Making the World Safe for Pimpocracy

By Crispin Sartwell

The Miss World pageant seems an odd occasion for the outbreak of sectarian violence. Americans might appreciate beauty pageants, or we might not, but either way we don't feel so strongly about them that we start dumping bodies in storm drains, as they seem to be doing in Nigeria.

And indeed, the pageant is to some extent merely an occasion: obviously various tensions - particularly between Moslems and Christians - long ago exceeded the boiling point.

But it is important to understand why a beauty pageant could actually touch this off.

Traditional Moslem men believe that women should not allow themselves to be objects of visual display for men other than their husbands. We western men disagree: disagree so vociferously in fact that it at times seems like we care about little else than that all reasonably attractive women parade themselves for our delectation.

At the widest scope, what is occurring, in the context of the "war on terror" and a variety of other factors, is a worldwide clash between "traditional" and "Western" cultures. Folks from orthodox Muslims to Rastafarians to orthodox Jews to the Amish to fundamentalist Christians to the vestiges of tribal cultures try to preserve their existence against the unremitting onslaught of global capitalism.

And though the schism in Nigeria is described as being between Moslems and Christians, the Miss World pageant is hardly a Christian religious festival, and the conflict is also between an urbanized and westernized south, and a traditional north.

One of the achievements of which we of the West boast is the freedom of women. And though no doubt the achievements of the West in this regard are considerable, we should not lose sight of the fact that both Islamism and global capitalism are patriarchies. Both seek to administer women for the benefit of men. But they have adopted superficially opposite ways of doing this.

At their most extreme, these ways consist of women draped in traditional garb from Nigeria to Indonesia as opposed to the latest Christina Aguilera video. In "Dirrty," Christina dances with strippers and shakes her oiled assets at the camera over pop music of stupefying banality. She says that, on her latest album ("Stripped") she's finally making music which expresses who she really is: that is, she believes her own work to be a deep and authentic human liberation.

Last week, in an ecstatic though typical moment in American culture, the finale of "The Bachelor" went up against a Victoria's Secret special. On one network, love and commitment amounted entirely to entertainment, provided in the gaps between commercials. On the other an eager public was provided with backstage glimpses of models receiving full-body makeup before emerging onto the runway.

Women, I assert, are no more required to conceal themselves in northern Nigerian villages than they are in Victoria's Secret specials or Miss World contests or Maxim magazines in which every aspect of the human being and her image is manipulated. Now Tyra Banks may well want to dress in lingerie and appear on national television. But trying to sort what Tyra Banks wants from what men want Tyra Banks to want long ago became conceptually impossible.

Nigerian Islamists evidently think that women should be subject to theocracy: the absolute rule of Allah and his sharia. We evidently think that women should be subject to our pimpocracy, in which the most fundamental values are empty sex and cash money.

Amazingly enough, we think that pimpocracy is self-evidently equivalent to liberation, and so we have dedicated ourselves to bringing it to every corner of the globe, no matter what anyone might want. That just might be why they hate our freedom.

Some commentators on both sides have tried to portray the "war on terror" as a war between Christians and Moslems. But our religion doesn't actually seem to be Christianity: it's a religion dedicated to the worship of such deities as Christina Aguilera, the only commandment of which is: "want."

The theocracy stones you to death for adultery, and thus encourages you to abide by its edicts. But the pimpocracy stones you with Christina merchandise; it inculcates its values by dedicating all the world's resources to the arousal and use of desire.

I wonder whether there might be some third choice.