Boreal

The Fractured Nation Interviews

Maude Barnstone

Sex and the Prophet

Johnny: The Prophet Muhammad as a man who loved women.

Maude: Don’t we all! Look, I’m not a prude. Men will be men, boys will be boys. Most men, especially middle-age men if they’re not gay lust after women other than their wives or girlfriends, especially younger woman and don’t give it a second thought. It’s human nature. For Christ’s sake even Jimmy Carter, that most Christian of Presidents, in the good meaning of the word, admitted in a Playboy interview that he had “looked on a lot of women with lust.”

Johnny: So a Christian President and the Prophet Muhammad lusted after women which you admit is no big deal. What is your point?

Maude: It’s no big deal if you don’t, like Muhammad-the-First, sorry, the Prophet Muhammad use your position as the appointed Messenger of God to make your fantasies come true using tactics that civilized society, or what used to pass for civilized society, would find morally questionable.

Johnny: Muslims hold the Prophet Muhammad as the personification of moral and civilized behaviour, an example to be emulated in every way.

Maude: And there’s the rub. Is it morally acceptable for an older man, or woman for that matter, to use his or her position of power, wealth or simply experience to influence a member of the smooth-skin, hard-body generation to have sex with the wrinkled, flabby one?

Johnny: I don’t think we have time to get into that.

Maude: The short answer seems to be, not a problem. Not a problem as long as there is no physical, psychological or spiritual violence – real or implied – in the immemorial – some would say immoral – quest by older folks to copulate with younger folks, to use a W. Bush expression.

But, what if you could turn this implied moral impediment that the pursuit of relationships with young women and girls must not include physical, psychological or spiritual threats on its head and not only allow but condone the use of physical, psychological and spiritual threats to coerce an unwilling partner into an unwanted sexual relationship?

Johnny: That would be despicable.

Maude: BOY, are you in trouble now! the Prophet Muhammad did just that and has become a hero to millions of middle-aged men, septuagenarians, octogenarians, balding, greying, pot-bellied, bearded men around the world who before he came along could only fantasize about sex with the hard-bodied set.

Johnny: I don’t believe this.

Maude: Believe it! He was so clever in doing this that young Muslim men willingly give up having relationships with young women in favour of letting these middle-age, septuagenarians, octogenarians, balding, greying, pot-bellied, bearded men be a virgin’s introduction to sexual relations.

Johnny: If it is true, I don’t think that was what the Prophet intended?

Maude: I don’t really blame the Prophet Muhammad. I blame his followers, especially the Muslim clergy. Here was a man, just beyond middle-age, who was given the opportunity to fulfill every middle-age man’s fantasy and he took it. He had the power to change the relationship between a man and a woman from a relatively balanced relationship, for the time, to that of jailor and prisoner. A relationship that would give men absolute powers over a woman’s life especially her sexual life. Fifteen, fourteen-hundred years later, this relationship, if you can call it that, is viewed as normal by hundreds of millions of Muslim men, and women for that matter. The Stockholm Syndrome on steroids.

Johnny: Interesting. Can we get back to Canada now?

Maude: Yes of course, and by the way, I’m so sorry about the way I acted at the beginning, calling you a wimp and all that, you are awfully sweet to let me get these things off my chest. I won’t forget you.

Johnny: After what we have just talked about the rest of the interview is bound to be anti-climactic?

Maude: [smiling] Don’t count on it.

Johnny: [expressing a sigh of relief] Good. The Fracture, yes The Fracture.

Maude: Where do you want to start?