{"id":1353,"date":"2012-06-30T03:08:20","date_gmt":"2012-06-30T03:08:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/forallevents.com\/reviews\/?p=1353"},"modified":"2012-08-29T02:39:10","modified_gmt":"2012-08-29T02:39:10","slug":"the-veil-edited-by-jennifer-heath-book-review-essay","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/forallevents.com\/reviews\/the-veil-edited-by-jennifer-heath-book-review-essay\/","title":{"rendered":"The Veil, Edited by Jennifer Heath — Book Review Essay"},"content":{"rendered":"
The Veil and Male Asceticism — Book Review Essay<\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/div>\n
Heath, Jennifer, Ed. \u00a0(2008)\u00a0 The Veil:\u00a0 Women Writers on Its History, Lore, and Politics<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0 Berkeley, Los Angeles, London:\u00a0 University of California Press.\u00a0 <\/span><\/div>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 A woman\u2019s body is a public entity.\u00a0 It is like a pebble dropped into a pool.\u00a0 A woman\u2019s presence creates waves that radiate.\u00a0 Everyone who sees her \u2013 females as well as males \u2013reacts to her physicality.\u00a0 This unavoidable reaction to a woman\u2019s physical presence creates a philosophical and social issue that defines the character of an entire society.\u00a0 It is not a question of controlling the woman\u2019s sexual feelings.\u00a0 She will be what she is and feel what she feels.\u00a0 The question is how much impact can we, the collective of males, allow that sensuality that she naturally radiates to have on males she comes in contact with?\u00a0 \u00a0This is not the woman\u2019s choice.\u00a0 A woman may have some choice in how she publicly presents herself, but the reaction of men to a woman\u2019s body is not under the control of the woman.\u00a0 Of course, the reaction will vary depending on the man.\u00a0 One\u2019s feelings in this matter are closely related to the degree of closeness and intimacy with a woman that a man finds tolerable as well as his constitutional sensitivity to erotic arousal.\u00a0 But it is the aggregate of men who decide how much of a woman\u2019s body they will allow themselves to be exposed to, and then limitations are imposed upon all women in their public dress or undress to which they must then adapt.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Jennifer Heath compiled a very nice anthology of fairly short articles including two cartoons by twenty-one different female authors exploring the widely varied meanings of the veil as experienced by women from a broad range of cultures and religious perspectives.<\/em>1<\/sup>\u00a0 <\/em>It is well illustrated with drawings and photographs that are very helpful.\u00a0 It is predominantly a contemporary treatment, although there are two historical pieces: one by Laurene Lafontaine, Out of the Cloister<\/em>, and the cartoon, Nubo: The Wedding Veil<\/em>, by Sarah Bell.\u00a0 The historical background that I am incorporating here came from external sources.\u00a0 I was rather dismayed at Heath\u2019s recapitulation on the last two pages of the book following over three hundred pages of excellent, informative discussion, where she seems to dismiss the significance of her own book and importance of the veil as a cultural and political symbol.\u00a0 <\/span><\/div>\n
Considering the real problems facing women, ideological battles about the veil are tragic wastes of time.<\/span><\/div>\n
What a woman chooses to wear on her head should be trivial to anyone other than that woman herself.\u00a0 <\/span><\/div>\n
[The veil] belongs only to the wearer. (Heath, p. 320-321)<\/span><\/div>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 As I pondered how she could make such a colossal error after the all of the rich discussion that preceded it, I realized that the strength of the book was also its deficiency.\u00a0 The strength of the book is the compilation of the perspectives of women who have experienced and lived with the veil in a wide variety of cultural contexts and how they have adapted to it and incorporated it into their feminine identity.\u00a0 The deficiency created by excluding the perspectives of males results in missing the connection between the social practice of veiling women and the ascendance of male asceticism as a cultural and moral ideal.\u00a0 This is what inspired me to write this review.\u00a0 The social practice of veiling women is always associated with a prevailing moral ideal of male asceticism.\u00a0 And asceticism in males always results in a devaluation of women.\u00a0 These two points are crucial to understanding this matter.\u00a0 Devaluation of women often masquerades as an elevation in the estimation of female virginity.\u00a0 But idealizing female virginity is an insult to women.\u00a0 It posits an immature condition as more desirable than the fully developed sexuality of an adult woman and seeks to exclude women from full participation in the activity of life, and in particular from physical relations with males.\u00a0 Idealizing virginity is not for the benefit of women, but rather supports male asceticism and sexual renunciation. <\/span><\/div>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Regardless of how individual women subjectively experience the veil, whether as oppressive, restrictive, protective, or liberating, the need<\/em> for the veil, the social imperative<\/em> for the veil, comes ultimately from men, particularly from ascetic men who are not well disposed toward women, who hold women in low esteem, and who particularly despise women\u2019s sexuality and see it a threat that must be suppressed and controlled.\u00a0 This is a point not developed in Heath\u2019s anthology.\u00a0 Heath\u2019s anthology is, for the most part, perspectives of contemporary women who have adapted to the veil and in turn have adapted the veil to their own purposes.\u00a0 It does not delve into the psychological need for the veil as experienced by males and thus the book is largely about the adaptation of women to the veil rather than contending with the male psychological needs that are the origin and sustenance of it.\u00a0 Heath’s authors stress the communicative function of the veil, the many different meanings it can carry in different cultural contexts, the ambiguity of the veil, how the veil selectively conceals and selectively reveals.\u00a0 Veiling is an intricate practice that can be adapted to many different purposes.\u00a0 It has subtlety and sophistication.\u00a0 Some western women, such as Pamela Taylor and Eve Grubin, choose the veil as an \u201cunambiguous rejection of the objectification of women by men\u201d (Taylor, in Heath, p. 120), or because it \u201callows us to experience our internal richness.\u201d (Grubin, in Heath, p. 187)\u00a0 Taylor found, however, that wearing the hijab in the United States resulted in the \u201cbitter irony of having swapped one form of objectification for another\u201d (Taylor, in Heath, p. 121)\u00a0 She found herself perceived as a proponent of militant, political Islam.\u00a0 Women cannot escape being imprecisely perceived (objectified) regardless of how they clothe or unclothe their bodies.\u00a0 The cartoon Nubo: The Wedding Veil<\/em> by Sarah Bell is an instructive cross cultural synopsis of folklore of the veil in relation to weddings.\u00a0 She reminds us that through most of history weddings have been a deal between men and the bridal veil served to insure that the groom would not back out before the deal was final.\u00a0 There is a story in the Bible where Jacob was tricked by a bridal veil into marrying the older sister of the woman he wanted.\u00a0 (Genesis 29)\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/div>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Aisha Lee Fox Shaheed in her article, Dress Codes and Modes:\u00a0 How Islamic is the Veil?,<\/em> frames the issue aptly:<\/span><\/div>\n
