Rabbi Shmuley Boteach Throws On His Burqa

While I"m not necessarily going to agree with everything Shlomy Boteach says, I don't know why Ali is throwing down the dreaded gauntlet of "essentialism" (I thought that was the bugwear term only when I was a graduate student in the eighties).  Belief in separation of the sexes may be presupposed upon certain biological differences, but they are mediated by cultural constructs and norms. Judaism relies upon these constructs much more than any purported essentialsim Further, I don't know about Boteach's preference for his wife's covering, but there may be something to the rhythms of intimacy and separation that characterize a religious couple's maried life. 

And forgive me if I'm naive, but I'm just guessing that Ali does not yet have children: some of my best anti-essentialist friends did the equivalent of 'taking it all back' once they had kids of their own.   Seems that somtimes boys will boys, and girls will be girls, despite what they taught us in graduate school.  Which doesn't mean we can't embrace their humanity.  Speaking of humanity, isn't that another kind of pernicious essentialism?  Unless, you mean the tzelem elokim that joins us all? www.openmindedtorah.blogspot.com 

Our gender balance, balancing necessary gender definition bit without imprisoning rigidity, is unique, and miraculous. Your reasoning is quite right, logical and correct. But, you are forgetting the miraculous aspect, of how we in fact do live: seeing the other gender a bit, but not too much. It works. This is made possible by some mysterious thing called our character, our personality, and no, that's not logical, or logically derived. It's a mystery! It's a miracle! But, it's in front of your nose! Boteach has a point, about too much familiarity reducing the whole thing to nothing, and killing interest. It's boring and threatening all at once. It's soul-less. Men turn off. They have to, to protect themselves.

Some modesty, but not too much. Not completely hidden, not completely exposed. What's wrong with that? There is a need for structure around the passions. That's news?

Honor Killing in Iraq?

Your comments have absolutely nothing to do with the posts at issue. I am not a moderator here but you should try and respect the limits of the comments thread kindly. 

A while back I wrote a piece on Jewcy about honor(less) killings among Muslims. It's a subject that I've confronted frequently in my life (largely because it really messes me up). In my piece, I tried to suggest that not just patriarchy, but many varieties of oppression itself, are historically rooted in Manichean readings of gender:

In any case, Boteach's article is ridiculous not because of its gender essentialism or male supremacism, but there is not an iota of proof for any of his claims.

I attended an elite WASP prep school back when such institutions were single-sex. I have also worked in Monsey, NJ, and I have evaluated various Islamic schools.

I have had the opportunity to observe lots of single-sex WASP, Catholic, Jewish, and Muslim schools. There simply is no obvious corellation between single-sex schools and a uniform type of sexuality, sexual behavior and approach to eroticism.

Boteach is just begging the question, and I can fairly safely state that even looking at single sex schools historically in one community I have found considerable variability of outcome over time even if the nature of the education remains constant.

During the early 20th century when we first begin to get a lot of data on single sex Jewish girls' schools, we find that an unexpected high proportion of graduates of such institutions fairly quickly rejected Judaism entirely and married non-Jewish men whether we look at Germany, Russia or Palestine. Today in schools that seem rather similar the drive to escape the tradition seems much weaker, and Jewish males from such schools are rather more likely to outmarry than Jewish females. (See Feldman and the anguish of the disinherited and Gary Rosenblatt: Noah Feldman and the Confrontation of American with Jewish or Zionist Values.)

Um, I'm not necessarily defending all of what Boteach wrote, but it's entirely unclear to me why your piece would include a picture of two burqa-clad women with the caption "Boteach's vision of femininity" underneath. That's both irresponsible and (as far as I can tell) inaccurate.

Maybe it is Shuley's fault, but what he says deserves the benefit of the doubt.

First of all, this topic is not 'everything or nothing'. To advocate something less than treating gender differences as imaginary is not at all the same thing as going to the burqa. If there is a benefit to it, a middle ground can be found. If a religious society is to be defined, what more important aspects of definition are there than food and sex?

Here are the benefits. It makes a lot of sense that the society of social gender equality (not speaking here about human and civil rights) becomes confused, degraded, jaded and ultimately boring. The lack of separation of sexes is causing a great stress and distortion in social relations. The games begin early on, and too often become violent and atrocious.

We should recognize that this separation is a two way street, not a dominance and suppression. If one was to ask a feminist, they would say that they want to be free to function without the sexual pressure and politics hanging over everything. Free from self-consciousness, from competition, free to dress for themselves and their friends. Safe from creepy stares and groping and unsolicited sexual signals They can't or at least rarely do that in mixed company. You cannot imagine the degree of peace of mind women have in that setting. The issue is not Boteach's or the Torah's ideas of femininity, that takes care of itself. It is about freedom, safety, stability, contentment.

Of course the same is true of males, and of young people who need to devote their energy to their maturity-building years with less distractions.

Now to be honest about the big picture - (from the male point of view although it is again a two way street): if you are physically or emotiuonally close to an appealing female that you cannot be committed to for any reason, does this not set up a mental and emotional conflict that affects your activities, decsions, and in principle your future?

In the advanced situation, the society ultimately becomes two societies, with the meeting places within the privacy and safety of the home.