COLLEGE SPEECH CODES MAKING US LOOK AWFUL ABROAD:
Do the sex code writers really expect an already consummated couple, so to speak, who met a month before in English lit class, Jamie and Sam say, to calmly discuss beforehand the nuance of whether they are going to make love, have sex, or rut like beasts of the field? Oh, how I long to know what the late George Carlin would have done with such material, unseemly by nature as it may be and as he often was (though usually for some redeeming purpose).
But the PC crowd that thinks up this stuff does not find anything about it the least bit funny. As best I can tell from a safe distance, campus Big Sister is totally humorless, thus managing the improbable feat of being unseemly, inane and tedious all at the same time.
Now what, finally at long last, has all this to do with the Middle East? The answer is “plenty”, but I will be brief.
To one extent or another, all Muslim Middle Eastern societies (to include those of North Africa, the Sahel and Southwest Asia), Arab and non-Arab alike, maintain traditional attitudes toward human sexuality and to how that subject in its various manifestations may and may not be discussed in public. I do not mean by this that these societies are free from pre- or post-modern sexual perversity; on the contrary, there is plenty of perversity and arguably no shortage of sexual neuroses as well from Morocco to Egypt to Pakistan and back again. But the public optic conveys a very different image, and toleration for what is defined as deviant behavior is low. This is not hard for Americans of a certain age to understand, for Middle Easterners’ attitudes toward homosexuality, out-of-wedlock sex, abortion and so forth are more or less indistinguishable from mainstream American attitudes a mere half century ago. Take careful note: We are the ones who have changed, and by normal social-historical criteria, the change has been blindingly rapid. . . .
The favorite rhetorical question asked here after 9/11 was “Why do they hate us?” The answer to this question is that it was and remains the wrong question. The typical tradition-minded Middle Easterner does not hate America. But rather a lot of tradition-minded Middle Easterners are disgusted by America. There is a difference.
The rise of “gay rights” discourse and especially of the gay marriage controversy to the pinnacle of American politics—all the way to the Supreme Court—befuddles and disgusts most of them. The immodesty and downright salaciousness of American “low” fashion, especially for women, repels and disgusts them, too. The manifest disrespect shown to elders and teachers alarms and disgusts them. The now deeply embedded linguistic obscenity in American culture, whether in some forms of popular music or just in overheard speech, repulses and disgusts them. And not that violence against women and homosexuals is unknown to them in their own societies—again, very much to the contrary—but the casual pervasiveness of it in Americans’ own depictions of American society shocks and disgusts them, too.
Above all, the deafeningly public character of all this—the banishment of useful hypocrisy, in other words—puzzles and disgusts to the point that many of them think we have simply gone mad. To figure out why so few Middle Easterners were won over by President Obama’s famous Cairo speech, and all the other speeches designed to project American “soft power” into the Muslim world (just check recent polling data to measure the failure), you need to understand this backdrop.
Well, to be fair, we don’t think much of Hollywood or the Social Justice Warrior class either. But for those asking “why do they hate us,” this may prove an uncomfortable answer.
