The Veil, Edited by Jennifer Heath -- Book Review Essay
The Veil and Male Asceticism -- Book
Review Essay
Heath, Jennifer, Ed. (2008) The
Veil: Women Writers on Its History,
Lore, and Politics. Berkeley, Los
Angeles, London: University of
California Press.
Jennifer
Heath compiled a very nice anthology of fairly short articles including two
cartoons by twenty-one different female authors exploring the widely varied
meanings of the veil as experienced by women from a broad range of cultures and
religious perspectives.1 It
is well illustrated with drawings and photographs that are very helpful. It is predominantly a contemporary treatment,
although there are two historical pieces: one by Laurene Lafontaine, Out of the Cloister, and the cartoon, Nubo: The Wedding Veil, by Sarah Bell. The historical background that I am incorporating
here came from external sources. I was
rather dismayed at Heath’s recapitulation on the last two pages of the book
following over three hundred pages of excellent, informative discussion, where
she seems to dismiss the significance of her own book and importance of the
veil as a cultural and political symbol.
Considering the real problems
facing women, ideological battles about the veil are tragic wastes of time.
What a woman chooses to wear on
her head should be trivial to anyone other than that woman herself.
[The veil] belongs only to the
wearer. (Heath, p. 320-321)
As I pondered
how she could make such a colossal error after the all of the rich discussion
that preceded it, I realized that the strength of the book was also its
deficiency. The strength of the book is
the compilation of the perspectives of women who have experienced and lived
with the veil in a wide variety of cultural contexts and how they have adapted
to it and incorporated it into their feminine identity. The deficiency created by excluding the
perspectives of males results in missing the connection between the social
practice of veiling women and the ascendance of male asceticism as a cultural
and moral ideal. This is what inspired
me to write this review. The social practice
of veiling women is always associated with a prevailing moral ideal of male
asceticism. And asceticism in males
always results in a devaluation of women.
These two points are crucial to understanding this matter. Devaluation of women often masquerades as an
elevation in the estimation of female virginity. But idealizing female virginity is an insult
to women. It posits an immature
condition as more desirable than the fully developed sexuality of an adult
woman and seeks to exclude women from full participation in the activity of
life, and in particular from physical relations with males. Idealizing virginity is not for the benefit
of women, but rather supports male asceticism and sexual renunciation.
Regardless of
how individual women subjectively experience the veil, whether as oppressive,
restrictive, protective, or liberating, the need
for the veil, the social imperative
for the veil, comes ultimately from men, particularly from ascetic men who are
not well disposed toward women, who hold women in low esteem, and who
particularly despise women’s sexuality and see it a threat that must be
suppressed and controlled. This is a
point not developed in Heath’s anthology.
Heath’s anthology is, for the most part, perspectives of contemporary
women who have adapted to the veil and in turn have adapted the veil to their
own purposes. It does not delve into the
psychological need for the veil as experienced by males and thus the book is
largely about the adaptation of women to the veil rather than contending with
the male psychological needs that are the origin and sustenance of it. Heath's authors stress the communicative
function of the veil, the many different meanings it can carry in different
cultural contexts, the ambiguity of the veil, how the veil selectively conceals
and selectively reveals. Veiling is an
intricate practice that can be adapted to many different purposes. It has subtlety and sophistication. Some western women, such as Pamela Taylor and
Eve Grubin, choose the veil as an “unambiguous rejection of the objectification
of women by men” (Taylor, in Heath, p. 120), or because it “allows us to
experience our internal richness.” (Grubin, in Heath, p. 187) Taylor found, however, that wearing the hijab
in the United States resulted in the “bitter irony of having swapped one form
of objectification for another” (Taylor, in Heath, p. 121) She found herself perceived as a proponent of
militant, political Islam. Women cannot
escape being imprecisely perceived (objectified) regardless of how they clothe
or unclothe their bodies. The cartoon Nubo: The Wedding Veil by Sarah Bell is
an instructive cross cultural synopsis of folklore of the veil in relation to weddings. She reminds us that through most of history
weddings have been a deal between men and the bridal veil served to insure that
the groom would not back out before the deal was final. There is a story in the Bible where Jacob was
tricked by a bridal veil into marrying the older sister of the woman he
wanted. (Genesis 29)
Aisha Lee Fox
Shaheed in her article, Dress Codes and
Modes: How Islamic is the Veil?,
frames the issue aptly:
The question at stake is whose
honor is being protected: that of the woman beneath the clothes, her father’s,
her husband’s, her family’s, her community’s, or her state’s? (Shaheed, in Heath, p. 298)
This question displays a realization that the veil is not
and cannot be just about the woman’s self expression. Its implications go all the way to the level
of state political governance. In
Arabic, the term hijab simply means
‘barrier.’ (Shaheed, in Heath, p. 295) The philosophical question posed by the veil
is whether there should be a barrier between the bodies of women and the eyes
of men. It is very simple, but the
myriad answers to it structure relations between men and women in every human society. It is not simply the personal choice of the
woman. A woman cannot choose between
walking down a public street stark naked or covered up in a burqa according to
her whim. She will never have such a
choice. The idea that it is, or should
be, simply the woman’s choice is naïve and totally unrealistic. A woman who ventures into a public space is
seen and reacted to by everyone and how she presents herself sets an example
for other women. Her personal choice,
and the degree to which she has one, will ultimately fall within parameters
defined and enforced by men.