The question at stake is whose honor is being protected: that of the woman beneath the clothes, her father\u2019s, her husband\u2019s, her family\u2019s, her community\u2019s, or her state\u2019s?\u00a0 (Shaheed, in Heath, p. 298)<\/span><\/div>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 This question displays a realization that the veil is not and cannot be just about the woman\u2019s self expression.\u00a0 Its implications go all the way to the level of state political governance.\u00a0 In Arabic, the term hijab<\/em> simply means \u2018barrier.\u2019 (Shaheed, in Heath, p. 295) \u00a0The philosophical question posed by the veil is whether there should be a barrier between the bodies of women and the eyes of men.\u00a0 It is very simple, but the myriad answers to it structure relations between men and women in every human society.\u00a0 It is not simply the personal choice of the woman.\u00a0 A woman cannot choose between walking down a public street stark naked or covered up in a burqa according to her whim.\u00a0 She will never have such a choice.\u00a0 The idea that it is, or should be, simply the woman\u2019s choice is na\u00efve and totally unrealistic.\u00a0 A woman who ventures into a public space is seen and reacted to by everyone and how she presents herself sets an example for other women.\u00a0 Her personal choice, and the degree to which she has one, will ultimately fall within parameters defined and enforced by men.\u00a0 <\/span><\/div>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Tolstoy expressed the underlying sentiment very well in his story The Kreutzer Sonata<\/em>.<\/span><\/div>\n
I used formerly to feel uncomfortable and uneasy when I saw a lady dressed up for a ball, but now I am simply frightened, and plainly see her as something dangerous and illicit.\u00a0 I want to call a policeman and ask for protection from the peril, and demand that the dangerous object be removed and put away.\u00a0 (Tolstoy, p. 179)<\/span><\/div>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It is this inner need, the fear called forth by the public visibility of the alluring female, that the ascetic male translates into a social imperative for suppression.\u00a0 The mere sight of a woman\u2019s face or body in a public place is an unacceptable provocation.\u00a0 P.E. Falk, an ultraconservative Jewish rabbi, sees threats and contamination in nearly every exposure to the female body <\/span><\/div>\n
Seeing is a form of contact, and contaminates. . .\u00a0 Every person is detrimentally affected by what he sees, even if it is of no interest to him. (Falk, p. 125)<\/span><\/div>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Ascetics despise the body and regard it as evil.\u00a0 They spend their lives renouncing physical pleasure and sensuality.\u00a0 Women are particularly despised because their beauty and allure is seen as a wayward enticement.\u00a0 A dichotomy is often posed between the \u201cspiritual\u201d and the physical, with the \u201cspiritual,\u201d being the superior and more desired condition.\u00a0 The body, and sexuality in particular, are inevitably denigrated. \u00a0Kirtanananda Bhaktipada, a leader in the Hare Krishna movement and an advocate of celibacy, articulated the foundation in his Joy of No Sex<\/em>:<\/span><\/div>\n
\u2018You are not that body,\u2019 yogis have taught their students from time immemorial.\u00a0 \u2018You are Brahman, pure spirit soul \u2013 eternal, full of knowledge and bliss.\u2019\u00a0 This is our identity, and on this platform we can begin to relish the joy of no sex.\u00a0 Thus to get rid of the Myth of the Need for Sex, we must<\/em> understand \u2018I am not this body.\u2019 This is the beginning.\u00a0 (Bhaktipada, p. 19)<\/span><\/div>\n
\u201cYou know, what is vilest about it,\u201d Tolstoy rails, \u201cis that in theory love is something ideal and exalted, but in practice it is something abominable, swinish, which it is horrid and shameful to remember\u201d (Tolstoy,<\/em> p. 187)<\/span><\/div>\n
\u201cIf the aim of humanity is goodness, righteousness, love \u2013 call it what you will \u2013 if this is what the prophets have always said, that all mankind should be united together in love, that the spears should be beaten into pruning hooks and so forth, what is it that hinders the attainment of this aim?\u00a0 The passions hinder it.\u00a0 Of all the passions, the strongest, cruelest, and most stubborn in the sex passion, physical love; and therefore if the passions are destroyed, including the strongest of them \u2013 physical love \u2013 the prophecies will be fulfilled, mankind will be brought into a unity, the aim of human existence will be attained, and there will be nothing further to live for.\u00a0 As long as mankind exists the ideal is before it, and of course not the rabbits\u2019 and pigs\u2019 ideal of breeding as fast as possible, nor that of monkeys and Parisians \u2013 to enjoy sex passion in the most refined manner, but the ideal of goodness attained by continence and purity.\u201d\u00a0 (Tolstoy, p. 183)<\/span><\/div>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 This is the ascetic repudiation of sensuality excellently expressed.\u00a0 It is the foundation of asceticism: a philosophical rejection of the body and a psychological rejection of one\u2019s personal identity bound to the body.\u00a0 The ascetic sees the problem not only in terms of controlling himself, that is, in modulating his own inner response to stimuli from the external world, but conscious of his own weakness and corruptibility he is compelled to impose controls on his and everyone\u2019s environment for the sake of defending his de-sensualized existence.\u00a0\u00a0 The narcissism of the ascetic based as it is on such an unnatural and unattainable ideal of de-sensualization is vulnerable in the extreme to near constant assault from the allure of female bodies.\u00a0 Because the conditions that give rise to ascetic sentiments are present at all times and places, as we will see later on, asceticism and the hostility toward women reflected in the insistence on keeping their faces and bodies covered will always be a possibility in human societies.\u00a0 But it need not attain credibility as a model for us all and despising the body and sensuality need not be held in elevated esteem or confused with \u201cvirtue,\u201d or \u201cnobility.\u201d\u00a0 The idea that love is essentially \u201cspiritual\u201d and elevated and \u201cnoble\u201d poisons relations between men and women.\u00a0 Repudiating the physically pleasurable, sensual connection to women is to end up despising them.\u00a0 If you like women, you have to like their bodies and you have to enjoy the public display of women\u2019s bodies that allows for shared enjoyment, both aesthetically and lustfully.\u00a0 <\/span><\/div>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Jeffrey Masson sees asceticism as an intrapsychic defense, a way of warding off threatening or inacceptable impulses to prevent their intrusion into consciousness and precipitating action.\u00a0 <\/span><\/div>\n
