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Catherine Price's Broadsheet post about a recent article on honor killings has been haunting me all week, not because the subject is new but because, like her, I can't get past the idea of a father stomping, stabbing and suffocating his 17 year-old daughter to death, with the help of his sons, and of her uncles then spitting on her grave in disgust. Why? Because the girl had a crush on and spoke to a British soldier in Basra.
I know many of us have heard these horrific stories before. Still, i never cease to be amazed, and repulsed, at the level of violence toward women and girls that is tolerated in countries across Africa and the Arab world, in East Asia and Eastern Europe, in China and throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.
Yes, we have plenty of violence against women at home, but I think it's safe to say that the level of violence against women and girls here, doesn't even compare to what takes place overseas. In many cases it is not only tolerated, or ignored, it is officially sanctioned by governments that claim they can do nothing to stop violent practices that occur mostly in tradition-bound enclaves ruled by male elders, or taking place in war-torn countries in states of perpetual anarchy.
Gang rapes, revenge rape, war rapes, punishment rapes, beatings, honor killings, genital mutilation, forced prostitution, the sale and marriage of little girls to grizzled old perverts. It's enough to turn the stomach. As American women we can march and speak out, we can give money to organizations working hard to prevent and hopefully end these ugly practices, and it will still continue unless the international community comes together to address it head on. We need formal, international treaties that attach sanctions and penalties against countries that tolerate this form of gender terrorism.
Too bad the United Nations can't take the lead. Its credibility on this issue is very comprised given that hundreds of U.N. peacekeepers working in troubled countries have been implicated in shameful sexual abuse scandals involving coerced sex with girls as young as eight in exchange for food and empty promises of jobs, or payments of a single dollar. Some of the U.N. workers are from the very countries where violence against women is an ingrained part of the culture. How sad that they are importing the worst of their values rather than their best, spreading disease and despair instead of the goodwill the UN is supposed to foster.
I know these traditions date back to past generations and are culturally institutionalized. I know too that the perpetrators are not usually enlightened or educated men, but barbaric and backward—yes backward—men. Still, this doesn't mean the larger society has to accept it. Nor do official government leaders who are usually educated men who know better.
How ironic that the term "honor killing" even exists. There is certainly no honor when men attack the most defenseless, least respected, less protected members of their society. And there's definitely no honor when world leaders, like the U.S., that are not shy about imposing their values on other countries in other ways, do so little about it.
The first sign of societal breakdown is when the male members of a society turn on their women and children. Seems to me that the affected countries were broken long ago.
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All right, Tim Noah, I will bite.
"What makes married women want to have affairs?" you ask?
The same things that make married men want to have affairs (excepting, of course, the desire to "spread seed").
Monogamy is hard. For all of us. It's unrealistic for people who live as long as humans do today. We, too, crave variety. We, too, have fantasies. We, too, are busy, overworked, have too many responsibilities, and want to blow off some steam. Some of us are neglected, abused, oppressed, unloved, ignored, deprived of affection, unhappy, unfulfilled. Some of us are just bored. Some of us are just horny. Some of us are getting old and we want to feel young and sexy again.
Some of us have been brainwashed by the Jane Austen fantasy, and we are still looking for Mr. Darcy.
Some of us love our husbands, but, well, we are married, not dead. There are a lot of hot, tempting women in the world, but there are a lot of hot, tempting men, as well, and we are exposed to their hot, tempting images everywhere, every day, all the time. (Note to Jonathan Rhys Meyers: Call me!)
I suspect there are as many reasons women want to have affairs as there are women having affairs.
I find it curious that so many people still buy into the myth that pairing off and staying together forever is the only model of a successful relationship. It's hard not to acquiesce to this religion-enforced, society-sanctioned, government-rewarded "lifestyle."
But as our rates of infidelity and divorce suggest, it's not realistic. This is not to say that we should live in a sexual free-for-all. There are great rewards that come with being in an emotionally, as well as sexually, intimate relationship. We do seem to naturally pair off, for a while, and have relationships this way—but serially. I think serial monogamy is perhaps more realistic, though it is also more complicated.
The problem is, how long is "for a while"? How long should it be? Seven minutes or 70 years?
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A guest post (or rather a challenge) from Slate's Tim Noah:
May I put in a good word for Philip Weiss?
Before proceeding, let me stipulate that I know Phil and have edited him in the past. It would be a stretch to call him a friend (we've exchanged perhaps five sentences over the past 20 years), but we hung out a bit during the 1980s and I remain fond of him.
One thing I've always admired about Phil is his personal courage as a writer of nonfiction, even at the risk of appearing foolish. Certainly he displays courage in his New York magazine piece, "What Makes Married Men Want To Have Affairs?" The article is an attempt to take something we already know—duh, males crave sexual variety—and explore what can be done about it without adopting the familiar posture of the locker-room raconteur, on the one hand, or the prim scold, on the other. To achieve this, it is necessary to engage men and women in a conversation with one another. Phil hints strongly that he himself has strayed, or (less likely, I think) that he has come so close to straying that it "jolted my marriage." Phil has discussed this "over the years with about six or seven people, and when you leave out my wife and therapist, they're all men." Which obviously didn't get him very far. Here, he's proposing something new. A topic seldom discussed in mixed company—indeed, the very topic that probably occasioned the invention of that idiotic phrase "mixed company" in the first place—is to be discussed with both men and women present.
The trouble with Phil's piece, as various XXers have pointed out, is that the female libido is scarcely heard from. Phil portrays women mostly as enforcers of monogamy and domesticity, and men as caged libertines who daydream about boffing the nearest Hooters' waitress and on occasion actually do. Phil acknowledges that married women have affairs, too—15 percent to men's 25 percent. But while the promiscuous men Phil writes about come off as mainstream humanists—regular guys—the promiscuous women Phil writes about are all exotic creatures—sex researchers, sex counselors, free-love bohemians, and prostitutes. The only "normal" woman willing to consider promiscuity, even for a moment, is his wife. She shuts down Phil's campaign to establish whoopee utopia by pointing out that if he wanted to be unfaithful, he'd have to accomodate her infidelity, too. Of course he backs down immediately—and realizes life and love are more complicated than his desire is willing to acknowledge.
The default female response to Phil's piece is to clobber him for being such a, you know, guy. Instead, I'd like to see a woman take up Phil's invitation to converse about the uneasy truce between monogamy and sexual desire. What makes married women want to have affairs?
I'll readily grant that taking up this topic requires considerably more daring from a woman than it took from Phil, because our society is a lot less tolerant of female infidelity, or even female daydreams about infidelity. In that stupid Stanley Kubrick movie, Eyes Wide Shut, hubby Tom Cruise plunges into a rococo sexual odyssey because wifey Nicole Kidman says merely that she experienced unrequited lust for another man. In older movies, whenever a woman sins, or contemplates sin, blam!—she's immediately run over by a truck. The political world is even more retrograde. There's a reason why you'll never hear presidential candidate Hillary Clinton say, as Jimmy Carter said in 1976, that she's experienced lust in her heart. If she ever let us find out she'd acted on it, as Bill did, her political career would never survive, as Bill's did. So, yes: This is hard stuff for a woman to talk about it. But talking about it seems more constructive, not to mention more interesting, than finger-wagging.
So how about it, XXers? You probably didn't need Phil Weiss to tell you why men have affairs, or at least fantasize about having affairs: They crave sexual variety, they long to recapture lost youth, blah blah blah. Like everything else about male sexuality, the male desire to lie with another woman is boringly uncomplicated. But why do women have affairs? The judgment of literature (Anna Karenina, Madam Bovary) is that they feel trapped and oppressed, or, less sympathetically, that they're easily gulled by preying males one or two notches up the social ladder. Two centuries later, I would imagine that life is a bit different. The answer we heard from writers like Erica Jong and Gael Greene back in the swingin' Plato's Retreat 1970s was that women crave sexual variety in precisely the same way men do. Three decades later, though, feminism no longer insists that women's desires and inclinations be identical to those of men. It may even be permitted to recognize that, at least superficially, the female sex drive seems, in the aggregate, less pronounced (or at least less conspicuous) than the male sex drive. You don't hear stories about men telling their wives they no longer want to have sex. You do hear stories about women telling their husbands they no longer want to have sex.
So, what's it all about?
Please don't refer me to The Erotic Silence of the American Wife and the groaning bookshelf of similar titles out there. My bad, I haven't read them. But let's face it: Those books were written for and by women, not for men and women. They're the equivalent of a ladies' lunch. Let's have a mixer instead. Why do women want to cheat?
Two ground rules:
1.) No diversions into what's cultural and what's "hard-wired" about women's sexuality. Once you fall down that rabbit hole, there's no coming back. Just talk about what is, and skip the warring evolutionary and behaviorist theories as to why this should be so.
2.) No bad-mouthing your husbands, or the male sex in general. Phil managed to write without bad-mouthing his wife, or women in general (except perhaps by implication). Even if men really are unregenerate shitheads, dwelling on this will just turn this back into a discussion about men.
Anyone game?
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Agree entirely, D, that Clinton doesn't get to reduce her loss to sexism. But what's the evidence that she has? She made that one "demeaning to millions of women" comment this week. Bill Clinton apparently mentioned it. (Not sure that counts, since I remain convinced that he is half-engaged in sabotage.) There was the "iron my shirts" moment (a real instance). There was the pile-on comment after the Philadelphia debate. Maybe there are several more instances, and I'm just forgetting. Or is it more that we all notice and remark upon it when she plays the gender card than that she plays it often? This is a woman who has spoken several times a day, for 15 or so minutes, over 15 months. She has said a lot of things a lot more frequently than "poor me I'm a victim." Hasn't she?
The Linda Hirshman thing also seems to me overblown and overstated. Not that it's entirely or even mostly wrong, just that to argue that all powerful women are portrayed as harpies all the time is no more true and useful than any other universal catchall. I buy that it's often hard to be a powerful woman—and harder than it is to be a powerful man, because there are fewer safe and familiar moves to make. OK. But I think Clinton has pulled it off more than most, and more than she has screwed it up. She is not Blanche DuBois! [insert here second and third Tennessee William examples that I am too illiterate to think of.] That's part of why so many women keep voting for her. I think.
