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Abusing Religion: Literary Persecution, Sex Scandals, and American Minority Religions
Sex abuse happens in all communities, but American minority religions often face disproportionate allegations of sexual abuse. Why, in a country that consistently fails to acknowledge—much less address—the sexual abuse of women and children, do American religious outsiders so often face allegations of sexual misconduct? Why does the American public presume to know “what’s really going on” in minority religious communities? Why are sex abuse allegations such an effective way to discredit people on America’s religious margins? What makes Americans so willing, so eager to identify religion as the cause of sex abuse? Abusing Religion argues that sex abuse in minority religious communities is an American problem, not (merely) a religious one.
238 pages, Paperback
Published July 17, 2020
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
July 31, 2021
Absolutely fascinating book about how American society makes a spectacular display of fighting sex abuse involving "outsiders" or minority religious communities, while totally ignoring (and thereby giving cover to) the abuse in mainstream institutions. I grew up Catholic when the clergy scandal broke. Of course, this scandal was swiftly blamed on gays who'd "infiltrated" the church. It couldn't possibly be that the Church's theology, tradition, and hierarchical structure gave rise to such abuse. But when it came to stories of abuse in Arab/Muslim communities, well, these stories *were* representative of the religion at large because that's “who they are.” Goodwin considers the commercial success of Not Without My Daughter, suggesting that the book and film resonated with Americans precisely because they gelled with Americans' pre-existing views of Islam as inherently violent, barbaric, etc.
In the beginning of the book, Goodwin discusses the "catholicization" of America, by which she means the mainstreaming of Catholic thought in post-Roe public life. Catholics, she says, influenced evangelicals and right-wing politicians by giving them the concepts of "the family" and "contraceptive nationalism," whereby sexual purity and so-called traditional family values become the means to protect America from literal and figurative insemination by dark-skinned others. Going back to Not Without My Daughter, the white woman played by Sally Field is innocent, vulnerable--a stand-in for the nation. She must be saved from the beast-like Muslim, who, more metaphorically, is trying to rape America. (This plot is also a reformulation of anti-Black propaganda like Birth of a Nation.)
I wish there'd been more on Catholicism's influence on the modern right, as there isn't a lot of scholarship on this topic compared to white evangelicalism’s influence. I do wonder, though, if it's really Catholics who gave the modern right the concept of the family or if it's secular eugenicists. Eugenicists like Paul Popenoe had a major influence on folks like James Dobson, and blatanlty eugenicist books like The Birth Dearth shaped the rhetoric of high-profile Catholics like Pat Buchanan in the '90s. I recently wrote about this here: https://religionandpolitics.org/2021/...
Highly recommend this book or at least listening to Goodwin on SWAJ podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast...
Goodwin is brilliant, sarcastic, and witty, and I'll definitely look forward to more of her work.
In the beginning of the book, Goodwin discusses the "catholicization" of America, by which she means the mainstreaming of Catholic thought in post-Roe public life. Catholics, she says, influenced evangelicals and right-wing politicians by giving them the concepts of "the family" and "contraceptive nationalism," whereby sexual purity and so-called traditional family values become the means to protect America from literal and figurative insemination by dark-skinned others. Going back to Not Without My Daughter, the white woman played by Sally Field is innocent, vulnerable--a stand-in for the nation. She must be saved from the beast-like Muslim, who, more metaphorically, is trying to rape America. (This plot is also a reformulation of anti-Black propaganda like Birth of a Nation.)
I wish there'd been more on Catholicism's influence on the modern right, as there isn't a lot of scholarship on this topic compared to white evangelicalism’s influence. I do wonder, though, if it's really Catholics who gave the modern right the concept of the family or if it's secular eugenicists. Eugenicists like Paul Popenoe had a major influence on folks like James Dobson, and blatanlty eugenicist books like The Birth Dearth shaped the rhetoric of high-profile Catholics like Pat Buchanan in the '90s. I recently wrote about this here: https://religionandpolitics.org/2021/...
Highly recommend this book or at least listening to Goodwin on SWAJ podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast...
