farhakhalidi.substack.com
It's an essay about the various flaws modern feminist sex positivity culture has for women, and that it's often a good idea to refrain from sex even if one isn't religious. The author is an Only Fans model for context. I thought it did a great job laying out the downsides of ubiquitous sex.(Reposted because I accidentally linked to reddit instead of the original essay earlier).
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Notes -
I think the only solution to sexual morals is purity culture enforced and maintained with equal passion for both sexes -- actually, even stronger for men, as has been understood in Christendom for a very long time.
This isn't in the culture war thread. So I'll try to be restrained in my views here. But I see the author's post as a distinct demonstration of the utter failure mode of Islam, that it does not teach sexual purity to both sexes but hammers home the impurity of sex for women while maintaining the significance of having many sexual partners for men.
What Christian purity culture done right does, what it's always done, is insist that both sexes are placed with the burden of avoiding sexual sin and seeking righteousness. And this is not a purity that is eternally lost, but something that can be regained through repentance and a change of heart. The Christian tradition is full of sexual sinners of all kinds who made the active choice to change their behavior and are celebrated as just as holy -- maybe even more, in some ways! -- as the saints who never struggled with such sins. "For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant; later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it." (Heb 12:11)
I also resent the repeated insistence that Western sexual mores are in any way equivalent to the ones from her background. The "husband stitch" is equivalent to full-on removal of the clitoris? Really? I'm open to this being a bad practice, but in any case I don't see this as equivalent to FGM, just as, while opposing it, I don't see male circumcision as equivalent to FGM.
I'd also note that the purity-based murder in London she recounts, from 2002, was not a native English father, but a Kurdish man, according to her own citation, weakening her view that this is a pervasive problem in the West because of Western values:
My stance on this issue is somewhere between her and her mother. I think she's right that the double standard for men and women, the teaching that God is "the type that’s supposedly the arbiter of justice, yet puts its thumb on the scale for women," is bad. I also don't believe in that God. Instead I believe in the God who teaches that "no fornicator or impure man, or one who is covetous (that is, an idolater), has any inheritance." (Eph. 5:5) May the fuckboys live in as much shame as the sluts -- perhaps more.
I agree with the author that there are many cases in which women choose to have sex when they'd probably be better off making a different choice. That's baked into the pie of my fair-minded views on sexual mores, and is the same for men. But I also think this particular person may be doing that thing where people project their own understanding of their sexuality onto other people, and then recoil in horror with an inability to understand how other people's legitimate sexual desires differ.
While I'm not the biggest fan of BDSM's existence in the world, I think she, like many radfems, has utterly no understanding of the actual and real women out there who legitimately and in the deep recesses of her desire want some sort of kinky sex life. I have known women like this. Fifty Shades of Gray did not become a best seller because of the patriarchy.
As with all radical feminists, I'm not sure she's the best person in the world to make a full determination as to the state of play re: women's sexuality. I believe she still has a lot of her mother in her, though she doesn't realize it. In her feminism, I think she may have become a raging sexist, denying equal agency and humanity to women. In pinning blame for all of the sexual revolution's failures on men, she ignores the actual reality that many women do want sex, even promiscuous sex, even kinky sex, and in that way falls deeply into her childhood beliefs that "it's different for boys."
Islam doesn’t encourage premarital sex for men. As with all Abrahamic religions there was a certain historic tolerance for prostitution and female chastity is discussed more than male chastity. But premarital sex for men is still zina, it’s still a sin.
What is different about Islam is that it is less concerned with agency than Christianity or modern rabbinical Judaism (which has invented many highly legalistic workarounds for historical Old Testament harshness). The man who kills his daughter for being seduced by a man doesn’t necessarily ascribe to her more agency than a Christian father who is merely Very Disappointed in her. Agency is simply not relevant.
By contrast, historically Christian honor killings involved a man murdering the man who cuckolded you, because he was the responsible agent. In Islam, honor killings seem to involve murdering the daughter who engaged in sexual immorality. The man must marry her and pay off the family if he is single (that much was historically the case in many non-Muslim societies too), but he is rarely murdered if this isn’t possible.
You mean the weekend marriages Shia men use to hire prostitutes are for married men only ?
the Catholic Church preaches traditional sexual morality and operated brothels in the Middle Ages, I don’t think the existence of prostitution really changes much.
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I'd agree with most of what you've said. But ultimately I think a better equilibrium is achievable than a Christian purity culture, although I probably couldn't convince you of that if you're operating off of Christians principles instead of utilitarianism. But I look at Christian purity culture and still see many failure ponits- e.g maritial rape, or to a lesser degree all the other ways a couple could get married and grow to dislike each other and would be much happier divorced. And I agree with you that the author overlooks the many women who do enjoy kink. Although I don't think she's saying they don't exist, just that many women are pressured into kink despite not enjoying it. And I think Christian purity culture also fails those women- if a girl would genuinely be happier engaging in BDSM with multiple different men a week, and those girls do exist I believe albeit they're rarer than some pop culture would lead you to believe, they should be free to pursue that. But I do think the sort of culture you paint would be my second choice. My first choice being a culture where everyone is aware of the biologically differences between men and women, and men are held accountable for sexual abuse but only sexual abuse that's real, and women are expected to exercise agency in identifying and seeking the outcomes that are actually best for her instead of just waiting for a hot man to ask her to hook up.
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