laurenfelton

I will never forget a visit I made to Ilana, an old friend who had become an Orthodox Jew in Jerusalem. When I saw her again, she had abandoned her jeans and T-shirts for long skirts and a head scarf. I could not get over it. Ilana has waist-length, wild and curly golden-blonde hair. “Can’t I even see your hair?” I asked, trying to find my old friend in there. “No,” she demurred quietly. “Only my husband,” she said with a calm sexual confidence, “ever gets to see my hair.”

When she showed me her little house in a settlement on a hill, and I saw the bedroom, draped in Middle Eastern embroideries, that she shares only with her husband—the kids are not allowed—the sexual intensity in the air was archaic, overwhelming. It was private. It was a feeling of erotic intensity deeper than any I have ever picked up between secular couples in the liberated West. And I thought: Our husbands see naked women all day—in Times Square if not on the Net. Her husband never even sees another woman’s hair.

She must feel, I thought, so hot.

From The Porn Myth

Why is it that any time someone wants to offer a “new” and “progressive” take on clothing customs—particularly the idea of veiling—it all relates back to sex? Instead of arguing that the veil is oppressive to women, we’re supposed to buy the idea that it’s liberating because it allows women to feel sexy? I say both camps of thought are a load of crap. Whether a woman veils or not she is doing so in order to please men or to be sexy. Whether a woman veils or not she is being sexually oppressed. Whether a woman veils or not it has nothing to do with her own beliefs, but instead with how the men in her culture might react to it. Here’s a ~radical~ idea: maybe we should learn to see women as people who are perfectly capable of making decisions regarding their dress without first considering whether the menz will approve.

A related post, from Facebook:

A non-Muslim guy asked a Muslim: Why do your girls cover up their body and hair? The Muslim guy smiled and took two sweets, he opened the first one and kept the other one closed. He threw them both on the dusty floor and asked the non-Muslim: If I asked you to take one of the sweets, which one you would choose? The non-Muslim replied: The covered one. Then the Muslim said that’s how we treat and see our women…

I recently saw this pop up in my news feed when a FB friend (see the kickass blog she writes for here) sparked an interesting discussion about the trend on her wall. As she pointed out, both of these popular takes on veiling are problematic in that one is rooted in the Islamophobic idea that all Muslim women are oppressed, while the other is an example of misogyny within the Muslim community. Those same ideas are at work in the article posted above, though it’s about a Jewish woman rather than a Muslim woman. Somehow the author seems to privilege these beliefs over the Western norm, arguing that porn has ruined men’s appreciation of the “real thing”—but I won’t even get into just how fucked up that point is. I’ll just leave it at this: she’s completely ignoring an entire culture of sexism toward women and hatred of our bodies that extends beyond porn and the way women in our society choose to dress. Also, I don’t know who the hell she interviewed, but some of us watch porn and have sex and make out with women because we enjoy it, not because we want to be “cool girls.”