Goodwin is brilliant, sarcastic, and witty, and I'll definitely look forward to more of her work.
May 1, 2023
This is one of the most important books that I read this semester. RTC.
November 11, 2020
Wow, I found this a super interesting analysis, bringing race and gender theories to nationalism and religion. Thought-provoking from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, as well as mainline Protestantism.
June 16, 2024
I began this book with high expectations that carried me through the intro and the first section, even though the book soon became not merely monumentally grim but tedious and unconvincing. I went from underlining passages I found provocative and interesting, to underlining nothing because nothing was particularly interesting, to underlining passages because they were ridiculous.
It's been almost a year since I read Part 1 of Abusing Religion; I can't remember it well enough to critique it. (The book was so boring and annoying that I would set it aside for months at a time. Eventually I powered through it because I wanted to see how terrible the Mormon shit was. More on that later.) I do remember Part 2, however, which is an analysis of Not Without My Daughter by Betty Mahmoody. Of Mahmoody's decision to submit to sex she finds distasteful as a way of placating an abusive husband, Goodwin writes, "the author emasculates [her husband] and reaffirms her own sexual exceptionalism.... Her covert use of contraception functions both to further emasculate her husband and to instantiate her own sexual agency" (88).
What the actual fuck. Seriously? A woman submitting to sex because she knows she can't really say no is in reality "emasculating" her husband? Not telling an abusive husband she's using contraception is another way of "emasculating" him? Did Goodwin write those sentences in an essay in a sophomore intro to religious studies class and just never reconsider them? What is Goodwin saying about Muslim men? Is their masculinity really so fragile? What is Goodwin says about women (who may or may not be Muslim themselves) married to Muslim men? Should those women be willing to get pregnant as often as their husbands want to knock them up, just so the women won't "emasculate" them?
Goodwin never seriously entertains the possibility that Betty Mahmoody and her daughter really were held prisoner in Iran by Mahmoody's husband and his family for 18 months, and that religion might have had anything to do with the treatment a woman and girl might receive in Iran in 1984-86, a time when Iran was a religious theocracy ruled by a supreme leader. (It still is, just fyi.) Instead, Goodwin claims that "Daughter articulates and authorizes anti-Muslim religious intolerance, while deploying anti-Muslim sentiment to discourage exogamy" (91). Again: WTAF?
Goodwin whines that "narratives like Daughter also portray Islam as condoning domestic abuse and marital rape without confronting the extensive prevalence of both phenomena within American households irrespective of religious identification" (96). Even if that's true, so what? It's not like Mahmoody has any obligation to do so, or that her decision to focus on her own experience invalidates that experience. Goodwin, after all, doesn't write about sexual abuse among Evangelical Christians (I do wonder how she would contrive to minimize and dismiss the accounts of abuse in something like Shiny Happy People, a 2023 documentary about the Duggars and their extended community) or Jehovah's Witnesses. Does that automatically invalidate her discussions of abuse in the religions she instead focuses on?
Part 3 of Goodwin's book deals with sexual abuse within the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, accusations of which led to a raid on the FLDS Yearning for Zion compound in Texas. Part 3 contains some of the stupidest statements I've ever read about Mormon polygamy written by a non-Mormon--generally, one has to be a practicing Mormon to produce statements as inane and insane as Goodwin's statements here. For starters, Goodwin claims that the FLDS approach to polygyny is "celestial, not lascivious" (107) instead of acknowledging that it can be both.
The third paragraph of Goodwin's discussion of the FLDS begins by acknowledging that "allowing the abuse of women and children is always and everywhere a community failing as well as an intimate violence" (102). This acknowledgment stands in contract to a passage she quotes approving: "For all the YFZ children, except for a handful of pubescent girls who, between the ages of fifteen and seventeen, were found to have had children, no other evidence has been submitted of any abuse or neglect, physical or sexual" (128). Oh, OK: except for the statutory rapes and pregnancies of multiple girls, "no evidence" of "abuse or neglect, physical or sexual" has been submitted.
