al-Jahiz’s story of Buthaynah, Jamil, and their families

Persons broad-minded enough to comprehend not just the center of the story, but also outer circles, can appreciate the comedy and tragedy of men’s sexual troubles.  Al-Jahiz, a ninth-century Muslim scholar who wrote with literary sophistication on a wide range of scientific and humanistic topics, was such a person.  As would most other learned Muslims of his time, al-Jahiz knew of the late-seventh-century Bedouin love poetry of Jamil ibn Abdallah ibn Mamar al-Udhri (d.701).  He thus knew the story of Jamil’s intense, but unrequited, love for Buthaynah.  Here’s how al-Jahiz told that story in his epistle on singing-girls:

Buthaynah’s brother was vexed in his heart with Jamil because of certain objections to Jamil’s association with her, and because of an idea that the acquaintanceship was not wholly innocent.  He complained of this to her husband, whose alarm was excited by the same thing that had perturbed the brother.  So they laid in wait for Jamil, when he came to visit Buthaynah, with the intention of killing him; but when they had listened to his and her talk, they heard Jamil saying to her by way of testing her:

{Jamil said,} “Would you like to do as men and women do for the quenching of love’s thirst and the extinguishing of passion’s fire?” “No,” said she. “Why?” he asked.  “Because,” she replied, “true love is spoiled when one has sexual intercourse.”  Then Jamil produced a sword which he had hidden under his garment, saying, “Had you granted the favor I asked, I would have plunged this into you.”

When the two others heard this, they were prepared to trust him without surveillance and rely on his chastity; they abandoned their intention of killing him and allowed him freedom to see her and talk to her. [1]

This story has a double frame of testing.  Buthaynah’s brother and husband test Jamil by secretly observing his relationship with Buthaynah.  Within that test, Jamil tests Buthaynah by asking her for sex.  Such self-similar framing is the main organizing structure for the tales of the thousand and one nights (Arabian nights).

Jamil, a classical Arabic love poet, asks for sex as a classical Arabic love poet would.  A modern-day American teenager, in bed with his girlfriend and wanting sex, would text her “dtf?”  A modern-day well-educated American college student would instead hand to his girlfriend across the pillow the university-approved consent form for sexual intercourse.  Jamil, in contrast, says to the woman of his desire: “Would you like to do as men and women do for the quenching of love’s thirst and the extinguishing of passion’s fire?”

Jamil was a Bedouin poet of udhri love — chaste love in which the male lover dies from suffering for love.  That oppressive but socially treasured construction of love typically develops in social circumstances of intense verbal competition.  Ovid in Augustus’ Rome brilliantly ridiculed such love.  In Jahiz’s account of Buthaynah, Jamil, and their families, Buthaynah responds to Jamil’s sex request with a world-saving fiat: “no.” Jamil the poet, at loss for words, can manage to reply only, “Why?”  Buthaynah in turn explains with characteristically feminine reason.  That feminine reason was the ruling reason in Jamil’s udhri love: “true love is spoiled when one has sexual intercourse.”  With more than wisps of ironic poetic imagery, Jamil then whips out a “sword” from under his garment and declares, “I would have plunged this into you.”[2]

Al-Jahiz’s story of Buthaynah, Jamil, and their families isn’t just comedic.  Socio-biological evolution has created within men’s nature intense concern about true paternity knowledge.  At a personal level, that socio-biological evolution manifests in men’s concern for sexual fidelity in a long-term mate.  At a social level, true paternity knowledge doesn’t matter because men’s interests are socially devalued.  At a personal, primal level, most men are highly eager to have sex.  Yet men in truth are more human than a male dog smelling a bitch in heat.  The social construction of men’s self affects their behavior.  Both the social construction of men’s self and the social system regulating men’s paternity interests can kill women and men.

Mary, mother of Jesus, like Buthaynah, beloved of Jamil, modeled virtue in the ancient Islamic world

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Notes:

[1] al-Jahiz, Epistle on Singing-girls, para. 10, trans. Beeston (1980) p. 16.