The ascetic exists because he is tempted.\u00a0 And not once, but over and over.\u00a0 The only role of women in ascetic literature is as degraded objects, inspirers of lust and the horror of lust.\u00a0 I need hardly labor this point, so evident is it in all the literature.\u00a0 This phobic avoidance of women bespeaks an unusually intense desire for contact. (Masson, p. 616) <\/span><\/div>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 However, the demands of lust are so strong and so insistent that mere psychic defense is not enough for the ascetic; he inevitably demands support of the entire society in the form of laws and institutions to aid him in his beleaguered struggle.\u00a0 This is the threat that asceticism poses to whole of humanity.\u00a0 It is not just a private manifestation of mental illness.\u00a0 Asceticism, on its own, is very difficult to sustain; it requires considerable social support or withdrawal into hermitage.\u00a0 Ascetics, driven by intense anxiety, set about aggressively enlisting any available support in order to impose their conception of social order upon everyone.\u00a0 Ascetics are not simply harmless, curious anomalies.\u00a0 They are malignant and their attempts to present themselves as morally superior must always be challenged and discredited. Asceticism, expressed as the need to keep the allure of women out of sight and out of mind is the equivalent of misogyny.\u00a0 <\/span><\/div>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In May of 1922, at age 22, Heinrich Himmler recorded in his youthful diary a telling incident.\u00a0 <\/span><\/div>\n
On Friday night he notes having seen a girl of three jump about naked before going to bed.\u00a0 His reaction was, \u2018I do not believe this to be right at the age of three when one should be teaching a child modesty.\u2019 . . . On the next day Himmler talks with the young wife of a doctor and tells her that he has never courted a girl.\u00a0 She teases him and calls him a eunuch.\u00a0 Himmler goes on to speculate that there are two sorts of people.\u00a0 On is \u2018the melancholic, stern, among which I include myself,\u2019 austere types who eventually succumb to sin if they do not get engaged or married early enough, \u2018since the animal in man is too powerful in us.\u2019 (Lowenberg, p. 630)<\/span><\/div>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In\u00a0 Himmler\u2019s case the ascetic defenses formed in adolescence succeeded insofar as he did not go through a self destructive period of sensual indulgence in the mode of Tolstoy or Augustine.\u00a0 But the anxiety and the sense of vulnerability in the face of sensual temptation is the same, and the resulting impulse to suppress the sensuality of others is also the same.\u00a0 It can be seen in ascetic males going back to ancient times.\u00a0 <\/span>\u00a0Tertullian, in On the Veiling of Virgins, <\/em>from roughly 200 C.E., tells us,\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/span><\/div>\n
So perilous a face, then, ought to be shaded, which has cast stumbling-stones even so far as heaven: that, when standing in the presence of God, at whose bar it stands accused of driving the angels from their (native) confines, it may blush before the other angels as well; and may repress that former evil liberty of its head,'(a liberty) now to be exhibited not even before human eyes. (Chapter 7)\u00a0 <\/span><\/div>\n
Hippolytus, around 215 C.E. in his Apostolic Tradition<\/em> writes:<\/span><\/div>\n
All the women should cover their heads with a pallium [a liturgical headpiece], and not simply with a piece of\u00a0linen, which is not a proper veil. 18:5<\/span><\/div>\n
These were all based upon an admonition of Paul in 1 Corinthians, which is rather confusing and ambiguous.\u00a0 On the one hand he says,<\/span><\/div>\n
But every woman that prayeth or prophesieth with her head uncovered dishonoreth her head: for that is even all one as if she were shaven.\u00a0 For if the woman be not covered, let her also be shorn: but if it be a shame for a woman to be shorn or shaven, let her be covered.\u00a0\u00a0 I Corinthians 11:5-6<\/span><\/div>\n
But on the other hand,<\/span><\/div>\n
But if a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her: for her hair is given her for a covering.\u00a0 I Corinthians 11:13<\/span><\/div>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Paul talks as if women should be covered [veiled?] on the one hand, but on the other hand, he says that the woman\u2019s long hair can serve as an adequate covering.\u00a0 Paul\u2019s apparent inability to make up his mind about this has resulted in the lack of a hard, clear, definitive position on this issue within the Christian scriptures and has thus given to Christian churches a flexibility that many conservative ascetics still object to.\u00a0 There are ascetics within Christianity who still today would assert an ultraconservative interpretation of these passages and impose a full repression on the female body. <\/span><\/div>\n
Referring to this passage in I Corinthians<\/em>, Robert Sungenis (2004) comments,<\/span><\/div>\n
The question for today\u2019s modern church and culture is: does this Scriptural mandate apply to us?\u00a0 The answer commonly given today is: \u2018No, women are not required to wear head coverings.\u00a0 That is an antiquated practice of the past, and today\u2019s church has officially declared that women are no longer bound to it.\u2019\u00a0 The truth is, the church has never abrogated the practice of head coverings; rather, the practice has fallen into disuse purely from cultural pressures.\u00a0 In a word, these cultural pressures have had a most damaging effect in deteriorating our whole society, and one of the more dramatic changes is the role of women.\u00a0 They have gone from wifely roles to business executives, from deacon\u2019s wives to veritable priests; from factory workers to fighting soldiers; from wives in submission to equal rights advocates; from child-bearers to child killers. (Sungenis, p. 1) <\/span><\/div>\n
The covering of women\u2019s bodies in public also signifies the domination and subjugation of women to male authority:<\/span><\/div>\n