Goodwin laments "the failure to distinguish between sexual abuse and a theologically sanctioned and intraculturally accepted practice of religiosexual difference--that is, plural marriage" (113) without ever acknowledging the very real possibility that there need not be any difference, that "a theologically sanctioned and intraculturally accepted practice of religiosexual difference" can indeed be a form of sexual abuse.
Goodwin reminds readers that sexual abuse happens among people who do not consider themselves religious, but Goodwin never grapples with the extent to which our secular society grew out of a religious one, or how religious texts and beliefs shaped our ideas of gender, sexuality, and patriarchy. IOW, when Goodwin claims that "attributing sexual abuse to religious peculiarity rather than to systematic violence does little to address the root cause of abuse" (129), she's completely missing the point that a system that advocates the execution of adulterers and rebellious children might actually be part of the root cause of abuse (See: Deuteronomy).
Goodwin claims that "discourse that identifies religious minorities as especially prone to sexual predation ignores larger systemic issues that perpetuate the abuse of women and children in broader American society" (130) without showing that that's true and without acknowledging that she herself arrives at a similar judgment in her conclusion, where she writes, "Considering Catholic clergy sex abuse also provokes the question of what, precisely is religious about these abuses" (140, emphasis in original). In the same paragraph, discussing the conditions that allowed the Catholic Church to hide for so long the systematic abuse of children by clergy, Goodwin writes, "These conditions of concealment, denial and enabling do not mere facilitate abuse--they produce abusers" (140, emphasis in original).
JFC, Megan: I wish it hadn't taken you 140 miserable pages to figure that out, but better late than never. Unfortunately, however, Goodwin never figures out that those religious conditions also "produce" victims. Religious commands and teachings are used to make people ignorant and ashamed of their bodies, respectful and deferential of authority, and willing to obey commands that seem wrongheaded and harmful. Religion is easily exploited as a means of grooming victims, who must be taught to participate in the "concealment, denial and enabling" of the abuse perpetrated on them.
Goodwin never grapples with what it means to be told from birth that failure to submit to "a theologically sanctioned and intraculturally accepted practice of religiosexual difference--that is, plural marriage" (113) will result in damning your whole family and condemning them to eternal torment--and will get you locked up, beaten, and/or separated from your family of origin. Goodwin quotes political scientist Susan Song's claim that "religious and cultural groups should be let alone as long as membership in these groups is voluntary. Not voluntary in the sense that a religious belief and attachments are experienced as choices, but rather than individual members can, if they wish, exit groups" (132). But leaving the FLDS is not voluntary, especially if you're a cute teenage girl. People who try to leave face all sorts of obstacles before they leave and severe punishment afterward if they do manage to get out. Nor is refusing a marriage or pregnancy something people with uteruses are allowed to do in the FLDS. Goodwin invokes FLDS women who say they have chosen their lives without coercion, but that cannot be true when they have no meaningful way of choosing otherwise: that's what coercion means.
Goodwin notes that the response to the Catholic church's clergy abuse scandal did not involved "deployment of armored personnel carries to Catholic parish parking lots" (138), but maybe it would have if people had learned that Catholic parents were voluntarily handing their minor children over to priests to be married, raped, and impregnated by men ranging in ages from 18 to 88. Goodwin also notes that "the heroes of those stories [of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy] are also Catholic" (139, emphasis in oiriginal) before noting that the stories she discusses in her book "do not offer nuanced, complicated insights into religions on America's margins" (140), a failing she herself is guilty of. Her statements about (F)LDS polygamy are binary, simplistic, and devoid of nuance. Furthermore, she might have found some FLDS "heroes" if she had bothered to talk to any women who actually left it and helped others escape.
In her epilogue, Goodwin shares an anecdote about the priest who "was there when [Goodwin] made [her] first confession" (142) and was likewise present at many events throughout seven years of Goodwin's religious training--and who asked her to sit on his lap during confession. After dismissing her own experience as trivial, Goodwin writes, "I am also acutely aware of how much cultural work goes into getting survivors to convince themselves that what happened to them was not that bad--how well we learn those lessons, and how much easier it is to say or do nothing at all" (143) without ever considering how that might also apply to the FLDS women and girls she insists "choose" to enter polygynous marriages as 14-year-olds or stay in as 40-something women with a slew of children and no education.