Tolstoy
expressed the underlying sentiment very well in his story The Kreutzer Sonata.
I used formerly to feel
uncomfortable and uneasy when I saw a lady dressed up for a ball, but now I am
simply frightened, and plainly see her as something dangerous and illicit. I want to call a policeman and ask for
protection from the peril, and demand that the dangerous object be removed and
put away. (Tolstoy, p. 179)
It is this
inner need, the fear called forth by the public visibility of the alluring female,
that the ascetic male translates into a social imperative for suppression. The mere sight of a woman’s face or body in a
public place is an unacceptable provocation.
P.E. Falk, an ultraconservative Jewish rabbi, sees threats and
contamination in nearly every exposure to the female body
Seeing is a form of contact,
and contaminates. . . Every person is
detrimentally affected by what he sees, even if it is of no interest to him.
(Falk, p. 125)
Ascetics despise the body and regard it as evil. They spend their lives renouncing physical
pleasure and sensuality. Women are
particularly despised because their beauty and allure is seen as a wayward
enticement. A dichotomy is often posed
between the “spiritual” and the physical, with the “spiritual,” being the
superior and more desired condition. The
body, and sexuality in particular, are inevitably denigrated. Kirtanananda Bhaktipada, a leader in the Hare
Krishna movement and an advocate of celibacy, articulated the foundation in his
Joy of No Sex:
‘You are not that body,’ yogis
have taught their students from time immemorial. ‘You are Brahman, pure spirit soul – eternal,
full of knowledge and bliss.’ This is
our identity, and on this platform we can begin to relish the joy of no
sex. Thus to get rid of the Myth of the
Need for Sex, we must understand ‘I
am not this body.’ This is the beginning.
(Bhaktipada, p. 19)
“You know, what is vilest about
it,” Tolstoy rails, “is that in theory love is something ideal and exalted, but
in practice it is something abominable, swinish, which it is horrid and
shameful to remember” (Tolstoy, p.
187)
“If the aim of humanity is
goodness, righteousness, love – call it what you will – if this is what the
prophets have always said, that all mankind should be united together in love,
that the spears should be beaten into pruning hooks and so forth, what is it
that hinders the attainment of this aim?
The passions hinder it. Of all
the passions, the strongest, cruelest, and most stubborn in the sex passion,
physical love; and therefore if the passions are destroyed, including the
strongest of them – physical love – the prophecies will be fulfilled, mankind
will be brought into a unity, the aim of human existence will be attained, and
there will be nothing further to live for.
As long as mankind exists the ideal is before it, and of course not the
rabbits’ and pigs’ ideal of breeding as fast as possible, nor that of monkeys
and Parisians – to enjoy sex passion in the most refined manner, but the ideal
of goodness attained by continence and purity.”
(Tolstoy, p. 183)
This is the
ascetic repudiation of sensuality excellently expressed. It is the foundation of asceticism: a
philosophical rejection of the body and a psychological rejection of one’s
personal identity bound to the body. The
ascetic sees the problem not only in terms of controlling himself, that is, in
modulating his own inner response to stimuli from the external world, but
conscious of his own weakness and corruptibility he is compelled to impose
controls on his and everyone’s environment for the sake of defending his
de-sensualized existence. The
narcissism of the ascetic based as it is on such an unnatural and unattainable
ideal of de-sensualization is vulnerable in the extreme to near constant
assault from the allure of female bodies.
Because the conditions that give rise to ascetic sentiments are present
at all times and places, as we will see later on, asceticism and the hostility
toward women reflected in the insistence on keeping their faces and bodies
covered will always be a possibility in human societies. But it need not attain credibility as a model
for us all and despising the body and sensuality need not be held in elevated esteem
or confused with “virtue,” or “nobility.”
The idea that love is essentially “spiritual” and elevated and “noble”
poisons relations between men and women.
Repudiating the physically pleasurable, sensual connection to women is
to end up despising them. If you like
women, you have to like their bodies and you have to enjoy the public display
of women’s bodies that allows for shared enjoyment, both aesthetically and
lustfully.
