For example, when a man strips off his clothes in a nightclub act, he doesn’t also take off his dignity, autonomy, and power as a human being, because there’s nothing in patriarchal culture that would interpret his behavior as giving up anything of real value to the women who watch him perform. If anything, he can get the male-centered satisfaction of having his body admired by women who lack the social power to treat his body like admired property. His relation to women in the audience doesn’t reflect a larger social reality in which men’s bodies are routinely regarded as objects to be sought after and controlled by women. But a woman who strips does so in a very different social context that changes entirely the meaning of her behavior and that of the men who watch her. In a patriarchal culture, her body has significance primarily in relation to men who value rights of access and use through various forms of contract, force, or purchase, from the bonds of love or marriage to prostitution to rape. Men who pay women to strip in front of them do far more than pay to watch someone they find beautiful or arousing take off her clothes. They also participate in a much wider social pattern that defines women’s existence in relation to pleasing men, to meeting male standards of attractiveness, and to being available for men’s appropriation and use. To some degree, the price of admission buys men the right to feel, if only in short-lived fantasy, a sense of indirect control over women’s bodies. Women who watch men strip, on the other hand, will find little in mainstream patriarchal culture that supports viewing or treating men in this way.

Although puritans often praise and celebrate the role of women as mothers, in every other role women are portrayed as deficient and subservient. Therefore, as a wife, she is completely under the tutelage of her husband; as a daughter, she is under the tutelage of her father; as a member of society, she is under the tutelage of all men.

And yet does it not all come again to the fact that it is a man’s world? For if a man chooses to be promiscuous, he may still aesthetically turn up his nose at promiscuity. He may still demand a woman be faithful to him, to save him from his own lust. But women have lust, too. Why should they be relegated to the position of custodian of emotions, watcher of the infants, feeder of soul, body and pride of man?

Although puritans often praise and celebrate the role of women as mothers, in every other role women are portrayed as deficient and subservient. Therefore, as a wife, she is completely under the tutelage of her husband; as a daughter, she is under the tutelage of her father; as a member of society, she is under the tutelage of all men.

Patriarchy is not men. Patriarchy is a system in which both women and men participate. It privileges, inter alia, the interests of boys and men over the bodily integrity, autonomy, and dignity of girls and women. It is subtle, insidious, and never more dangerous than when women passionately deny that they themselves are engaging in it. This abnormal obsession with women’s faces and bodies has become so normal that we (I include myself at times—I absolutely fall for it still) have internalized patriarchy almost seamlessly. We are unable at times to identify ourselves as our own denigrating abusers, or as abusing other girls and women.

Historically, the honor-modesty system was circum-Mediterranean, with important features of it extending well beyond the Mediterranean’s shores. Ethnographers often describe it as having two complementary axes: one emphasizing hostility and performative bravado toward outsider men and the other emphasizing protection and seclusion of insider women.

The geographic distribution of Islam does not coincide with that of the honor-modesty system, which antedated it throughout MENA. As the fastest growing world religion, it has spread into large areas of sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, though in India it gives way to Hinduism and Buddhism, which not only map out very different spiritual quests but provide different systems
of caring for the mind and body. Thus the honor-modesty system clearly can thrive without Islam, and Islam can thrive in societies that do not so strongly embrace the honor-modesty system. It is their conjunction in MENA that gives the region much of its cultural—and psychological—character.

Muslim women are the battleground of so many of our conversations and debates about what is right and proper and halal.

Jon Stewart:
So female soldiers should just expect to be sexually assaulted?

Samantha Bee:
Well… female soldiers, gal reporters, lady doctors, teacherettes, aviatrixes… That’s just the way it is when you’re a woman intruding in a man’s world. We expect to be paid slightly less and raped slightly more.