Curbing men
Equal sharing of sexual morality
October 27, 2000
The Iranian
One day back in 1957, when I was living in Paris, I stumbled on the
following dispatch in The International Herald Tribune:
IRAN BUREAU BANS PRETTY TYPISTS
TEHRAN, March 13 (AP) -- Beautiful stenographers have been banned
in the Iranian Ministry of Agriculture. The order issued yesterday by the
minister, General Hassan Akhavi, ruled that pretty secretaries and typists
should not be employed. Under the new rule, a girl who came first out of
110 applicants for a typist job has been turned down because of her beauty.
The general was probably a practicing Muslim. But in those days he could
not impose the chador on female employees. Instead he came up with his
own interpretation of Islamic mores. After all the veil is nothing but
a way to prevent men from being sexually aroused. Probably without being
aware of it, the general invented a secular version of the hijab to keep
his male employees from being distracted: No pretty secretaries!
Twenty years ago the mullahs ascended the Peacock throne and expunged
all the "modernizing" laws of the Pahlavi era. Once again Iranian
women hide their features behind black fabric. They look like giant ants
or permanent mourners.
In fact, the hijab, which never disappeared in the ultra-conservative
Arabian peninsula, has made a rapid comeback in more advanced Muslim countries
such as Egypt, Turkey, Jordan, Tunisia, etc. As a matter of fact, Muslim
societies have remained male-oriented and dominated by men . Everything
is devised for the comfort and satisfaction of Adam's sons. On the sexual
level, men are not asked to control their urges; but women are instructed
not to arouse them!
In their recent book (A Natural
History of Rape.Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion, MIT Press
, 1999) biologist Randy Thornhill and anthropologist Graig Palmer recount
an incident which happened in Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim
country: when the cook of a primatologist was raped by an orangutan, her
husband said it was nothing to be concerned about because the perpetrator
wasn't human! To boot, nobody asked the woman how she felt!
In the dawn of the 21st century and the third millennium, is it not
high time to split the task (and burden?) of sexual morality and behavior
equally? Why should not men also exert some restraint on their sexual urges?
Freud once said sexual control and discipline has been the engine of
Western civilization. Iran and other Muslim countries should think about
this. After all it won't imply a lot of capital investment. All you need
to do give young and not so young men (including the proliferating class
of mullahs) a crash course on how to curb sexual desire.
Author
Fereydoun Hoveyda was Iran's ambassador to the United Nations from
1971 to 1978. To learn more about the Hoveydas, visit www.hoveyda.org.