Jeffrey
Masson sees asceticism as an intrapsychic defense, a way of warding off
threatening or inacceptable impulses to prevent their intrusion into
consciousness and precipitating action.
The ascetic exists because he
is tempted. And not once, but over and
over. The only role of women in ascetic
literature is as degraded objects, inspirers of lust and the horror of
lust. I need hardly labor this point, so
evident is it in all the literature.
This phobic avoidance of women bespeaks an unusually intense desire for
contact. (Masson, p. 616)
However, the
demands of lust are so strong and so insistent that mere psychic defense is not
enough for the ascetic; he inevitably demands support of the entire society in
the form of laws and institutions to aid him in his beleaguered struggle. This is the threat that asceticism poses to
whole of humanity. It is not just a
private manifestation of mental illness.
Asceticism, on its own, is very difficult to sustain; it requires
considerable social support or withdrawal into hermitage. Ascetics, driven by intense anxiety, set
about aggressively enlisting any available support in order to impose their
conception of social order upon everyone.
Ascetics are not simply harmless, curious anomalies. They are malignant and their attempts to
present themselves as morally superior must always be challenged and
discredited. Asceticism, expressed as the need to keep the allure of women out
of sight and out of mind is the equivalent of misogyny.
In May of
1922, at age 22, Heinrich Himmler recorded in his youthful diary a telling
incident.
On Friday night he notes having
seen a girl of three jump about naked before going to bed. His reaction was, ‘I do not believe this to
be right at the age of three when one should be teaching a child modesty.’ . .
. On the next day Himmler talks with the young wife of a doctor and tells her
that he has never courted a girl. She
teases him and calls him a eunuch.
Himmler goes on to speculate that there are two sorts of people. On is ‘the melancholic, stern, among which I
include myself,’ austere types who eventually succumb to sin if they do not get
engaged or married early enough, ‘since the animal in man is too powerful in
us.’ (Lowenberg, p. 630)
In
Himmler’s case the ascetic defenses formed in adolescence succeeded
insofar as he did not go through a self destructive period of sensual
indulgence in the mode of Tolstoy or Augustine.
But the anxiety and the sense of vulnerability in the face of sensual
temptation is the same, and the resulting impulse to suppress the sensuality of
others is also the same. It can be seen
in ascetic males going back to ancient times.
Tertullian, in On the Veiling of Virgins, from roughly 200 C.E., tells us,
So perilous a face, then, ought
to be shaded, which has cast stumbling-stones even so far as heaven: that, when
standing in the presence of God, at whose bar it stands accused of driving the
angels from their (native) confines, it may blush before the other angels as
well; and may repress that former evil liberty of its head,'(a liberty) now to
be exhibited not even before human eyes. (Chapter 7)
Hippolytus, around 215 C.E. in his
Apostolic Tradition writes:
All the women should cover
their heads with a pallium [a liturgical headpiece], and not simply with a
piece of linen, which is not a proper veil. 18:5
These were all based upon an admonition of Paul in 1
Corinthians, which is rather confusing and ambiguous. On the one hand he says,
But every woman that prayeth or
prophesieth with her head uncovered dishonoreth her head: for that is even all
one as if she were shaven. For if the
woman be not covered, let her also be shorn: but if it be a shame for a woman
to be shorn or shaven, let her be covered.
I Corinthians 11:5-6
But on
the other hand,
But if a woman have long hair,
it is a glory to her: for her hair is given her for a covering. I Corinthians 11:13
Paul talks as
if women should be covered [veiled?] on the one hand, but on the other hand, he
says that the woman’s long hair can serve as an adequate covering. Paul’s apparent inability to make up his mind
about this has resulted in the lack of a hard, clear, definitive position on
this issue within the Christian scriptures and has thus given to Christian
churches a flexibility that many conservative ascetics still object to. There are ascetics within Christianity who
still today would assert an ultraconservative interpretation of these passages
and impose a full repression on the female body.
Referring to this passage in I Corinthians, Robert Sungenis (2004) comments,
The question for today’s modern
church and culture is: does this Scriptural mandate apply to us? The answer commonly given today is: ‘No,
women are not required to wear head coverings.