Being covered is a mark of subjection and authority.\u00a0 It induces the woman to be humble and preserve her virtue, for the virtue and honor of the governed is to dwell in obedience.\u00a0 John Chrysostom c.400 CE\u00a0 Homilies on I Corinthians<\/em>, 26,5<\/span><\/div>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Laurene Lafontaine wrote a very interesting, informative contribution to Heath\u2019s anthology on the history of dress for cloistered Catholic nuns from Tertullian (c. 200 C.E.) to the Vatican II Ecumenical Council, (1962-1965) and the reactions beyond (Out of the Cloister<\/em>).\u00a0 After a long era between the Council of Trent in 1563 and the Code of Canon Law of 1917 where cloistered women wore distinctive and diverse dress, the veil was revived and women were required to sit separately from men and women were forbidden from preaching within their own congregations.<\/span><\/div>\n
Once again, the requirement of the veil by papal fiat served to remind women, religious and lay, of the Church\u2019s theological position regarding women as inferior and subordinate.\u00a0 (Lafontaine, p.81)<\/span><\/div>\n
Uta Ranke-Heinemann had been a professor of Catholic theology at the University of Essen, Germany, but lost her position and was excommunicated in 1987 after declaring the virgin birth to be a theological position rather than a biological fact.\u00a0 Ranke-Heinemann points out in her book, Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven<\/em>, the pre-Christian origins of asceticism and celibacy in the Christian Church tracing it to Stoic and particularly to Gnostic traditions that held a deeply pessimistic outlook on life itself, not only on sexuality (Chapter 1). \u00a0Her book catalogs a long litany of hostility toward women from Catholic theologians and clerics going back to ancient times based fundamentally on the notion that women are inherently unclean.\u00a0 In particular, the veiling of women was a direct extension of the idea that the mere sight of a woman was a lure to sin.<\/span><\/div>\n
Clement of Alexandria writes: With women \u2018the very consciousness of their own nature must evoke feelings of shame.\u2019 (Paedagogus<\/em> II, 33, 2)\u00a0 . . . Women should be completely veiled, except when they are in the house.\u00a0 Veiling their faces assures that they will lure no one into sin. (Paedagogus <\/em>III, 79, 4)\u00a0\u00a0 (Ranke-Heinemann, p. 127-128)<\/span><\/div>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Miles (1989) in her study of the meaning of female nakedness in Christian thought found that this repugnance toward women extended to the point where women were understood to \u201cbecome male\u201d if they were to enter the kingdom of heaven.\u00a0 (Chapter 2) <\/span><\/div>\n
Christian authors imply, by their repeated warnings to women on the topic of their dress and comportment, that it is largely a woman\u2019s responsibility to avoid producing desire in men. (Miles, p. 72)<\/span><\/div>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The practice of veiling women goes back thousands of years, long before Christianity and Islam.\u00a0 It is referred to in the Old Testament and has been found in many ancient societies all around the world.\u00a0 Judith Berman, based on a review of several hundred figural representations from the Upper Paleolithic period (40,000 \u2013 10,000 years ago) concluded that Upper Paleolithic women very likely styled their hair. (Berman, p. 292)\u00a0 The Venus of Brassempouy, <\/em>found in southwestern France, <\/strong>is a 25,000 year old carving of a female face from mammoth ivory.\u00a0 She seems to be wearing some sort of head covering, or perhaps has her hair configured in braids.\u00a0 If you think about the origins of veiling women both historically and psychologically, you are quickly led to thinking about the origins and impetus for clothing the human body.\u00a0 <\/span><\/div>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In the Bible the origin of clothing is related to a dawning awareness of shame. (Genesis 3)\u00a0 This is probably not accurate.\u00a0 The Bible story correctly notes that people are not naturally ashamed of their bodies. \u201cWho told thee that thou wast naked?\u201d (Genesis 3:11)\u00a0\u00a0 However, the shame in being unclothed probably appeared after<\/em> the status associated with being clothed in certain ways had been established.\u00a0 Shame is a learned affect.\u00a0 Young children are not ashamed of their bodies and have to be taught this important lesson.\u00a0 Shame is a feeling of loss of esteem in the eyes of others.\u00a0 One has to be aware of the expectations of others and share an internalized value system related to those expectations in order to feel shame.\u00a0 This is a rather complex psychological and cultural construction that would develop and evolve over time in response to the acquired meanings of being covered.\u00a0 Clothing and the social significance of being clothed most likely came first, then the sense of shame in being unclothed.\u00a0 It was likely related to an increasing stratification of human societies after the development of agriculture about 8000 to 10,000 years ago.\u00a0 <\/span><\/div>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 People in hunting and gathering societies in warm climates, who have not been exposed to outside cultures where clothing is worn, wear little or nothing. (Gilligan, pp. 26-29)\u00a0 Ian Gilligan very effectively argues that the earliest human clothing was for thermal protection against cold.\u00a0 Humans have very limited biological defense against cold and therefore must have developed some means of protecting their bodies to maintain their temperatures against the cold weather which was known to exist in areas of early human habitation.\u00a0 I won\u2019t repeat Gilligan\u2019s rather complex arguments, which also depend, interestingly, on genetic analyses of human body lice, but here I will just summarize his results.\u00a0 <\/span><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Considered collectively, the genetic studies on human lice favor an early date for<\/span><\/div>\n
the loss of body hair cover, probably by around three million years ago, and a<\/span><\/div>\n
comparatively late date for the time when humans first adopted clothing that has<\/span><\/div>\n
continued in use up to the present. It would appear that <\/span>Homo <\/span>has been thermally <\/span>\u201c<\/span>naked<\/span>\u201d <\/span>from the outset and would at times have required the use of clothes as a behavioral adaptation to cold exposure in circumstances when environmental conditions exposed that thermal vulnerability. However, it was not until after the last interglacial, around 90<\/span>\u2013<\/span>100,000 years ago, that clothing came into more-or-less continuous use among at least some modern human groups.\u00a0 (Gilligan, p. 32)<\/span><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 This does not exclude psychological and cultural accompaniments, for it is very likely that as soon as humans began putting clothes on their bodies, they began to overlay them with meanings beyond mere utility.\u00a0 It is clear that from very early times, adornment, or the lack thereof, became a communicative device among modern humans.\u00a0 Jewelry, for example, goes back at least 70,000 to 100,000 years. (Gillgian, p. 56)\u00a0 Robinson (1988), arguing against utility as the original motive for enhancing the body with clothes uses ample illustrations to show how clothing and adornment is used as much to enhance the display of the body and draw attention to it as to conceal it.