Others have lauded the far greater modesty of the Muslim world, and claimed that the burq’a freed a woman from enslavement to sexuality, allowing her to discover a more meaningful relationship with men by concealing her appearance from their superficial obsessions. Only the redoubtable InstaPundit, Dr. Glenn Reynolds of the University of Tennessee Law School, has made complete sense:
Is it a “power play” when women want to wear bikinis to please men? Is it a “power play” when men dress or groom or whatever in a particular way to please women? And—even assuming that this statement is true—what precisely is immoral about it? Not much that I can see.
Of course, I’m probably a slave to false consciousness. Certainly all my work at maintaining chiseled, hairless pecs seems to be wasted now.
It’s nice to know there’s someone out there who can let the gas out of an argument bloated with nonsense. So much of the dialogue over sex and sex differences is near to bursting from it.
Hot Flash To Muslim Apologists: This sort of moral equivalence will never fly. Muslims use a disgraceful religious rationale to chattelize and oppress their womenfolk. When they add political power to the mix, denying women the right to choose their own paths through life by force, it goes from disgraceful to unconscionable. Islam is the only major body of belief that prescribes female enslavement to men. It cannot be defended. Attempts to defend it only underscore just how horrible it is.
Muslim treatment of women is the clearest indication of why their societies are doomed, why they can’t compete with the Judeo-Christian West, and why they’re so envious of Western superiority to them in every walk of life. They can’t achieve; they’re too busy keeping their slaves down, for fear of what they would do if freed. They can’t argue; the ability to argue is extinguished in them at an early age, to make room for a huge mass of totalitarian drivel with a religious veneer. So they do what’s left: they enslave, oppress, mutilate, torture, and kill.
Don’t expect anyone with three functioning brain cells to buy into any claptrap about the burq’a “liberating” its wearer. It’s as much a manacle as any device of locking steel. But Muslims might discover in the end that it’s shackled their men quite as firmly as their women, by imprisoning them in eternally unsatisfiable, raging lust, and by denying them the special achievements and delights that women acting autonomously, according to their own perceptions, desires, and judgment, could provide.
But what of our domestic gender-war feminists, the ladies who really do feel a bikini is a tool of oppression? Well, as long as I’ve picked this evening to go around cheesing people off…
Even Hotter Flash To American Gender-War Feminists: By all means insist on respect from men. But you should have some respect for men, too, and for the majority of women, who don’t see male interest in female pulchritude as a demeaning thing.
Because men are normally the initiators of the courtship dance, over twenty thousand generations of human evolution women have developed the instincts and skills for attracting the interest and winning the affections of strong, capable men. Part of that involves knowing what attracts men in the first place—physical comeliness—and knowing when, where, and how to exploit it.
No matter how you feel about men, any decent man will court injury and death to protect you—and the overwhelming majority of men are decent, especially in the clutch when it’s most important. Do not allow anyone to make you ashamed of what you are, or of what you want, or of being willing to pay a price you deem acceptable to get what you want. But extend that right to others whose desires and priorities diverge from yours, too. In America, no one can force you into either a bikini or a burq’a; it’s your choice as a sovereign self-owner.
Do I think I’ve ended the argument here? Of course not. But some things are not said often enough. Some things, because of the touchiness between the sexes these past thirty years, are seldom said at all. But Dr. Reynolds shouldn’t have to stand unsupported. Even if, according to Thoreau, “Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one,” it’s always better not to have to stand alone. Except before a firing squad, of course.
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