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.

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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.

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Why Is Maybelline’s New Mascara Commercial All About Gigi Hadid’s Boobs?

Advertising is kind of like the registered sex offender who moved in next door of media. It is creepy, vague and mysterious. It makes false claims of rehabilitation. And its presence is always felt. Maybe that comparison is too much for you, but you can’t deny that when the beloved weekly sitcom of your choosing goes to commercial, and the volume somehow becomes twice as loud, that we’re being encroached upon by something sinister. And no matter how much we rebuke advertisers for piss poor photo shopping of already slender models, hyper sexualizing everyday objects (I’m looking at you, Hardee’s) and lightening ethnic skin tones—they still continue on their merry path of consumer manipulation like a child with it’s fingers in its ears. And now the industry appears to be blissing out on some new patriarchal high, as Maybelline just unveiled its new Falsies Push Up Drama Mascara, the commercial for which is somehow entirely about breasts.

To get to the core of the problem though, first we have to go back. Back to the age of the supermodel in the late eighties/early nineties when the women who walked the run ways were also household names. People like Tyra Banks, Kate Moss, Linda Evangelista, Cindy Crawford and Naomi Campbell had the fashion industry’s balls in a vise-grip, and as a result ruled the world. And then those women aged out of prime modeling years, and for some reason, be it industry flux between music, entertainment and fashion, or just the enigma of zeitgeist, the women who came after them never became the cultural figures that their predecessors were. With a few exceptions, models shifted out of the forefront of the art world, and actresses and female musicians took their places on magazine covers and the arms of famous men.

Now for the twist—bear with me, it’s rooted in that new hot button thing–feminism. In the past few years we’ve been experiencing a new wave of feminism, so unplanned, so unexpected, so different from its past iterations, that to call it fourth wave feminism doesn’t feel quite right, and it’s definitely not whatever post-feminism was. This feminism is trendy. It is heavily influenced and facilitated by the internet. And it’s coming out of the mouths of not just activists and everyday women, but of stars and politicians. To the staunch male anchors of our patriarchal society, even the most female-friendly, this is so unsexy. Top comedians like Amy Schumer having prime time shows predominately dedicated to mocking sexism, lead actresses making their Oscar acceptance speeches about the wage gap, and presidential candidates being asked in debates about reproductive rights is a buzz kill for he-man-penis-havers who just want to watch titties bounce from vats of money while silent women branded with their name bring them domestic beer.

This inundation of Hollywood and the music industry with much more vocal women concerned with equal rights and ending sexist norms has created an unexpected consequence—the return of the supermodel. The Hadid sisters, Kendall Jenner, Lily Aldridge, Mara Hunt, Karlie Kloss, among others, are the most sought after models in the industry right now, and in turn they have become bonafide celebrities. Their names ring out in living rooms, and they’re replacing actresses as spokeswomen just like those aforementioned women did in the nineties. For as excited as the whole country seems to get for the Victoria Secret Fashion Show, or for how many of these new supermodels you follow on Instagram, the frenzy around these women feels deeply rooted in a backlash against feminism in the entertainment industry. There’s no room for feminism in high fashion or lingerie modeling. Obviously niches for plus sized and other “quirkier” types of models have been carved out painfully by a few dedicated pioneers, but for the most part it’s an industry impenetrable by feminism because it was built on the back of sexism.

Thus giving birth to this Maybelline commercial starring Gigi Hadid, and crafted by advertising executives that seem to have really run with the fact that they had a Victoria Secret supermodel at their disposal, rather than an actress with far more rigid ideas of what being a spokesperson should entail. An actress shilling out a beauty product to the masses of normal America women typically has on a beautiful dress in a nondescript location, smiles with her eyes, does a few hair flips and implores viewers to buy the product because they deserve it, or something like that. But not in Hadid’s world.

In the Falsies mascara commercial you see Hadid sitting at a vanity in a bodysuit. As the camera pans to her reflection in the mirror, she shoves her breasts upward the way you do if you’re talking to a girlfriend about how perky your tits were when you were 18, as she says, “sometimes I like to push it up.” She ends up at a club, ready to “dare to get the push up effect.” A clumsy, hot guy spills a drink on her. But it’s okay, she can just take her shirt off! There is then a close-up of just her torso as she rips open her top to reveal her boobs spilling out of a bra. And then she dances around the club in just a bra while men circle her because, like the overdub of her voice says, “I’m not shy. My drama, I totally own it!” The last shot is of her straddling the same guy that spilled a drink on her, while the words “make it happen” flash across the screen.

One of the biggest enigmas of feminism is the dissonance between strength and sexuality. As young women forging ahead in this new age of feminism, social media and the internet, we want to be just as empowered and respected as we are sexy and wanted. Unfortunately those things are very hard to make go together. Thanks to men running the show for most of history, power from a woman is often seen as emasculating and prudish. Conversely, sexuality from a woman is seen as slutty and irresponsible.

I get it—the commercial on the surface is way more exciting and fun than when Sarah Jessica Parker reclines on a chaise and tells you about how moisturizing Garnier is, or when Jennifer Aniston sits on a sunny porch and talks about how natural Aveeno is. But at the same time, we are living in one fucked up time when anyone thinks its suitable to condescend to women by trying to sell them shit you put on your eyes by flaunting a young girls tits around for the male gaze. I don’t have tits on my face, and I don’t need to see Gigi Hadid’s to make me want to buy mascara.

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