\u00a0 It is very likely that adornment<\/em> of the body, pre-existed clothing.\u00a0 The evidence for this is the fact that people who wear no clothes at all adorn their bodies with paint, tattoos and a variety of scarring techniques, often to draw attention to their sexual attributes (Robinson, 1988).\u00a0 It can be seen that clothing and a sense of modesty are clearly to be distinguished both in their origins and in their relationship to covering the human body.\u00a0 The point is that while veiling women, understood as compulsory head covering or face covering or full body covering, is associated with male asceticism, clothing of the body per se is not.\u00a0 The Bible story is incorrect in linking the origin of clothing with a sense of shame in the body.\u00a0 Both females and males bond their personal identity to being dressed a certain way, but clothing and adornment of the body existed for perhaps many thousands of years before it was overlaid with a sense of shame in being naked. <\/span><\/div>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Aisha Lee Fox Shaheed, in her article, Dress Codes and Modes,<\/em> referred to earlier, presents a nice discussion of the complex language embodied in clothing and its relation to social identity as well as politics.\u00a0 <\/span><\/div>\n
For our family, veiling was tied to our identity as a religious minority in India and symbolized familial honor but was never viewed as a religious injunction or a requirement of Islam.\u00a0 <\/span><\/div>\n
Every person with a Muslim heritage has a different experience, precisely because what we wear \u2013 including the veil \u2013 depends on our specific culture(s), the historical moment, and prevailing conceptions of female modesty and sexuality.\u00a0 (Shaheed, in Heath, p. 293) \u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Dress codes and styles for women have changed over time within our own society, so it should not be hard for western readers to comprehend the varied trends in dress for women in Muslim countries.\u00a0 Women seem to adapt to whatever clothing regimen is maintained in their societies and they internalize these conventions and adapt their identity as women to those conventions.\u00a0 Barbara Goldman Carrel in her article, Shattered Vessels that Contain Divine Sparks<\/em> studied Hasidic Jewish women in New York City and found that a sense of modesty becomes part of female identity and that the smallest details of clothing acquire meaning and significance that identifies a woman as part of a particular community or group and which also serves to differentiate her from a surrounding society with which she does not wish to be identified.\u00a0 If the demands of modesty are not overly strict and oppressive, women will adopt and support them as part of healthy feminine identity.\u00a0 However, if the rules become too strict and oppressive, women tend to chafe and may rebel.\u00a0 Consider the example of the Amish, who have imbued clothing with meaning and significance down to the smallest details, from Jana Hawley\u2019s article, The Amish Veil: Symbol of Separation and Community<\/em>. <\/span><\/div>\n
Some Amish communities require that Amish women use straight pins to close their dresses while other Amish communities use snaps for dress closures.\u00a0 When I lived in Jamesport a young girl was visiting from an Amish community in Indiana where snaps were used to close the dresses.\u00a0 In Jamesport, straight pins were used.\u00a0 Concern from the elders immediately was raised because young Jamesport girls were seen trying to \u2018get by\u2019 sewing snaps into their dresses.\u00a0 A special meeting was held and the girl from Indiana was told that if she did not remove all the snaps from her dresses and start using straight pins like the other girls in Jamesport, she would have to return to Indiana. . . While she was in Jamesport, the Indiana girl removed the snaps from her dresses, but she stayed on only a few months because she decided Jamestown was too strict.\u00a0 (Hawley, in Heath p. 94)<\/span><\/div>\n
Some women see advantage in the veil\u2019s protection.<\/span><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
As a physical barrier, the veil denies men their usual privilege of discerning whomever they desire.\u00a0 By default, women are in command.\u00a0 The female scrutinizes the male.\u00a0 Her gaze from behind the anonymity of her face veil or niqab is a kind of surveillance that casts her in the dominant position.\u00a0 (Masood, in Heath p. 226)<\/span><\/div>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I would rejoin to Masood that her sense of being in command amounts to a sense of safety from the intrusive interest of males.\u00a0 It does give her some refuge from sexual interest expressed toward her, but she is not free to discard her veil at will.\u00a0 She is not free to express sexual interest in men as she feels inclined.\u00a0 Her anonymity does not change the negative estimation of her body held by the male culture that dictates she must don the veil.\u00a0 It does not change the esteem of her sexuality, which is regarded as a social threat that must necessarily be kept under wraps.\u00a0 Any sexual adventure she does engage in must be done in utmost secrecy under pain of severe punishment.\u00a0 Masood relates an incident herself that makes this quite plain.<\/span><\/div>\n
In the Jordanian capital of Amman, I once saw a woman in full niqab, a thick black veil covering her entire face with a six-inch open strip around the eyes.\u00a0 She wore black from head to toe.\u00a0 But there was something odd about her, as she stood alone on a street corner, teetering on stilettos.\u00a0 After a while, a car drove by, screeched its tires, and stopped.\u00a0 A man got out yelling profanities at the woman who was apparently his sister.\u00a0 She yelled back in defiance, protesting loudly as he clutched her wrist and dragged her toward the waiting car.\u00a0 She refused to get inside and her voice climbed decibels, occasionally breaking midsentence from hoarseness.\u00a0 There was a strange disconnect between the fury coming out of her mouth and her black-cloaked obscurity.\u00a0 Suddenly she whipped out a cell phone from somewhere under her voluminous garments and furiously punched the numbers with a black gloved finger.\u00a0 She spoke through it through her face veil, which fluttered with the movement of her hidden lips.\u00a0 <\/span><\/div>\n
The brother went ballistic.\u00a0 He grabbed his sister\u2019s hand, yanked away the mobile and smashed it with his feet.\u00a0 Then he tightened his grip twisting her hand behind her back.\u00a0 The girl howled and kicked him in the shins with her spiky heels.\u00a0 He smacked her head and tried to push her to the ground.\u00a0 As their fighting continued another car approached.\u00a0 A sleek white Mercedes with tinted windows.\u00a0 The passenger door opened and a tall, gray-haired man in a double breasted suit stepped out and gestured to the woman with a curt angling of his head.\u00a0 <\/span><\/div>\n
