East vs. West

One of the founding intellectuals of Muslim fundamentalism, Sayyid Qutb, became radicalized while getting a Master's degree in rural Colorado in the 1940s, which bodes ill for President Bush's initiative to import 15,000 more Saudi students. A reader in Istanbul believes that the old bachelor was indeed freaked out by American male-female relations:

Up front, you're absolutely right about the whole dynamic of importing foreign students in the hope of propagating the allegedly superior Western liberal cultural norms. It only backfires on the whole for the simple reason that no culture's males enjoy learning how backward and useless the culture they've inherited from their ancestors.

Qutb probably felt that sexual difference between the East and the West very acutely, regardless of how much textual real-estate he allocated to it in his books. I am completely sure of that.

But why is that?

Call me reductionistic, but probably the answer lies - just like with nationalism - with the marital patterns. In other words, close kin marriages.

It is no coincidence that the so-called "romantic" norm has evolved among the European Caucasian demography because of the specific workings of the incest taboo. For the Eastern male, the female is not someone endowed with the legal status of having "sexual desire," or being the subject of desire. That is because in his social reality, females are assigned, by familial authority and fiat, their partners, period. Only in a social environment where the daughter is to be married to non-family (a stranger) can the question of she having a say on with whom she's coupled gain prominence. And that quite naturally, through the dynamic of parenthood. If you, as a parent, are simply wedding your daughter to your brother's son, there's no "emotions" to discuss: he's family. If, however, it is Mr. X, then you'll ponder, "Heck, is he worthy of our daughter?" And "Does our beloved girl consent?"

And it is only in such an environment that romance, and with it the intra-gender rivalry, can come to the fore.

In the East, the male doesn't know anything like having to "earn" a girl: sooner or later he's assigned one. In the West, he has to *get* the girl - attract her attention, be able to flirt with her, seduce her, etc.

This drives the Eastern male crazy.

The whole high-falutin' rhetoric of "morals" is just a blanket over this arrogance. Women who both dress so immodestly (since they, too, have to compete for the attention of desirable males) who then show the insolence of having a say in whom they are paired with. Unthinkable and unacceptable for the Eastern male...

Think of the frustration that comes with being excluded from this game from the start by definition (due to race).

I could relate numerous personal incidents involving this, but when I was witnessing those incidents I didn't have a clear picture of the why. Now I do: it's the bloody "marital patterns."

The Middle East, far from being the haven of inclusiveness that leftie morons imagine it to be, is probably the most xenophobic part of the earth, and most probably because of this.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer