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OPINIONS
posted 10/2/2001
The minute the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center and the lives of thousands within them were reduced to smoking rubble by suicidal Islamic fundamentalists, it occurred to nearly everyone at
promotion
once that fundamentalism was perhaps a bad idea. Not grasping this sudden shift in national sentiment, televangelists Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson went on TV two days later suggesting that New York's towers had been struck down like Babel's because God had withdrawn His protection from the skeptical. "I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians . . . all . . . who have tried to secularize America . . . helped this happen," said Falwell.
Oh sure, blame the lesbians. But nobody did. In fact, pundits and public denounced the two 700 Club idols with such swift unanimity that both men felt divinely inspired to recant.
Despite the ghastly timing of his sermon, though, Falwell's intuition was on target in one sense: the American lifestyle in all its pleasure-loving, sexually egalitarian variety is currently under siege from all sides. Political and economic relationships, not sexual mores, may be the decisive engine driving power-seekers to acts of war, but they run on other motors as well. Reactionaries political and religious take our sexual freedoms seriously, and so should we.
The pathological sexual intolerance of the men who perpetrated the September 11th massacre is well known. Afghanistan's government, the Taliban, under whose protection Osama bin Laden organizes and directs his war against the West's occupation of the Middle East, has brought state-sponsored sexual terror to an historical peak. If you're a woman in Afghanistan today, you are not only required to veil up, face to foot, but if you're so bold as to show leg in public, the Taliban's "Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice" may go so far as to have your leg cut off.
The cells of bin Laden's terrorist network, Al-Qua'eda, established in cities worldwide, no doubt include far more cosmopolitan elements (a number of the suicide pilots, assured entry to heaven and the favors of virgins in exchange for their martyrdom, reportedly spent their last few hours carousing in bars). Still, the terrorists are mostly of the pseudo-Islamic Wahhabi sect that, like the Taliban, interprets Sharia (or Islamic law) to mean that a woman uncovered or employed, or independent in any way is a woman degraded and an affront to God. When you try to imagine how a bunch of men steeped in such beliefs process Britney Spears, you can only be surprised that they haven't murdered more of us.
Should we flaunt our liberties then, in defiance of fear and in affirmation of life? Should we make this an era of unapologetic pride in sexual display and creative transgression? It would be easier to bravely say yes if the only people maddened by sexual permissiveness were the terrorists of Al-Qua'eda. But in the current "war against terror," many of our allies, including the current administration, are almost as queasy as our enemies about the way we live and love, and in a nation that needs to stand united against an outside threat, this makes our choices more complicated.
Part of this is solely pragmatic. To track down and disable Al-Qua'eda, a loose network of people connected primarily by faith and mostly speakers of Arabic, we need the full support of the traditional, non-fanatical Muslim community. We especially need the Muslim community's language skills and street sense. For our nation to be safe, we need Muslims to report their neighbors' suspicious patterns of behavior, confessions and boasts tendered in confidence. Because no one offers this sort of loyalty and participation readily when they feel repulsed and insulted by the culture they're living in, our safety depends in part on ordinary but traditionalist Muslims feeling comfortable here.
Why not make it easier for them? As it is they're going to have to put up with a certain amount of blind bigotry and ethnic profiling. Do they have to see your nipples through your shirt while you tongue-kiss your lover in the street as well? Which is to say: Are your public expressions of love, existential charm and individual freedom now inimical to the national interest and, in some obscure way, your own? (Not to mention the effluvia of our entertainment industry, which play as hostile cultural provocations from Cairo to Karachi.)
However you answer this, don't be surprised if the question keeps coming at you. A September 23rd New York Times editorial by Lamin Sanneh, professor of history and religion at Yale University, suggested that because politics and religion are so entwined for Muslims, no rapprochement between the Islamic and Western worlds is likely until we relax some barriers between church and state. Is that code for "Let's impose some sexual prohibitions here?" You bet your bustier it is.
The media has already begun to tack towards traditionalism. On September 11th, the media's impulse to view all Americans through a respectable (a.k.a. "soberly asexual") lens was instantaneous. The networks began to launch Project Bland-Out the moment it was clear that America was under attack. Instead of the usual New York of kooks, criminals and monied raptors, we were shown a city of ordinary but mediagenic people who but for their quaint accents could pass for Middle Americans. It was a useful exaggeration of American togetherness that even the Bush-voting red states agreed to buy. And for a damn good reason: because a nation under attack can't afford to focus on secondary conflicts of values and tangles of desire.
It's for this reason that the public has agreed to relinquish so many civil liberties in those rare instances when we've been in a war of self-defense. On the lip of such a crater now, one asks one's self: As the war for "civilization" rolls on and on how much actual civilization do you fight to preserve? Do you defend commercialized and commodified sex along with exploratory, intellectual or relational sex? Do you fight for what's permissible in private and let go of public show? Where do you draw the Great Satan's sexual boundaries? Where's your line in the sand?
There are no quick or obvious answers to the questions I'm asking here, and, most importantly, there are no correct answers. But whatever you choose to do, you might want to re-evaluate what sex means to you so that you can best respond to this new set of circumstances. Is it a purely selfish activity, an epicurian act of pleasure, a race against death? (Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we may get anthrax.) Is it an act of subversion, overt or covert? (Let the Parthenon crumble, I will fight for my right to party.) Is it possibly a spiritual exercise the means by which you knit the join between beast and angel, mind, matter, thought, feeling, being and nothingness? (My body is a temple and sex is the way I worship in it.) What does sexual activity mean in your life, on how many levels and how important is it to your core values? And if it has some dignity to it, some humanity, even some divinity for you, how might you begin to make that understood, if at all, by those who feel otherwise?
Navel-gazing about sex may seem like self-indulgent wank while American citizens and soldiers risk their lives to defend an oil-dependent and often ruthless American empire against the predations of an amorphous, enraged and brutal global foe. But the Wahhabist obsession with controlling the body isn't really so trivial. When we're honest about our lives, we recognize that there's just something about the nuanced, unexpected and contradictory truths of sexual experience that is, at base, the opposite of fanaticism and fundamentalism and those of us who hold this fact dear are going to need a certain degree of mental focus and possibly even political organization to protect this knowledge against what storms may come. If we're willing to die for these liberties, shouldn't we also be better prepared to fight for them?
