Random Thought #2

I just thought of the perfect name for my general approach to the pursuit of knowledge, which is something like the following: Whenever I'm presented with any kind of question, I assume the most cynical hypothesis possible, try to refute it as best as I can, and usually fail. It's seemed to have worked pretty well, so far.

I call it Murphy's Razor.

All's Fair? Part 2

Setting that topic aside, let me get to the reason I started this post in the first place. Yes, part 1 was just a big, unintentional digression. You might have noticed that the title of this post- "All's Fair?"- has little or nothing to do with the content of part 1, and the reason for that is because it was going to be a musing about love and sexual morality. It's been something I've been thinking about a lot lately, and that article about hymen restoration seemed like a perfect illustration of something that doesn't often seem to occur to the people who long for a distant, idyllic past where good-old-fashioned sitcom values ruled. It seems like a lot of people, left and right, tend to make the innocuous mistake of looking at the significantly lower divorce rates in the past and in formerly colonized countries and thinking, "what the hell is it that they did right that we're doing wrong, with our ridiculous divorce rates?"

So we look to our old friend, inductive argument. We infer to the best explanation, and the obvious answer to the problem seems to be that the pseudo-Victorian sexual morality held by so many of the former colonies (and that we held ourselves until the sixties happened) is the answer, and that the degradation of old fashioned sexual values is why marriage is dying. To be perfectly honest, if I was confronted with a convincing enough sociological study that said that homosexuality, sodomy and premarital sex were actually the reason so many marriages fail and that getting rid of them would bring happiness and stability to the marriages that were left, I'd be tempted. But I submit to you that what Indian culture is doing right is- drumroll please- nothing.

Social sanctions and sexual taboos can force you stay in a marriage or make you cling desperately to your virginity, but they're not going to do anything else. Social pressure doesn't bring love into marriages that lack it (though, to be fair, time and shared experiences occasionally do). They don't make people psychologically or socially healthy who weren't before. If a study says that Indian couples get divorced less often, I think it probably means just that and nothing else. And it always amazes me that, despite that commonsensical explanation being immediately available, people are willing to go as far as they do to make social sanctions against sexuality as strong as they so often are. It stuns me that there are people out there who can understand that gay couples can be in bona fide heavens-to-betsy grade A love with a capital l-o-v-e and still say no to gay marriage. It boggles the mind that someone can understand that there are people out there who have had the experience of seeing new things in old things the way one does when in love, and had that experience because of someone of the same sex, and still say that they shouldn't have the right to a legally and socially sanctioned union because it seems icky. And the dark side of the effort to cling to our old sexual morals goes so much farther than just bans on gay marriage and surgically restored hymens. (See Saudi Arabia and its rampant, violent misogyny).

I wonder how much all the folks out there who want a return to old fashioned values really know what they're wishing for. Literature's a great treasure trove of evidence for this point; women are basically slaves and property in the Iliad (and the Old Testament for that matter), and the Tale of Genji has the title character adopting a 12-year old girl to raise as a fragile, stunted ideal wife.

To be fair, that’s an oversimplification. It's not like people who want "old fashioned values" (whatever that means) want to annul suffrage and bring back the legal model of women as chattel. What the advocates of old sexual morality want is not so much a regression but a revision, to which I say, sounds awesome. Technically speaking, modifying our old sexual ethics until they match an ideal set of mores pretty much amounts to the same thing as building that ideal set from scratch.

And therein, dear readers, lies the rub. Here's the million dollar question. Which of our old sexual mores is the baby and which the bathwater?

Most (though not all) ethical philosophers make a distinction between what they call the right and the good: There are good things that you can do that you have a right not to do (like giving to charity) and other things that you have a right to do but are bad (like being racist). When it comes to sex, a lot of ethical philosophers are concerned with the right instead of the good when it comes to sexual ethics; what exactly constitutes consent, when is sex so unconscionably harmful that we have to criminalize it, etc.

