Jack Burhenne writes:

I recently discovered your website, and I think you might appreciate the article below by Henry Makow. [Laura writes: I am familiar with Makow and agree with much of what he says. See discussion below about the difficulty in comparing the West with Muslim traditions.]

I think the Muslim fear of American feminism and what it would mean for their culture and religion is a key factor in our war with them. I think they understand the dangers in feminism and its effects better than American Christians do.

These “housewife” issues play out on a global stage.

      
Bikini vs. Burka – the debauchery of women

[By Henry Makow]

On my wall, I have a picture of a Muslim woman shrouded in a burka.

Beside it is a picture of an American beauty contestant, wearing nothing but a bikini.

One woman is totally hidden from the public; the other is totally exposed. These two extremes say a great deal about the clash of so-called “civilizations.”

The role of woman is at the heart of any culture. Apart from stealing Arab oil, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are about stripping Muslims of their religion and culture, exchanging the burka for a bikini.

I am not an expert on the condition of Muslim women and I love feminine beauty too much to advocate the burka here. But I am defending some of the values that the burka represents for me.

For me, the burka represents a woman’s consecration to her husband and family. Only they see her.It affirms the privacy, exclusivity and importance of the domestic sphere.

The Muslim woman’s focus is her home, the “nest” where her children are born and reared. She is the “home” maker, the taproot that sustains the spiritual life of the family, nurturing and training her children, providing refuge and support to her husband.

In contrast, the bikinied American beauty queen struts practically naked in front of millions on TV. A feminist, she belongs to herself. In practice, paradoxically, she is public property. She belongs to no one and everyone. She shops her body to the highest bidder. She is auctioning herself all of the time.

In America, the cultural measure of a woman’s value is her sex appeal. (As this asset depreciates quickly, she is neurotically obsessed with appearance and plagued by weight problems.)

As an adolescent, her role model is Britney Spears, a singer whose act approximates a strip tease. From Britney, she learns that she will be loved only if she gives sex. Thus, she learns to “hook up” furtively rather than to demand patient courtship, love and marriage. As a result, dozens of males know her before her husband does. She loses her innocence, which is a part of her charm. She becomes hardened and calculating. Unable to love, she is unfit to receive her husband’s seed.

The feminine personality is founded on the emotional relationship between mother and baby. It is based on nurturing and self-sacrifice. Masculine nature is founded on the relationship between hunter and prey. It is based on aggression and reason.

Feminism deceives women to believe femininity has resulted in “oppression” and they should adopt male behavior instead. The result: a confused and aggressive woman with a large chip on her shoulder, unfit to become a wife or mother.

This is the goal of the NWO social engineers: undermine sexual identity and destroy the family, create social and personal dysfunction, and reduce population. In the “brave new world,” women are not supposed to be mothers and progenitors of the race. They are meant to be neutered, autonomous sex objects.

Liberating women is often given as an excuse for the war in Afghanistan. Liberating them to what? To Britney Spears? To low-rise “see-my-thong” pants? To the mutual masturbation that passes for sexuality in America? If they really cared about women, maybe they’d end the war.

Parenthood is the pinnacle of human development. It is the stage when we finally graduate from self-indulgence and become God’s surrogates: creating and nurturing new life. The New World Order does not want us to reach this level of maturity. Pornography is the substitute for marriage. We are to remain single: stunted, sex-starved and self-obsessed.

We are not meant to have a permanent “private” life. We are meant to remain lonely and isolated, in a state of perpetual courtship, dependent on consumer products for our identity.

This is especially destructive for woman. Her sexual attraction is a function of her fertility. As fertility declines, so does her sex appeal. If a woman devotes her prime years to becoming “independent,” she is not likely to find a permanent mate.

Her long-term personal fulfillment and happiness lies in making marriage and family her first priority.

Feminism is another cruel New World Order hoax that has debauched American women and despoiled Western civilization. It has ruined millions of lives and represents a lethal threat to Islam.

I am not advocating the burka but rather some of the values that it represents, specifically a woman’s consecration to her future husband and family, and the modesty and dignity this entails.

The burka and the bikini represent two extremes. The answer lies somewhere in the middle.

