She’s the Lebanese born, South American starlet loved by penis carriers across the clash of civilizations. You didn’t know she was an Arab though, did you? Well, this is an established fact in the Middle East. I know because I’ve been teaching 19 and 20 year old boys in Sharia countries for the last two years. I’ve got classrooms full of Omanis, a building full of Saudi Arabian military cadets, and a bar full of Lebanese on my side, and you have an unwillingness to check Wikipedia on your Iphone on yours.
“She’s born here,” a Lebanese bartender says as he points to the floor in a little town called Zahle. Across the bar Lebanese Muslims and Christians and Atheists are drunkenly flailing to the latest Shakira hit. Give me a dozen Shakiras born across the Muslim world and made famous in the West, and I’ll show you that it was an illusion that these civilizations were ever clashing in the first place. If there’s one thing we all have in common, it’s the objectification of women.
“No, no, no,” you say, “I live in an enlightened society that let’s women vote and drive cars, and have jobs, and we even let hags like Barbara Walters and Rosie O’ Donnell stay on TV.” It’s true the “West” as a whole has grown far more progressive towards women in the last century and a half or so, but most of the countries in the Middle East have only been modern nation states for around 50 years, and the forces that ousted their colonial overlords often drew on the Old Testamentesque religious fervor of a male population to secure the nationhood of these places to begin with.
What do you suppose would happen in our enlightened America if in a quest for morning ratings from a growing population of stay at home, unemployed males the cast of “The View” was replaced with Megan Fox, Jessica Alba, Tyra Banks, and Tina Fey? Ratings would soar and the entire demographic of the show would shift, regardless of what was coming out of their pretty mouths.
So what’s the point of this line of reasoning? That men like hot women? Well, there’s actually a quirky counter-intuitive twist to this logic. Objectified, successful women empower women trapped behind Sharia’s veils and abayas. That’s stupid, you say, it’s flawed logic, it’s a straw man (for you philosophy majors getting ready for a job as gas station attendants and Wal-Mart Greeters). We should be focusing on Marie Curie, Margaret Thatcher and Oprah, and all those other famous women we hear about all the time…you know…like that woman who’s the CEO of something, and that other one who’s in the Senate. The glass ceiling is still well in effect, and the women who are famous for something other than beauty and sex appeal don’t often rest on the tips of our tongues.
Sex doesn’t just sell, it unshackles. Women, even women under the veil, know this, but they only see it from a distance. When sexy celebrities, especially accepted sexy celebrities start infiltrating, it becomes more acceptable to be sexy. Women living in societies dominated by men will quickly discover that something about exposed curves severs the connection between the spinal cord and the cerebellum, and we men will do just about whatever you want. The idea that anyone hates us for our freedoms is an incredible fallacy. I live within Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi Sharia, and I meet people every day who want to move to America and take advantage of its freedoms. What people hate us for is blowing shit up.
What unites women across cultures? Men are idiots. The Bible held out for a little while, and before you judge the black slab of fabric called an Abaya, take a look at a picture of a European beach in the 19th century. You’d be lucky if you had some necks and calves to titillate you. I still find it astonishing that the suffrage movement gained any traction before the advent of the bikini.
This is why we need more Shakiras. In the Islamic, conservative world Britney Spears is just a whore. Maybe that’s a bad example, but what we need are female celebrities with Middle Eastern roots who become popular in the West. What’s cool in America eventually becomes cool everywhere. Americans are lucky in a way, because the world has no choice but to view us simultaneously through the lens of both our foreign policy and our pop culture. This forms a rather beautiful balance that needs to be exploited, and exploited by a dozen Shakiras.
This small army of sinuous sirens will writhe, captivate, and inspire the veiled beauties of the world to rise up, gussy up, and take from men that which we’re perfectly willing to give, the freedom that we in the West have been loved for all along.
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