mcsquared Posted February 8, 2004 Share Posted February 8, 2004 Found a few interesting passages in "Reading Lolita in Tehran" which seem pretty relevant to the cultural context of sexuality. The setting is post-Islamic revolution in Iran with a teacher narrating about a reading discussion group with her female students who are in their 20s and 30s. I had discovered my girls separated what they described as intellectual or spiritual love(good) from sex(not good). What mattered, apparently was the more exalted realm of spiritual affinity. Even Mitra had dimpled her way through the argument that sex was not important in a relationship, that sexual satisfaction had never mattered to her...Azin [one of the married students] said that the most important thing in life was the mystical union one felt with the universe. She added, philosophically , that men were just vessels for that higher spiritual love... By the time I had chopped the cucumbers and the herbs, adding them to the yogurt, I had come to a conclusion:our culture shunned sex because it was too involved in it. It had to suppress sex violently for the same reason that an impotent man will put his beautiful wife under lock and key. We had always segregated sex from feeling and from intellectual love, so you were either pure and virtuous, or dirty and fun. What was alien to us was eros, true sensuality. These girls, my girls knew a great deal about Jane Austen, they could discusss James and Woolf intelligently, but they knew next to nothing about what they should expect of these bodies which, they had been told, were the source of all temptation. Link to post Share on other sites
VivreEstEsperer Posted February 12, 2004 Share Posted February 12, 2004 Huh, that's very interesting! I'm not sure exactly what to make of it. Link to post Share on other sites
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