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.”

projectqueer:

Elizabeth Hasselbeck: Lesbians Just Can’t Find A Man

Project Queer: Thanks for sharing this!

My favorite part of the article:

Hasselbeck told viewers that lesbians link up for companionship, not sex—a claim which her co-host, Joy Behar, called “ridiculous.” “Being gay is not just holding hands and walking through the tulips,” Behar says. “Oh Elisabeth,” quips Pop Crunch, “it takes real work to make Sarah Palin look like the smartest Republican with a vagina.”

That is such a ridiculous claim. I can only hope that Hasselbeck was kidding. (I do not watch TV at all really so I could not tell you what kind of personality Hasselbeck has). Either way, props to Joy Behar for telling it like it is.

I don’t watch The View, but I watch most of the clips about LGBTQ-related issues. I typically disagree with Hasselbeck, and this is no exception, but I must say I’m pretty put off by all the criticism she and other women on the show face. They certainly make a lot of ignorant comments about homosexuality (as do the majority of people I know), but those comments are always attributed to the fact that they’re idiotic women rather than the fact that they’re not particularly well-versed in queer theory.

I don’t like what Hasselbeck is saying, but I also don’t like the fact that no one can offer an intelligent critique of what she’s saying without making a quip about her vagina. The fact is: she’s not an expert on sexuality and neither is Joy Behar. I could write an entire essay here about why Behar’s view is just as problematic as Hasselbeck’s, but because she appears to be defending lesbians, a lot of gays are blindly defending her and dismissing Hasselbeck as stupid, as a dumb blonde, as another idiotic Republican with a vagina.

I think this clip is pretty important in that these women reflect the variety of misguided views out there on sexuality — both Hasselbeck’s idea that lesbianism is about a lack of options and Behar’s idea that shifting sexual attraction is all about societal pressure and embracing one’s ‘true’ sexuality later in life. Hasselbeck is dismissing lesbianism as a last resort, but Behar is dismissing all older, recently out lesbians as women who have been suppressed their whole lives, longing for another woman while suffering though unhappy heterosexual relationships. It is possible, you know, for people to have fulfilling relationships with the opposite sex and fulfilling relationships with the same sex.

A lot of the people I know are so resistant to the idea that this can happen because they’re frightened by the idea that sexuality is fluid. Perhaps they’re worried the “ex-gay” religious crowd will use these kinds of examples to validate the idea of gay conversion therapy, or perhaps they’ve got a bad taste in their mouth from years of hearing: “it’s just a phase; you’ll settle down with a nice [man/woman] eventually.” Whatever the case, it’s a dangerous mindset to trap ourselves into. You can’t fight ignorance with ignorance. Although I’m sure there are a lot of women out there who have finally embraced their lesbianism after years of unhappy heterosexual relationships, that’s not true for everyone, and attempting to invalidate a person’s past experiences and feelings by attributing their life choices to societal pressure does nothing to advance our community. There’s really no reason to keep shoving ourselves into boxes when it comes to defining our sexuality.