Covered Women

I was a Catholic kid growing up in the 1950's. During that era, the Church schools were administered by nuns whose habits included keeping themselves covered by black and white cloth.

But during my lifetime, now extending into 65 years, all that nunnery garb has gone the way of the buffalo. You don't hardly see old-style nuns walking around in public any more.

On the other hand, there appears to be a worldwide movement by some religious people to keep their women covered. More about that in a moment.

Another thing that was going on back in the day, when I was a youngster, was the growth of viewership in playboy magazine, a publication that was eagerly snapped by pubescents like myself and many others, for the sake of looking at naked women.

Generally, us good Catholic boys preferred to train our eyes onto the girls in the magazine, instead of the nuns who were teaching us at school.

That infamous magazine was not the only one, as you probably know. There were many others, such as penthouse and hustler. As the years rolled by, those rags just got raunchier and raunchier. Then along came the X-rated movie houses, peep house, topless bars and ultimately the worldwide web on which any female genitalia and mammary-triggered acting out can be fantasized. At various times I sampled them all before God got a hold of me and got me straightened out on a few things.

Now I notice, ubiquitously, we inhabit an hyper-stimulating post-religious world where many women who court the public spotlight compete with each other for male gawks by flaunting outfits that take exposure, instead of fashion, to the max.

This is very titillating, and at times seems pleasant and quite alluring, but it doesn't solve any problems. In fact, as a certified old geezer now I am starting to think this whole hefneresque uncoverage trend has generated more trouble than its worth.

All these sexy women sauntering around in the world can actually make a man's life much harder--not easier--to bear.

My personal experience uncovers this truth: when you get right down to it, there is nothing better for a man in this world than a real, live woman who loves him, and there is nothing better for a woman than a real, live man who loves her.

But now we have millions of horny men walking around in the post-modern, post-religion, post-playboy, post-marriage, post-internet world being constantly tormented by all these uncovered women.

And so along cometh the Muslims imams, raising their hajibual judgements against our licentious western ways.

As a Christian, I cannot deny they have a point.

They want to keep the women covered. Western women see this as oppression. Maybe it is, but there are some western men who discreetly understand why it is that the Muslims want to cover their women with hijab and niqab. My born-again assessment of this conundrum is that Law (of covering women, or anything else) is no salvation--and no solution--for delivering us over-stimulated males from our sexual obsessions. We each have our own frustrations to deal with, and that is an issue between each man and his God. And his woman, if he is fortunate enough to have one.

In other news, it has been reported that some great historian said somewhere that what goes around comes around.

I could say that, in my lifetime, the notion of women being modestly dressed has incrementally disappeared; maybe it went around the dark side of the moon or somewhere to be disposed of forever. Religious people are criticized for being old-fashioned, puritanical, repressed, blahblahblah, for their antiquated ideas about keeping women covered.

Now the idea of modesty comes back around, but this time from a different source--a different religion--not the old Catholic one, not the old Puritan one, not the old Calvinist one, but the new/old Muslim one that comes slouching from the east.

And this old guy wonders if now we really get what's coming to us. Nebuchadnezzer is not just mouthing empty fatwahs.

Maybe it's time to take cover.


Glass half-Full

The Problem with Women

The problem with women is that men desire them so much.

Excuse me--that's not "the" problem. It's just one of many.

And of course there are many problems with men too. Maybe I should restate the problem:

The problem with men is that they desire women so much.

The reason I bring this up is this: the sexual desire problem is bigger than it used to be. Back in the day, when religions were a formative influence on public morality, the various religions distributed specific, benevolently voluntary restraints on men's desires for women. This made for a fairly well-disciplined society.

But nowadays, with religious disciplines waning, the benefits of God-inspired morality--which is to say marriage, fidelity, vigilant raising of children, etc--these benefits are diminishing among Western populations.

For my generation, the Baby Boomers, the whole situation took a turn for the worse back in the '50s, when the Hefner doctrine came into fashion.

This ideology, promulgated in Hefner's playboy magazine, says a man can do anything he wants with his private parts, and insert them anywhere he wants. This ribald world-view, later popularized through LIFE magazine's promotion of mini-skirts, bunnies, drug experiences etc, exacerbated--or should I say masturbated--the problem.

By the mid '60s, men were walking around in libidinous disorientation so severe that it led to terrible societal problems, such as: ubiquitously irresponsible sex, which implanted a new plethora of children without fathers, and provoked frequently rampant hookups among rootless humans, and sometimes porno-dependent behavioral patterns fixated on mammary obsessions, and even rape, with occasionally millions of jilted lovers hardening their hearts to true love, simultaneously with a pandemic of drunken sex, ultimately accompanied by STDs, and in certain locales a plague of AIDs-ridden bath houses.

It was a wild time for sex. For true love and familial development--not so much.

But now religion is trying to make a comeback.

It's not the old religion you knew about back in the day. It's not that old worn-out hypocritical ritualistic type of religious practice that went hand-in-hand for millennia with Catholic catechism, or Protestant doctrine, or Judaic Torah. It's not even the fundamentalist bible-thumpers' holy-rollin' sanctification, nor the new-agers' spacy universalism, nor the scientology celebritive hoohah. No, none of these are facilitating the big Religion comeback.

It's the new kid on the block, Sharia.

The Sharia-promulgators have an effective solution for our sexual problem.

Keep 'em covered! Keep those women veiled, dammit!

It's the opposite of the Hefner doctrine, which required women to be more and more uncovered while in public places. The Hefner doctrine has, you see, run its playful, toss-the-baby-out-with-the-bathwater course. The deleterious effects of the 1960's sexual revolution will soon be neutralized! Maybe even neuterized, if the transies have their way.

And so the new religious Sharia movement, soon to go viral as a revolution, may take control. This development is enabled because of the continuing historical operation of the Hegelian dialectic. The Great Struggle between Thesis ( Western Judeo-Christian tradition) being opposed by the Antithesis (Enlightened godless secularism), will be resolved through the new Synthesis: Sharia Law. It's the Hegelian dialectic, as applied to public morality instead of old fuddy-duddy academic ideologies.

Sharia-think will strive to obliterate the contemporary hot raving dominatrix godless hookup obsessive decadence of the West, which has, in its advanced stages, lately degenerated into a gov.campaign to make men desire men instead of women, and vice-versa. But that won't work in the human race writ large.

So the Sharia-propagators are sure they can take over in a big way, and rest assured of this: the women will be covered.

This is revolutionary! Are you ready for it? Men, all your sexual frustration will be over! Plus, the women will be yours for the taking with your right hand. And the women will be doing all the work by covering themselves discreetly so that you'll be spared the crisis of unbridled desire.

The impending Sharia prescription, however, does come with a warning label:

Warning: Repeated use could provoke adverse side effects such as dogmatic repression and fascist behavior.

This could negatively impact your freedom and everybody else's too.

So I propose a simpler, safer solution to our problem. Let's just go back to the sixth commandment given to Moses. We'll all be more satisfied, and it will be good for the kids.



Glass half-Full