Then there was the astonishing and sad story of Elisabeth Fritzl, the Austrian teenager (now 42) who was held for 24 years as a sexual captive by her father in a tiny basement. And today, there are the ludicrous protests about pop starlet Miley Cyrus' (somewhat) provocative photos for Vanity Fair.
I didn't think about the link between them all till I happened across a story in Arab News about Queen Rania of Jordan speaking at a conference in Saudi Arabia on the suppression of women in the Arab world www.arabnews.com/?page=1§ion=0&article=109352. The reference in her Wikipedia entry about her being the “third most beautiful woman in the world in the 2005 top 100 of Harpers & Queen magazine” was the kicker. It seemed to downgrade her intelligence to a secondary characteristic. Not that I have anything against a beautiful anyone, especially women, and she is using her beauty and her status to address issues in a way no other woman could in Saudi Arabia. She didn't wear a facial veil, for one thing, and some of her hair was distinctly visible. That was as provocative in the Arabian peninsula as the Miley Cyrus pics were to the family values crowd in the U.S. She knows how to employ her power.
She, the wife of a relatively liberal Arab monarch, is working to defuse stereotypes of the submissive Muslim woman in a country that is among the most retrograde in its attitudes to half of humanity. Women in cities there still can't drive cars without risking immediate arrest, even if the laws are being relaxed in less developed areas. She is clearly her own woman, but that's because she is Queen Rania, not Rania Someone Else. She is doubtless back home in Amman by now, and how much impact she had is hard to guess. It's probably minimal. If anything, hard-line Salafists in Riyadh see her as offering a good argument to maintain control over other uppity women.
Josef Fritzl, like Wolfgang Priklopil, the other Austrian who held Natascha Kampusch captive from age 10 to age 18, is someone the working of whose mind I prefer not to speculate upon. As with marriage traditions in Chechnya, I simply don't want to know about how a man could hate his own daughter that much. I only note that he treated her as a possession in the most literal way. Ditto the children he fathered on her.
The Miley Cyrus ruckus is easier to read about because no-one was kidnapped. While I try to ignore pop-starlets, she is ubiquitous and, until now, hard to dislike. But these were not paparazzi shots, but contracted, posed Annie Liebovitz portraits. Stills from the shoot are all over the web, and clearly nobody forced her to doff her top and wrap herself in a sheet. Though she was equally clearly persuaded by Liebovitz, and her handlers acquiesced.
Several things bother me here. One is fathers who consider putting their (more or less) pretty daughters on stage to sing at a time when they should be shrieking “Omigod!” and texting friends about homework assignments, or fretting about males of their own age. Pop music is about sex, even (especially?) the music aimed at pre-pubescent kids. Remember the Spice Girls? The 11-year-olds didn't squeal for them because they sang about Barbie dolls. Or rather, they did, and portrayed them too.
Pop is sex, and sex is power. That's why we like it; or fear it. To listen and dance to it is one thing, but to be up on stage, performing, is to have your sexuality squared, or cubed. You become the source, not the recipient, of the hormonal kick, whatever the lyrics you're singing.
The possession issue here is a distorted mirror-image to the Chechnya/Austrian pervert scenarios: Cyrus was given a “freedom” that no 14-year-old could handle, and at 15 can't manage much better. She is now being pushed to apologise for having done something with her parents and/or management's encouragement. That strikes me as messing with her head - big-time. People at 15 don't take responsibility for their actions, because they haven't quite figured out how to do that one yet. It follows later, when they're granted responsibility. She is, in effect, being told to lie about her own power and her own role, as well as about her own sexuality.
At 15, we are both absorbed by sex and still largely clueless what it's really about, however much we experiment. We need to explore that side of ourselves with some shreds of privacy around us. Denied that, and also asked to deny the obvious by her family and management, this girl strikes me as a candidate for rehab in about four years.
There's a second issue here though, and it's the one that bothered me most as I read the news reports and all the comments. Endless numbers of people were complaining about “the sexualising of young girls.” As just observed, sex is the major preoccupation for anyone in the middle of the second decade of life. What actually is it, when do I get some, how much can I give/take, what's love got to do with it, how late will my parents get home ... Being Christian means you just add to the complexity; you've not altered the basic predicament.
Here, the outraged moms and dads of Smallville perpetuate this possession of girls' sexuality, requiring that teenage girls not think these things. Miley Cyrus (and other young female entertainers I can't be bothered to list) are possessed by proxy, and the possessors now are appalled, the way Saudi Arabian traditionalists are privately appalled by Queen Rania. She must be innocent, the way kidnapped Chechnyan brides must redeem themselves through decades of forced mariage and motherhood. It's just a distorted mirror-image of such kidnapping; but not, sadly, its opposite.
I hope and assume the idea of ownership of women, or ownership over womanhood is fading, but it won't disappear in my lifetime. At least for Miley Cyrus there will be rehab, since she has the money and, no doubt, the support network to tell her the cool place to go and detoxify when she has acquired the habit of anesthetising her self-doubts.
Maybe Queen Rania could explain things to the Cyrus family, or the shocked and appalled crowd? I doubt that she will, though. She sees more important targets in sight. Maybe she'll even make it to Chechnya one of these days.