Looks like the accidental theologist is on her way to becoming the accidental ontologist.   Story of what I’ve been up to this past year or two to come, but meanwhile, here’s a hint of where I’m going, just published in The Stranger (yes, The Stranger!) with this great illustration:

https://www.thestranger.com/features/2019/08/14/41072753/mysteries-of-menopause?fbclid=IwAR21z8SL0-ysaSmT9QaCPJO7Ms0UqUZfPgTUfUJU8fZlPqLKAXUldfl8k9o

(Note to self:  got to get a pair of glasses like those.)

A couple of years back, I started referring to my friend Rebecca Brown as “the divine Ms Brown” (as in “the latest piece by the divine Ms Brown…”). Not that I have any desire to worship her – or anyone or anything else for that matter – but her writing definitely touches on the transcendent. The word fit.

Then I realized that another friend, contemporary-art curator Robin Held, deserved a better adjective than all the “amazings” and “wonderfuls” constantly used for her. I started thinking of her as “the iconic Ms Held.” That fit too.

I could always stick with the usual words, of course. But when “awesome” is used for everything from the latest video game to a new flavor of ice-cream, it becomes meaningless. There’s no real awe there, just as there’s no real wonder in “wonderful.”

“Amazing” is popular, but seems to indicate surprise that any woman could be strong and intelligent and outspoken.

“Incredible” begs the question.

And as for “courageous” – if it takes courage for a woman to speak her mind and be active in the world (at least in the West), then we’re in worse trouble than I thought.

There’s a whole range of monikers we could use instead of the standard wonderfuls and awesomes and amazings.  I began jotting them down, and found that I could put names of women I know to every one of them. I’m pretty sure you can do the same:

— the badass Ms X

— the incomparable Ms Y

— the unstoppable Ms Z

— the outrageous Ms A

— the formidable Ms B

— the dynamite Ms C

— the fearless Ms D

— the fearsome Ms E

— the notorious Ms F

— the path-breaking Ms G

— the ferocious Ms H

— the inimitable Ms I

— the indomitable Ms J

— the brilliant Ms K

— the magnificent Ms L

— the dynamic Ms M

— the genius known as Ms N

— the epic Ms O

— the mind-blowing Ms P

and this isn’t even the whole of the alphabet.

Some of these tags are stronger, some less so, but you get the idea: We need better accolades for strong, intelligent women. And quit with the weak female-only ones.

Words like “gutsy” don’t cut it — who ever describes a man they admire as gutsy?  “Ballsy?” — oh puh-lease…  “Incredible”? — really, you find it hard to credit?  “Innovative?” — aren’t we all?

So let’s innovate.  No matter what gender you are, feel free to pitch in and share better suggestions in the comments.  And start using them. Liberally.

Think big, think strong, and celebrate strong women with strong language!

The right-wing is trying like hell to do a number on the minds of American women. You know that thing about abortion being the hardest choice a woman will ever have to make, or the one she most regrets? Bullshit.

In fact 90% of all American women who’ve had an abortion are either glad or simply relieved they did (click here for the research.)  And for every woman I know who’s had an abortion (that’s half the women I know, and quite possibly half the women you know too), a safe, routine, minimally invasive procedure was far from the hardest decision of their lives. For many, like me, it was the simple, sane choice. The only hard part was finding the money to pay for it.

You want a hard decision? What about marriage? Or divorce? Taking on a mortgage? Choosing a cancer treatment? Allowing a terminally ill spouse to die with dignity? What about the multitude of hard decisions we all have to make in the course of our lives, men and women?

But right-wingers don’t think women capable of rational decision-making at all.  It’s apparently especially hard for us delicate souls, which is presumably why they think we agonize over it and decide wrong.  How very Victorian of them. They’re apparently white knights in shining armor, out to save every woman from her own distressingly poor judgment.  In their ideal world, no woman would be “allowed” to make a decision without prior permission from the Republican caucus.  Certainly not any woman with an income under a million a year.

But it’s not our decision-making that stinks, it’s theirs.  Because not only is it morally and ethically bankrupt, it’s full of lies — deliberate lies.

— Like Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina pretending to be near tears as she talked about watching a video that didn’t exist and never had.

— Or the head of the House Oversight Committee trying to play gotcha with the head of Planned Parenthood by using a bogus chart created by an anti-abortion group.

