Sex And State Power

My pal Bookworm has a great piece up on American Thinker...here's a sampling:

For many years, physicists have tried to find a unified theory of everything. They have faith that somewhere out there, there is a theory that will explain the physical properties of all things, without any exceptions. I'm not sure that dream will be realized in the scientific arena, but I think I might have stumbled across a unified theory that underlies statist philosophies, whether they are socialist or theocratic: sex.

Before you get too excited, this article isn't going to be about voluptuous women in slinky, abbreviated clothes, or scantily clad men with rippling pecs and washboard abs. Sorry.

Instead, this article focuses on the sordid, depressing, government-controlled side of human sexuality. That is, it examines sex not from the viewpoint of any given individual's particular desires, but from the viewpoint of a state intent upon gaining maximum control over that same individual.

Those of us who came of age before the 1980s, when the Judeo-Christian, Western tradition, though battered, was still ascendant, view our sexuality as a private matter. We believe that our bodies are our own property, which means that we should not be touched or controlled sexually without our consent. A person raised with this worldview inevitably believes as well that his ability to control his body is the essence of his individuality. This physical individuality is the antithesis of slavery, which represents a person's ultimate lack of control over his body.

Statist regimes, of course, cannot tolerate self-ownership, which is the natural enemy of government control over the individual. The easiest example one can find of a statist regime using sexuality to deny individuality and dominate its citizens is, of course, Islam.

A wise friend of mine once opined that Islam's entire quarrel with the West rests on its fear that Western values will undermine Islam's control over its women and, with that, its control over the men who benefit from a system that subjugates one half of the population to the control of the other half. There's a great deal of truth in that observation.

Unlike most other conflicts, Islam's quarrel with the West does not revolve around borders, water supplies, or economic control over assets. Instead, it focuses on culture -- and the heart of the Islamic cultural difference with the West, at least in the Muslim mind, is Islam's statist determination to erase a woman's individuality through control over her sexuality.

In the Muslim world, women are viewed as temptresses, and men as feeble creatures incapable of resisting feminine wiles. The only way to control the anarchy that this perceived sexual imbalance creates is for the State -- and remember that Islam and the State are indistinguishable from each other -- to exert total dominion over the women within its reach.

The best way to regulate women is to remove them entirely from view. Islam has traditionally relied upon harems to isolate women from view (and, not coincidentally, from the body politic). This practice is still used in Saudi Arabia, where women may not leave the home unless they are accompanied by a male family member.

Should the imprisonment option be unavailable, however, wrapping the women in completely obscuring, shapeless mountains of cloth is an adequate substitute. Women so enveloped, aside from losing any individuality, are relatively dysfunctional and, therefore, are entirely dependent on men.

Read the whole thing

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