[lbo-talk] Re: Particularly Humiliating in "Arab Culture"?

[Luke Weiger]

Anxiety over sex may be the same in kind, but there are vast differences in
degree.  E.g. in America we may call promiscuous women "sluts", but we don't
allow their family members to kill them.  Formulations which imply some sort
of equivalence, or near equivalence, are deeply misleading.

-- Luke

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Doug Henwood" <dhenwood at panix.com>
To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org>; <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, May 19, 2004 5:57 PM
Subject: [lbo-talk] Re: Particularly Humiliating in "Arab Culture"?


> Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> >Doug wrote:
> >
> >>Isn't this a story of how two cultures - both deeply religious and
> >>anxious about sexuality - are meeting in explosive ways?
> >
> >Presumably, you are amongst the least religious and sexually anxious
> >Americans.  Imagine that you are subjected (by a foreign military
> >which have the power of life and death over you) to the same
> >treatment to which Iraqi detainees were subjected.  Would you find
> >yourself less degraded and traumatized than they were?
>
> I have no idea. But I don't think it's mere Orientalism to say that
> Arab/Muslim cultures are full of anxieties about the feminine and the
> homoerotic. How else do you explain the veiling of women? And I
> certainly know that it's not Occidentalism to say the same about
> American culture - that a bunch of professional torturers emerging
> from an anxiety-ridden dominant power would get a special thrill out
> of torturing the people it hopes to colonize in these particular ways.
>
> Doug
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