In her epilogue, Goodwin writes
No fucking duh, Megan! Your whole book is an example of that. Think about how stupid someone has to be to write a paragraph like that after scolding people for "the failure to distinguish between sexual abuse and a theologically sanctioned and intraculturally accepted practice of religiosexual difference" (113) like marrying 14-year-old girls off to 65-year-old men. Not only has religion been "rendered special in Goodwin's mind," which keeps HER "from recognizing certain behaviors, certain requests, certain habits, as abusive," she condemns those who don't suffer from her reprehensible form of intellectual and ethical blindness.
Goodwin also claims that "the abuse of American women and children in religious communities is not a religion problem. It is an American one" (146, emphasis in original). Yet again: What The Actual Fuck? Is Goodwin unaware that Mormon polygamists also live in Canada and Mexico, and that recalcitrant girls are shipped around the continent precisely to be out of reach of friends and relatives who could offer help--much like Betty Mahmoody in Iran? I know of plenty of Americans who high-tailed it to Mexico so they could be polygamists, all while retaining American citizenship. Goodwin cannot be so ignorant as to imagine that the sexual abuse of children by Catholic clergy happened only in the USA. Surely she is not ignorant of the fact that at least four dozen Catholic priests credibly accused of sexual assault were transferred from the US to other countries, where they were beyond the reach of the US legal system. Leaving aside the readily available fact that the sexual abuse of children by Catholic clergy is a global atrocity (Wikipedia to the rescue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholi...) mismanaged by the Holy See (someone tell Goodwin: the Holy See is not in the United States), why can't "the abuse of American women and children in religious communities" be both "a religion problem" AND "an American" problem?
What a fucking shitshow this whole embarrassing book is. It provides arguments perpetrators will use to "name and define [a] reality" in which sexual abuse of minors and the systematic oppression of women are defended as "a theologically sanctioned and intraculturally accepted practice of religiosexual difference."
And now, having read and reviewed this piece of unmitigated trash, I am going to throw up and take a shower.
ETA June 16, 2024: I'm reading The Tragedy of Heterosexuality, in which the author, Jane Ward, discusses Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity as a lens into heterosexual misogyny. Ward writes:
IOW, there was a lot more going on in Betty Mahmoody's memoir about the misogyny and violence she experienced in Iran than her just being bigoted against Islam, but Goodwin is either ignorant of it or refusing to acknowledge it. Either way, Goodwin's critique is utter crap.
It's been almost a year since I read Part 1 of Abusing Religion; I can't remember it well enough to critique it. (The book was so boring and annoying that I would set it aside for months at a time. Eventually I powered through it because I wanted to see how terrible the Mormon shit was. More on that later.) I do remember Part 2, however, which is an analysis of Not Without My Daughter by Betty Mahmoody. Of Mahmoody's decision to submit to sex she finds distasteful as a way of placating an abusive husband, Goodwin writes, "the author emasculates [her husband] and reaffirms her own sexual exceptionalism.... Her covert use of contraception functions both to further emasculate her husband and to instantiate her own sexual agency" (88).
What the actual fuck. Seriously? A woman submitting to sex because she knows she can't really say no is in reality "emasculating" her husband? Not telling an abusive husband she's using contraception is another way of "emasculating" him? Did Goodwin write those sentences in an essay in a sophomore intro to religious studies class and just never reconsider them? What is Goodwin saying about Muslim men? Is their masculinity really so fragile? What is Goodwin says about women (who may or may not be Muslim themselves) married to Muslim men? Should those women be willing to get pregnant as often as their husbands want to knock them up, just so the women won't "emasculate" them?
