Obscenity
So petty tyrannical spiteful controlling interfering clerics get their way and yet another woman is prevented from working, living her life, having ordinary grown-up interactions, having fun, expressing joy and exuberance. The world is made just a little safer for narrowness and deprivation and general nothingness.
Pakistan’s Minister of Tourism has handed in her resignation after coming under criticism from a hardline Islamist cleric for hugging her parachute instructor after completing a jump in France, an official said on Tuesday. Nilofar Bakhtiar, one of three women ministers in the Pakistani cabinet, made the parachute jump in March to raise money for victims of an earthquake that killed 73,000 people in Pakistan in October 2005. Shortly afterwards, Pakistani newspapers published a photograph of her giving her para-jumping instructor a hug, and a pro-Taliban cleric issued a decree calling on the government to sack her for “obscenity”.
To people who think like that, everything women do is obscene; women themselves are obscene; their mere unconcealed existence is obscene. They scream obscenity from every pore. Every hair follicle, every joint, every muscle, every flake of skin is throbbing and dripping and shuddering with obscenity; every sound, every movement, every inhalation and exhalation; every thought, every act, every word; it’s all, all steeped in sex and filth and obscenity. There are not enough hours in the day for them to persecute and punish women for being so obscene. But they do what they can.
C’mon! Everybody knows that hugging is obscene. I’m pretty sure you can get pregnant that way. And unless Allah was in the room at the time supervising the conception, pregnancy is definitely obscene.
“But criticism from radical clerics is not to be taken lightly in Pakistan”
The holy obscene radical farcical cleric in question ought himself to take a permanent running jump and land up in the Indus river. The creep..
Nice to see you’ve finally caught on. You keep getting caught up in specifics, when it’s really that you and all other women are intrinsically and ineradicably obscene. Now back in your burqa, please; you’re upsetting the menfolk.
Sorry I have to be on the side of the taliban on this one,what kind of world would it be if we all went around hugging parachute instuctors?and the military implications are shocking paras hugging my god anarchy!!!
Slightly off-centre observation this, but never mind. To most adolescent boys, in my experience, women/”girls” are exactly as you describe – throbbing packages of temptation to lust. There’s a Philip Roth line somewhere about a guy in a roomful of teenage schoolgirls, and his sweaty perception that under their clothes they all have “c*nts, for f*cking!”
The only difference is in turning this lust-package perception from a source of yearning to one of condemnation – except of course that it isn’t really a turn, it’s just the insertion of an apparent conflict within the odious perception itself. And one that non-religious men are quite capable of making, labelling women who *won’t* shag them as “whores”….
Or, to put it in a word, projection.
It is true that women need protection in that they tend to be smaller and weaker than the average male, many of whom would like to exploit/subjugate/rape them.
The patriarchy has set itself up as the protector of females for centuries, and it has clearly failed. I seriously doubt if women can unite for some kind of ad hoc protection, so the obvious resort is to the state. Women must insist that laws be enacted and enforced for our protection. I know this sounds like just stating the obvious, but I think too many women deny the part about needing protection. We do. Unlike me, most women aren’t trained in martial arts and prepared to use their training (and sometimes even I wonder about the 2nd part of that).
Anyone else here have difficulty thinking Pakistan’s ready for democracy… ?
Nick:
If the US were applying consistent criteria as to which countries they invaded, Pakistan would have been occupied long ago. I guess they just don’t have enough worth stealing.
Trying to take something positive out of this I note that the fatwa says it is un-Islamic to jump out of a plane with a parachute. If all Islamists take this seriously the problem should over time solve itself…
Doug – The Algerian elections of 92 threw up a highly reactionary islamist winner, who was immediately ousted by a military coup, supported to the hilt by Paris. Washington not the only bad guys I guess…
Nick S:
The memory of that Algerian situation in ’92 is a bit dim, but I seem to recall that Washington had its fingers in that pie along with Paris.
I doubt that you thought I was saying it, but just to be explicit, I agree with you. All of the bad guys do not report for duty in Washington.
Ahh, ok!
(I have a cold. Will that suffice ?)