muslim eye for the straight guy

I just realized that the last two books I've read are the Vagina Monologues and Fight Club! (wow, it's hard to imagine two books so extremely different in their likely audience) Anyway, the two books, especially in combination, are a good spring board to talk about some things.

First, Vagina Monologues:
According to one of the monologues, the last recorded clitoridectomy to occur in the United States was performed in 1948 on a five-year old girl to cure her of masturbation. But other sources suggest that it has been done on female patients as recently as the 50's. I only mention this to say that neither Muslims nor Africans have some kind of exclusive copyright on the practice.

Very often, in a multitude of ways, legitimate concerns for the well-being and position of women in society are used as a club to reinforce racist or otherwise prejudiced attitudes towards certain communities. I don't know what the perfect response/solution is but one which comes to mind is to prescribe a healthy dose of history.

As societies or civilizations, "Islam" and "The West" are not these rigid unchanging things. On both sides, the position of women changes over time and there is no reason to think that it won't continue to change. For long periods during their mutual histories, the position of women has actually been higher in Muslim societies than in Western ones. And from the position of world history, the gains which women have made in the West are quite recent. For example, even if you want to look at this past century, women in Turkey had the right to vote and stand for election before women in France. And Pakistani women had the right to vote and run for office election several decades before women in Switzerland.

So there is no reason to think that women in Muslim societies won't continue to achieve greater opportunity and justice. And there is no reason for Western societies to rest on their laurels. All societies fall short, and all societies have work which urgently needs to be done on this front.

Secondly, Fight Club:
This is a huge oversimplification, but basically Fight Club is a novel about groups of men who find their manhood by getting together and beating each other up. Part of the idea is that modern-life is so emasculating that men feel a need to go to some serious extremes just to compensate. And even in the real world, it seems like in many ways a lot of men feel that they don't quite know how to be men and need to join groups to figure out how; from Promise Keepers, to the Million Man March, to Robert Bly's Men's Movement, etc. Even Queer Eye for the Straight Guy can be viewed as a bizarre and indirect manifestation of the same phenomena.

So how does this phenomena affect Muslim men? I think that's an open-ended question which is worth some further discussion. Off the top of my head I'd say that you probably could find examples of men who "don't know how to be men" and engage in unhealthy or negative behaviors. But I would also suspect that some aspects associated with Islam (clearer gender roles, notions of "male space" and "female space", etc.) are positive and healthy (if they aren't taken to abusive extremes.)

What do people out there think? Is there a need for a Muslim Men's Movement to heal our collective psychic wounds?