— Or abortion opponents pretending there’s no such thing as an embryo.  They’d have us think that every abortion is that of a full-term viable fetus, when none are.  The vast majority of abortions are embryonic, medically defined as up to eight weeks from conception.  But hey, you can’t see an embryo on a sonogram, let alone wave photographs of it in an attempt to guilt-trip women.  So lie, baby, lie — and screw the lives you mess up in the process.

It’s clear by now that nobody cares about facts in the fantasy world of today’s Republicans.  Real facts, that is, as opposed to imaginary ones.

Those of us who live in the real world know for a fact that imaginary facts are dangerous.  Remember those non-existent weapons of mass destruction used as the reason to invade Iraq?  Or those non-existent scientists asserting with great authority that there was no such thing as climate change?

Forget hard decisions for the moment.  Here’s an easy one:  A year from now, do all you can to make sure we send this gang of women-hating, war-mongering, planet-polluting liars back to whatever slime pit they crawled out of.

How have we allowed this to happen? How have we allowed anti-abortion activists to call themselves pro-life? How have we not called them out, loud and clear, on this Orwellian double-speak?

Many of those against abortion are the same right-wingers who want to nuke the hell out of Iran or any other designated enemy of the day; who support the death penalty no matter how many death-row inmates have been proven innocent; who obstruct all attempts at gun control even when kindergarten kids are massacred; who see nothing wrong about cops shooting unarmed black men in the back. But a single fertilized egg inside a woman’s uterus? Suddenly, that’s sacred.

They’re not pro-life. I am. And Planned Parenthood is. And NARAL, the National Abortion Rights Action League, is. Because nobody here is advocating for abortion per se; what we’re for is the right to have one. For motherhood to be a matter of choice, not compulsion. And for a child’s right to come into the world wanted and welcomed. What we’re for, in short, is life. Not life in the abstract, but real life, as it is lived.

What we’re for is not more but fewer abortions. And the way to achieve that is clear: sex education in schools, and freely available contraception for women. Yet the anti-abortion crowd is against both. Which means that all they ensure is that there’ll be more abortions.

The historical record is clear: women have always aborted pregnancies, whether with herbs, with knitting needles, or with wire coat-hangers in back-street abortions such as the one that nearly killed a close friend when I was a student. So now that abortion is safe – a minor medical procedure – the anti-abortion crowd are doing everything they can to make it dangerous again: to make the woman pay for having the gall to be sexual, and to make the unwanted child pay too.

If a woman chooses to carry a pregnancy to term and then give the child up for adoption, I totally support her choice. But it is cruel and punitive to force her to do so. It is downright obscene to insist that a rape victim carry her rapist’s child. And to make a woman give birth to a severely disabled child doomed to die in pain within hours, weeks, or months is nothing less than torture, of both mother and child.

This isn’t about the Bible or the Quran. It’s about punishment, about a basic attitude of life negation, of harshness and joylessness. It isn’t pro-life; it’s anti-life.

If its advocates weren’t causing so much misery and suffering, I might even find it in myself to feel sorry for them.

Nearly every woman I know has either had an abortion or helped another woman get one. I know this because as the Republican attack on Planned Parenthood ramps up, I’ve been asking. Old and young, black and white and brown, married and single, straight and gay, religious and irreligious – women have been telling me their abortion stories.

But I think we need to tell them publicly too. To break the weird veil of shame and secrecy that still hangs over the decision, even when abortion is legal. To stand up and say “Yes, sure, I had one.”

So here’s the story of mine.

I was 20 years old – young and dumb, as every 20-year-old has every right to be. Not that dumb, though, since I was using a diaphragm thanks to the Marie Stopes clinic, the one place in the whole of England at the time that would provide contraception to an unmarried 17-year-old.  And the diaphragm worked fine until my first summer in Jerusalem, when it didn’t. Not because of any fault in the device, but because I hadn’t put it in. Carried away, late in my menstrual cycle, I’d said “Come on, it’s okay.” And three weeks later, realized it wasn’t.

There was no doubt in my mind what I needed to do. The guy I was with was a no-goodnik, the result of a bad case of delayed teenage rebellion on my part. I had an undergraduate degree in psychology but no idea what I wanted to do next, only that since I could barely handle myself, no way could I handle a baby. But abortion was still illegal in Israel. And I was dead broke.

