Mikarrhea

Islam puts pubic hair on your head

Earlier, I was tying a scarf on my head and having a little trouble adjusting it. Having posted that last bit about how onerous it is for women to maintain appropriate coverage out in public in Iraq, it hit me again what an unbelievable pain in the ass it must be to have to always make sure that not the slightest stray hair on your head is "showing." No "showing" your hair, even if it happens to decide to show itself. If an Islamic woman removes her veil in the forest, is she really "showing" her hair? Is it like in Judaism, where they cleverly get around this question by saying you have to cover your head in front of god? After all, god is supposed to be everywhere. (Irrelevant aside: Max once asked my ex, if god is everywhere and I punch the air, am I punching god?, and my ex, going with the flow of the logic, said, yes. Max replied triumphantly, so then when I pee, I'm peeing on god!)


The Japanese taboo against pubic hair comes to mind: apparently, in the Japanese hierarchy of obscenity pubic hair is considered even more obscene than the genitalia it surrounds and obscures. I remember watching Japanese porn videos in a Tokyo hotel: all pubic hair and genitalia were meticulously digitally fuzzed out, but semen prodigiously splurted from behind the digiblur, and the camera's authoritative sharp focus confirmed the presence of, if not caressed, skinfold puddles of it. Now, if I had to label something the offensive part, it'd be the cum, not the genitals. But then again, that's me. (Always weird to be reminded there are such cultural differences-- makes me wanna do research in comparative obscenity-- although, come to think of it, that's basically just another name for the first fifty years of cultural anthropology)

What's the natural consequence of suppressing through social mechanisms of shame the display of some part of the body? Um, could it be to eroticize it? By collectively agreeing to (or at least acting within the boundaries of) a taboo on pubic hair more stringent than that in the U.S., the Japanese pack pubic hair with a greater sexual charge than we.

OK, so you see where I'm going. . . . Islam, by enforcing women's head covering, is effectively trying to turn all women's tresses into Japanese pubic hair.

Shouldn't a "correctly" socialized Islamic person seeing a woman's head hair in public have pretty much the same charged response as a "correctly" socialized Japanese person confronted with luxuriant undergrowth between a woman's legs? The charge might carry attraction, revulsion, or some combination of the two. But the sense of significance, of scandalousness, of rarity, and above all of the female hair-violator's unambiguous and blatant sexual display would attach almost inevitably, regardless if a particular spectator were male or female, straight or gay.

I wonder if some Islamic men think of the West as foremost a civilization where women constantly run about displaying their pubic hair in public and freaking everybody out . . . .