[2] According to Montgomery (2006) pp. 19, 20, al-Jahiz is a “protean writer of unbounded versatility, astonishing intellectual acumen, and disarming flamboyance”; and al-Jahiz’s epistle on singing girls should be read “as a product of its time, coruscatingly savage in its mordancy, as an intellectually scintillating and rhetorically elusive epistle in which multivalency is combined with polyphony.” That description also fits well Ovid and Ovid’s love elegy.

[image] Apotheosis of the Virgin.  India, Mughal dynasty, ca. 1600.  Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, S1990.57.  On display in Worlds Within Worlds: Imperial Paintings from India and Iran, July 28 – September 16, 2012.

References:

Beeston, Alfred Felix Landon, trans. 1980.  ‘Amr ibn Baḥr al-Gāḥiẓ. The epistle on singing-girls of Jāḥiẓ (Risālat al-qiyān). Warminster: Aris & Phillips.

Montgomery, James E. 2006. “Beeston and the singing-girls”. Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies. 36: 17-24.

personal services for economically managing communications

Applications for technically managing communications are common.  Email applications typically allow the user to set rules for filtering, routing, and archiving emails.  Telephone companies provide some call management services such as call forwarding and call blocking.  Google Voice offers call routing based on the calling number, the time of day, and your phone numbers or voice mails.  For example, you could set calls from your father to ring on all your phones — your home fixed-line phone, your work phone, and your mobile phone.  You could also set calls from your ex-boyfriend to be always routed to your voicemail.

Personal services for economically managing communications are less developed.  Google Voice doesn’t include call-routing options based on your service prices and your minutes of use.  For example, you can’t switch routing of calls from your mobile phone to your voice mail when you’re close to exceeding your purchased block of minutes. Companies like Truaxis and Validas access customers’ online telephone account information to offer personalized, money-saving recommendations on calling plans and service providers.  But those companies don’t allow customers to set rules for call processing based on the customer’s calling prices and use.

Personal data on communication service prices and service use aren’t readily available for the development of services for economically managing communications.  A challenge for the communications industry is to make such data available through smart disclosure.

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forcing men to make monthly payments to their rapists

U.S. courts have uniformly affirmed that the state can lawfully force boys and men to make monthly payments to their rapists.  The circumstances that produce this outcome are:

  1. woman rapes boy or man with a sex act of reproductive type [1]
  2. rapist gets pregnant from the rape
  3. rapist gives birth to the baby, rather than aborting it
  4. rapist doesn’t get rid of the child under safe-haven infant abandonment laws
  5. rapist doesn’t give the child up for adoption

The rapist can then legally receive a “child support” order that requires the raped boy or man to make monthly payments to his rapist.  The size of these payments depend on the rapist’s income, not the child’s needs, and there’s is no legal requirement that these payments actually be used to financially support the child.  Moreover, if the rapist is granted state payments under the welfare program Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, the state will require the rapist to name the raped father of the child.  The state will then on its own motion establish a “child support” order against that boy or man, and the state will collect on behalf of the rapist any payments made under that order. Circumstances of men being legally required to make monthly payments to their rapists have been numerous enough to generate more than seventeen court cases.  All the court cases addressing these circumstances have affirmed that a raped man is legally obligated to make payments to the woman who raped him.[2]

Requiring raped boys and men to “pay child support” is truly a marvel of sophistry, delusion, and social exploitation.  Courts typically gesture to the best interests of the child.  The irony of referring to the best interests of the child seems to be lost is cases imposing child support on boys of ages twelve and fifteen who were victims of statutory rape.  Courts hold up the principle “every child has a right to support from both parents.”[3]  But what about single parents?  Should law, public policy, and courts discourage single parenthood?  If the public concern is about the financial support of children, two parents are surely better than one parent.  But three or more financial parents is better than two. Why not impose child-support orders on grandparents as well as the brothers and sisters of the parent?  The best interests of the child would be better served by imposing child support orders on the whole village.[4]

Boys and men being legally forced to to make monthly payments to their rapists indicates that elite men and women devalue fundamental interests of ordinary men.  Legal platitudes about the best interests of the child and the virtues of two-parent families are emotive superstructure above base interests.  A law review article published in 1992 asked:

Men also have interests in their genetic progeny and in their reproductive autonomy.  If we object to what some characterize as coerced motherhood, can we close our ears to pleas about coerced fatherhood? [4]

Two decades latter, the answer unquestionably is yes.  What that answer fundamentally means for open, free, democratic societies remains to be seen.

justice ponders child support law and goes blind

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Table: child support rape cases (Excel version)

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Notes:

[1] The outcome is the same if a woman acquires a male’s sperm through fraud or theft.  See Higdon (2011) pp. 18-20.

