Pascal’s scandalous advice and the religious outlook on women’s sufferings in Iraq

I happened to come across an interview on the first day of this year, The interview was cast by Iraqi Media Net, which is an Iraqi semi-official TV station. During this interview, the interviewee, a woman whose name I have missed and whose veil and uttering betrayed her affiliation with a religious party and her possibly being a member of the Iraqi parliament (MP), made remarks insulting to women in general and to Iraqi women in particular. What make these remarks even more insulting are the facts that they were made by a politician and MP and that they were expressed in a fleeting and a matter-of fact fashion. In other countries that uphold human rights, people who make male chauvinistic remarks like those made by this MP will be punished and expelled from parliament.

Without a further ado, I cite her 2 remarks below:
FIRST REMARK: Men are intelligent and complete, implying that women are mentally backward and lacking. We can fairly infer that a woman like this interviewee, a MP, will see herself, in accordance with the phallic blueprint, as lacking by virtue of women’s lack (of penis). But one wonders what logic she employs when she translates this ‘genital lack’ in her phallic view into a mental lack. I look forward to her reply, and I am sure she would recognize herself even though her name I have missed.
While waiting for her reply, whose coming I greatly doubt, I feel it is necessary to make some relevant comments on her first remark as follows:
A. Her remark, though obviously is based on traditional Islamic teachings, is appealing to a hidden patriarchal or phallic thesis of the woman’s lack (of penis). The penis, as I illustrated elsewhere (reference 1), is elevated to the status of phallus that represents the dominant oppressive social discourse. Her remark exemplifies that the phallic discourse is not only ruling the minds of men affiliated with these religious parties, but it has as well colonized the minds of women in these parties. Hence one can certainly assert that these women are the slaves of a phallic discourse; they are not true representatives of women’s’ interest, and that, on the contrary, their presence in parliament might constitute a major obstacle to Iraqi women’s struggle for gender equality, and the achievement and upholding of their human rights.
B. Although the MP’s remark implied women’s lack of intelligence, her remark was a disguised sexual message. As indicated above, she implies, without uttering, that a woman is a lack. This lack in her eyes is transcending geniality and becomes total, involving the woman’s brain and intelligence. Therefore, the MP’s sexual agenda, remain unspoken and implied, translates itself into even a more malignant agenda of an absolute lack. It is absolute because it annihilates the body and mind of the woman.
C. The Iraqi religious parties exercise a taboo on discussion of sexual matters. They have no sexual policies, and if they had, it is unspoken and is one of oppression and denial of people’s right for sexual pleasure, particularly of women. This MP, who happened to be anatomically a woman, but only anatomically, voices her remarks in a matter -of fact fashion. She never pauses and asks; “Why. Why do I believe that women are less intelligent than men? Where is the evidence?”. But to expect her, as a spokesperson for her male chauvinistic brothers and sisters, to ask questions starting with ‘Why” is an utter exercise in illusion, as Islam has become, or has been always?, a recycling of the delivered, and hence her asking such questions will amount, in the eyes of the Clerics, to heresy that is punishable by excommunication or even killing.
D. Masking sexuality though religiosity is an excellent example of denial and repression. However, sadly, this religious denial and repression of sexuality, as a source of pleasure, is equally shared by supposedly ‘secular’ parties or groups, whose (election) programs and campaigns never touch on sexual matters and exercise the utmost censorship on such matters. They even (not very) secretly believe that any laxity on this taboo on their parts could jeopardize their election success. Their ready- made pretexts read as such: ‘our society is not ready for a progressive sexual agenda’; or ‘It is wiser to think of what is more important now’-certainly at the heart of what constitutes allegedly the most important’ lies the self-imposed, male, oppressive view. Arguments based on ‘political wisdom’ and ‘diplomatic shrewdness’ also abound. However, whatever the justification is, leftist sexual policies, or more precisely the lack thereof, can only contribute to sexual and gender oppression, despite claiming otherwise.
E. The notion of social ‘Happiness’ as a political objective could be destructive and counterproductive in the realm of reality and therefore could be objected to, and rightly so, it if it were not related immediately to a notion of social responsibility; some Iraqis and many Iraqi politicians are happy with oppression and corruption. However, not withstanding this justifiable objection, an Iraqi communist party whose motto or part of it is “Nation’s Happiness’ seems, at least hitherto, to collude with the phallic agenda of the religious parties and hence exercises the same measure of censorship on sexual matters in its program and political agenda. This is very sad and disappointing and seems to be based on a myopic or reductionist vision of viewing happiness mainly in terms of economy and materialism. Certainly, materialistic objectives such as provision of electricity, clean water, security, employement, and decent health care are extremely important, but they cannot, by themselves, suffice to achieve a program of Happiness, though they are perhaps sufficient for a decent civil life. Ingredients such as securing the rights of people to create and express their thoughts freely are essential for attaining the objective of happiness. Another ingredient, namely, sexual pleasure, is also in an integral part of any earthily or even heavily pleasure and happiness (heavenly pleasure as represented in the seductive notion of beautiful nymphs in Quran). Needless to say, sexual pleasure is well recognized by sexologists and human rights organizations alike as a human right and as a major source of happiness alike.
F. As a matter of scientific education for this MP in case she makes an appeal based on her ignorance of scientific facts (though an appeal of ignorance of science on the part of a politician is never accepted as a valid appeal), I asset that, scientifically speaking, there is no evidence that women have lower Intelligence Quotient (IQ) than men. On the contrary, there is ample scientific evidence that clearly prove that women and men, though using different brain areas, achieve similar IQ. To make my point, it suffices to discuss in some detail one of these pieces of evidence as below.
While there are essentially no disparities in general intelligence between the sexes, a University of California Irvine (UCI) study has found significant differences in brain areas where males and females manifest their intelligence (reference 2).
The study shows women having more white matter and men more gray matter related to intellectual skill, revealing that no single neuroanatomical structure determines general intelligence and that different types of brain designs are capable of producing equivalent intellectual performance. “These findings suggest that human evolution has created two different types of brains designed for equally intelligent behavior,” said Richard Haier, professor of psychology in the Department of Pediatrics and longtime human intelligence researcher, who led the study with colleagues at UCI and the University of New Mexico.
In general, men have approximately 6.5 times the amount of gray matter related to general intelligence than women, and women have nearly 10 times the amount of white matter related to intelligence than men. Gray matter represents information processing centers in the brain, and white matter represents the networking of – or connections between – these processing centers.
This, according to Rex Jung, a UNM neuropsychologist and co-author of the study, may help to explain why men tend to excel in tasks requiring more local processing (like mathematics), while women tend to excel at integrating and assimilating information from distributed gray-matter regions in the brain, such as required for language facility. These two very different neurological pathways and activity centers, however, result in equivalent overall performance on broad measures of cognitive ability, such as those found on intelligence tests.