Goodwin never seriously entertains the possibility that Betty Mahmoody and her daughter really were held prisoner in Iran by Mahmoody's husband and his family for 18 months, and that religion might have had anything to do with the treatment a woman and girl might receive in Iran in 1984-86, a time when Iran was a religious theocracy ruled by a supreme leader. (It still is, just fyi.) Instead, Goodwin claims that "Daughter articulates and authorizes anti-Muslim religious intolerance, while deploying anti-Muslim sentiment to discourage exogamy" (91). Again: WTAF?
Goodwin whines that "narratives like Daughter also portray Islam as condoning domestic abuse and marital rape without confronting the extensive prevalence of both phenomena within American households irrespective of religious identification" (96). Even if that's true, so what? It's not like Mahmoody has any obligation to do so, or that her decision to focus on her own experience invalidates that experience. Goodwin, after all, doesn't write about sexual abuse among Evangelical Christians (I do wonder how she would contrive to minimize and dismiss the accounts of abuse in something like Shiny Happy People, a 2023 documentary about the Duggars and their extended community) or Jehovah's Witnesses. Does that automatically invalidate her discussions of abuse in the religions she instead focuses on?
Part 3 of Goodwin's book deals with sexual abuse within the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, accusations of which led to a raid on the FLDS Yearning for Zion compound in Texas. Part 3 contains some of the stupidest statements I've ever read about Mormon polygamy written by a non-Mormon--generally, one has to be a practicing Mormon to produce statements as inane and insane as Goodwin's statements here. For starters, Goodwin claims that the FLDS approach to polygyny is "celestial, not lascivious" (107) instead of acknowledging that it can be both.
The third paragraph of Goodwin's discussion of the FLDS begins by acknowledging that "allowing the abuse of women and children is always and everywhere a community failing as well as an intimate violence" (102). This acknowledgment stands in contract to a passage she quotes approving: "For all the YFZ children, except for a handful of pubescent girls who, between the ages of fifteen and seventeen, were found to have had children, no other evidence has been submitted of any abuse or neglect, physical or sexual" (128). Oh, OK: except for the statutory rapes and pregnancies of multiple girls, "no evidence" of "abuse or neglect, physical or sexual" has been submitted.
Goodwin laments "the failure to distinguish between sexual abuse and a theologically sanctioned and intraculturally accepted practice of religiosexual difference--that is, plural marriage" (113) without ever acknowledging the very real possibility that there need not be any difference, that "a theologically sanctioned and intraculturally accepted practice of religiosexual difference" can indeed be a form of sexual abuse.
Goodwin reminds readers that sexual abuse happens among people who do not consider themselves religious, but Goodwin never grapples with the extent to which our secular society grew out of a religious one, or how religious texts and beliefs shaped our ideas of gender, sexuality, and patriarchy. IOW, when Goodwin claims that "attributing sexual abuse to religious peculiarity rather than to systematic violence does little to address the root cause of abuse" (129), she's completely missing the point that a system that advocates the execution of adulterers and rebellious children might actually be part of the root cause of abuse (See: Deuteronomy).
Goodwin claims that "discourse that identifies religious minorities as especially prone to sexual predation ignores larger systemic issues that perpetuate the abuse of women and children in broader American society" (130) without showing that that's true and without acknowledging that she herself arrives at a similar judgment in her conclusion, where she writes, "Considering Catholic clergy sex abuse also provokes the question of what, precisely is religious about these abuses" (140, emphasis in original). In the same paragraph, discussing the conditions that allowed the Catholic Church to hide for so long the systematic abuse of children by clergy, Goodwin writes, "These conditions of concealment, denial and enabling do not mere facilitate abuse--they produce abusers" (140, emphasis in original).
JFC, Megan: I wish it hadn't taken you 140 miserable pages to figure that out, but better late than never. Unfortunately, however, Goodwin never figures out that those religious conditions also "produce" victims. Religious commands and teachings are used to make people ignorant and ashamed of their bodies, respectful and deferential of authority, and willing to obey commands that seem wrongheaded and harmful. Religion is easily exploited as a means of grooming victims, who must be taught to participate in the "concealment, denial and enabling" of the abuse perpetrated on them.