[2]  Here’s a list of child support rape cases.  Many such cases probably occur in low-level family court proceedings that are largely opaque to external policy evaluation and analysis.  For example, online searches don’t show the Ohio child support rape case described obliquely in a newspaper article.  Moreover, given the unanimity of courts’ opinions, a rape victim might wisely judge that bringing such a case isn’t worth the cost.  Forcing boys and men to make monthly payments to their rapists is more bizarre to reason than unusual in practice.  On courts’ unanimity in making such decisions, see Hidgon (2011) p. 13.

[3] See, e.g. County of San Luis Obispo v. Nathaniel J., 50 Cal. App. 4th 842 – Cal: Court of Appeal, 2nd Appellate Dist., 6th Div. 1996 at 845.

[4] Two law review comments  (London (2004) and Johnson (2005)) and two law review articles (Jones (2002) and Higdon (2011)) have focused on requiring boys and men victims of rape to pay child support.  Three out of four of those authors are female.  London (2004) considers the issue from a highly gynocentric perspective. Higdon (2011), p. 12, observes:

Few would argue with the proposition that, if a man voluntarily has sex with a woman and a child results, then he should be liable for child support.

Two decades ago, few would argue for gay marriage.  A law review article published in 1994 declared authoritatively, “As a direct consequence of biological differences, reproductive choice is a right exclusive to women.”  See Thompson (1994) p. 393.  Thus biology is destiny, and men don’t get reproductive rights because men don’t get pregnant.  That’s wholly specious.  That men don’t get pregnant simplifies the moral issue of reproductive rights from aborting a fetus to not having the state impose unplanned financial parenthood on a man for no act of his own other than having sex of reproductive type.  Higdon (2011), p. 41, begins its conclusion:

Despite the noble policies upon which it is premised, the practice of holding biological fathers strictly liable for child support is not without its shortcomings.

These polices are no more noble than circumlocution in describing gross injustice.

[5] Shultz (1992) p. 93.  Higdon (2011), p. 26, states, “courts simply have to start taking a different approach to this issue.”  Higdon (2011) still has not been published in a law review.  Law reviews themselves are quite capable of ignoring and obscuring the gross unreasonableness of this area of law.

References:

Higdon, Michael J. 2011.  “Fatherhood by Conscription: Nonconsensual Insemination and the Duty of Child Support.” (February 14, 2011). University of Tennessee Legal Studies Research Paper No. 139.  Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1761333 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1761333

Johnson, Dana. 2005.  “Comment, Child Support Obligations that Result from Male Sexual Victimization: An Examination of the Requirement of  Support.” 25 Northern Illinois University Law Review, pp. 515-538.

Jones, Ruth. 2002.  “Inequality in Gender-Neutral Laws: Why Must Male Victims of Statutory Rape Pay Child Support for Children Resulting from Their Victimization?” 36 Georgia Law Review, pp. 411-63.

London, Ellen. 2004. “Comment, A Critique of the Strict Liability Standard for Determining Child Support in Cases of Male Victims of Sexual Assault and Statutory Rape.”  152 University of Pennsylvaian Law Review, pp. 1957-99.

Shultz, Marjorie M. 1992.  “Abortion and Maternal-Fetal Conflict: Broadening Our Concerns.” 1 Southern California Review of Law and Women’s Studies 79.

Thompson, Angela. 1994.  “International Protection of Women’s Rights: An Analysis of Open Door Counselling Ltd. and Dublic Well Women Centre v. Ireland.” 12 Boston University International Law Review 371.