She was squatting on her haunches, a whimpering black huddle with teary eyes.\u00a0 The well-dressed stranger helped her up and led the still crying woman into the backseat of his car. Then he went up to the disgruntled brother, who was pummeling his fists on the car\u2019s roof.\u00a0 A lengthy speech followed.\u00a0 The older man took a wad of bills from his wallet, slipped them into the brother\u2019s front shirt pocket, and patted his cheek in a there, there kind of way.\u00a0 <\/span><\/div>\n
The brother laughed sarcastically and hurled one final insult at his sister waiting inside the car.\u00a0 The one word I made out was sharmuta<\/em>, the Arabic word for whore. (Masood, p. 221-222) <\/span><\/div>\n
This incident clearly shows who has the real power over women behind veils.\u00a0 <\/span><\/div>\n
Just because my veil blocks your senses, doesn\u2019t mean it blocks mine.\u00a0 The veil is no blindfold.\u00a0 I see out; you are the one whose vision is obstructed.\u00a0 My senses are alive and have a field wherein to play, away from where your eye can penetrate.\u00a0 My sex is alive \u2013 what on earth makes people think that women who veil do not take pleasure in eros?\u00a0 Veiling \u2013 with us \u2013 has nothing to do with asceticism and self-denial.\u00a0 My sense of beauty is alive.\u00a0 I comb out my hair and put on the rouge and the silk, among friends, in a woman\u2019s culture curtained off from you, an outsider.\u00a0 Is that why you find the veil frustrating from your male-identified viewpoint, you who are used to women putting out for your gaze?\u00a0 Because its aesthetic is the opposite of strut, is that the reason why you take it as such an affront?\u00a0 (Kahf, in Heath, p. 29-30)<\/span><\/div>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 No, the reason the veil is an affront has nothing to do with your rejection of my interest in seeing your body.\u00a0 The affront does not come from you or your choice.\u00a0 The affront comes from the imperative<\/em> that compels you and all other women to don the veil.\u00a0 That imperative does not originate with you or even with the aggregate of women who join you in wearing it.\u00a0 It originates with a coterie of men who would attempt to deprive all<\/em> men of a sensual connection to nearly<\/em> all<\/em> women.\u00a0 The veil in its many degrees makes a woman the private property of the men on her side of the veil.\u00a0 This can be benevolent and protective of the woman, or it can be tyrannical and utterly cruel.\u00a0 But the woman is officially closed off from public availability, that is, availability for any man who encounters her to contemplate her as an object of lust. \u00a0Veiling women is an outward manifestation of a religious moral outlook presided over and enforced by clerics and their adherents who wish to restrict all desire, both male and female, to a very narrow channel.\u00a0 It is one thing for a woman to make a personal choice to veil herself as an expression of her spirituality and her adoption of a religious moral code.\u00a0 It is quite another for an entire society of women to be required to veil themselves under pain of legal sanction and physical intimidation.\u00a0 Gazing at women with enjoyment and desire reflects a need for connection<\/em> to women on the part of males.\u00a0 The rabbi (P.E. Falk) is right.\u00a0 Looking is a form of contact.\u00a0 But rather than contaminate, it represents a positive valuation of women and pleasure in the sensual connection to them.\u00a0 It includes<\/em> women in the public space of society.\u00a0 Insisting that women remain covered except in their own homes is indeed a repudiation and an affront to that need.\u00a0 But it is not only a repudiation of the male desire for connection to women, it is a devaluation of women themselves.\u00a0 It says that indifference to women is preferable to sensual connection in the pleasure of beholding.\u00a0 Ideally women should be ignored most of the time.\u00a0 Our desire for them and our enjoyment of them should not intrude into daily life any more than can be helped. \u00a0They should not be seen or heard any more than is absolutely necessary.\u00a0 Life should be austere and taking pleasure in women should be kept to a minimum.\u00a0\u00a0 Veiling should not be the free choice of individual women, and women\u2019s choice is not the origin of the veil.\u00a0 The veil becomes a social and political imperative imposed and enforced by men for reasons that have to do with male psychology rather than out of consideration for the private space of women.\u00a0 A hostile woman, or a woman who experiences discomfort or aversion to the sexual interest of males, may make good use of the veil to shut out their intrusive gazes and longing.\u00a0 But it is not out of respect for her privacy that the veil becomes a universal requirement.\u00a0\u00a0 It is males who make these rules for their own self regulation.\u00a0 <\/span><\/div>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Nowhere can this be better seen than in Saudi Arabia where the hostility toward women and the exposure of their bodies is blatant and openly expressed on the public streets.\u00a0 Sherifa Zuhur in her article, From Veil to Veil,<\/em> relates several incidents of vicious harassment by the religious police on public streets for small infractions of the ultra-strict dress code for women \u2013 which seems to require considerable organized effort to sustain.\u00a0 It is clearly not about protecting women.\u00a0 Women are the persecuted, and their visible presence is nearly criminal.\u00a0 <\/span><\/div>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 J.D. Salinger, who was influenced by Buddhist and Hindu teachings from India, embraced an ideal of asceticism that proved disastrous for his wife and family.\u00a0 According to his wife \u201cwe did not make love very often, the body was evil.\u201d \u00a0(Salinger, p. 91)\u00a0 His daughter, Margaret Salinger, described reading a passage from the autobiography of her father\u2019s Yogi.\u00a0 In it the Yogi details the complaints of his wife and his neglect of her and his family. \u00a0Salinger comments, \u201cI have to say that reading this, forty years after my parents\u2019 engagement was like reading the obituary of our family before we even became one\u201d (Salinger, p. 88)\u00a0 Margaret Salinger\u2019s memoir is a touching, beautifully written illustration of the devastation asceticism wreaks upon women when played out in a marriage or in the upbringing of a daughter. <\/span><\/div>\n
Behind every good, enlightened man, Christ figure, Teddy, or Seymour in my father\u2019s writing, there\u2019s a damnation or a demonization of womanhood and a sacrifice of childhood.\u00a0 (Salinger, p. 424)<\/span><\/div>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 However, she shows remarkable insight into the childhood origins of these misogynistic attitudes, and this anecdote linking antagonism toward women to the earliest interactions with the mother was the only such early developmental illustration I could find despite considerable searching.\u00a0 <\/span><\/div>\n
