Family values
by David Atkins
Yesterday I wrote about the centrality of patriarchy disguised as "family values" to the conservative project of maintaining private power, be it in Rick Santorum's America or in Wahhabist Saudi Arabia. I argued that in a bizarre but very real sense, keeping women oppressed was seen as central to the maintenance of conservative political and economic power. Case in point: the disturbingly American psychotic sexual politics of Iran under the Ayatollahs:
Khamenei contends that the health of the family unit is integral to the Islamic Republic's well-being and is undermined by female beauty. Although to some this worldview is fundamentally misogynistic, Khamenei sees men, not women, as untrustworthy and incapable of resisting temptation:
In Islam, women have been prohibited from showing off their beauty in order to attract men or cause fitna [upheaval or sedition]. Showing off one's physical attraction to men is a kind of fitna … [for] if this love for beauty and members of the opposite sex is found somewhere other than the framework of the family, the stability of the family will be undermined.
Interestingly, the word Khamenei employs against the potential unveiling of women -- fitna -- is the same word used to describe the opposition Green Movement that took to the streets in the summer of 2009 to protest President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's contested reelection. In other words, women's hair is itself seen as seditious and counterrevolutionary. Even so-called liberal politicians in the Islamic Republic have long fixated on this issue. Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, Iran's first post-revolutionary president, who has spent the past three decades exiled in France, reportedly once asserted that women's hair has been scientifically proven to emit sexually enticing rays.
This sort of sexual "family values" politics designed to quash female empowerment leads not surprisingly to rampant, culture-wide hypocrisy:
Google Trends, which monitors searches from around the world, shows that of the seven countries that most frequently search the word "sex" on Google, five are Muslim and one (India) has a large Muslim minority. (The word "sexy" is even more popular among Arabs.) Google Insights, another trend spotter, shows that the most rapidly rising search term for Iranians so far in 2012 has been "Golshifteh Farahani," a popular exiled actress who in January posed topless for the French magazine Madame Figaro.
That's reminiscent of the fact that the leading porn consumers in the United States, per capita, are red states with hyper-religious Utah and hyper-conservative Alaska leading the pack.
I'll close with Ayatollah Khamenei:
More than Iran's enemies need artillery, guns, and so forth, they need to spread cultural values that lead to moral corruption.… I recently read in the news that a senior official in an important American political center said: "Instead of bombs, send them miniskirts." He is right. If they arouse sexual desires in any given country, if they spread unrestrained mixing of men and women, and if they lead youth to behavior to which they are naturally inclined by instincts, there will no longer be any need for artillery and guns against that nation.
Substitute "America" for "Iran" and "Satan" for "America," and it sounds like something Rick Santorum might have said. Misogyny is central to the conservative social order. Take it away, and conservatism itself crumbles underfoot. The Ayatollahs know it. The Taliban know it. Rick Santorum knows it. Rush Limbaugh knows it.
And that's why, no matter how counterproductive it is for Republicans, they can't resist waging the war on women. It's of existential importance to them.
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