May 11, 2007--Fanaticism LXXXI--Men Will Be Men

While we’re preoccupied with the effect of Hip-Hop culture on our youth, in Iran the Religious Police are stopping women in the street to see if they are wearing makeup and to check if they have too much hair peeking out from their head scarves. And in Saudi Arabia, which is still a very, very conservative country, in spite of the proliferation of Starbucks and McDonalds and affluent youth regularly jetting off to Dubai or London to haunt the discos and bars, there is a version of a debate raging about how far is too far and how much fun is too much fun. (See NY Times article linked below.)

They’ve at least got McDonalds figured out—woman are allowed to slip in for a Big Mac, but they must stand on a line separated by a wall from the one on which men are required to stand. Though they are still forbidden to drive themselves home.

Have you noticed that the fundamentalist strains of all the world’s major religions spend an inordinate amount of time making and enforcing restrictive rules for women? In all, women are relegated to limited roles with much of their time directed to serving the various wishes and needs of men.

As a young boy I vividly remember watching in fascination how the orthodox Jewish men in my family spent so much of their time studying or praying while the women were excluding from participating in these most exulted of activities. At the schul the women had to sit in the balcony which was surrounded by a curtain so that if the men looked up they would not be distracted (or get excited) by their presence. Versions of this ceremonial segregation are also common in most other religions

And later in life I began to observe how male-centric and arbitrary the rules were when it came to sexual practices--more accurately, sexual services. These rules appear to be at the heart of the matter—they enable men to have their way with women—frequently many at a time since multiple marriages and concubineage are religiously permitted. In fact, often encouraged.

I had a fantasy recently about how this came about: Some millennia ago a group of aging men gathered in a tent in the middle of a desert to come up with rules for life that would assure their dominance and good times. They quickly came to realize that all they desired required that they impute to God immortal rules to guide the separate and distinct behavior of men and women—with, in all instance, women literally and figuratively on the bottom.

I saw the results of this fantasy played out regularly in the homes of my relatives where the men sat around the table pouring over their ancient texts, ignoring all that was going on around them, while the women scrambled to hush the children and, hand and foot, waited on the men.

I decided to then and now to go no further—stopping myself from wondering what was permitted behind closed doors after we left . Too much information.