I found my way to the Jerusalem branch of an aid organization for Brits – a single room with a single occupant, who took one look at me as I stood miserably in the doorway and before I could open my mouth said “You’re pregnant, aren’t you?”

I nodded yes.

“And you need an abortion.”

Another nod.

“And you don‘t know where to go.”

Again, a nod.

“And you don’t have any money.”

At the final nod, she said “Sit down,” and made three phone calls: one for an appointment with a leading gynecologist who didn’t believe in forcing women to have children; one to her HQ to get approval for a loan to pay his fee; and one to a publishing house to get me a job as a copy-editor so that I could pay back the loan.

We have been firm friends ever since.

The procedure itself was a non-event. (The doctor gave me a prescription for the pill and said he hoped to never see me again, though in fact he did, but not with me as the patient – he ran a maternity clinic, and was the obstetrician for three of my friends as I helped with their labor.) I parted ways with the no-goodnik, and set about the never-ending process of growing up.

And now, almost half a century later? No regrets. Quite the contrary, since I suspect this was the one rational decision I made the whole of that year. In short: thank god I had an abortion.

I’ve just experienced a strange sense of time travel — seeing myself twenty-odd years ago and finding her familiar and yet unfamiliar.

A reader found this video online and sent me the link.  I had no idea it even existed.  I only vaguely remember doing the interview, so had no idea what I was going to say next.  Sometimes I laughed as I watched, sometimes I cringed, but for the most part, I looked at this self-possessed 1992 self in amazement, as though asking, Who is this woman?

So for the record, and because it is part of my past, of the decade I spent writing about matters automotive (and earning far more money doing it that I ever have by writing about politics or religion), here it is:

[youtube=http://youtu.be/Cf62K7PypPg]

A footnote, also for the record:  it took a few years, but I drove all the speed out of me, and now take an almost perverse delight in slowness.

And, um, I no longer wear leopard print shirts.

Two excellent minds — liberal activist and journalist Mona Eltahawy and Huffington Post UK political editor Mehdi Hasan — went head to head at the Oxford Union on whether, per the provocative headline of Eltahawy’s article in Foreign Policy Magazine, Arab men hate women.

Go to it, accidental theologists!  But…

Please view the whole video before you comment.  Let’s get beyond knee-jerk reactions.  It’s true that it’s a long video, but if you don’t consider the whole issue important enough to merit 47 minutes of your time, I hereby suggest you forfeit the right to comment.

–

[youtube=http://youtu.be/T9UqlEmKhnk]

There was something unsatisfactory about the New York Times’ front-page obit for Nobel literature laureate Doris Lessing, at least for me.  So I went back to the archives to look for the magazine piece I wrote on her in 1982, and there I found the complex, ornery, fiercely intelligent writer I’d spent a whole day talking with.  It’s long (the NYT Magazine really ran magazine-length pieces back then), so if you want to read the whole piece, click here.  A few out-takes:

On Euro-centrism:

“I’m glad that I was not educated in literature and history and philosophy, which means that I did not have this Euro-centered thing driven into me, which I think is the single biggest hang-up Europe has got. It’s almost impossible for anyone in the West not to see the West as the God-given gift to the world.”

On marriage:

In retrospect, she says, ”I do not think that marriage is one of my talents. I’ve been much happier unmarried than married. I’m probably unmarriageable now. I just can’t imagine a marriage that would make sense to me. Once you’ve passed 30, I think, it becomes harder and harder for a woman to do. It’s easy when you’re a teenager; perhaps that’s the built-in mechanism for continuation of the species.”

On religion and politics:

”There are certain types of people who are political out of a kind of religious reason,” she says, digging dirt ferociously out of the kitchen table. ”I think it’s fairly common among socialists: They are, in fact, God-seekers, looking for the kingdom of God on earth. A lot of religious reformers have been like that, too. It’s the same psychological set, trying to abolish the present in favor of some better future — always taking it for granted that there is a better future. If you don’t believe in heaven, then you believe in socialism.

On Sufism:

”I’m not a Sufi, I’m studying it,” she says. ”It takes a very long time to become one, if ever, which distinguishes us from all these cults that create instant mystics. The Sufis see the whole guru phenomenon as a degeneration, and the people who pursue gurus as unfortunates.”

