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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Those reservations may not go far enough for some, but if critics like Turner are objecting that Houellebecq's portrait of sexual tourism isn't accurate, it's hard to imagine they would raise the same objection to an equally inaccurate picture that equated all sexual tourism with slavery, that assumed every woman working as a prostitute was forced into it, and that denied that there were any advantages for women in sex work. In a passage that could fit quite comfortably into "Platform," a character in John Burdett's novel "Bangkok 8," a former Thai prostitute who's become a madam, puts it this way:
"This kind of Western hypocrisy disgusts me, quite frankly. Why doesn't the BBC make a documentary on the rag trade, with all those women working twelve hours a day for less than a dollar an hour? What is that if it's not selling your body? The West doesn't care about exploitation of our women, it simply has a problem with sex and at the same time they're using sexual titillation to sell their shows. They love to embarrass middle-aged white men who hire our girls. Western women can't handle it that their men get a better time over here. If they're too mean-spirited to give their men pleasure, that's their problem. The bottom line is that it's about money. Thailand makes very little income from industries like the clothing industry -- Western companies take the lion's share. But in the sex trade we see a true redistribution of global wealth from East to West. That's what got them so hung up."
That's echoed somewhat by the English literary critic Ian Littlewood in his "Sultry Climates," a sexual history of the Grand Tour. Littlewood writes, "Why, for example, does sexual exploitation trouble us so much more than the various kinds of exploitation that provide us with cheaper consumer goods? The process by which other people's lives are blighted for our convenience is not, after all, peculiar to the sex trade."
"Platform" has been called the "A Modest Proposal" of sex tourism, and like Swift's essay, the safest, shallowest way to dodge its implications and distance yourself from its logic to is to fall back on the safe position of appreciating it as a wicked satiric exercise. Reading "Platform," the same as reading Swift, requires you to take the writer's reasoning seriously, meet it head on and, if you find it repulsive, refute it.
Houellebecq takes obvious delight in skewering conventional liberal pieties about the sex trade. It's true that his ideological opponents are often straw men, like the strident, sexually hysterical woman who inveighs against sex tourism during his trip to Bangkok. But what may be most infuriating to some readers and critics is that Houellebecq insists that moral outrage by itself is not enough -- that it does nothing to address the reality of these women's lives. Houellebecq is implicitly asking the critics of sex tourism here, Given the economic realities of these countries, what alternative would you propose to allow these women to make a comparable income? And if you can't come up with one, are you implying that it would be better for them to live in poverty than to offend your sense of propriety? You don't have to agree with Houellebecq to see the point he's making about the narcissism of moral outrage -- how it's often used to demonstrate moral superiority rather than address the issue at hand.
It may be equally upsetting to some that while Houellebecq understands the distance that inevitably separates prostitutes from customers, he insists that these transactions can be conducted with respect and even tenderness on both sides. Houellebecq takes the old joke, "Would you patronize a prostitute? -- answer: "No, I'd treat her as an equal" -- and puts flesh on it. Like the other sexual encounters in "Platform," Michel's experiences with prostitutes are anything but dingy and unfeeling. If they don't match the connection he makes with Valérie, they are connections nonetheless.
The moral conundrum that sex tourism represents in "Platform" is that it is simultaneously a vision of sex turned into yet one more consumer commodity and also one of the only forms of sexual human connection left to the alienated West. It's crucial to keep in mind the less-than-flattering vision of the West in "Platform" when dealing with an even more explosive part of the book, its portrait of Islam. "Platform" has been called an anti-Islam book and I want to be very clear about that -- it is. It does not, however, follow that it is a racist book. It's hard to make that claim when Houellebecq has Michel say, "It's true, Muslims on the whole aren't worth much," or to describe them as "blood clots" in the "migratory flow crisscrossing Europe like blood vessels." When Houellebecq indulges in those cracks, he's making it easier for his critics to charge him with racism.
But there is no reason that a writer can't take an intellectual or moral position against a system of beliefs. What Houellebecq has come up against, though, is not just politically correct multi-culti attitudes that demand we have respect for all cultures, but the squeamishness that rears its head whenever someone attempts to criticize a religion. "Editorial writers think they're serving the interests of democracy when they ask us to deny the evidence of our senses," Pauline Kael wrote in her review of "Mean Streets." She could have been talking about today's editorialists who insist that the phenomenon of priests sexually abusing kids has nothing to do with Catholicism, or the editorialists insisting that Islamic fundamentalism has nothing to do with Islam. The usual protests are that Islamic extremism represents a very small percentage of Muslims, which is no doubt true. But it's not unfair to wonder why that large segment has been so quiet or so equivocal in their condemnation. And it's not unfair to bring up the danger that Arab intellectuals put themselves in when they have criticized Islam.
Of course, sooner or later someone is bound to bring up the Inquisition and the Crusades to prove that Christianity is just as brutal. But the gulf of centuries between those events and the present simply points out that today there is no religion but Islamic fundamentalism that is involved in mass killings in the name of a god on a global scale. This is not to suggest that Islamic fundamentalism is medieval. Authors like Paul Berman and the British political writer John Gray have insisted that fundamentalist Islam shares a religious mystical utopianism with all totalitarian movements of the 20th century -- communism, Nazism, fascism. What makes it hard to see that is that though Islamic fundamentalism avails itself of modern technology and the totalitarian dreams of mass murder that surfaced in the last century, the world it seeks to bring about feels like one that could only have been conceived by people afraid not just of progress, but of common sense -- the ultimate fantasy of willfully ignorant piety.
There's no denying that part of the excitement of "Platform" is the force with which Houellebecq says the unsayable, his determination to cut through moral equivocation and, in Kael's words, to not deny the evidence of his own senses. It's no surprise that a writer who spends so much time equating what it means to be human with the ability to feel pleasure would be repulsed by the asceticism of Islam, would see the religion's prohibitions as life denying, would see its misogyny as particularly noxious. Far from feeling defensive about his position, Houellebecq aims here to put those who don't share his loathing on the defensive. Is he extreme? Unquestionably. But it's sometimes just this impolite extremity that can shake up complacent notions. And the challenge he is putting out is one that calls for an answer -- namely, what is it that keeps liberals from condemning a culture that embodies everything they rightly hate? The persecution of women and gays, the refusal to recognize a separation between church and state, state (and thus theocratically) controlled press, the impossibility of scientific inquiry.
