Women, chocolate and sex. Who was the evil genius who thought up – obvs, in the course of a marketing campaign – this infernal triangle? It’s definitely one of the wettest things we women have ever been flogged. Much as I like broads, you can’t imagine a man coming over all unnecessary over a Walnut Whip. Why does chocolate need to be a big, sticky old metaphor? I’m always reminded of Alan Partridge’s scolding of his new squeeze, Jill, after she ‘surprises’ him with some ‘sensuous’ mousse during foreplay: ‘It may be chocolate to you, Jill, but to an unwitting member of staff this could look like some sort of dirty protest against the standard of service in the hotel.’
Different chocolate bars are guilty of different things. Flake commercials used to suggest fellatio, while a finger of Fudge evoked other erotic pursuits. But I think that no chocolate bar ever inspired so much sexual silliness as the Fry’s Turkish Delight. The slogan of its old ad campaign, ‘Full of Eastern Promise’, accompanied television and cinema commercials from the 1960s to the 1980s. In 2000, ‘Eastern Promise’ was ranked 37th in Channel 4’s poll of the 100 greatest TV adverts. I well remember the beauty of the big-eyed bints who sat under silken canopies in desert vistas, watching swarthy hunks with scimitars show off on horseback before inviting them in for some E-number-filled snacks.
Whenever I see some daft, posh bird in a keffiyeh, I see them as the spiritual granddaughters of those models partaking in Fry’s oleaginous pink jelly (which is also how I like to describe Owen Jones’s brain when he’s thinking about gay rights in Gaza).
Even worse are the ‘burqa berks’. You’d think that all that romance-of-the-desert crap would have gone the way of all other ‘Orientalism’. The veil is a cross between a shroud and a cloth thrown over a parrot’s cage. In Islamist regimes, it reflects a woman’s status as a cross between a child and a chattel. So you’d hope that privileged Western women trying on such a garment would feel not just guilty of the crime of cultural appropriation, but also the sting of sexism. This is a garment that brave young women, unlucky enough to be born under Islamic regimes, have sacrificed their lives to be free of.
There have always been privileged women who fancy grabbing a handful of oppression from the dressing-up box, secure in the knowledge that they can soon be garbed in their freedom again at will. Years before journalist Laurie Penny, who constantly squeals about Western sexism, was dressing up as nonbinary / neurodiverse or whatever they / them identifies as now, she dressed up as a Muslim woman for an afternoon. ‘I wore an abaya with full headscarf’, she wrote in 2009. ‘For the first time since puberty, I felt that people might be seeing the real me, rather than looking at my body.’ In 2017, we had the spectacle of non-Muslim women voluntarily ‘hijabing-up’ on supposedly pro-women marches in protest against Donald Trump’s first inauguration. As writer Nervana Mahmoud put it in response:
‘One cannot stand against Trump’s misogyny while condoning or ignoring others’ misogyny as “cultural” or “religious”. Such selectivity is what led to the rise of Trump in the first place. Women’s rights are for all, not just for American and other Western women.’
And now Emily Maitlis, co-host of The News Agents and former Newsnight presenter, has joined in this peculiarly icky form of culturally appropriating modesty drag. The uber-privileged and wildly out-of-touch worldview of Maitlis has been dealt with in depth on spiked previously. So perhaps we shouldn’t be so surprised that when writing in The Times last month about her recent Saudi mini-break (while swooning over ‘too-hip-to-handle Peruvian-Japanese fusion bars’ where ‘the clientele is young, rich, immaculate and injected’), Maitlis asked, straight-faced: ‘Could I reconcile everything I thought I knew about Saudi – the regime, its treatment of journalists, women, foreign labourers – with a place I wanted to hang out?’ In pursuit of the answer to this burning question, Maitlis happily covered just about every inch of her body:
‘I opt for khaki tailored combats, wide Me+Em jeans, buttoned-up cream silk blouses, a Dries Van Noten floor-length coat and a wide silk headscarf in matching stone. Heels for night, trainers by day. But I also add in an abaya – a black, floor-length robe that covers everything except the face. And it will be a lifesaver for all those moments I want to disappear anonymously into the old city.’
You’ll be pleased to hear she was advised by a friend not to go ‘full burqa’, at least.
It’s interesting to compare Maitlis’s Saudi jaunt with the late Oriana Fallaci’s 1979 interview with Ayatollah Khomeini, which appeared in the New York Times soon after the Islamists took power in Iran. Going to meet him dressed in a chador, she reasonably asked the old goat why the regime required women to ‘hide themselves, all bundled up’. When asked a simple question, the clown threw in the towel with admirable haste. ‘If you do not like Islamic dress you are not obliged to wear it’, he snapped. Fallaci promptly pulled off her covering, saying as she did so: ‘That’s very kind of you, imam – and since you said so, I’m going to take off this stupid, medieval rag right now.’ And then, off he flounced!
A day later, the interview recommenced, with Khomeini’s son, Ahmed, advising Fallaci not to even mention the subject of enforced female covering. She duly did it straight away:
‘First [Khomeini] looked at me in astonishment… Then his lips moved in a shadow of a smile. Then the shadow of a smile became a real smile. And finally it became a laugh. He laughed, yes. And, when the interview was over, Ahmed whispered to me, “Believe me, I never saw my father laugh. I think you are the only person in this world who made him laugh.”’
Maitlis’s breathless account of her Saudi mini-break made me laugh, but in a manner best described as ‘hollow’. While rich Western women cover up for kicks, brave Muslim-born women die for the right to remove their prison garments. With her selfies from Saudi, shame on Maitlis and her shroud-washing sisters.
‘A cheap holiday in other people’s misery’, the Sex Pistols sang of tourism to the divided Berlin in the 1970s. But this is far, far truer of wealthy Western women who wear the hijab, whether in the course of cosplaying oppression or just for the fun of it.
Julie Burchill is a spiked columnist. Her book, Welcome to the Woke Trials: How #Identity Killed Progressive Politics, is published by Academica Press.