That is an antiquated practice of the past, and today’s church has
officially declared that women are no longer bound to it.’ The truth is, the church has never abrogated
the practice of head coverings; rather, the practice has fallen into disuse
purely from cultural pressures. In a
word, these cultural pressures have had a most damaging effect in deteriorating
our whole society, and one of the more dramatic changes is the role of women. They have gone from wifely roles to business
executives, from deacon’s wives to veritable priests; from factory workers to
fighting soldiers; from wives in submission to equal rights advocates; from
child-bearers to child killers. (Sungenis, p. 1)
The covering of women’s bodies in public also signifies the
domination and subjugation of women to male authority:
Being covered is a mark of
subjection and authority. It induces the
woman to be humble and preserve her virtue, for the virtue and honor of the
governed is to dwell in obedience. John
Chrysostom c.400 CE Homilies on I Corinthians, 26,5
Laurene Lafontaine wrote a very interesting, informative
contribution to Heath’s anthology on the history of dress for cloistered
Catholic nuns from Tertullian (c. 200 C.E.) to the Vatican II Ecumenical
Council, (1962-1965) and the reactions beyond (Out of the Cloister). After
a long era between the Council of Trent in 1563 and the Code of Canon Law of
1917 where cloistered women wore distinctive and diverse dress, the veil was
revived and women were required to sit separately from men and women were
forbidden from preaching within their own congregations.
Once again, the requirement of
the veil by papal fiat served to remind women, religious and lay, of the
Church’s theological position regarding women as inferior and subordinate. (Lafontaine, p.81)
Uta Ranke-Heinemann had been a professor of Catholic
theology at the University of Essen, Germany, but lost her position and was
excommunicated in 1987 after declaring the virgin birth to be a theological
position rather than a biological fact.
Ranke-Heinemann points out in her book, Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven, the pre-Christian origins of
asceticism and celibacy in the Christian Church tracing it to Stoic and
particularly to Gnostic traditions that held a deeply pessimistic outlook on
life itself, not only on sexuality (Chapter 1). Her book catalogs a long litany of hostility
toward women from Catholic theologians and clerics going back to ancient times
based fundamentally on the notion that women are inherently unclean. In particular, the veiling of women was a
direct extension of the idea that the mere sight of a woman was a lure to sin.
Clement of Alexandria writes:
With women ‘the very consciousness of their own nature must evoke feelings of
shame.’ (Paedagogus II, 33, 2) . . . Women should be completely veiled,
except when they are in the house.
Veiling their faces assures that they will lure no one into sin. (Paedagogus III, 79, 4) (Ranke-Heinemann, p. 127-128)
Miles (1989)
in her study of the meaning of female nakedness in Christian thought found that
this repugnance toward women extended to the point where women were understood
to “become male” if they were to enter the kingdom of heaven. (Chapter 2)
Christian authors imply, by
their repeated warnings to women on the topic of their dress and comportment,
that it is largely a woman’s responsibility to avoid producing desire in men.
(Miles, p. 72)
The practice
of veiling women goes back thousands of years, long before Christianity and
Islam. It is referred to in the Old
Testament and has been found in many ancient societies all around the
world. Judith Berman, based on a review
of several hundred figural representations from the Upper Paleolithic period
(40,000 – 10,000 years ago) concluded that Upper Paleolithic women very likely
styled their hair. (Berman, p. 292) The Venus
of Brassempouy, found in
southwestern France, is a 25,000 year old carving of a female face from
mammoth ivory. She seems to be wearing
some sort of head covering, or perhaps has her hair configured in braids. If you think about the origins of veiling
women both historically and psychologically, you are quickly led to thinking about
the origins and impetus for clothing the human body.
In the Bible
the origin of clothing is related to a dawning awareness of shame. (Genesis
3) This is probably not accurate. The Bible story correctly notes that people
are not naturally ashamed of their bodies. “Who told thee that thou wast
naked?” (Genesis 3:11) However, the
shame in being unclothed probably appeared after
the status associated with being clothed in certain ways had been
established. Shame is a learned
affect. Young children are not ashamed
of their bodies and have to be taught this important lesson. Shame is a feeling of loss of esteem in the
eyes of others. One has to be aware of
the expectations of others and share an internalized value system related to
those expectations in order to feel shame.
This is a rather complex psychological and cultural construction that
would develop and evolve over time in response to the acquired meanings of
being covered. Clothing and the social
significance of being clothed most likely came first, then the sense of shame
in being unclothed. It was likely related
to an increasing stratification of human societies after the development of
agriculture about 8000 to 10,000 years ago.
People
in hunting and gathering societies in warm climates, who have not been exposed
to outside cultures where clothing is worn, wear little or nothing. (Gilligan,
pp. 26-29) Ian Gilligan very effectively
argues that the earliest human clothing was for thermal protection against cold. Humans have very limited biological defense
against cold and therefore must have developed some means of protecting their
bodies to maintain their temperatures against the cold weather which was known
to exist in areas of early human habitation.
I won’t repeat Gilligan’s rather complex arguments, which also depend,
interestingly, on genetic analyses of human body lice, but here I will just
summarize his results.