On the long view:

“We’re a species under extremely heavy stress. We emerged from the last ice age 12,000 years ago, and we are shortly — say, next week or in a thousand years’ time — going back into another ice age. Compared to that threat, nuclear war is a puppy. We have lived through many ice ages, through wars and famines. Look at Barbara Tuchman’s book on the 14th century, ‘A Distant Mirror’ – nobody thought they would survive that century, but they did. We can survive anything you care to mention. We are supremely equipped to survive, to adapt and even in the long run to start thinking.”

I wasn’t a “fan” of Lessing’s.  I admired her, but clearly with considerable reservations.  It wasn’t until a few weeks later, with the piece edited and ready for publication, and myself back in the United States, that admiration won out.   I got a panicked phone call from the New York Times:  “Can you call Doris Lessing and try to talk some sense into her?”

Um, come again?

Apparently they’d wanted to send a photographer, and she’d said no.  “There’s plenty of photos of me out there,” she’d said.  “You can use any of them.  No need to go taking another one.”

“But Mrs Lessing, we’re running this as the cover story,” they’d objected, with all the weighty consciousness of the magnitude of a New York Times Magazine cover.  “And we can only do that if we have our own photo of you.”

“So don’t run it as the cover story,” she’d said.  “What do I care?”  And hung up.

I loved it.  Most people would jump any number of hoops to be on the cover of the NYT Magazine.  But Doris Lessing truly didn’t care.  And even as I realized she’d done me out of a cover story as well as herself (they’d run the piece, of course, but with an old black-and-white photo and not as the lead), I started laughing out loud.  And could all but hear them down the line thinking, “Christ, she’s as crazy as Lessing.”

Last month, Town Hall Seattle ran a program called ‘Three Lives,’  originally touted as eulogies of three public figures — Christopher Hitchens, Kim Jong-Il, and Vaclav Havel — linked by the sole fact that they’d happened to die within four days of each other in December.  I was asked to speak about Hitchens.  “No way,” I said.  “Not unless you’re ready for an anti-eulogy.”

They were.

Here’s the video, in which I start at about the 4.45 time mark, running to 23.10.

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But if you want to see a really great presentation, go back to the video and start at the 57.35 mark, where ACT Theatre artistic director Kurt Beattie and actors Bob Wright and Tom Carrato deliver a stunning tribute to Vaclav Havel, inspiring me to go out and buy a copy of ‘Disturbing the Peace’ the next day, when I also read this moving assessment by his long-time translator, Paul Wilson.  I’m only sorry Havel had to die for me to pay closer attention.  But then that’s kind of Wilson’s point.

Since Joe Nocera in today’s NYT puts it better than I can right now, I’m running (below) part of his response to the egregious Bernard Henri-Levy‘s hysterical crowing about l’affaire DSK (Strauss-Kahn was dragged “lower than the gutter,” his treatment was “pornographic,” perfidious America etc).   Ironically, BHL’s screed was published the same day his dear, maligned, noble friend DSK was charged with another count of attempted rape in France, where his accuser, indisputably white and part of the same privileged upper-class elite, described his behavior as that of “a chimpanzee in rut.”

BHL is outraged — outraged! — that New York District Attorney Vance took the word of a mere hotel maid over that of an esteemed member of the French establishment.  He also blithely ignores the DNA evidence and the maid’s injuries, assuming that if she had lied in the past, on her asylum application, she must of necessity be lying now.

(Word of warning to all women:  never tell a lie in case you get raped, because we all know that it’s impossible for women who lie to be raped.)

Nocera rightly calls out BHL on his elitism.  And takes pride in the fact that the case is in jeopardy not because of DSK’s multi-millionaire lawyers, but because of  the hard work of DA Vance’s horribly underpaid team.

It’s just a pity Nocera’s piece didn’t run yesterday, Independence Day:

I can’t see what Vance did wrong. Quite the contrary. The woman alleged rape, for crying out loud, which was backed up by physical (and other) evidence. She had no criminal record. Her employer vouched for her. The quick decision to indict made a lot of sense, both for legal and practical reasons. Then, as the victim’s credibility crumbled, Vance didn’t try to pretend that he still had a slam dunk, something far too many prosecutors do. He acknowledged the problems.

