A Modest Middle East Proposal

Sadly, the streets of Beirut are not packed with naked women as suggested by the title of this flyer that I picked up on Friday at the Omari mosque. First of all, it's winter. Secondly, Lebanese women do wear clothes. Tight clothes. But clothes nonetheless.

The flyer is actually concerned with the city's over-the-top billboards and shop displays, which are in fact full of underwear and blue jeans ads of dubious taste. (My favorite gross-out poster is for a nightclub north of town called "Virus" with the slogan: "Get Infected!")

Still, sexy billboards are hardly the new phenomenon that this modesty campaign makes them out to be. Beirutis have had an appreciation for the human form ever since the Greeks and Romans were here, and sexy advertising -- in ever escalating degrees of tackiness -- came with modernity. In fact, this flyer is the new phenomenon. True, in conservative rural areas, billboards of bikini models are often defaced with a splash of paint. But this is the first time I've seen discontent expressed in the capital.

That said, it's hard not to sympathize with the view that Lebanon's mass-media is mindlessly monkeying Western culture's commercialized objectification of women. As Britney Spears and her ilk take over the planet with their cartoonish reduction of female sexuality, Lebanon is producing its own version of the species. Here's a fairly tame example: a magazine covered with a picture of Marwa, a local celebrity. She's actually a singer, not a stripper, despite the fact that she seems ready to rip off her bodice.

If the Lebanese are doing a pretty good job at turning women into mediated objects, we've shown them how. The reality is that the West has done a better job at exporting pornography than democracy to the Middle East. When I was in Iraq in the fall of 2003, a few months after the American invasion, a epidemic of porn addiction was sweeping the country. After years of being shut off from the information-age and watching nothing but state television programming of marching bands and political speeches, Iraqis were deluged with the full-bore 1,001 channel satellite television mind-melt, and many of them couldn't handle it. I'd go into hotel lobbies and the staff would be watching fickey-fickey movies. My tennis coach wanted me to bring him girly magazines. Things got so bad that the American-run press center in the Green Zone, which had donated computers for the use of Iraqi journalists, put up a screen-saver forbidding the surfing of pornographic websites.

Is it a coincidence that there is a resurgence of radical puritanism in the Middle East at a time when we are pumping our ever-more pornified popular culture into the airwaves? The consequences are more serious than just a campaign of funny flyers distributed at moderate mosques. In Lebanon right now, the army is currently at a stand-off with an armed ultra-religious Palestinian faction outside a refugee camp near Sidon. The incident that sparked the siege occurred when a policeman lifted the veil of a woman entering the camp to make sure she wasn't a man smuggling weapons. Outraged members of the group began shooting at the security forces, wounding one policeman in the eye.

Most Muslims in Lebanon, while respecting the modesty and privacy of women who choose to wear veils, would not let that interfere with the interests of public safety. If America really wants to to support moderates like them (and win the so called war on Islamic fascism -- whatever that means) why don't we start sending the Middle East something more substantial than our pay-per-view pop culture.

By Andrew Lee Butters/Beirut