I just didn’t understand, I guess. I was raised with three sisters and the rule was that you don’t hit girls. That didn’t seem exactly fair when three of them ganged up on me, but that was the rule. Or, at least I thought that was the rule. Seems that there are times when there MUST be violence against women. Yep. Read it on the internet right HERE.

The first reform law respecting domestic violence against women in the Anglo legal tradition is the so-called “rule of thumb”. Until passage of that Act of Parliament, it was legal for a man to strike his wife, one of his possessions or “chattle”, with any size stick he could find. After the act, it was illegal to beat your wife with anything bigger around than your thumb. Don’t laugh. If it was you and the choice was get hit with a two by four or get hit with a stick the size of your thumb, which would you chose? Helped lots of women in their daily lives. Very compassionate at the time.

Bleedin’ heart ponces, them wot passed that, is wot I sez, now pass down that pint, willya?

Just jokin’ with you girls, just pullin’ your chain.

But, I did kind of want to write briefly about this article because it makes clear that one part of the problem that Islamic people have with Western cultures is that we try to incrementally change their culture to suit ourselves based on what seems to us like the self evident truths of our Declaration of Indepence.

For them, though, it’s not that simple. For them, their entire culture is organic and it seems to them that we are asking them to use salt as a substitute for sugar in their cake recipe. Sure the salt won’t be as bad for our burgeoning belly as sugar, but it would ruin the cake. For them, even parts of the society they don’t like are also necessary, it’s a gestalt and you take the bad with the good.

And, even those of us who are good old Western Rationalist liberal 1st Amendment red blooded patriots gotta say that, if we look at everything we do with respect to women, not all of it might look too good to someone on the outside. For example, are you really proud of America’s obsession with breasts and short skirts and buttcrack bluejeans? If you’re an Islamic mother or father — even “westernized” and civilized and literate and urban blah blah blah — do you really want your daughter running around like Brittany Spears and Lindsay Lohan and Nichole Richie? Now, imagine if you are a parent of a daughter and you live in rural areas of poverty in the Islamic Crescent and see American television and movies.

Let me put it to you another, I hope provocative, way. OK, World War II comes along and we have Rosie the Riveter and all that and going back to the kitchen was boring and so the 60s and 70s comes along and we get N.O.W. and millions of women who want to work go to work and your fate is no longer so limited and hooray for our side. Great. But, how about now when almost every woman MUST work either because she’s a single mom or it takes two incomes to keep a roof over your head. Is the life of the vast majority of American women so great that a women in Damascus in a harem room covered in silks might not say, well, this ain’t so freakin’ bad compared to standing on your feet 12 hours a day sloshing coffee in some trucker’s lap.

One more attempt to see rotary blades and defecation interact: the Yemen writer guy clearly sees this as a way to avoid divorce. I wonder how many divorces would be avoided if, for the first and only time in the relationship, a man could legally, ethicaly and morally get away with just slapping her face hard and telling her to get over it, divorce is a bitch and it’s a hell of a lot better to work things out. What seems like an unthinkable idea to you seems to me to be rational and defensible as long as one starts from outside our culture and in one where family relationships are much more horizontal.

What I’m trying to get to here is an understanding of their thinking, I’m looking for ways to cross this cultural divide in order to look for places of contact. The beginning of engagement must be to lose the flinch whenever the topic is raised and be willing to see things from a different perspective. If I understand the scheme he explains, it’s fight, sleep on the couch, fight, hit, go to your mother’s and get advice from everyone in the family before you split up. That doesn’t seem all that different than what happens here except that in America, the guy goes to the pokey and all your girlfriends get to call him a jailbird bastard.

Me? I don’t have a dog in the fight, personally. I like what we got here ’cause it’s what I’m used to. I still don’t hit girls and still think it is just wrong when anyone else does. I oppose personal violence across the board.

That said, we are engaged with the Islamic world and this, I think, gives us an insight into their way of thinking. Maybe the way to go would be an Islamic “rule of thumb” instead of entirely transforming their way of life? There must be some way to get the Prophet behind a little mercy when it’s all in the family even under the Sharia. Of course, if you’ve got three wives, it may not be advisable to hit one of them when the three of them can gang up on you in your sleep, like maybe younger sisters could maybe do to some fictional other guy older brother you know.

blogblah!!!

POST SCRIPT: A Personal Aside

I don’t know bleep about attachments and such but I know when I’ve got it good, does that count? Just a few days ago, we were freezing without power in the dark after a horrible winter storm and today I’ve had the top down on my MidLifeChrysler. Tonight, I treated myself to sliced pineapple and cottage cheese early and I made a big pan of scratch brownies filled with pecan halves this evening. Today, I received not one but two missives from two very important people in my life and the good vibes from that shared love has me all goo goo melty inside. Perhaps it would be better to follow another path, but i’m content to be attached to my daughter and the feel-good I get from getting a note from her; maybe I’m bad to revel in the chocolate and nuts and the time when you eat the chocolate brownie batter with a glass of ice cold milk right after you put the pan in the oven, but you’ll just have to judge me bad, I guess, because I just couldn’t help myself; and, if finding simple pleasure in having the wind and the sun in my face, the joie de vivre of whipping in and out of traffic, the feeling of being released from a freezing corner of hades, well, if that’s wrong, as the song goes, I don’t want to be right. At least I was in the moment, dude. I wasn’t thinking about anything else but the brownie batter and the cold milk, I promise. I don’t mind getting all Marcus Aurelius but let me have a bit of my Epicurius as well, thankee very much.

Hedonism Rulz!