HOME / e-mail to the editors: Letters from our readers.

Defending My BookA response from the author of The East, the West, and Sex.

By Richard BernsteinPosted Thursday, Aug. 6, 2009, at 1:41 PM ET

Nothing serves the righteously indignant like a handy enemy, and where there's no real enemy handy, the temptation to create one can be irresistible. That at any rate seems to me to explain the luridly indignant review of my book, The East, the West, and Sex, that appeared a few weeks ago in Slate. Normally I think book writers should take their lumps in silence, but the Slate review was so willfully uncomprehending, so brim-full of moralistic error and ad hominem falsehood, that it's too hard not to reply.

RSS

Actually, the reviewer, Johann Hari, seems to agree with the basic premise of my book. It is what I call the dirty little secret of colonialism and post-colonialism: The West's exploration and domination of the East, which is more a cultural than a geographic entity, brought with it a sexual advantage and also a kind of liberation from the sin-ridden constraints of the sexual culture of Christendom. Hari's main complaint is that I fail to understand how dark and grim the story I tell in the book was and continues to be in its contemporary manifestations, how all the women involved were "beaten-down, deeply deprived," forced by the colonialist masters to "spread their legs" for a few pennies.

"Any admission that this system was built on suppressing women seems to be wrung out of [me] in passing;" Hari writes. "Every experience of male liberation is described with approving ejaculations." Moreover, he continues, it is "revolting" of me to "imply" that the exploited women involved in this world of exploitation "wanted it."

"Approving ejaculations," "revolting"—there's a vocabulary here that would be overwrought even if Hari's statements were accurate. But the demonstrable fact is that they're utterly false, and what's demonstrable is the abundant material in the book that Hari asserts to be missing from it, or, if not entirely missing, wrung out of me only in passing, material that graphically and unmistakably describes how the system often did suppress women, and brutally so. I could give many illustrations of this, but in the interest of brevity, I'll cite just one of the more spectacular, the reminiscences of one Edward Sellen, a colonial-era British officer who tells how he spied a very young Indian woman in a schoolyard near where he lived and paid the headmistress a fee, in return for which the girl was brought to him, naked. When Sellen's commander learned he had deflowered the girl without his permission, he had her brought to him, and he raped her.

Since I assume moral intelligence on the part of my readers, I don't insult them by labeling this story as an illustration of the hideous side of colonial power. But that's obviously what it is. Moreover, neither it nor the many other stories I tell along the same lines had to be "wrung out" of me, nor do I tell them only "in passing." They are central to the whole endeavor. It's amazing to me that a reviewer could so totally misrepresent this.

Page: 1 | 2 SINGLE PAGE