Quote:
Originally Posted by kindlekitten
In All Seriousness;
I was taking classes from an Imam when I was getting ready to go to Kuwait. I wanted to not be a cultural monster. he explained to me that all of the extreme measures taken towards covering women was not to repress women, it was because men were just completely incapable of controlling themselves in any circumstance, so it was decided that the easiest thing was to remove the temptations.
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Exactly. Every culture has controls on behavior. The question is whether the controls are internal or external.
Our culture presumes a man can control himself, and that the controls will be internal. Their culture assumes he
can't, and you must limit the provocation, so the controls will be external.
Latin America is slowly moving out of that mindset. It's changing nowadays, but 50 years ago or so, young males were taught that they were hot blooded and passionate, and left alone with an attractive young woman, they would be unable to control themselves and would have their way with her. Young women were taught that they were weak and feminine and passive, and would of course be unable to resist the attentions of the male.
The culture got around the obvious problems by making sure young unmarried women weren't
left alone with men. They were always accompanied by the duenna, an older married female relative who served as a chaperon.
Latin America got the attitudes from Spain, and Spain probably got them from the Arabs, during the period when the Moorish Arabs controlled much of the Iberian peninsula.
There are occasional nasty incidents over here when male exchange students from middle eastern countries come over here to study. Because their culture assumes they can't control themselves, they never learned how to, and relationships with female fellow students become problematic. I've also heard horror stories of women who married middle eastern men over here. Everything was fine as long as they were over here. When he took her back home among his family, he became a dramatically different person, and the relationship rapidly became unbearable for her.
There are other implications as well. In the middle east, relations among families are critical, and family networks provide many functions that might be the province of local government here. Young unmarried daughters are valuable currency in such relationships, and marriages are often things arranged by families. A marriage is a political and economic alliance between the families involved, made for the benefit of the families. An unmarried woman who loses her virginity out of wedlock is debased currency, and a destabilizing factor in her society. The response in some places can be having her stoned to death.
Ultimately, all such behavior evolved to aid the survival of the
society. The individual is not important. The problem is that cultural reflexes like that can persist long after their value has passed, because such cultural reflexes change with glacial slowness.
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Dennis