Considered collectively, the
genetic studies on human lice favor an early date for
the loss of body hair cover,
probably by around three million years ago, and a
comparatively late date for
the time when humans first adopted clothing that has
continued in use up to the
present. It would appear that Homo has
been thermally “naked” from the outset and would at
times have required the use of clothes as a behavioral adaptation to cold exposure
in circumstances when environmental conditions exposed that thermal
vulnerability. However, it was not until after the last interglacial, around 90–100,000 years ago, that
clothing came into more-or-less continuous use among at least some modern human
groups. (Gilligan, p. 32)
This does not
exclude psychological and cultural accompaniments, for it is very likely that
as soon as humans began putting clothes on their bodies, they began to overlay
them with meanings beyond mere utility. It
is clear that from very early times, adornment, or the lack thereof, became a
communicative device among modern humans.
Jewelry, for example, goes back at least 70,000 to 100,000 years.
(Gillgian, p. 56) Robinson (1988), arguing
against utility as the original motive for enhancing the body with clothes uses
ample illustrations to show how clothing and adornment is used as much to
enhance the display of the body and draw attention to it as to conceal it. It is very likely that adornment of the body, pre-existed clothing. The evidence for this is the fact that people
who wear no clothes at all adorn their bodies with paint, tattoos and a variety
of scarring techniques, often to draw attention to their sexual attributes (Robinson,
1988). It can be seen that clothing and
a sense of modesty are clearly to be distinguished both in their origins and in
their relationship to covering the human body.
The point is that while veiling women, understood as compulsory head
covering or face covering or full body covering, is associated with male
asceticism, clothing of the body per se is not.
The Bible story is incorrect in linking the origin of clothing with a
sense of shame in the body. Both females
and males bond their personal identity to being dressed a certain way, but
clothing and adornment of the body existed for perhaps many thousands of years
before it was overlaid with a sense of shame in being naked.
Aisha Lee Fox
Shaheed, in her article, Dress Codes and
Modes, referred to earlier, presents a nice discussion of the complex
language embodied in clothing and its relation to social identity as well as
politics.
For our family, veiling was
tied to our identity as a religious minority in India and symbolized familial
honor but was never viewed as a religious injunction or a requirement of
Islam.
Every person with a Muslim
heritage has a different experience, precisely because what we wear – including
the veil – depends on our specific culture(s), the historical moment, and
prevailing conceptions of female modesty and sexuality. (Shaheed, in Heath, p. 293)
Dress codes
and styles for women have changed over time within our own society, so it
should not be hard for western readers to comprehend the varied trends in dress
for women in Muslim countries. Women
seem to adapt to whatever clothing regimen is maintained in their societies and
they internalize these conventions and adapt their identity as women to those
conventions. Barbara Goldman Carrel in
her article, Shattered Vessels that
Contain Divine Sparks studied Hasidic Jewish women in New York City and
found that a sense of modesty becomes part of female identity and that the smallest
details of clothing acquire meaning and significance that identifies a woman as
part of a particular community or group and which also serves to differentiate
her from a surrounding society with which she does not wish to be identified. If the demands of modesty are not overly
strict and oppressive, women will adopt and support them as part of healthy
feminine identity. However, if the rules
become too strict and oppressive, women tend to chafe and may rebel. Consider the example of the Amish, who have imbued
clothing with meaning and significance down to the smallest details, from Jana
Hawley’s article, The Amish Veil: Symbol
of Separation and Community.
Some Amish communities require
that Amish women use straight pins to close their dresses while other Amish
communities use snaps for dress closures.
When I lived in Jamesport a young girl was visiting from an Amish
community in Indiana where snaps were used to close the dresses. In Jamesport, straight pins were used. Concern from the elders immediately was
raised because young Jamesport girls were seen trying to ‘get by’ sewing snaps
into their dresses. A special meeting
was held and the girl from Indiana was told that if she did not remove all the
snaps from her dresses and start using straight pins like the other girls in
Jamesport, she would have to return to Indiana. . . While she was in Jamesport,
the Indiana girl removed the snaps from her dresses, but she stayed on only a
few months because she decided Jamestown was too strict. (Hawley, in Heath p. 94)
Some women see advantage in the veil’s
protection.
As a physical barrier, the veil
denies men their usual privilege of discerning whomever they desire. By default, women are in command. The female scrutinizes the male. Her gaze from behind the anonymity of her
face veil or niqab is a kind of surveillance that casts her in the dominant
position. (Masood, in Heath p. 226)
I would rejoin
to Masood that her sense of being in command amounts to a sense of safety from
the intrusive interest of males. It does
give her some refuge from sexual interest expressed toward her, but she is not
free to discard her veil at will. She is
not free to express sexual interest in men as she feels inclined. Her anonymity does not change the negative
estimation of her body held by the male culture that dictates she must don the
veil. It does not change the esteem of
her sexuality, which is regarded as a social threat that must necessarily be
kept under wraps. Any sexual adventure
she does engage in must be done in utmost secrecy under pain of severe
punishment. Masood relates an incident
herself that makes this quite plain.
