A reader writes in response
A reader writes in response to my comments Sunday about the veiling of women:
"The problem with this argument [made by Hasan at-Turabi] is that it places the blame for women's objectification on women's bodies, as if they are inherently dangerous and by their very existence produce spontaneous eruptions of lust in the innocent men who walk the planet with them.
The objectification lies not within the female form but in the eyes of the beholder, who refuses to look at a woman (however she is clothed) as a person rather than an object. When Victorian women were covered in cloth from neck to foot, their male compatriots managed to objectify their ankles.
Veiling a woman to render her "non-erotic" is like treating smallpox with a topical salve."
That is indeed the problem with that argument, and it’s why I’m not advocating veiling women.
What Turabi is saying, in effect, is that it is within the nature of males to objectify women. There is no male “innocence,” here, quite the opposite. It is because all men cannot be relied upon to have developed the refinement required to respect the personhood of women that it is more practical to short-circuit their natural tendencies. It is not the uncontrollable, destructive sexuality of women that Turabi sees as the problem. It is the uncontrollable, destructive sexuality of men, and the blame is theirs. As pointed out, even female ankles could not escape the Male Gaze (to use a drippingly PC term from the bowels of Academia).
To put it another way, Turabi might have regarded it as a sad commentary on the state of Muslim culture that its men cannot be relied upon to exert a civilized restraint upon their thoughts and inclinations. My point was that, inasmuch as the solution of the veil is problematic, so too is the American solution. Our solution is, of course, no solution at all. Nothing is covered, nothing is hidden, all is exposed, and there is no longer a tradition of male restraint or refinement.
Turabi did not say that the veil rendered the woman “non-erotic,” he said that it prevented her from being viewed as an “erotic image.” The difference between “erotic” and “pornographic” is famously one of interpretation, but in its most refined sense the erotic seems to have more to do with what is hidden than what is exposed. In the same article Shabbir Akhtar holds that the veil renders a woman more erotic, which is to say that it lends a refinement to female sexuality that is missing in a pornographic culture such as America’s.
Given that objectification is such a problem, solutions to it ought to be examined for their efficacy. The veil, at least, has the potential to instruct a society by offering a tangible sign that such objectification is not the mark of high culture. Here in America, there is no such potential.
