In Egypt, 80% of women are sexually harassed. Two-thirds of men admit assaulting women: And we in the West are depraved…?!
(“I collapsed and cried for a long time“)
It is often stated that the West is decadent – that we treat our women like whores, or cattle. Our advertisement industry can’t seem to sell a bar of soap, a tube of toothpaste, a family car or even a mortgage loan, without showing us images of near naked women who are begging the punters for it.
Then, there are our celebrities and reality TV shows, and the way that each and every mainstream movie needs at least a few shots of naked breasts and one or two steamy sex scenes.
So yes, on the whole, I would say I agree with the observation that our Western culture and our attitudes to sex – and women – are crude, exploitative and often quite vile.
Some of the fiercest critics of our Western way of life are, none too surprisingly, Muslims. There are those Muslim women, in the West and elsewhere, who now proclaim that wearing the veil or the hijab is a form of feminism; a way to protest the exploitation of women by the West’s pornographic culture.
Never mind that the veil, historically speaking, is not far removed from the slave collar: Covering yourself from the lustful gaze of men is seen by them as superior to being exploited.
(“My mother says I shouldn’t answer back”)
Then, there are the more traditional – and male – remonstrations against Western sinfulness; mostly by the same kind of bearded misogynists we have always had in our own Judeo-Christian culture.
In effect, these guys do see women as cattle but merely insist these (future) possessions should not be paraded in the street, for other eyes to feast on. Like the Muslim ‘feminists’, these cattle bosses think the veil and the hijab are splendid inventions.
Anyway, whatever the differences may be between all those Muslims who see the West as utterly depraved, they all agree that things are much better in most Muslim countries. Maybe not in some of the more fundamentalist Islamist Hell holes but certainly in more moderate countries, like Egypt.
Well, you know what? I am no fan of our modern, greed and quick fix driven West. I think there is a Hell of a lot wrong with the way we live our sad and hurried lives. When I think of all the millions of people, sitting home and watching some reality TV show, I think of a huge herd of cows, standing around one of those huge salt licks – licking and licking and licking, with eyes as empty as any junkie’s gaze.
Still, I’d rather live with the brazen, if stupid, commercialization of sex, and the whole pathological and pathetic Big Brother industry, than be caught dead in the sickeningly hypocritical, Allah-loving main streets of Egypt. If that is life in even a moderate Muslim country, I’d say, bring on a whole army of Richard Dawkinses and a Great Lake’s worth of the most aggressive detergent.
Anyway, just read the BBC news article I linked to, here below. I can promise you it is disgusting in ways that our most lurid billboards and Paris Hilton videos will never be able to touch:
“Seven Egyptian women talk about their experience of sexual harassment on the streets of Cairo. It is an increasingly common problem, with a recent survey suggesting more than four out of five women have been sexually harassed, while nearly two-thirds of men admitted assaulting women.”
(I remember so many scary harassments”)
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