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The ailing Ted Kennedy has said that he would like the successor to his seat be his wife, Vicki. Isn’t this rather richly ironic since Kennedy has done all he can to stop the Clintons from extending their White House dynasty by opposing Hillary’s election to the presidency? Ted’s Senate seat has been in his family for more than 50 years. (It was previously JFK’s.) I’m from Massachusetts, so I know that voters there are reluctant to accept that they have free will when it comes to the political ambitions of Kennedys, but it’s unseemly and un-American for this clan to think it has a permanent claim on any office. XX’s own Rosa Brooks pointed out that the late Benazir Bhutto, seen in this country as a champion of democracy, named her son as her successor in her will. Brooks wrote, “To Bhutto, political power was something one could inherit, something to be passed along from spouse to spouse and from parent to child. … That's dynastic politics, not democratic politics.” Dynastic politics hasn’t worked out very well for us lately. If a candidate is a member of a political family and is also by all measures worthy of being elected to office, fine. But let’s stop choosing our elected officials because they’re married to, or children of, officeholders.
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Anyone else catch yesterday’s ripped-from-the-headlines Law & Order finale? About a New York governor who hires expensive young hookers (and some strange, tangentially related murder)? Anyone else notice that the single biggest difference between the Spitzer narrative and L&O’s—aside from the fact that the fictional governor gets away with it—was the craven legal meddling by the ruthlessly ambitious Silda character? Just checkin’.
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Emily I don’t think anyone disputes that hideous instances of sexism have been stirred up in this campaign. Nor does anyone dispute that Ms. Clinton is entitled to address it, which she has done very deftly at times. The question is whether she’s entitled to reduce her entire failed campaign to sexism—which has the practical effect of splitting women into those-who-are-angry-about-sexism, and those who what? Think it’s acceptable? There’s one other practical effect that warrants mentioning, and that is that it reduces a complex, brilliant, and talented candidate to a big whomping cliché. My friend Susannah writes: “I find it increasingly unbearable to watch Hillary. It feels like she has become the archetype I find most painful to see in women—a high-maintenance, delusional, and "difficult" woman who feels entitled to do whatever she likes. ... Meanwhile, Obama is forced to tiptoe around essentially just humoring her. There is a pathetic "Yes, dear" quality to the way he is forced to react to her these days.”
This mirrors a sense I’ve had that we might have finally crossed the Hirshman line. Linda Hirshman argued persuasively that all powerful, ambitious women are at some point dismissed as “hysterical” or “insane.” Too true. The problem now is that when Clinton behaves irrationally, we can’t call her out for it because it would be sexist. If we can't call irrational behavior irrational because the character in question is a woman, then it’s a short hop from here to a Tennessee Williams play ...
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I dutifully watch American Idol every week because my daughter is a huge fan. After two seasons, I have learned to (almost) enjoy it. I basically just pretend I'm living in a different age and a pleasant second-string country, maybe in Latin America or the Middle East, where every week me and my extended family sit down to watch a goofy variety show filled with amateur singing and colorful local characters. Then last night, after the final results show, I found myself unreasonably elated when they announced that David Cook had won. For those of you who are above such frippery, you might not know that this was not at all the expected result. The night before, after the final showdown, the judges had all but declared the other finalist, David Archuleta, to be the better man. Then last night they dragged us through Fox infomercials and a string of has-been celebrities until, an hour into the show, they announced that in fact COOK had won, by nearly 12 million votes.
So why do I care? And why should you? Well, here is my very unfounded theory: Cook is the Democrats, and Archuleta is the Republicans. More specifically, Cook is Barack Obama and Archuleta is, if not John McCain then some dependably modern Republican-type. Both come off as sweet, good guys, but Cook is older and decidedly cooler. He's a baby-faced rocker from just outside Kansas City whose performances have been unreliable. One week he's awesome and the next so-so. He's mostly cheerful but sometimes moody and glum and seems to expect to lose.
Archuleta, meanwhile, is a 17-year-old fuddy-duddy from Utah who grew up singing show tunes and Elton John. His mother is from Honduras, and he has four siblings. He's deeply humble and entitled at the same time. I've always imagined him as home-schooled but I have no evidence, outside his large family and unyouthful musical tastes. A Los Angeles Times blog suspected he skipped the first verse of "Imagine" on Idol because he's a Mormon and would take offense at the line about "no religion." I think of him more as a Mitt Romney-type—weekly transmitting secret religious messages only his fellow conservative Christians would pick up. Every week I scrutinized his song choices and his outfit, and quizzed no one in particular: Why did he choose Neil Diamond's patriotic song "Coming to America"? Why does he have a huge anchor sewn onto his jacket? Is there some Jesus parable about an anchor?
So come last night, I was sure Archuleta would win. Which is how a Democrat would think. Despite all evidence pointing to the Democrat's superior charisma, vitality, momentum, relevance, and musical tastes, they still think the Republicans have some secret silent majority that will prevail in the end. And then, lo and behold, those extra votes showed up on the right side. Hallelujah.