Chairman of the American Conservative Union and former White House Director Matthew Schlapp recently offered a bit of illustrative wit. When asked about the 160 Iranian schoolgirls killed in an airstrike that a Pentagon probe and international human rights investigations1 have found the U.S. is likely responsible for2, he replied, they would otherwise have been “alive in a burqa.”3
Misogyny vs Murder
The statement was widely condemned for its callousness and ignorance. As it should be, as society ought at minimum to know murder is typically barbaric. But his remark matters for another interesting reason (beyond general indictment of the U.S. pundit class). The proposition, stated plainly, is the title of this essay. Why is conformity to nonconforming liberal sexual norms marshaled as the primary freedom for women? Also, who does it serve, and why must that framing not be allowed to stand? Women, vulnerable populations, may be detained, dispossessed, starved, bombed, torpedoed, and girls massacred in what is now being scrutinized as the fault of AI or out-of-date target data4, but should a society already bearing the brunt of this fail the cherry-picked test of gender modernity, this renders them civilizationally disqualifying. It is one of the little witticisms of contemporary media morality that misogyny and homophobia are graver offenses than murder.
We usually object by pointing to their hypocrisy, and defend by pointing to women’s autonomy and choice. Most objectors to sentiments like the one Schlapp professed, explain that we, as subjects of and in the West, have little standing to lecture others about progress while backing war. Additionally, conservative deployment of sexual freedom here is especially revealing. The freedoms they prescribe for Iranian women are ones they enjoy privately yet legislate against publicly in the U.S. – extramarital affairs, sexual libertinism, Grindr scandals, to name a few – suggesting that what’s exported is a useful ideological instrument and fantasy.
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Or, as I remember watching a clip of a comedian professing a species of glib progressive banter that, given enough time without being carpet-bombed (note the passive term – these questions seldom indict the doer’s worldview), Gazans might eventually “get to gay.”5 His line of defense for Palestine, good intentions aside, was poor anthropology of satisfactory pacing towards a liberal metropole. But can we go further and look at the epistemic framework? Why the primarily sexual nature of (Muslim) women’s freedom? How is this tenable, given the unspeakable scale of destruction wrought, and pointedly in a post-Epstein revelation?
The Cost-Effectiveness of Women’s Liberation
Part of the answer does lie in modern public political reason. It is very good at recognizing freedoms that can be cast as private acts, such as those of dress, self-expression, intimacy, etc., because they are litigated at relatively low cost. Public reason is far less good at recognizing freedoms that depend on collective provisions. Think of housing security, public transport, and healthcare, all of which require institutions and political economy (in sum, a bikini does not require land reform). This does not mean liberalism does not care for material conditions.6 But dominant contemporary discourse (including media, NGOs, rights discourse, and elite politics) privileges negatively conceived, low-cost liberties. One can therefore be passionately and outwardly exhibiting a desire for women’s liberation, while remaining entirely indifferent to (or supportive of) sanctions, bombardment, austerity, social collapse, the entire gamut of terrible things, and this is an internally consistent position.
We may intuitively know this, but remain hesitant to cross the line beyond calling it a hypocrisy into naming this libidinal economy of humiliation for what it is. No amount of disclaimers as to the true nature of the Shari’a or wrongful politics in the implementation of it, the excellence of Iranian women graduates, or describing the follies of the West – having arrived early to its current enthusiasms now reserving the right to discipline others for exhibiting traits it itself shed recently – will suffice, if we simply stop here.
The larger problem is that Muslim societies are described through a particular lens where time, place, class, institutions, strategy, and state interest are thinned out or disappear altogether7. Processes that could and would elsewhere be located alongside state formation and regional competition/conflict, militarization, or without deep interrogation into doctrine, even when, yes, that language is religious (I’ve previously written about Buddhist nationalism and the ongoing Rohingya ethnic cleansing, for example), are instead read as an indictment of a single theological civilizational body8. Veiling has acquired density now more than its reality, to which we can register anxieties about Islam9. It is made to do too much explanatory work.
The Muslim Woman and the Libidinal Economy
I do not deny that norms governing women’s dress intersect with legal status, mobility, employment, or family structure. But it is not a proxy for them. It is a shorthand that should be refused, because it replaces concrete inquiry into state power and policy. The consequence is that liberation is displaced from the level of political economy to that of sexual life. Emancipation now is articulated as an exit from the most distinguishing religious norms, producing endless overreach in the process, leading to a severe contraction of the emancipatory horizon. Sovereignty, redistribution, peace, social provisions, the gamut of just things, recede while obscuring the perpetual war machine and its horrific consequences.