Hannon writes:

I enjoyed the essay of Makow’s you posted and would agree to some extent with what he says about the burka. However, underneath what is highly symbolic attire for Westerners, Muslims have in-law issues, domestic squabbling, two-way emotional abuse and all the other maladies we have in the West. The men have a tighter grip on social structure but at the same time women may be quite influential in a
behind-the-scenes sort of way. Sometimes they are elected to high office. Aside from higher birth rates, I am not so sure that Muslim societies are much better than us in maintaining healthy gender roles
for men or women overall.

It is one thing to see women wearing the niqab or burka on TV, another to walk along streets where there are no females *without* these coverings, save pre-menstrual girls and elderly women. I have experienced this and it was a strange shock to my system. Not strange in a bad way, just very odd and oddly compelling, as “exotic” cultures tend to strike some of us at first. This was before I had learned anything at all about Islam and so it was an experience of cultural mystery more than anything else.

Makow writes:

“For me, the burka represents a woman’s consecration to her husband and family. Only they see her. It affirms the privacy, exclusivity and importance of the domestic sphere. The Muslim woman’s focus is her home, the “nest” where her children are born and reared. She is the “home” maker, the taproot that
sustains the spiritual life of the family, nurturing and training her children, providing refuge and support to her husband.”

I think these things are true, and there is a beauty in this arrangement. It agrees well with a very pious religious tradition (I mean here pious in the “archaic” sense of something virtuous and stolid). But these outward customs cannot detract from what is human nature: our tendencies to habits that are non-creative or destructive.

If anything, the ingrained Arab culture of honor and shame reinforces such dysfunction yet it will not often show on the surface in their own societies.

It is easier for Western women to act outside their natural female roles and with high visibility. Maybe Makow is right. This distortion has reached a level of unavoidable, everyday obsceneness and we ignore it or revel in it instead of rejecting it. Perhaps we can learn something positive and substantive from Islam after all– not to attain what they have, but to regain what we have lost.

Laura writes:

I don’t envy any woman who wears the burka and I can’t imagine what it is like to walk through streets filled with fully cloaked women and devoid of the charming expressions of female faces. Arab culture has, as you say, its own extreme approach to the position of women, very different from the best of Western tradition. I think of Tocqueville’s famous observations on the position of women when he visited America. He spoke of their visibility, their self-confidence and their devotion to their own sphere. That is our tradition and Arab culture can teach us little that can’t be better learned from our own past.

I took Makow’s point to be that the burka represents the antithesis of the overexposed female in the West – both unworkable extremes in their own way.

Laura continues:

It’s interesting that this subject and your previous comments about the haughty expressions of women are connected. They both concern the power of the female face.

Women’s faces are part of their allure, but it’s hard to believe men are so aroused by them that women need to be completely cloaked. Veils are so much more beautiful, with the woman’s face obscured but not completely blocked out. That’s why there seems to something hateful about the burka. The veil makes
a woman beautiful and the burka makes her inanimate and almost frightening.

Hannon writes:

I think of the burka as a show of intimidation when worn in the West. It certainly does not enhance the beauty of women in those countries– in fact it is a radical denial of same, in a broader social sense– and I tend to agree with the idea that it reflects the conditioned weak wills of their men. How much of this is Islam and how much is Arab culture is difficult to say but the potential power of women seems to frighten them more than any other social factor.

They say the coverings can be removed only in the presence of other women or children or men you could not marry (i.e., family relatives– very close ones!). An English friend in England was asked by her male friend if she would marry him “temporarily” just so they could make an errand down the street.

Did you ever see the photo of Laura Bush sitting on a sofa with four other women, all of them in full black burkas? One may have had an eye slit only; it was visually a picture in pink and black. Extremely weird and creepy.

Aside from airline stewardesses, the only instance where I saw a young woman’s face in the Arab world was by accident. I was walking along a foot path, an alleyway, and a young woman passed by with her veil open while she was holding it. Her face was painted a pale lime green, in the manner of females in that area, and it did not detract at all from her beauty. She was very striking and gave an embarrassed smile for just one second.

Now that you have me thinking about it, could it be that women’s faces are significantly more expressive than men’s? It seems that way. It seems to reflect the interior landscape, which of course is very different and differently sensitized in either gender. Obviously some men are more sensitive to these things.

Laura writes:

Women lead a richer affective life and their faces reflect this. With babies, women talk with their faces. In general, they exhibit a greater range of expression than men. This is why the sullen look you mentioned before seems so artificial and disturbing. In a way, it’s the self-imposed burka of Western women. I don’t think this is meant to repel men but to show a macho toughness.

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