Mother Jones magazine on Tumblr

A quick reflection (no, seriously) on female objectification and the “Bin Laden porn” thing.

We were immediately reminded of this passage from Lawrence Wright’s 2004 New Yorker story, “The Kingdom of Silence,” about living under Wahhabi strictures in Saudi Arabia. Which, BTW, if you haven’t read, you should. Now.

A middle-aged Saudi told me, “I am worried about the next generation. They don’t see any real women at all. You don’t see each other’s wives, daughters, sisters. Everything is masculine. And yet they are bombarded by images. They can easily see porn. They live in the imagination of sex all the time. We don’t grow naturally, to be loved, not to be loved—we don’t undergo these changes. Two-thirds of the marriages here are basically loveless. Many men cheat—there’s a lot going on underground.”

Some Saudi men openly joke about their behavior when they leave the country. “We’re all sex maniacs, by the way,” one said to me. He regularly flies to Morocco for female companionship. “There’s a part of me that I share with all men, where women are concerned. And there’s a part I share with Arab men. But there’s a big part that only Saudi guys have in common.”

The absence of socialization between men and women struck me as a potent factor in terrorist fantasies. The hijackers who killed themselves on September 11th were propelled in part by the notion of being rewarded in the afterlife with the company of virgins. Such abstractions don’t seem quite so strange in a country where images of women piped through a satellite dish seem more vivid than actual Saudi women—whom the male reporters at the Gazette liked to call B.M.O.s, or “black moving objects.”

View high resolution

March Madness: Democrats vs. Dictators

Foreign Policy’s epic bracket competition is, well, epic.