Sex and the Muslim Feminist

I realized this even then. Contesting
the premises of my professor and classmates would label me the prude, the
insufficiently liberated. Speaking would court encirclement by pitying, knowing
glances reserved for one understood to be plagued by yet un-confronted
repressions. If I spoke, I would give them what they wanted: a Muslim woman to
save, to school in the possibilities of sexual liberation.  It would be impossible, in the rush and
fervor of that savior encounter, to explain that my oppositions were not at all
to sex or sexual pleasure, but to its construction as unproblematic,
un-colonized by patriarchy, the entire measure of liberation. A Muslim
feminist, I was sure, could not make that sort of nuanced distinction.

---

It was not always this way. When
radical feminist Kate Millett wrote Sexual
Politics in 1970, her central thesis was that the sexual act is imbued with
the power differentials that operate in a patriarchal society. Millett argued
that sex had an ignored political aspect and to prove it she took apart the
work of then “progressive” writers Henry Miller, D.H. Lawrence and Normal
Mailer. What passed for risqué and erotic, she asserted, was really a
normalization of subjecting women to the demeaning and the degrading. Feminism
could not leave this realm unaddressed; Equality or the real power of the
Sexual Revolution could not be harnessed unless this happened. Sexual
liberation could not be the sum total of women’s liberation, because the role
of sex as a venue for the perpetuation of patriarchy needed to be analyzed.

It looked like it would happen. When
Millett’s book was published, it was a best-seller and she was feted as a
darling of the feminist movement. The renown or the centrality of her thesis
did not endure, and while the tracts of other Second Wave feminists remained
referenced and read, Millett’s problematization of sex was sidelined. As Second
Wave turned to Third Wave and then post-feminism, Sexual Politics became ever more rarely read and for a while even
out of print. In 2010, forty years after its publication, feminist scholar Sheila
Jeffreys—one of the few feminists who have drawn
parallels between cosmetic surgery and practices
like Female Genital Mutilation—wrote a commemorative article, presenting
her own account of what had happened to Millet’s work. She credited Millett with
having fueled the work of feminist critics of pornography, such as Catherine
McKinnon and Andrea Dworkin—that came later. Jeffreys attributes the neglect of
Millett in part to the turn toward “pro sex feminism in the academy,” which promotes other, less radical voices instead.

Of course the loss of interested
in a critique of sex cannot be pinned on the academy alone. The emphasis on sexual
freedom permitted the taming of radical feminism to fit the capitalist society from
which it emerged. If sex was understood as a commodity that women were choosing
to consume, then its problematic aspects could be disguised. The
objectification of women as sexual objects could hence be replaced by the
objectification of sex and even sexualization. Put in operation this strategy
meant this: women could choose to purchase bigger breasts not to please men but
because they enhanced the woman’s own self-esteem, enhance her capacity to
enjoy the liberation of sex. The focus shifted away from the state and from oppressive
institutions to the women herself. Instead of taking on the thorny business of
how sex itself replicated patriarchy in complex ways, sex was made into a
commodity, which could be consumed by both men and women.

The visible consumption of sex
birthed a sort of easygoing, pop-feminism, and as the 80s marched into the 90s it
was everywhere. Sex and its avid consumption by women was the basis of the hit
HBO television show Sex in the City; the
character Samantha’s voracious sexual appetite was popular culture’s way of
celebrating all the equality that the Sexual Revolution handed women. Feminism,
as it had survived in the American mainstream, was sex positive, and
questioning whether the calibration of equality or liberation against the amount
of sex consumed was not of much interest. Sex and the female consumption of it,
was again an issue in the HBO show Girls. In an effort at greater realism,
borne of millennial self-consciousness, there was more awkwardness, more gritty
detail (in one episode, Hannah, the main character Googles “the stuff that gets
around condoms”) but the show did not contest the premise that the consumption
of sex, even bad sex, is a central to feminist liberation. 

In the years that followed,
imperialism was also invited to the party: after 9/11, the idea of that sexual
liberation was necessary for gender equality was deemed one of many reasons to
wage war on countries where attitudes towards sex were different from American
attitudes. Women’s groups like the Feminist Majority
supported, even exhorted, the invasion of Afghanistan, to liberate Afghan
women from the Taliban. The Afghan woman’s blue burka became
the symbol of sexual repression, the basis for the most righteous feminist
indignation and of bombings and night raids. That the same women may not want
their country bombed and occupied, or might wish to fight their own battles,
were the sort of ifs and buts that were not entertained. 

Feminism joined hands with
nationalism and everyone cheered the newlyweds, even though they had previously
been (rightly) suspicious of each other. If burka-wearing Afghan women were repressed
then surely American women, their saviors, were liberated. Even more feted were
Muslim women who chose to follow the American recipe and define their own
feminism entirely in the vocabulary of sexual liberation; the performative
equivalent of this was to throw off the veil. Books featuring American women
descending into Afghanistan, opening beauty shops and educating Afghan women in
the ways of the liberated—books like Kabul
Beauty School: An American Woman Goes Beyond the Veil, which ironically
tells of how beautification can be a form of empowerment—were bestsellers.

---

The paper I wrote for the
graduate seminar looked at a Pakistani law that criminalizes fornication and
adultery. The Zina and Hudood Ordinance had been passed in 1979 by a military
dictator General Zia ul Haque. It had stayed on the books since then (and is
still there today) even after the country had elected a female Prime Minister
twice. The best she had been able to do was to order the freeing of all the
women imprisoned under the law. Some of them had refused to leave the prison;
being accused of a sexual crime had been damning and they would face too much
stigma if they returned to their families. The law remained a mess: one of its
worst consequences was that women who made rape accusations were then
criminalized as participants in fornication or adultery.