Lévy, himself a member of the French elite, seems particularly incensed that Vance wouldn’t automatically give Strauss-Kahn a pass, given his extraordinary social status. Especially since his accuser had no status at all.

But that is exactly why Vance should be applauded: a woman with no power made a credible accusation against a man with enormous power. He acted without fear or favor. To have done otherwise would have been to violate everything we believe in this country about no one being above the law.

As for Strauss-Kahn’s humiliation, clearly something very bad happened in that hotel room. Quite possibly a crime was committed. Strauss-Kahn’s sordid sexual history makes it likely that he was the instigator. If the worst he suffers is a perp walk, a few days in Rikers Island and some nasty headlines, one’s heart ought not bleed. Ah, yes, and he had to resign as the chief of an institution where sexual harassment was allegedly rampant, thanks, in part, to a culture he helped perpetuate. Gee, isn’t that awful?

The point is this: We live in a country that professes to treat everyone equally under the law. So often we fall short. The poor may go unheard; the rich walk. Yet here is a case that actually lives up to our ideal of who we like to think we are. Even the way the case appears to be ending speaks to our more noble impulses. Vance didn’t dissemble or delay or hide the truth about the victim’s past. He did the right thing, painful though it surely must have been.

To judge by his recent writings, Bernard-Henri Lévy prefers to live in a country where the elites are rarely held to account, where crimes against women are routinely excused with a wink and a nod and where people without money or status are treated like the nonentities that the French moneyed class believe they are.

I’d rather live here.

————————

Making the same point:  Peter Beinart in today’s Daily Beast.

It’s a whole new generation of feminists.  They’re foul-mouthed (some of them), outrageously dressed (or undressed), with green and purple and orange hair (or just regular hair).  They’re straight and lesbian and both.  They’re young — in their early twenties mainly.  And dynamite — these are not women you want to mess with.

A cynical press was quick to label a “new wave” of feminists in the 1980s as “fuck-me feminists” (aka, with weird decorousness here in Wikipedia, “sex-positive feminists”).   Well, as the new generation of feminists would say, fuck that.

These are the fuck-you feminists.  The SlutWalk feminists.  There was lots of skin on display here in Seattle on Sunday, and great tattoos.  There were ripped fishnet stockings and day-glo pink platform boots and deliberately slutty thrift-store bras and teddies.  Five-year-olds with signs saying “Free to be me.”  A super-sexy Superwoman.  A woman in full Amish dress and bonnet carrying a sign saying “How I dress does not mean Yes.”  And lots of people with black teeshirts with “This is what a feminist looks like” in white lettering — many of them men.

“The radical notion that no-one deserves to be raped,” read one ironic banner.   “Fuck shame,” read another.  And “Jesus loves sluts” (directed at the nutters from Westboro Baptist Church — the ones who picket military funerals — who gave up and took their “Jesus hates fags” signs to a gay picnic instead).

Shameless?  You bet.  These new feminists are taking all the old insults — slut, bitch, whore, dyke — and running with them, turning them inside out.

Rocking and shocking their feminist forebears?  Definitely.  Too many older feminists have criticized the SlutWalk movement for feeding into the over-sexualization of women — which makes them  sound alarmingly like their own mothers criticizing them when they first took to the streets in protest (“I didn’t raise my daughter so’s she could go parading around like this in public…”)

Hey, the founding generation of feminists — my generation — don’t “own” feminism.  That’s the whole point of founding a movement.  You hand it on.  Younger women take the reins.  They reshape it, fight sexism in their own ways, redefine what it is to be free and female.  They make the movement their own.

So what if most of the SlutWalkers haven’t read ‘Against Our Will,’ Susan Brownmiller’s classic on rape?   They get it.  Stop blaming the victim;  blame the rapist.  Stop shaming the victim;  shame the rapist.  You don’t get raped because of what you wear;  you get raped because a rapist attacks you.  It’s not a sex crime;  it’s a crime of violence.

“I’m just sorry we still have to be out here saying this,” said one of the dozen or so women over forty in the crowd of over a thousand.   I knew what she meant.  In a perfect world, we’d be rid of rape.  But it takes more than one generation.  And this one’s going about it with an in-your-face directness that I totally admire.