In the Jordanian capital of
Amman, I once saw a woman in full niqab, a thick black veil covering her entire
face with a six-inch open strip around the eyes. She wore black from head to toe. But there was something odd about her, as she
stood alone on a street corner, teetering on stilettos. After a while, a car drove by, screeched its
tires, and stopped. A man got out
yelling profanities at the woman who was apparently his sister. She yelled back in defiance, protesting loudly
as he clutched her wrist and dragged her toward the waiting car. She refused to get inside and her voice
climbed decibels, occasionally breaking midsentence from hoarseness. There was a strange disconnect between the
fury coming out of her mouth and her black-cloaked obscurity. Suddenly she whipped out a cell phone from
somewhere under her voluminous garments and furiously punched the numbers with
a black gloved finger. She spoke through
it through her face veil, which fluttered with the movement of her hidden lips.
The brother went
ballistic. He grabbed his sister’s hand,
yanked away the mobile and smashed it with his feet. Then he tightened his grip twisting her hand
behind her back. The girl howled and
kicked him in the shins with her spiky heels.
He smacked her head and tried to push her to the ground. As their fighting continued another car
approached. A sleek white Mercedes with
tinted windows. The passenger door
opened and a tall, gray-haired man in a double breasted suit stepped out and
gestured to the woman with a curt angling of his head.
She was squatting on her
haunches, a whimpering black huddle with teary eyes. The well-dressed stranger helped her up and
led the still crying woman into the backseat of his car. Then he went up to the
disgruntled brother, who was pummeling his fists on the car’s roof. A lengthy speech followed. The older man took a wad of bills from his
wallet, slipped them into the brother’s front shirt pocket, and patted his
cheek in a there, there kind of way.
The brother laughed
sarcastically and hurled one final insult at his sister waiting inside the
car. The one word I made out was sharmuta, the Arabic word for whore.
(Masood, p. 221-222)
This incident clearly shows who has the real power over
women behind veils.
Just because my veil blocks
your senses, doesn’t mean it blocks mine.
The veil is no blindfold. I see
out; you are the one whose vision is obstructed. My senses are alive and have a field wherein
to play, away from where your eye can penetrate. My sex is alive – what on earth makes people
think that women who veil do not take pleasure in eros? Veiling – with us – has nothing to do with
asceticism and self-denial. My sense of
beauty is alive. I comb out my hair and
put on the rouge and the silk, among friends, in a woman’s culture curtained
off from you, an outsider. Is that why
you find the veil frustrating from your male-identified viewpoint, you who are
used to women putting out for your gaze?
Because its aesthetic is the opposite of strut, is that the reason why
you take it as such an affront? (Kahf, in
Heath, p. 29-30)
No, the
reason the veil is an affront has nothing to do with your rejection of my
interest in seeing your body. The
affront does not come from you or your choice.
The affront comes from the imperative
that compels you and all other women to don the veil. That imperative does not originate with you
or even with the aggregate of women who join you in wearing it. It originates with a coterie of men who would
attempt to deprive all men of a
sensual connection to nearly all women. The veil in its many degrees makes a woman
the private property of the men on her side of the veil. This can be benevolent and protective of the
woman, or it can be tyrannical and utterly cruel. But the woman is officially closed off from
public availability, that is, availability for any man who encounters her to
contemplate her as an object of lust. Veiling
women is an outward manifestation of a religious moral outlook presided over
and enforced by clerics and their adherents who wish to restrict all desire, both
male and female, to a very narrow channel.
It is one thing for a woman to make a personal choice to veil herself as
an expression of her spirituality and her adoption of a religious moral code. It is quite another for an entire society of
women to be required to veil themselves under pain of legal sanction and
physical intimidation. Gazing at women
with enjoyment and desire reflects a need
for connection to women on the part of males. The rabbi (P.E. Falk) is right. Looking is a form of contact. But rather than contaminate, it represents a
positive valuation of women and pleasure in the sensual connection to
them. It includes women in the public space of society. Insisting that women remain covered except in
their own homes is indeed a repudiation and an affront to that need. But it is not only a repudiation of the male
desire for connection to women, it is a devaluation of women themselves. It says that indifference to women is
preferable to sensual connection in the pleasure of beholding. Ideally women should be ignored most of the
time. Our desire for them and our
enjoyment of them should not intrude into daily life any more than can be
helped. They should not be seen or heard
any more than is absolutely necessary. Life
should be austere and taking pleasure in women should be kept to a
minimum. Veiling should not be the free
choice of individual women, and women’s choice is not the origin of the
veil. The veil becomes a social and
political imperative imposed and enforced by men for reasons that have to do
with male psychology rather than out of consideration for the private space of
women. A hostile woman, or a woman who
experiences discomfort or aversion to the sexual interest of males, may make
good use of the veil to shut out their intrusive gazes and longing. But it is not out of respect for her privacy
that the veil becomes a universal requirement.
It is males who make these rules for their own self regulation.
Nowhere can
this be better seen than in Saudi Arabia where the hostility toward women and
the exposure of their bodies is blatant and openly expressed on the public
streets. Sherifa Zuhur in her article, From Veil to Veil, relates several
incidents of vicious harassment by the religious police on public streets for
small infractions of the ultra-strict dress code for women – which seems to
require considerable organized effort to sustain. It is clearly not about protecting
women. Women are the persecuted, and
their visible presence is nearly criminal.
J.D.
Salinger, who was influenced by Buddhist and Hindu teachings from India,
embraced an ideal of asceticism that proved disastrous for his wife and
family. According to his wife “we did
not make love very often, the body was evil.” (Salinger, p. 91) His daughter, Margaret Salinger, described
reading a passage from the autobiography of her father’s Yogi. In it the Yogi details the complaints of his
wife and his neglect of her and his family. Salinger comments, “I have to say that reading
this, forty years after my parents’ engagement was like reading the obituary of
our family before we even became one” (Salinger, p. 88) Margaret Salinger’s memoir is a touching,
beautifully written illustration of the devastation asceticism wreaks upon women
when played out in a marriage or in the upbringing of a daughter.
Behind every good, enlightened
man, Christ figure, Teddy, or Seymour in my father’s writing, there’s a
damnation or a demonization of womanhood and a sacrifice of childhood. (Salinger, p. 424)
However, she
shows remarkable insight into the childhood origins of these misogynistic
attitudes, and this anecdote linking antagonism toward women to the earliest
interactions with the mother was the only such early developmental illustration
I could find despite considerable searching.
I mentioned earlier that, as a
child, Seymour [the character in Salinger’s story, Seymour: An Introduction] threw a rock at a little girl who was
sitting in the sunshine, inflicting serious injury, opening up her forehead and
requiring stitches. In the story,
everyone in the family understood that it was ‘because she looked so beautiful’
sitting there in the sunshine. I don’t
understand it, but to the Glass family and their author [her father, J.D.] it
was an almost religious act and made perfect sense. The only way I have of approaching some feel
for this is something I learned from my son.
We went through a period during the terrible twos where he’d hug me and
be really close, and then all of a sudden he’d throw something at me or hit
me. It was so weird; he’d only misbehave
like that when things were really lovey-dovey, not when he was mad about
something. We figured out that at times
it (Mommy and me) became too intense for him and that he felt engulfed, in
danger of being swamped by me and his feelings for me. He still got put in time-out for doing it,
but I could then help him with it by backing off a bit, and encouraging him to
use his words, and also by having his dad take over more of the parenting stuff
for a while, until he’d regained his equilibrium. It makes me think of my aunt saying, ‘It was
always Sonny (J.D.) and Mother, Mother and Sonny. Daddy never got the recognition he deserved.’
All I know is that a man who is too close to his mother, who can’t separate
properly, is as much of a danger sign as one who hates his mother and can’t get
close to women. It’s a tricky thing to
getting those boundaries right.” (Salinger,
p. 86n)
Indeed this
boundary issue remains a lifelong contention in every man’s life and impacts
every relationship with a woman. Its
parameters are set in the earliest interactions between a baby boy and his
mother. These early interactions,
underlined and reinforced through years of growing up, shape the boy’s basic
temperament and his unconscious expectations and attitudes toward women. This separation and boundary issue is closely
related to the phenomenon known as masochism.
Masochism might be defined as finding advantage in suffering, or in making
a virtue of deprivation. It is a
spectrum that is found in nearly all human relationships to some degree with
the most extreme form being religious asceticism. Masochism in a certain measure is normal and
probably necessary for civilized living, although the term is not usually
invoked until it progresses far down the spectrum toward self-destructiveness. It has presented difficulties for
psychoanalytic theory from the beginning (Menaker, pp. 156-159). In the psychoanalytic literature, whenever
masochism is a pronounced trend in a person’s character it always seems to be
related to a mother who was unable to respond to her child with warmth and
understanding (Panken, 1973, esp. Chapter 4; Menaker, Chapter 18; Berliner,
1958; Novick and Novick, 1987).
The conflict between the
infantile need for being loved and the experience of suffering at the hands of
the loved object is the basic and most clearly causal pattern in the cases I
have seen. (Berliner, p. 346)
There are cases in which a
parent has been outrageously cruel to the child. In other cases milder forms of rejection
occurred, including traumatic events in weaning or toilet training, discipline
against masturbation, absence of the mother, appearance of a sibling, demanding
or overauthoritarian attitudes or oedipal defenses on the part of a parent, and
many other forms of deprivation . . .