Personally, though, it seems like the more pressing and difficult question lies with the good instead of the right. It's hard to imagine that many people, left or right, are willing to advocate the criminalization of sexual acts performed consensually and conscionably in the privacy of one's own home, but the subtler, trickier and possibly more important issue lies with what exactly constitutes "good" and "bad" sex (that is, ethically). As important as it is to worry about what sex should be legally sanctioned, it seems like there's more immediate importance to the question of what sex should be socially sanctioned. And no matter how much it seems from what I've written so far that I'm your stereotypical northeast-coast hyper-progressive denizen of a brave new world, I honestly find it hard not to suspect that the gradual relaxation of sexual taboos since suffrage has, once it crossed a certain threshold, led to women being objectified more rather than less. And then of course, there are plenty of ways we're still stuck in the fifties and are way worse off for it. (Understatements ftw!)

So what’s the optimal set of sexual morals for society to have?

To be continued.

All's Fair? Part 1

So, I look through the Times website last night and I find this article on the page- a small, out of the way link that was glaring at me like a neon light- and I'm not sure what to think. My first and predictable reaction was to shake my head in dismay. Now, don't get me wrong. This is not to pass judgment on the women who have this procedure performed, and the head-shaking isn't at them. It's at the fact that this kind of thing needs to happen at all.

I have enough faith in my friends to leave out all the relevant disclaimers about Islam being a profound and moral religion, but let's face facts- there's a reason you'll find the Quran on the Eastern Religions shelf at Barnes & Nobles despite the fact that Moses is mentioned in it more than Muhammad is. It may be part of the Judeo-Christian corpus, but most predominantly Muslim countries are former colonies and fall under the loosely defined category we call the "third world". Most of these countries have skipped over the industrial revolution altogether and are trying to find a place in the digital one with varying degrees success, but whether you're the more fortunate Turkey or UAE or mired in the there-but-for-the-grace-of-Allah hardships of Somalia or Afghanistan, you're going to deal with the fact that you just skipped over a period of your historical evolution that Europe and the Americas got to enjoy four whole centuries of. One of the nice parts of that package is that you have a sense of your culture, history and community in a way that's hard to find in the former colonial powers; I (and even Muslim Indians) grew up immersed in the Ramayana and Mahabharata, and I have a relationship with them that not many people in the west have with the Iliad or the Poetic Edda or even the Bible. My relationship with the old epics is in no small part responsible for my love affairs with both philosophy and literature. But one of the dark sides of that connectedness with history is that the archaic elements of your past cling to you as tightly as the civilized ones, and a puritanical sexual morality is no small part of that. It can tear families apart.

So it's honestly hard to be judgmental of the women who get this procedure. It's hard to even think of them as being stodgy or conservative, coming from the culture that I'm from. Indian culture, and especially my generation of Indian-Americans is pretty often caught in that thorny briar patch between the old world and the new. We take half of our moral instincts from Nehru, Tagore and other progressive revolutionaries of the independence struggle, and another half from rural village ethics that give us a sense of conscience and community at their best but at their worst are willing to compromise human rights for family honor (See: Sati and the caste system). And this is despite the fact that the first world has been good to my family. Culture shock to us involves pain, fear, struggle and disorientation, but it usually lacks the bitter edge it often has for African, Middle Eastern and Latin American immigrants.

So we have a sense of what it's like to feel like your culture and your morality is in periodic conflict with the western world, but not every third-world culture is as fortunate as ours has been. Most third-world countries have had a Nehru, Atatürk, Locke or Jefferson to bridge the gap between the ancient and the modern, but not all of them have. I can only imagine what it's like to be an immigrant from one of those cultures, and I don't think I'd have the courage to take a stand if I was a second-generation immigrant woman from one of those cultures. A white lie, a surgical procedure and a minor compromise of your integrity seem like a small price to pay to not be alienated from your family and community (though a well-deserved kudos and god bless to the women who do stand up).