The problem, of course, is sex.
Here’s what the Trojan war
Did: is Helen, the beautiful Greek,
Kidnap victim or whore?
This is not what peace knows or expects.
When you are too humiliated to speak,
Out come the weapons. The weapons talk, instead—
Weapons invented by the tongue-tied geek
For the brutal male, who loudly counts the dead.
Today’s War of Islam is a simple one:
Lands where the women are more beautiful than the men
Are going to get invaded again and again.
Have you seen women from the Middle East?
Heavens! Even the eyes are a feast.
The Middle East wants to hide its Helen,
Because love is a problem when the woman is a “ten.”
The West is different; its women are not pretty.
Have you seen Sarah Jessica Parker from “Sex in the City?”
The West, short on beauty, promotes sex and freedom.
Modesty? Veils? Allah? The West doesn’t need them.
If the West, which insults Islam, had its women hide all,
The West would never have sex at all.
So pity the West, and its desire;
And the world: aflame with God, and make-up, and pride, and fire.
We hesitated to publish “The Problem, Of Course, Is Sex,” because we felt it would offend—precisely because of the sex problem identified in the poem: the author of the poem is a white male, and, in a look-ist frenzy, perpetuates cruel and fraudulent stereotypes in the poem. Yes, as the author of the poem, we admit on a superficial level, the poem does this, but this is only by way of illustrating what is perhaps the chief problem in the current Muslim crisis—the aggressive Puritanism of Radical Islam—for who doubts the rapacious, misguided morality of the Taliban, in its wounded-pride, religious, purity, is not at the center of the whole, crazed, passionate terrorist grievance? It is the Greeks losing their Helen, a society’s sex-pride massing for war and revenge, and willing to sacrifice their children for it. Is this not it? Meanwhile, the war-like, invading, divide-and-conquer, bullying West, casually tossing off shows like “Sex In the City,” celebrates license and freedom—which insults the invaded people’s soul every day. The Islam crisis may ultimately be about oil and geo-political strategy. But we feel it is also about sex. At the very least, sex is what drives the signing up, and blowing up, for the manic, righteous, revenge-of-rape/rape-revenge cause. To reduce geo-political complexity to rape is a poetic trope; poets sometimes understand the crude and simple truth of a very complex issue is, indeed, the truth, despite the complexity of the issue, with its minefield of offenses to polite society, a polite society, in this case, which has smoothly and professionally committed massive wrongs. The insult to Western women in the poem represents more bitter fruit, a furtherance of the revenge-wound. As with the vengeful Hamlet’s madness—once a wrong begins, who knows where it will end?