I argued that the secular feminist movement in Pakistan that
challenged the laws had been a failure. The public rallies they held could not
attract ordinary women and political risks that came with visible opposition
could mostly only be taken by women who had powerful male benefactors with
existing political clout. Because of this the only women who marched or
protested were elite urban women who were themselves rarely targeted by the
law. A better move, I argued, would have been to take to task the Islamic
credentials of the law itself. Muslim feminists like the legal scholar Asifa
Quraishi were doing just that: In her paper “Her Honor: An
Islamic Critique of the Rape Laws of Pakistan from a woman sensitive
perspective”, Quraishi tries to debunk
the idea that Islamic law demands Zina prosecutions in the form that they were
being legislated and carried out in Pakistan. Quraishi tries to reorient the
discourse on Zina in the direction of seeing Islamic law as a tool for women’s
empowerment rather than oppression. In addition to Quraishi, I discussed the
work of Quranic scholar Amina Wadud, whose “Inside Gender Jihad: Women’s Reform in Islam” had just been published. Like Quraishi,
Wadud argued that Islamic religious doctrine, interpreted for hundreds of years
exclusively by men, had to be reclaimed by women. In the reclamation lay the
possibilities of equality and empowerment.

I got a B on the
paper. The professor was concerned that I had not really engaged the texts and
discussions that had formed the bulk of our class discussions. It was true. I
had tried to prove many things with the paper, primarily that sexual liberation
was crucial and important, but that it must be centered on the understanding of
sex itself as a venue of contention, which has implications on gender relations
that go beyond the consent and pleasure of the two parties. Instead of stating
my arguments in the language of sexual consumption familiar to Western
feminists, a Muslim vagina monologue, or a hymn to the liberation of hymens, I
wanted to make room for a feminist discourse that had relevance to Muslim women.
I was rejecting the premise that sexual pleasure—instead of equality—had to be
the centerpiece for feminist agitation.

---

Some feminists
are now beginning to question aspects of sex-positive feminism. A few weeks
ago, Michelle Goldberg, author of The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power and
the Future of the World,
wrote in The Nation: “For a lot of people, the contemporary sexual
regime celebrating pleasure above all else isn’t that much fun.” Goldberg, who titled her
essay “The Problem with Idolizing Sexual Liberation,” is discussing the work of
Rachel Hills, an Australian feminist who spent several years documenting the consequence
of sexual liberation for millennials; having sex, even a lot of sex, she
argues, has become its own oppressive sexual convention. Hills submits that “true
female sexual autonomy doesn’t just necessitate the right for women to have sex
without stigma or judgment, although this is of course important. It also
entails the right to confidently not have sex when it is unwanted or
unavailable on the terms she might prefer.”

To
bolster her argument, Hills presents findings from hundreds of interviews, tales
of women who have felt that they have to pretend to be more sexual than they are
in order to fit into the ideal of the cool, hip feminist. Magazines marketed to
women bolster this paradigm, pushing the achievement of orgasms, adventurous
sex lives, and the constant incorporation of novelty as the basis for a good
and even healthy sexual life. All of this, Hills concludes, has led to the
transformation of women from sexual objects to sexual subjects. While the
former were policed by other people, the latter police themselves, watching and
regulating their own behavior in order to create for themselves an identity
that fits the cultural ideal.

The new form of subjection Hills identifies has enormous consequences
for intersectionality, which holds that oppressive institutions, racism,
sexism, xenophobia are interconnected and that the task of creating feminist solidarity is
incomplete without engaging the overlap between them. If sex positive feminism
imposes behavioral rules on women in America, it similarly demands that other
feminisms—which seek to ally with mainstream American feminism—state their
goals and aims in the same language, equating liberation with sex positivity.
The stories and narratives of the “other,” in this case the Muslim feminist,
that get touted as heroic and worthy of alliance hence must invoke this
language, the celebration and centrality of sexual pleasure as the essence of
feminism, unveiling as the central act of liberation. It is not a benign
request, since the happy alliance of capitalism and imperialism with this brand
of dominant feminism ensures also that those who do not acquiesce are left out
of the conversation, deemed irrelevant, prudish, parochial and hence deserving
of silence. On the opposite side, sex positivity becomes synonymous with
capitalism and imperialism, creating equally crude oppositional discourses that
seek the revival of chastity as a norm for Muslim women who oppose capitalism
and imperialism.

I wish I could have written this for that seminar. I was
angry then, trying to juggle being divorced and a mother in an environment
where I had little support. I had broken every gender norm I had been raised
with, had chosen education and independence, and all the struggles that came
with it. The seminar’s pre-occupation with sex, particularly its frequency and
variety, seemed trivial to me, unconnected to the feminism that I was trying so
hard to model for my daughter. It hurt to be judged inadequate somehow by those
whose class and color seemed to make them better equipped to define the terms
of feminism.

I am less angry now, but equally concerned. The anointing
of sex positive feminism has over time permitted the transformation of a deep
and complex feminist movement into one that helps brand magazines and sell
lingerie to women who can imagine themselves emancipated based on the consumption
of sex. In becoming the central metaphor for liberation, it has eviscerated
critiques of imperial overtures abroad and encouraged a deliberate deafness
toward all the dialects of empowerment that do not translate themselves into
its language. Its biggest casualty has been the stereotyping and exclusion of
Muslim feminists, whose frontline struggles against terror, against religious
obscurantism, and against the weight of patriarchal domination have all been
relegated to a position of inferiority, based on their refusal to affirm that
freedom essentially and centrally means the freedom to have sex.

Share and Enjoy