(Berliner, p. 346)
We suggest that the first layer
of masochism must be sought in early infancy, in the child’s adaptation to a
situation where safety resides only in a painful relationship with the
mother. (Novick and Novick, p. 243)
These are mothers who, for a
variety of reasons, cannot pay attention to their children’s needs. (Novick and Novick, p. 242)
The atmosphere
in such households seems to have been emotionally barren, punitive, rejecting,
and sometimes hostile. Masochism as the
quality of being self-despising and self-denying, is an attempt through
identification to hold on to a loved one who is essentially cold, critical, and
rejecting (Menaker, pp. 163, 188f). The
best description of this that I could find did not come from the psychological
literature, but from a story by Franz Kafka called A Little Woman. It is a
short story that appeared in a small collection called A Hunger Artist. Kafka does
not present the woman he describes as his mother or the mother of the Hunger
Artist featured in the following story, but for my purposes that does not
matter. I am treating her as a paradigm,
an archetype that represents to a greater or lesser degree the early experience
of males who later become ascetics and who harbor a deep antipathy toward
women. Kafka describes her thus.
This little woman, then, is
very ill-pleased with me, she always finds something objectionable in me, I am
always doing the wrong thing to her, I annoy her at every step; if a life could
be cut into the smallest of small pieces and every scrap of it could be
separately assessed, every scrap of my life would be an offense to her. I have often wondered why I am such an
offense to her; it may be that everything about me outrages her sense of
beauty, her feeling for justice, her habits, her traditions, her hopes, there
are such completely incompatible natures, but why does that upset her so
much? There is no connection between us
that could force her to suffer because of me.
All she has to do is regard me as an utter stranger, which I am, and
which I do not object to being, indeed I should welcome it, she only needs to
forget my existence, which I have never thrust upon her attention, nor ever
would, and obviously her torments would be at an end. I am not thinking of myself, I am quite
leaving out of account the fact that I find her attitude of course rather
trying, leaving it out of account because I recognize that my discomfort is
nothing to the suffering she endures.
All the same I am well aware that hers is no affectionate suffering; she
is not concerned to make any real improvement in me, besides whatever she finds
objectionable in me is not of a nature to hinder my development. Yet she does not care about my development
either, she cares only for her personal interest in the matter, which is to
revenge herself for the torments I cause her now and to prevent any torments
that threaten her from me in the future.
I have already tried once to indicate the best way of putting a stop to
this perpetual resentment of hers, but my very attempt wrought her up to such a
pitch of fury that I shall never repeat it.
(Kafka, p. 235-236)
Were such a
woman to be the mother of a young boy, and were this narrative to reflect that
young boy’s experience, it would not be hard to understand why he would come to
make a virtue of renunciation and maintain a lifelong mistrust and aversion to
women. The fact that this story appears
in front of a story about a man who starves himself to death in front of a live
audience is not a coincidence. A man who
insists on hiding women behind veils is himself hiding from the extreme anxiety
and pain that the physical allure of women call forth from his original
experience of rejection and hopeless longing.
At the outset
I said that a woman’s body is a public entity.
The veil recognizes this, but seeks to privatize it. Jennifer Heath’s anthology is an excellent
overview of how women adapt to this circumstance and the many meanings it
carries in a broad range of backgrounds and societies. Brief, well written, focused articles each
make a unique contribution to an interesting mosaic. The writers do not call the veil into
question, they seem to treat is as a given, and they do not explore the origins
and perpetuation of the practice of veiling women in the needs of ascetic males
from all faiths, and how misogyny and asceticism, which result in the
compulsion to hide the bodies of women and renounce the sensual connection to
them, begin in the earliest interactions between a baby boy and his
mother. The psychological origins in
deficient early maternal care in some men imply that male asceticism, and thus
the impulse to veil women as a social imperative, will always be a possibility
in human societies. It has a very long
history going back at least as far as civilization. However, its credibility as a social ideal is
in decline. The long era of the ascetic male
being the determiner of the values governing human relations is ending and the
character of civilized living is changing.
Religions whose moral outlook is founded on asceticism and sexual
renunciation will have to change or find themselves increasingly marginal and
irrelevant. The connection between men
and women is fundamentally physical and sensual. Women, as well as men, are better off when
women are conceived of as a shared resource rather than as private property and
the connection between men and women is seen as fundamentally sensual and
erotic and felt in every visual encounter.
1. By “veil” I mean a
head covering, which could be a scarf, hijab, purdah, niqab, abaya, burqa, or
any of a wide range of female head coverings that may or may not cover the
face, or part of the face, or the rest of the body.
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