I mentioned earlier that, as a child, Seymour [the character in Salinger\u2019s story, Seymour: An Introduction<\/em>] threw a rock at a little girl who was sitting in the sunshine, inflicting serious injury, opening up her forehead and requiring stitches.\u00a0 In the story, everyone in the family understood that it was \u2018because she looked so beautiful\u2019 sitting there in the sunshine.\u00a0 I don\u2019t understand it, but to the Glass family and their author [her father, J.D.] it was an almost religious act and made perfect sense.\u00a0 The only way I have of approaching some feel for this is something I learned from my son.\u00a0 We went through a period during the terrible twos where he\u2019d hug me and be really close, and then all of a sudden he\u2019d throw something at me or hit me.\u00a0 It was so weird; he\u2019d only misbehave like that when things were really lovey-dovey, not when he was mad about something.\u00a0 We figured out that at times it (Mommy and me) became too intense for him and that he felt engulfed, in danger of being swamped by me and his feelings for me.\u00a0 He still got put in time-out for doing it, but I could then help him with it by backing off a bit, and encouraging him to use his words, and also by having his dad take over more of the parenting stuff for a while, until he\u2019d regained his equilibrium.\u00a0 It makes me think of my aunt saying, \u2018It was always Sonny (J.D.) and Mother, Mother and Sonny.\u00a0 Daddy never got the recognition he deserved.\u2019 All I know is that a man who is too close to his mother, who can\u2019t separate properly, is as much of a danger sign as one who hates his mother and can\u2019t get close to women.\u00a0 It\u2019s a tricky thing to getting those boundaries right.\u201d\u00a0 (Salinger, p. 86n)<\/span><\/div>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Indeed this boundary issue remains a lifelong contention in every man\u2019s life and impacts every relationship with a woman.\u00a0 Its parameters are set in the earliest interactions between a baby boy and his mother.\u00a0 These early interactions, underlined and reinforced through years of growing up, shape the boy\u2019s basic temperament and his unconscious expectations and attitudes toward women.\u00a0 This separation and boundary issue is closely related to the phenomenon known as masochism.\u00a0 Masochism might be defined as finding advantage in suffering, or in making a virtue of deprivation.\u00a0 It is a spectrum that is found in nearly all human relationships to some degree with the most extreme form being religious asceticism.\u00a0 Masochism in a certain measure is normal and probably necessary for civilized living, although the term is not usually invoked until it progresses far down the spectrum toward self-destructiveness.\u00a0 It has presented difficulties for psychoanalytic theory from the beginning (Menaker, pp. 156-159).\u00a0 In the psychoanalytic literature, whenever masochism is a pronounced trend in a person\u2019s character it always seems to be related to a mother who was unable to respond to her child with warmth and understanding (Panken, 1973, esp. Chapter 4; Menaker, Chapter 18; Berliner, 1958; Novick and Novick, 1987).\u00a0 <\/span><\/div>\n
The conflict between the infantile need for being loved and the experience of suffering at the hands of the loved object is the basic and most clearly causal pattern in the cases I have seen.\u00a0 (Berliner, p. 346)<\/span><\/div>\n
There are cases in which a parent has been outrageously cruel to the child.\u00a0 In other cases milder forms of rejection occurred, including traumatic events in weaning or toilet training, discipline against masturbation, absence of the mother, appearance of a sibling, demanding or overauthoritarian attitudes or oedipal defenses on the part of a parent, and many other forms of deprivation . . .\u00a0 (Berliner, p. 346)<\/span><\/div>\n
We suggest that the first layer of masochism must be sought in early infancy, in the child\u2019s adaptation to a situation where safety resides only in a painful relationship with the mother.\u00a0 (Novick and Novick, p. 243)<\/span><\/div>\n
These are mothers who, for a variety of reasons, cannot pay attention to their children\u2019s needs.\u00a0 (Novick and Novick, p. 242)<\/span><\/div>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The atmosphere in such households seems to have been emotionally barren, punitive, rejecting, and sometimes hostile.\u00a0 Masochism as the quality of being self-despising and self-denying, is an attempt through identification to hold on to a loved one who is essentially cold, critical, and rejecting (Menaker, pp. 163, 188f).\u00a0 The best description of this that I could find did not come from the psychological literature, but from a story by Franz Kafka called A Little Woman<\/em>.\u00a0 It is a short story that appeared in a small collection called A Hunger Artist<\/em>.\u00a0 Kafka does not present the woman he describes as his mother or the mother of the Hunger Artist featured in the following story, but for my purposes that does not matter.\u00a0 I am treating her as a paradigm, an archetype that represents to a greater or lesser degree the early experience of males who later become ascetics and who harbor a deep antipathy toward women.\u00a0 Kafka describes her thus.<\/span><\/div>\n
This little woman, then, is very ill-pleased with me, she always finds something objectionable in me, I am always doing the wrong thing to her, I annoy her at every step; if a life could be cut into the smallest of small pieces and every scrap of it could be separately assessed, every scrap of my life would be an offense to her.\u00a0 I have often wondered why I am such an offense to her; it may be that everything about me outrages her sense of beauty, her feeling for justice, her habits, her traditions, her hopes, there are such completely incompatible natures, but why does that upset her so much?\u00a0 There is no connection between us that could force her to suffer because of me.\u00a0 All she has to do is regard me as an utter stranger, which I am, and which I do not object to being, indeed I should welcome it, she only needs to forget my existence, which I have never thrust upon her attention, nor ever would, and obviously her torments would be at an end.\u00a0 I am not thinking of myself, I am quite leaving out of account the fact that I find her attitude of course rather trying, leaving it out of account because I recognize that my discomfort is nothing to the suffering she endures.\u00a0 All the same I am well aware that hers is no affectionate suffering; she is not concerned to make any real improvement in me, besides whatever she finds objectionable in me is not of a nature to hinder my development.\u00a0 Yet she does not care about my development either, she cares only for her personal interest in the matter, which is to revenge herself for the torments I cause her now and to prevent any torments that threaten her from me in the future.\u00a0 I have already tried once to indicate the best way of putting a stop to this perpetual resentment of hers, but my very attempt wrought her up to such a pitch of fury that I shall never repeat it.