Ann Marlowe

Originally published in L.A. Weekly, March 17,2005

Sexual hypocrisy, fractured identities and Azadeh Moaveni’s Lipstick Jihad

BY ANN MARLOWE

In her gripping memoir of “growing up Iranian in America and American in Iran,” Azadeh Moaveni illuminates one of the broadest political truths: Falseness in sexual life leads to falseness everywhere, the denial of truths of the individual body leads to corruption of the body politic.

This isn’t to say that strictness in sexual matters is unilaterally hypocritical, or that sexually conservative cultures corrupt. The rules of traditional societies, including those of traditional Islam, generally work for those particular societies. In the course of my three trips to Afghanistan, and four weeks spent living in an Afghan Uzbek family compound in a provincial city, I met a lot of relatively happy, satisfied people living under rules I’d personally find intolerable: no social mixing of unrelated men and women; arranged marriages, typically between first cousins; and social life pretty much limited to extended family. To be sure, there are Afghans who somatize rather than complaining or acting out their discontent; they live in a pre-Freudian culture so, okay, they’re entitled to some hysteria. But most people seem to find the rules wise, fair, and essential to the continuation of a deeply satisfying, meaningful way of life.
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Originally published on Salon.com, October 19, 2004

The New Yorker correspondent witnessed the fall of Saddam and the beginning of the uprising. But he fails to explore the destruction Saddam did to the souls of his people.

BY ANN MARLOWE

You’d guess it less and less from the news, but it’s easy to become infatuated with Iraq. As a measure of my own fascination, my heart leapt when I saw “Baghdad” on the departures board at Dubai Airport two weeks ago, although I was on my way to my first love among war zones, Afghanistan. Iraq felt like a might-have-been great romance. And I was not alone: One of my embedded reporter friends was nearly on the verge of tears when he left in May 2003 after two months of sand, heat and shooting. Baghdad is ugly and polluted and the situation continues to deteriorate. Yet journalists I know have returned again and again.

What grabbed us is the people, their warmth and paradoxical openness. They can give of themselves fully. My driver in Baghdad — everyone I knew there, and Jon Lee Anderson, too, bonded with their driver — spoke to me about his life. It felt no different from listening to a good friend. I am sure there are thoughts he did not want to share with an American, a non-Muslim and a woman, but he shared his feelings. This is a trait I’ve noticed in Afghans, too, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it is the one positive effect of living under oppressive or corrupt governments.
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Originally published on Salon.com, June 8, 2004

I still support the war in Iraq, but we need to rid ourselves of our perverse myths about Middle Eastern men and women.

By Ann Marlowe

“The notion that Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation became a talking point among pro-war Washington conservatives in the months before the March, 2003, invasion of Iraq. One book that was frequently cited was ‘The Arab Mind,’ a study of Arab culture and psychology, first published in 1973, by Raphael Patai … The book includes a 25-page chapter on Arabs and sex, depicting sex as a taboo vested with shame and repression … The Patai book, an academic told me, was ‘the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior.’”

– Seymour M. Hersh, the New Yorker, May 24.

Poolside in Baghdad last June, I told some American journalists that I thought Iraqi men were pretty cute. They thought I was joking. The invective exploded: “Fat, sexist Arabs” was the party line. I was shocked, not least because these same reporters routinely criticized the American occupation for treating Iraqis poorly. And I was hurt, too. Many Iraqis looked like my own people. They looked like Jews. If Arabs are fat and sexist, what are they saying about Jews behind my back? Slurs against Arabs are, after all, just another form of anti-Semitism.

At the time, I worried that these casual bigotries showed an American inability to see Arabs as fully human. Perhaps this incident should have served as a wakeup call for me that my optimism about our ability to win Iraqi hearts and minds was misplaced. But as a supporter of the war I buried these doubts, and hoped for the best. Even if the journalists were giving vent to prejudices they would have been ashamed to voice about Jews, blacks or Asians, I thought better of the American soldiers I met. (more…)