Fewer groups have been more burdened by this arrangement than the Muslim woman. She is a woman under compulsion, regardless of all else, one we can violently displace to modernity by becoming a woman in circulation.
Thus, the expanding sexual market within the libidinal economy. Sex sells, nakedness sells. I don’t need to go down the route of conspiracy to speak plainly of pragmatic expansionary logic and its churn for fresh material (explicit comments on X about pornography and Iranian women, and some diaspora women’s own deployment of sexualized self-presentation on social media, are testimonies to this). The sexual market is a behemoth we (certainly I) do not quite grasp the magnitude of. For example, the global pornography industry generates an estimated tens of billions annually. Advertising, tourism, and surveillance capital all make the question of who profits from the expanded circulation of sex an urgent political-economic one; meanwhile, we Americans have yet to contend with the full enormity of the Epstein files.
Libidinal economies leave untouched those structures that rendered women in these regions precarious in the first place and, in fact, find them conducive to the project of expanding the sexual marketplace. Secular modernity finds the publicly naked body as the body least governed by transcendent authority or any communal or divine norms10. Consider the overbloated and heedless makeup and fashion and influencer realms, lingerie-style dresses masquerading as harmless trends.
Consider pornography production company BangBros launching “Tour of Booty”: a staged fantasy series consisting of videos shot on cameras mounted on the rifles of American soldiers on tour in the Middle East and Afghanistan. (For your own sake, do not look this up.) This is the same company that “pitched the idea of Mia Khalifa wearing the hijab to ‘play up the idea that she was “the pretty Persian girl gone bad”.11’” Another production company created a Hijab Hookup series12, describing its premise: “When growing up in a conservative and traditional culture, you must suppress your deepest desires. The Middle Eastern babes of Hijab Hookup know way too well how hard it is to keep their sexual urges silent, and they are finally ready to let their inhibitions run free! With the help of the right man, these hijabi ladies can’t wait to experience what the rigid cultural rules have withheld from them.”13 The unveiled, sexually available body is the body most fully converted into circulating sexual capital. Religious discipline of any kind, whether or not from the Islamic standpoint is correct, is irrelevant, as they all appear as an obstruction to this circulation.
This is why defending Muslim women by using the language of choice or pointing to the wisdom of modesty will not work because this framework does not want an answer about veiling; it wants it to displace every other question.
Zionism, the Sexual Marketplace, and the Munitions Industry
One of the ways Israel and Zionist supporters consolidate Western legitimacy is to position themselves as guardians of a sexual modernity that the Muslim world has not yet attained. The effect is that the expansion of the sexual marketplace and the expansion of the security state become mutually reinforcing projects. For example, a small number of ultra-wealthy donors have often had outsized influence on pro-Israel advocacy and U.S. policy discourse. As I write this (on March 23, 2026), headlines announce that Leonid Radvinsky, the owner of OnlyFans, has passed away, after a career profiting from pornography by “first buil[ding] a shady business as a teenager in which he operated websites that claimed to lead users to porn content involving underage children or bestiality.”14 He and his wife reportedly pledged $11 million to AIPAC in 2024.15
The current war with Iran, like its predecessors, recycles the same discourse. What the Shari’a dictates of women and how that has played out in Iran’s socio-politico-historical evolution, what Iranian women are doing or what abuses they face is irrelevant; the U.S. and Israel have already decided a priori that they are sexually deficient and in need. The marketplace, as it turns out, expands in one direction, and the munitions follow.
The public may have condemned Schlapp’s statement, but it remains a reality that U.S. and Israeli aggression is violently proselytizing so long as it can still imagine itself as delivering women into modernity. So much so that a justification of murder by an audit of gender and sexual mores is respectable enough to conjure some attempt at serious response.
A serious account of liberation would ask what the endpoint is, not whether a woman is visibly “modern.” It would recognize that war rearranges gendered life in ways that peacetime morality and those living in peace scarcely understand, and determine whether they possess durable access to the necessaries of life. Until that confusion is cleared, the world will continue to be instructed, with great moral urgency, that the worst fate imaginable is to be insufficiently promiscuous in one’s intimacies, even while one is buried under rubble.
Related:
– Hijab And Niqab In North America: Politics, Identity, And Media Representation
– From Sri Lanka – The Niqab Ban and The Politics of Distraction
#Culture3 weeks ago