So me, I just stood there beaming, aware of am alarming sense of absurdly maternal pride whelming up in me.  I was so damn proud of this new feminist generation.  Happy just to stand there and be part of their protest.  And as ready as they were to stand up to any police officer who asks what a woman was wearing when she was raped and say “Fuck that.”

——————

Later the same day, for those with ethical reservations:

Was just in Elliott Bay Bookstore and came across this:

And smiled.

More absurdity this week:  FIFA, the international governing body of football, banned the Iranian women’s soccer team from an Olympic qualifying event because the players wear hijab — Islamic headscarves.  The official reason:  safety.  Wearing a hijab while playing “could cause choking injuries.”

Yeah, sure.  As one commenter noted, Google “hijab soccer choking deaths” and the search engine doesn’t exactly hum.

These aren’t just any hijabs, mind you.  They have to be the coolest  ones ever.  They’re like speed-skaters’ hoods, and the players look like white-clad ninjas.   I’ll bet they can move like ninjas too.   Clearly FIFA has no sense of style.

Correction:  FIFA has no sense, period.

The decision to ban the Iranian team was made by FIFA head Sepp Blatter, who’s apparently one of those Berlusconi-type men who’ll tell you how much he loves women, by which he means how much he loves looking at female flesh.  No, I’m not making assumptions.  The arrant hypocrisy of this ban is clear when you consider the fact that Blatter proposed in 2004 that women players wear plunging neckines and hot pants on the pitch to boost soccer’s popularity.  Tighter shorts, he said, would create “a more female esthetic.”

I guess it was kind of amazing he didn’t propose wet tee-shirts.

And if you believe that Blatter is for a moment concerned about women being injured, his response to requests by human rights organizations to take a stand against the sex trafficking that accompanies the arrival of the World Cup was this:  “Prostitution and trafficking of women does not fall within the sphere of responsibility of an international sports federation but in that of the authorities and the lawmakers of any given country.”

No, Blatter’s all about the sport.  He’s presumably salivating for more on-field celebrations like Brandi Chastain‘s famous shirtless moment when the U.S. won the 1999 Women’s World Cup.  And drooling over women’s sportswear catalogs instead of Victoria’s Secret ones.  In which case he’s pathetically misreading that Chastain photo.  This was the victory of hard work and muscle over frills and pretty posturing.  Serena Williams revolutionized women’s tennis in much the same way, making it a power game (in dress as well as style of play — the black catsuit she wore a couple of years back was dynamite).

What Blatter’s really doing is trying to piggyback on the burqa ban in France and the minaret ban in his native Switzerland.  But the good news is that it’s backfiring on him.  Badly.  Already the focus of multiple accusations of corruption in his 12-year tenure as FIFA president, he probably saw this as an easy way to try to redeem himself by jumping on the anti-Muslim bandwagon.  Instead, the storm of criticism might be an indication that Europeans are beginning to realize just how badly they’ve been manipulated by misogynistic xenophobes on such issues as burqa bans.

One further note on that shirtless photo:  Chastain herself was amazed when it ran worldwide .  “I wasn’t trying to make a statement;  I was just carried away, and doing what male players do in the same situation,” she told me when I met her not long after.  “I was really surprised there was so much fuss about it.  I mean, there’s a much better photo of the victory moment, but nobody ran that one.”  Here it is, on the right — the photo they didn’t run, baggy shirt, baggy pants, and all.  Which I guess just means the world is full of Blatters.

—————————

(Thank to Sarah Hashim for alerting me to this story.  I know I was born in England, but soccer’s not my thing.  Tennis, though…)

Sometimes I wonder what year it is.  2011, or 1911?

Item:  former IMF director Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s legal team is about to spend at least half a million dollars trying to discredit the immigrant chambermaid who accused him of rape and sexual assault.  Presumably, they’ll try to use her sexual history against her.  After all, she’s a widow with a 15-year-old child.  That is, she’s no virgin.

Item:  the so-called virginity tests forced on women protestors in Cairo by the military.  In fact these were officially sanctioned rape, even if no penetration was involved.  They were a deliberately chosen means of intimidating, humiliating, and attempting to control women.  To say that virginity has nothing to do with political activism is to belabor the point.  It’s not as though those who “passed” the publicly administered “test” were released with the military blessing to go demonstrate in freedom.  It was yet another means of repression.