G. Elsewhere (reference 1), I theorized that the conservative totalities of Iraqi political parties, especially the religious ones, is greatly informed, in psychological terms, by death anxiety. There is ample empirical evidence from psychological research to support my view. For instance, a meta-analysis by Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, and Sulloway (reference 3) in 2003 analyzed 88 studies from 12 countries, with over 22,000 subjects, and found that death anxiety, intolerance of ambiguity, lack of openness to experience, uncertainty avoidance, need for cognitive closure, need for personal structure, and threat of loss of position or self-esteem all contribute to the degree of one s overall political conservatism. The researchers suggest that these results show that political conservatives stress resistance to change and are motivated by needs that are aimed at reducing threat and uncertainty. According to Robert Altemeyer and other researchers, individuals that are politically conservative tend to rank high on Right-Wing Authoritarianism, as measured by Altemeyer s RWA scale (reference 4).. Psychologist Felicia Pratto and her colleagues have found evidence to support the idea that a high Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) is strongly correlated with conservative political views (reference 5).

SECOND REMARK: This MP does not only shamelessly insult women by implying their mental deficiency, but she also offers treatment, based or her religious/phallic thesis of women’s lack, which is summed up in one word, namely, ‘patience’. That is, she calls on Iraqi women to deal with their long, ongoing sufferings though learning the ‘virtue of patience’, through, as she indicated, reading the biographies of Muslim women such as Khadija or Om Kalthom. I know of the first but not of the second. As far as Khadija is concerned, as far as I gather, she had been a wealthy businesswoman and, when she married the prophet Mohammed, she became even more influential and powerful. So I cannot understand how reading her biography will help improve the ‘art and science of patience’. Whether they read these biographies or not, I am sure that many Iraqi women will find the recipe of ‘patience’ most insulting, patronizing and belittling of their sufferings. There are millions of Iraqi women who have been suffering widowhood, oppression, honor killings, unemployment, corruption, etc. Hence many women and men will bitterly wonder how this new opiates of patience, advocated by this MP, can help these women. She herself refrained from letting us into the secret of how ‘patience’ can turn the miserable lives of millions of Iraqi women into decent human lives. Her secret, however, was thinly veiled, as opposed to her thickly veiled body/’brain’. And just a modicum of intellectual deliberation suffices to easily strip the secret off its veil and reveal the Phallus underneath in all its ugliness, backwardness, and destructiveness. No wonder that the Iraqi woman activist Nebras Almamouri asserts that many female MPs in Iraq (certainly not all) act as fillers to complete the quota allocated to a party, and that their presence in parliament has nothing to do with the reality and agenda of women in Iraq (reference 6).
This MP’s advice of patience to Iraqi women reminds us of the ‘scandalous advice’ of Pascal (1623 – 1662), a French physicist and philosopher of religion, toward unbelievers: "kneel and pray, and then you will believe".

One last question we ought to ask ourselves: ‘What is more of a prostitute, a woman who sales her body, or a woman who sales her mind and soul, to men’?


References:
1. Talal Alrubaie. 2008. The epidemic of the veil and the plights of the phallic discourse. http://www.ahewar.org/eng/show.art.asp?aid=665.
2. http://www.innovations-report.de/html/berichte/studien/bericht--39198.htm
3. Jost, J.J, Glaser, J., Kruglanski, A.A., & Sulloway,
F.J. (2003). Political conservatism as motivated
social cognition. Psychological Bulletin, 129(3),
339-375.
4. Altemeyer, B. (1981). Right-wing authoritarianism.
Winnipeg, Canada: University of Manitoba Press.
5. Jim Sidanius, James H. Liu, John S. Shaw,
Felicia Pratto. 2006..Journal of Applied Social
Psychology 24(4): 338 – 366.
6. Alsharq Al-Awsat of 4th January 2009.

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