The Problem of Sex Posted by Shadi Hamid

Go to Google trends. And try putting in the following search terms: sex, [bad] sex, porno. Some may be surprised to find just to what extent Middle Eastern countries top the list (could this really be the only thing the Middle East gets high scores on?). What is going on? The Arab world, particularly the Gulf, is infamous for its casual perversity, for its hypersexual netherworlds, undergrounds, and its almost sacred faith in a kind of inverted “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy for the masses. I have lived in the Arab world for a relatively significant amount of time and I still find the whole thing quite mysterious. With that said, I apologize if I am exaggerating the extent of the problem, which may very well be the case (that’s what happens if you are assaulted with two and a half hours of a movie – The Yacoubian Building – which captures, like few things I’ve seen before, the almost total moral, economic, social, and cultural collapse of the modern Arab world).

In any case, the “problem of sex” – it’s always a problem, isn’t it? – interests me because it provides yet more evidence of how closed, repressive societies divert their citizens from their natural equilibriums. It’s not that Arabs are different than Americans, at least in any essential sense. The problem more likely is one intimately related to an authoritarian political structure which, in turn, is reflected and reproduced in almost every other facet of life. On the other hand, in a truly democratic society – one which actually guaranteed freedom of expression and speech – Arab citizens would have the opportunity to break free from the conformist, suffocating political culture which currently prevails, and internal frustrations – some of them sexual, no doubt – could be channeled more productively (through, say, the ballot box).

In a free society, religion would cease to be the purview of the state, which has done more than anyone else to distort it, contaminate it, and hand it over, perhaps unwittingly, to extremists and other unsavory characters. In Egypt and Jordan – the supposedly “moderate,” pro-American Arab states, no less – mosques are micromanaged by ostensibly “secular” regimes which give clerics prepared scripts and force-feed the populations with Friday odes to the all-compassionate President-King. It is no surprise, then, that people, in their profound disillusion, look elsewhere for spiritual fulfillment. As long as the Arab state intervenes in cultural production and blocks its citizens from political participation, it will provoke similarly exclusivist (and violent) reactions from its opponents (i.e. the last 50 years of Arab history).

Distortions and religious subsidies screw up the marketplace of ideas and then, as a result, you start to get unnatural expressions of religio-political zeal. When people are denied the opportunity to express their grievances through legitimate, peaceful, democratic channels, they will likely resort to illegitimate, extralegal mechanisms of political expression. To put it more simply, tyranny leads to terror. Similarly, when young men are told that they cannot hold hands with a member of the opposite sex until they get married (and they don’t usually get married until their late 20s or early 30s, because getting married is just about the most expensive thing you can do the Arab world today), then their natural sexual desire will be suppressed for a comparatively extended period of time. Such desires may find expression in a host of potentially unhealthy practices and behaviors. Let's not forget that young, single men (who lack the means to marry), as Jedediah Purdy points out in a recent article, provide the most vulnerable recruits for extremist, maximalist movements. In such a way, the religious, political, economic, and sexual, comes together in a rather fascinating – but certainly frightening – Molotov cocktail.

Comments

[J Thomas]

In a truly democratic society – one which actually guaranteed freedom of expression and speech – Arab citizens would have the opportunity to break free from the conformist, suffocating political culture which currently prevails, and internal frustrations – some of them sexual, no doubt – could be channeled more productively (through, say, the ballot box).

You've got something like a double bind there. A society can't guarantee freedom of expression while it has a conformist suffocating culture.

Many of the problems you point out were present in the USA in the 1950's, but our official freedoms didn't do much about it that decade.

And the freedom of expression we have now mostly lets us sort ourselves out. The freedom available in San Francisco is different from that available in Omaha. Lots of things you can see in public in SF would get the participants arrested in Omaha. But a guy who speaks with a deep southern accent in SF can expect to be snubbed at every turn, unless he's visibly gay.

It just isn't that easy.

[Zathras]

The desperate struggle of liberals to show that they are too different from neoconservatives is not helped by posts like this one.

A society's "...almost total moral, economic, social, and cultural collapse..." is not likely either to be entirely the product of its political system or to be a problem that changing its political system will satisfactorily address. That is not a difficult concept. Any one of the American Founding Fathers would have assumed its truth as a matter of course. In our more developed and morally advanced age, though, it is not an idea we feel able to acknowledge publicly, because to do so would be to admit the possibility that Arabs are, after all, not quite like us. Their problems may not be curable with our remedies or, to put in a way liberals are likely to find even less comfortable, Arabs may need to import a lot more from the West than its political ideas.

For American and European social liberals sex is the Holiest of Holies, so perhaps the focus on it here should not be surprising. But look at the argument advanced here. Arab men's sexual desire is suppressed for too long; it is very expensive for them to marry; and this is because of the role of the state in religion? Pardon me, but this is nonsense. There are a lot of reasons to deprecate a state role in religion, but this isn't one of them. If this is the problem Hamid says it is, to address it the culture, not the government, needs to change.

Now, I don't see the future of the Arab world as central to the fate of humanity. My prescription for American policy toward the Arab countries is less involvement in their internal affairs, not more -- because our resources are limited, and nearly every other region of the world is more important to us and has more to offer. Neoconservatives, partly I think because their worldview is heavily influenced by their emotional attachment to Israel and partly because of the inertia generated by the Bush administration's adventure in Iraq, disagree. And liberals pretty much disagree too, for reasons that don't appear much different to me, for they share with neoconservatives the beliefs that there are problems here we can solve without adjusting our own thinking that much and that it is more important for us to do this than to do anything else in the whole field of foreign affairs.

[Reynolds]

This is a pretty convoluted piece Shadi. When people talk about a hard-on for politics, I don't think it's meant literally. You don't seriously think that making voting more meaningful or available for men in their 20's is going to make them less horny, do you? And the link between being unmarried and carrying out suicide bombings...Are you married? Are you getting laid? Are you blowing up buildings? And while you type "no" back to me three times let me say that I know lots of guys (and girls) who aren't married, who aren't getting laid, and who aren't blowing up buildings.

As for what causes extremism to proliferate in the Arab World, I don't know. It could be the poverty in the region, the piss poor education system in every Arab country save the Gulf countries, crushing illiteracy, the absence of regional production, the unavailability of regular and suitable work for men in their teens and twenties, the lack of investment by regional regimes in technical skills which enable other developing countries to compete in the globalizing economy, utterly insufficient resources for an ever-increasing (not to mention unsustainable) population, a religious climate equitable to that in Europe during the late Middle Ages and early Reformation, the presence of Americans in the region, the presence of Israelis in the region, or the presence of Arabs in the region...I just don't think that all the problems in the Arab World stem from guys not getting laid. I mean, almost no one in the Vatican is getting laid and its the safest, richest, best educated country on earth per capita, not to mention a theocratic state.

[Anon]

How long exactly have you lived in the Arab world? You don't strike me as someone who knows it all THAT well.

[Anon]

Two points about this absolutely strange notion you're inventing here: 1) A large proportion of Saudis and people from the Gulf, whom you claim are some of the main purveyors in the Arab world, are not exactly impoverished.

2) Many of the extremists are middle class.

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