Goodwin never grapples with what it means to be told from birth that failure to submit to "a theologically sanctioned and intraculturally accepted practice of religiosexual difference--that is, plural marriage" (113) will result in damning your whole family and condemning them to eternal torment--and will get you locked up, beaten, and/or separated from your family of origin. Goodwin quotes political scientist Susan Song's claim that "religious and cultural groups should be let alone as long as membership in these groups is voluntary. Not voluntary in the sense that a religious belief and attachments are experienced as choices, but rather than individual members can, if they wish, exit groups" (132). But leaving the FLDS is not voluntary, especially if you're a cute teenage girl. People who try to leave face all sorts of obstacles before they leave and severe punishment afterward if they do manage to get out. Nor is refusing a marriage or pregnancy something people with uteruses are allowed to do in the FLDS. Goodwin invokes FLDS women who say they have chosen their lives without coercion, but that cannot be true when they have no meaningful way of choosing otherwise: that's what coercion means.
Goodwin notes that the response to the Catholic church's clergy abuse scandal did not involved "deployment of armored personnel carries to Catholic parish parking lots" (138), but maybe it would have if people had learned that Catholic parents were voluntarily handing their minor children over to priests to be married, raped, and impregnated by men ranging in ages from 18 to 88. Goodwin also notes that "the heroes of those stories [of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy] are also Catholic" (139, emphasis in oiriginal) before noting that the stories she discusses in her book "do not offer nuanced, complicated insights into religions on America's margins" (140), a failing she herself is guilty of. Her statements about (F)LDS polygamy are binary, simplistic, and devoid of nuance. Furthermore, she might have found some FLDS "heroes" if she had bothered to talk to any women who actually left it and helped others escape.
In her epilogue, Goodwin shares an anecdote about the priest who "was there when [Goodwin] made [her] first confession" (142) and was likewise present at many events throughout seven years of Goodwin's religious training--and who asked her to sit on his lap during confession. After dismissing her own experience as trivial, Goodwin writes, "I am also acutely aware of how much cultural work goes into getting survivors to convince themselves that what happened to them was not that bad--how well we learn those lessons, and how much easier it is to say or do nothing at all" (143) without ever considering how that might also apply to the FLDS women and girls she insists "choose" to enter polygynous marriages as 14-year-olds or stay in as 40-something women with a slew of children and no education.
In her epilogue, Goodwin writes
Religious authority figures who abuse women and children do not do so because they are religious, but religion--protected by the Constitution of the United States, rendered special in the minds of Americans--too often provides cover for abusers and imbues them with power. "The more powerful the perpetrator, the greater his prerogative to name and define reality, and the more completely his arguments with prevail," writes Judith Herman (Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, 8). Religion can keep us from recognizing certain behaviors, certain requests, certain habits, as abusive. (144)
No fucking duh, Megan! Your whole book is an example of that. Think about how stupid someone has to be to write a paragraph like that after scolding people for "the failure to distinguish between sexual abuse and a theologically sanctioned and intraculturally accepted practice of religiosexual difference" (113) like marrying 14-year-old girls off to 65-year-old men. Not only has religion been "rendered special in Goodwin's mind," which keeps HER "from recognizing certain behaviors, certain requests, certain habits, as abusive," she condemns those who don't suffer from her reprehensible form of intellectual and ethical blindness.
Goodwin also claims that "the abuse of American women and children in religious communities is not a religion problem. It is an American one" (146, emphasis in original). Yet again: What The Actual Fuck? Is Goodwin unaware that Mormon polygamists also live in Canada and Mexico, and that recalcitrant girls are shipped around the continent precisely to be out of reach of friends and relatives who could offer help--much like Betty Mahmoody in Iran? I know of plenty of Americans who high-tailed it to Mexico so they could be polygamists, all while retaining American citizenship. Goodwin cannot be so ignorant as to imagine that the sexual abuse of children by Catholic clergy happened only in the USA. Surely she is not ignorant of the fact that at least four dozen Catholic priests credibly accused of sexual assault were transferred from the US to other countries, where they were beyond the reach of the US legal system. Leaving aside the readily available fact that the sexual abuse of children by Catholic clergy is a global atrocity (Wikipedia to the rescue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholi...) mismanaged by the Holy See (someone tell Goodwin: the Holy See is not in the United States), why can't "the abuse of American women and children in religious communities" be both "a religion problem" AND "an American" problem?