\u00a0 (Kafka, p. 235-236)<\/span><\/div>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Were such a woman to be the mother of a young boy, and were this narrative to reflect that young boy\u2019s experience, it would not be hard to understand why he would come to make a virtue of renunciation and maintain a lifelong mistrust and aversion to women.\u00a0 The fact that this story appears in front of a story about a man who starves himself to death in front of a live audience is not a coincidence.\u00a0 A man who insists on hiding women behind veils is himself hiding from the extreme anxiety and pain that the physical allure of women call forth from his original experience of rejection and hopeless longing.\u00a0 <\/span><\/div>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 At the outset I said that a woman\u2019s body is a public entity.\u00a0 The veil recognizes this, but seeks to privatize it.\u00a0 Jennifer Heath\u2019s anthology is an excellent overview of how women adapt to this circumstance and the many meanings it carries in a broad range of backgrounds and societies.\u00a0 Brief, well written, focused articles each make a unique contribution to an interesting mosaic.\u00a0 The writers do not call the veil into question, they seem to treat is as a given, and they do not explore the origins and perpetuation of the practice of veiling women in the needs of ascetic males from all faiths, and how misogyny and asceticism, which result in the compulsion to hide the bodies of women and renounce the sensual connection to them, begin in the earliest interactions between a baby boy and his mother.\u00a0 The psychological origins in deficient early maternal care in some men imply that male asceticism, and thus the impulse to veil women as a social imperative, will always be a possibility in human societies.\u00a0 It has a very long history going back at least as far as civilization.\u00a0 However, its credibility as a social ideal is in decline.\u00a0 The long era of the ascetic male being the determiner of the values governing human relations is ending and the character of civilized living is changing.\u00a0 Religions whose moral outlook is founded on asceticism and sexual renunciation will have to change or find themselves increasingly marginal and irrelevant.\u00a0 The connection between men and women is fundamentally physical and sensual.\u00a0 Women, as well as men, are better off when women are conceived of as a shared resource rather than as private property and the connection between men and women is seen as fundamentally sensual and erotic and felt in every visual encounter.\u00a0 <\/span><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
1.\u00a0 By \u201cveil\u201d I mean a head covering, which could be a scarf, hijab, purdah, niqab, abaya, burqa, or any of a wide range of female head coverings that may or may not cover the face, or part of the face, or the rest of the body.\u00a0 <\/span><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
\u00a0<\/span>References<\/span><\/strong><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Berliner, Bernhard (1958 [1995])\u00a0 The Role of Object Relations in Moral Masochism.\u00a0 In Essential Papers on Masochism<\/em>.\u00a0 Edited by Margaret Ann Fitzpatrick Hanly.\u00a0 New York and London:\u00a0 New York University Press.\u00a0 pp. 344-359.\u00a0 <\/span><\/div>\n
Berman, Judith (1999)\u00a0 Bad Hair Days in the Paleolithic:\u00a0 Modern Reconstructions of the Cave Man.\u00a0 American Anthropologist<\/em>, Vol. 101, No. 2,\u00a0 pp. 288-304.<\/span><\/div>\n
Bhaktipada, Kirtanananda (Swami)\u00a0 Joy of No Sex<\/em>.\u00a0 New Vrindaban, WV:\u00a0 Palace Publishing.<\/span><\/div>\n
Falk, P.E. (1998) \u00a0Modesty, An Adornment for Life.<\/em>\u00a0 Jerusalem; Gateshead, England:\u00a0 Feldheim Publishers.\u00a0 <\/span><\/div>\n
Gilligan, Ian (2010) The Prehistoric Development of Clothing: Archaeological Implications of a Thermal Model. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory<\/em><\/span> 17<\/strong>:1, 15-80<\/span><\/div>\n
Hanly, Margaret Ann Fitzpatrick, Ed. (1995)\u00a0 Essential Papers on Masochism<\/em>.\u00a0 New York and London:\u00a0 New York University Press.\u00a0 <\/span><\/div>\n
Kafka, Franz (1948 [1971])\u00a0 The Penal Colony:\u00a0 Stories and Short Pieces<\/em>, Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir.\u00a0 New York:\u00a0 Schocken Books.<\/span><\/div>\n
Loewenberg, Peter (1971)\u00a0 \u00a0The Unsuccessful Adolescence of Heinrich Himmler.\u00a0 The American Historical Review<\/span><\/em>, Vol. 76, No. 3, pp. 612-641 <\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
Masson, Jeffrey Moussaieff (1976)\u00a0 The Psychology of the Ascetic.\u00a0 Journal of Asian Studies<\/em>,\u00a0 Vol. 35, No. 4, pp. 616-635\u00a0 <\/span><\/div>\n
Menaker, Esther (1995)\u00a0 The Freedom to Inquire:\u00a0 Self Psychological Perspectives on Women\u2019s Issues, Masochism, and the Therapeutic Relationship<\/em>.\u00a0 Northvale, NJ and London:\u00a0 Jason Aronson.\u00a0 <\/span><\/div>\n
Miles, Margaret R. (1989)\u00a0 Carnal Knowing:\u00a0 Female Nakedness and Religious Meaning in the Christian West<\/em>.\u00a0 Boston:\u00a0 Beacon Press.\u00a0 <\/span><\/div>\n
Novick, Kerry Kelly and Novick, Jack (1987 [1995])\u00a0 The Essence of Masochism.\u00a0 In Essential Papers on Masochism<\/em>.\u00a0 Edited by Margaret Ann Fitzpatrick Hanly.\u00a0 New York and London:\u00a0 New York University Press.\u00a0 pp. 237-264.<\/span><\/div>\n
Panken, Shirley (1973)\u00a0 The Joy of Suffering:\u00a0 Psychoanalytic Theory and Therapy of Masochism<\/em>.\u00a0 New York:\u00a0 Jason Aronson.\u00a0 <\/span><\/div>\n
Ranke-Heinemann, Uta (1990)\u00a0 Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven:\u00a0 Women, Sexuality, and the Catholic Church<\/em>.\u00a0 New York:\u00a0 Doubleday.\u00a0 <\/span><\/div>\n
Robinson, Julian (1988)\u00a0 Body Packaging: A Guide to Human Sexual Display<\/em>.\u00a0 Los Angeles:\u00a0 Elysium Growth Press.\u00a0 <\/span><\/div>\n
Salinger, Margaret A. (2000)\u00a0 Dream Catcher:\u00a0 A Memoir<\/em>.\u00a0 New York:\u00a0 Washington Square Press.\u00a0 <\/span><\/div>\n
Sungenis, Robert A. (2004) \u201cShould Today\u2019s Women Wear Head Coverings?\u00a0 A Scriptural, Historical and Canonical Analysis.\u201d\u00a0 Bellarmine Theological Forum.\u00a0 Online.\u00a0 http:\/\/www.catholicintl.com\/articles\/Head%20Coverings%20for%20Women.pdf <\/span><\/div>\n
Tolstoy, Leo (1889 [1960])\u00a0 The Kreutzer Sonata.<\/em>\u00a0 New York:\u00a0 New American Library.<\/span><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Veil and Male Asceticism — Book Review Essay Heath, Jennifer, Ed. \u00a0(2008)\u00a0 The Veil:\u00a0 Women Writers on Its History, Lore, and Politics.\u00a0\u00a0 Berkeley, Los Angeles, London:\u00a0 University of California…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":124,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"yasr_overall_rating":0,"yasr_post_is_review":"","yasr_auto_insert_disabled":"","yasr_review_type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[837],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1353","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-joe-cillo"},"yasr_visitor_votes":{"stars_attributes":{"read_only":true,"span_bottom":"