As a longtime advocate of sexual freedom who grew up in the West, I have a natural tendency to see the world in Western terms, which means that I see sexual freedom in Western terms. I pretty much agree with the IASHS framework of "Basic Sexual Rights" (which Glenn Reynolds aptly described as a "Sexual Bill of Rights"), although as a libertarian I have serious problems with government involvement in including human sexuality. The right to do something should not translate into a right to do it at taxpayers' expense. So to that extent, I would take exception to interpreting the IASHS's point 8 to include taxpayer funding:

8. The recognition by society that every person, partnered or unpartnered, has the right to the pursuit of a satisfying consensual sociosexual life free from political, legal or religious interference and that there need to be mechanisms in society where the opportunities of sociosexual activities are available to the following: disabled persons; chronically ill persons; those incarcerated in prisons, hospitals or institutions; those disadvantaged because of age, lack of physical attractiveness, or lack of social skills; and the poor and the lonely.

I realize that many in the West do not agree with me, including a number of readers of this blog. Yet regardless of these disagreements, the fact that in the West we can discuss these things in a more or less civilized manner is something I tend to take for granted as a United States citizen.

It is easy for me to forget that in other parts of the world, merely advocating sexual freedom can get you killed. Just ask Seyran Ates, author of a new book titled "Islam Needs a Sexual Revolution." The mere title of the book has earned her death threats and forced her to go into hiding.

Not a new experience for the author.

To backtrack a bit, Ms. Ates was forced to abandon her legal career in Germany out of fear for her life. What bothers me more than that was to read that when she was attacked in public, the "good Germans" neaby did nothing to help her:

While defending Muslim women for the last two decades, she's been insulted and threatened by her clients' husbands and relatives. She was always able to brush it off, until last year.

As she was about to enter a Berlin courtroom with a client filing for divorce, the husband assaulted the two women. The man called the lawyer a whore, shouting, "What ideas have you put in my wife's head?" Ates says.

None of the many onlookers offered to help the women.

Ates says that brazen incident in public, at a time when she sees increasing Islamization in Europe, convinced her she had to shut down her practice. As a single mother, she says, her life and that of her young daughter have priority.

The 'Multicultural Mistake'

Ates blames the rise of political Islam in Europe in great part on what she calls excessive tolerance, both by the left and the right, of repressive traditions of minority cultures -- and a widespread unwillingness to integrate immigrants into mainstream society. She calls it the "Multicultural Mistake," also the title of her recently published book.

Forced marriages, she says, are locking up German-born Muslims in separate Islamic enclaves.

There are tens of thousands of women so isolated from German society that they're unable even to call an ambulance.

I admire this woman's feistiness, and I hardly need to point out that it takes a lot more bravery to write a book titled "Islam Needs a Sexual Revolution" than it would to write one titled "Christianity Needs a Sexual Revolution." What galls me is that in the West, publishers and bookstores would eat up the latter (while heaping praises on the author for "courage"), but the former would be shunned -- by cowardly publishers, and most likely be condemned for hurting the religious sensibilities of Muslims.

When a tyrannical, murderously-sexist ideology is allowed to dictate terms in this way, it's time to ask what has happened to the West?

And where is America the Brave?

This woman has more balls than any of the craven cowards who would shun her, and as to why her book isn't listed for sale at Amazon, I am hoping that it's because the publishing details are still being worked out. But considering what happened at Yale, I fear the worst.

Never mind that she has already pulled some punches. I was fascinated to read in her Der Spiegel interview, that the original title of "Islam Needs a Sexual Revolution" had been "I'll Fuck Whoever I Want." These were the last words of a Muslim girl murdered by her brother:

"I'll fuck whoever I want" was the sentence Hatun Sürücü, a Turkish girl from Berlin, said to her brother before he murdered her, and that's how I came up with the idea to use it as my title.

Regarding sexuality, I found myself a bit startled by a remark Ms. Ates made in the interview contrasting the sexuality of Muhammad to the "asexuality" of Jesus:

SPIEGEL: Muhammad had a dozen wives. Is he a role model?

Ates: When an Arab man needs a justification for having several wives, he says: It was the same with Muhammad.

SPIEGEL: Christian men don't have that excuse.

Ates: No, but it's a shame that Christians worship such an asexual man. Muslims are in a better position, in that respect, but this need of the man to have several women, legitimized by Muhammad, has led to a hidden and extreme sexualizing of Islam.

I have long suspected that there is a certain tension over this Jesus-as-a-role-model business, and I suspect that many a red-blooded type man sees Jesus as, well... Seriously, I'd like to discuss this without being offensive, but I don't know how.

While this post is not about iconography, it isn't my fault that for ages, innumerable pictures of Jesus show him looking like this:

To be fair, there have been innumerable modern attempts to rework Jesus, such as this:

And I suppose someone could portray Jesus with a bomb in his head, like this:

No, it wouldn't draw death threats from angry Christians. But OTOH a Jesus with a bomb on his head would be considered so historically inaccurate that it would not be taken seriously.

As to sexual freedom, one of my worries is that a number of angry and disgruntled men might make the mistake of seeing Islam as ultimately offering them more sexual freedom -- if we assume that Muhammad is the role model -- than they would Christianity, or contemporary Western mores that pay lip service to sexual freedom on the left while penalizing it heavily from both sides. (That last link was found in a long and thoughtful essay about misandry which Glenn linked the other day, but which paradoxically triggered troubling, unwanted, and downright paranoid thoughts on my part about Islamic sexuality.) I don't think I need to belabor the point that such male sexual "freedom" is not freedom at all, but conditioned upon submission to Islam, and is totally at the expense of women, who have zero sexual freedom, and who can actually be treated as criminals under Sharia law for being raped.

If the world is in fact "global," I think that Western advocates of sexual freedom have a lot of work cut out for them.