What a fucking shitshow this whole embarrassing book is. It provides arguments perpetrators will use to "name and define [a] reality" in which sexual abuse of minors and the systematic oppression of women are defended as "a theologically sanctioned and intraculturally accepted practice of religiosexual difference."
And now, having read and reviewed this piece of unmitigated trash, I am going to throw up and take a shower.
ETA June 16, 2024: I'm reading The Tragedy of Heterosexuality, in which the author, Jane Ward, discusses Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity as a lens into heterosexual misogyny. Ward writes:
Though Najmabadi's focus is on nineteenth century Iran, her book is a case study with global and contemporary significance as it highlights the intersections between misogyny, heterosexuality, and imperialism. In a nutshell, Najmabadi argues that as the new concept of heterosexuality began to circulate in the nineteenth century, Iranians resisted one of its defining principles--that men should feel love for, and desire companionship with, women. This idea was a "hard sell;' Najmabadi explains, not only because it conflicted with long-standing beliefs about women's subordination and degraded status (how could men love their inferiors?) but also because most Iranians had lived in gender-segregated and homosocial (if not homoerotic) environments in which intimacy was reserved for people of the same sex. Najmabadi further explains that even heterosexual lust was looked upon with suspicion by some Iranian commentators, because it stood to threaten men's patriarchal power: "if a woman can satisfy a man's desire, he may become enamored of her, develop an affection bordering on love, and consequently, become subordinate to her?' And yet, under the imperialist influence of Europe, where new ideas about the superiority of heterosexual romantic love and the pathology of homosociality were rapidly taking hold, the Iranian state launched a cultural campaign to encourage men and women to direct their affections toward each other. This represented a dramatic shift in the way that men's relationships with women were conceptualized, and it presented something of a paradox: "falling in love was what a man did with other men ... [and] falling in love with women more often than not was unmanly;' but modern heterosexuality compelled men to engage in precisely this unmanly act.
Najmabadi's book drew my attention to two seemingly obvious but rarely acknowledged points: (1) modern notions of heterosexuality require men to feel love and affection for women, the very population they have dominated and dehumanized for centuries, and (2) this has caused many problems for straight people, who are struggling to transition from the trauma and legacy of misogyny to something more authentically "straight"-if by straightness, we mean authentic and noncoercive heterosexual love. While Najmabadi's focus was on Iran, there is evidence across the globe of men's resistance to loving their wives and other women sexual partners and of the historically and culturally varied manifestations of women's horrific subjugation by men in marriage.
IOW, there was a lot more going on in Betty Mahmoody's memoir about the misogyny and violence she experienced in Iran than her just being bigoted against Islam, but Goodwin is either ignorant of it or refusing to acknowledge it. Either way, Goodwin's critique is utter crap.
April 4, 2022
Focuses in on her coined term contraceptive nationalism to explain the demonization of minority religions when sexual scandal occurs. I'm convinced people use sexual scandal to characterize religions they don't understand but I think this also applies just as much to Christianity anywhere where it isn't the dominate religion. In the first few century bisophs were killed for canabalism and have love orgies. News flash they were simple partaking in the lords supper or the Eucharist. Being a minority religion that wasn't understood Christianity was demonized by Rome. So I don't find her point profound or helpful in bettering the world. Protestant Christian values happens to be the majority in the USA (whatever that means because protestantism is just build your own Christianity.) This book finds instances of the majority reacting poorly and painting minority religions with the stroke of their worst members but that always happens and will always happen. I would suggest that books exaggerate the problem by not looking at the larger dynamics of history. Alot of her analysis is very good, just not helpful or novel. I enjoyed this book but I would have liked to see it linked revelantly to a larger conclusion or solution.
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