For those who might think this is a peculiarly Islamic thing, consider that Muhammad’s first wife, Khadija, with whom he lived monogamously for 19 years, was twice widowed by the time they married.  And that of the nine women he married after her death, only one was a virgin at marriage (the others were all divorced or widowed).  Since virginity was clearly a non-issue to Muhammad himself, any religious argument for it is hard to make.

As for those virgins in paradise, well, see my TEDx talk for that.

The same applies in Christianity.  Yes, of course I know about the Virgin Mary — I wrote a book about her.  But as I pointed out there, to reduce the concept of virginity to the existence of a biologically useless membrane called the hymen is worse than absurdly literal.  It totally misses out on the grand metaphor of virginity, which existed around the world at the time.  As with a virgin forest, it stood for incredible fecundity, for a surfeit of growth and reproduction, untamed and unfettered.  That is, virginity was the miracle of fertility, and in that respect, the Virgin Mary is the last in a long and once-powerful line of mother goddesses.

So let’s not blame religion.  That’s just the excuse.  Nor such a thing as a “Middle East mentality.”   Because…

Item: as late as the 1970s, British officials were administering virginity tests too.  And again, the purpose was to intimidate women — to deter them from entering the country as immigrant brides (if they weren’t virgins, it seemed, they had to be lying about their reasons for entering the U.K.).   And while we’re talking about Brits, by the way, how weird is it that at that same time, the early 1970s, Richard Branson chose the name Virgin for his enterprises?  Flying the friendly skies?

Perhaps all this means that in forty years’ time, the confusion of virginity with virtue will be as outmoded in Egypt as it now is (Branson excepted) in England.  But then of course it’s not about virtue, and never was.  It’s about the peculiar desire of some men (thank God not all) to control women — their sexuality, their behavior, their freedom of choice.  That is, it’s about not about women as people, but as possessions.

Item:  A commenter on this blog, fulminating against Islam with such blatant racism that I had to bar him as spam, summed up his argument this way:  “We know how to treat our women.”  That “we” evidently referred only to men, specifically to non-Muslim western men who think of women as possessions — “ours” — and as such, to be (mis)treated as “we” see fit.   He was, he made clear, a fundamentalist Christian.

So tell me, what year are we living in?  Scratch the years I gave at the top.  If you go see Werner Herzog’s new movie, Cave of Forgotten Dreams (about the prehistoric paintings on the walls of that cave), you might discover that even Neanderthals had more respect for women than this.  And they lived 35,000 years ago.

You might think it absurd that a woman driving a car is news.  But then this is the absurdity known as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, now frantically trying to censor video clips of Manal al-Sharif driving.  An apparently government-supported online drive is under way to beat women caught driving, and al-Sharif  (this is her, to the right) is being held in detention for “inciting public opinion” and “disturbing public order.”

That is, for driving while female.  DWF.  A crime.

Watch the Al Jazeera report here.  Check out the newly replicated Facebook page here.  Read al-Sharif’s instructions for the June 17 ‘drive-in’ protest here on Saudiwoman’s Weblog.

And then consider the far greater absurdity of the continued existence of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which refuses to extend the most basic civil rights (even the vote) to half its population, and whose wealth and power is entirely fueled by the Western thirst for oil.  An intensely repressive Middle East regime, that is, funded directly by Western money.

But that’s only the surface.  This Western oil money is still funding the worldwide Saudi export of the most conservative and repressive form of Islam.  If there is one single country that has enabled violent Islamism, it’s not the perceived enemies of the United States like Libya, Afghanistan, or Iran, but our “good friends” the Saudis — our oil dealers.

The Saudis thought they had escaped “the Arab spring.”  They sent their military into Bahrain to help squelch protests there.  They encouraged the violent suppression of protests in Yemen.  They thought they had things under control.

But another kind of Arab spring may now be in the making.  An Arab summer, perhaps.  Six months ago, a single Tunisian street vendor couldn’t take it any more and sparked a revolution by setting himself on fire.  Now a tech-savvy Saudi woman refuses to take it any more and threatens to spark another revolution by simply taking the wheel.

This is how it starts — with individual acts of defiance, with a refusal to knuckle under, with an insistence on basic dignity.  And with the support of a vast and unsquelchable online community.

The links are above.  Go to it, everyone.