CNN reports that a Saudi judge in the town of Onaiza has refused (a second time, this time on reconsideration) to annul the marriage between an 8-year old girl and a 47-year old man:
The girl’s father, according to the attorney, arranged the marriage in order to settle his debts with the man, who is “a close friend” of his. At the time of the initial verdict, the judge required the girl’s husband to sign a pledge that he would not have sex with her until she reaches puberty….
The judge ruled that when the girl reaches puberty, she will have the right to request a divorce by filing a petition with the court, the lawyer said.
Anyone see a major timing issue here, between the girl’s right to appeal and the husband’s supposed pledge?
To steal a line from one of my favorite TV shows, Angel: “There’s not enough yuck in the world [to describe such a thing].”
For centuries, educated Westerners have had a remarkable tendency to either romanticize people from traditional societies, often using some offshoot of the “noble savage” meme. or vilify them in the tradition of Thomas Hobbes for living “nasty, brutish and short” lives. Such false dichotomies can be readily found today across a variety of media, yet they simply mask disturbing cross-cultural patterns.
The way in which young girls are sexualized may differ from culture to culture – we got the Lolita effect and Britney/Miley, they got child marriage – but such pre-teen or young teen sexualization crosses borders, much as it always has.
In the classic 1928 D.H. Lawrence short story The Woman Who Rode Away, an American woman literally rides away from modern civilization for a grand adventure among a tribe of Native Americans, only to find, as Lawrence writes in his fabled final sentence:
The mastery that man must hold, and that passes from race to race.
