If Only We Could Have Lubna Hussein, Dr. Catherine Lim & My Dear Pixie for Tea

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Singapore intellectual Catherine Lim takes on the big boys.

There’s no doubt that Dr. Catherine Lim, 67, is a Smart Sensuality woman. Today’s NYTimes calls Lim “the most vivid personality in strait-laced Singapore.”

When Dr. Lim isn’t writing tales of romantic love, she is one of Singapore’s governments most acute critics.

Anne’s Dream About Lubna Hussein

I woke up this morning dreaming a colorful vision Lubna Ahmed Hussein. She was speaking in a large department store here in America, about the connection between clothes and female sensuality. Lubna was dynamic, beautiful and modestly dressed, as she talked about trousers being a badge of identity and self-determination.

Meanwhile, in my sleeping vision, I was running around worrying what we would all eat for lunch. I’m being swept into a tide of vegetarianism, healthy eating and global cultural customs.

Startled by my dream — but also understanding it, given my immersion in Lubna’s case for nearly three months now — I just recalled my university work around Sudan’s feminist movement, back in the 70s. I wrote a political science paper about the growing women’s movement in Sudan.

How amazing it is, to revisit the subject now, many years later. I took an entire class on Sudanese politics.

There were no morality police when I was a university student, arresting and flogging women for wearing strait-laced gabardine trousers on the streets of Khartoum. Sudan was inspirational for women in those years, full of promise and vigor.

We ladies were all intending to conquer the world back then.

The Meaning of Fashion and Clothing

Back to Catherine Lim, who also understands the power of clothes. Dr. Lim also wears full-coverage clothing but a very different kind.

In the midst of all our Anne of Carversville conversation about Western-living women donning burqas — often against the advice or wishes of their husbands — we have an older and perhaps wiser woman who wears a cheongsam, the long silk sheath with slits in the sides that offers what she calls “a startling panorama of the entire landscape of the female form.”

I am dying to have my dear Pixie, Lubna and Lim for a SKYPE debate on this subject, with me as the neutral moderator.

Oh, what am I saying — I am not moderate on this subject; I am passionate! Hopefully, though, I am respectful and understanding, willing to listen and in agreement that international women can find consensus, in and out of our hijabs.

Even my dear Pixie is aggravated over the Lubna Hussein case. Let it be a reminder to what happens to women, whose being, identity and sexuality are controlled by the state, her religion — or both, depending on one’s point of view.

For many women, this state of affairs — religion and the state ruling her clothing —  is double trouble. I believe that Lubna would agree with me, having grown up in the years where women’s rights flourished in Sudan.

In those days — just two and three decades ago, there were no Sudanese morality police nipping at women’s ankles with a prod here, a prod there and finally the full force of a lashing, a dramatic anti-feminist gesture, filled not only with pain and scars but also humiliation before men, family, friends, and community.

Lastly, we have the ultimate shame, of Allah himself, watching her disgrace. I can relate well, having my own shameful experience with the Catholic church. I, too, was innocent. I understand the full range of guilt a woman assumes under these circumstances. It’s always the case that we women are guilty, even in the grossest of situations.

No wonder some women willingly run for burqas. How else do we prove ourselves worthy of respect, valued as women with chaste and sincere motives?

In a sense, wearing a burqa or full-coverage clothing by choice is a double-dare from a strong, intelligent woman, a way of communicating that ‘I am not the harlot you suggest’.

Full-coverage clothing is a badge of honor in a world where large numbers of people see women as whores.

Ladies Special train service has been introduced so far in India’s four largest cities: New Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Calcutta.Reading the story about Indian women getting their own Ladies trains, to escape “eve teasing”. I’m not a person who one thinks that all men are dogs, even if they engage in “eve teasing”. I will say that in America, where we are ‘decadent’ by comparison in our clothes, women are not routinely touched by strangers on the streets, as they are in India and Egypt.

Entire countries of men aren’t fundamentally immoral. Just recently, though, we posted a woman’s experience in Morocco and it was similar to “eve teasing” in India.

Perhaps societies that routinely suppress female sensuality — believing that women are whores, if not properly managed by men and the good book— do subconsciously encourage men to touch women as they please.

Science tells us that the more forbidden something is, the more we seek it.

I posted a story about the police routinely raping women in Thailand yesterday, and it made me sick to my stomach. Many of the 43,000 women flogged last year in Sudan also say that the morality police sought sexual favors from them.

Sudanese women supporting Lubna Hussein confront police in Khartoum

Once a Whore; Always a Whore

Call a woman a whore, and you’re entitled to do with her what you please, in many a person’s mind — female and male alike. Sordid women deserve what’s coming to them.

As we learned loudly and clearly in my journal article Lubna Hussein,  Chansa Kabwela, 20 Women Stripped to Their Underwear in Uganda: Are the World’s Male Morality Squads Coming Unhinged? the female officer in charge of Kabwela’s arrest also believes that photos of babies being born dying are pornnographic.

Many women support the flogging of women like Lubna or the five-year imprisonment of Chansa Kabwela, for trying to save dying babies.

One in five babies dies in childbirth in many of these countries. Is considering childbirth ‘porn’ one of the reasons? I don’t know, but I intend to read more in an investigation into child mortality rates and the religious mores of the country.

43,000 women sounds like in an incredible number of women to be arrested in any city area — it’s a perverted disease really. Could this flogging business be some warped form of sexual dominance and sexual experience in a city that demands you have little or none?

Burqa Benefits

Wearing full-coverage clothing ends the debate. In a city that calls modest gabardine trousers “flashy”, we’re not dealing with rational minds. A woman can end the harassment once and for all, covering herself head to toe, in an effort to get on with her life.

Seriously, how can anyone — man or woman, a member of any country or religion on earth — consider the remote possibility that a woman who willingly covers herself head to toe, is a whore? Case closed!

You are a very sick person, if you do think a fully-covered woman is a prostitute. Only Lubna’s crowd — me included — are prostitutes. I know that Dr. Catherine Lim understands the predicaments of women like us.

Covering herself, at long last, a woman escapes from having others define her morals. She is now in charge of her self-definition at long-last — or at least she thinks she has some peace from this relentless obsession with her sexuality.

Like Catholic nuns — before these pious, good and dedicated women abandoned veils in large numbers — the habit was a symbol of honor and commitment to noble principles and actions. I’ve haven’t asked non-veil-wearing nuns if they feel equally pious and dedicated without their veils, but I believe that they do.

Conversely, while I reject Naomi Wolf’s assertion that burqas are sensually mysterious and intoxicating, I can see that the garment helps a woman control her image in a world that wants to control it for her. She may be hidden from view, but she’s chaste.

Dr. Lim and colleageus at a monthly talk for University Women’s Association in singaporeCatherine Lim understands this sensually-conflicted slice of life so very well, which is why she wears her cheongsam and other body-conscious clothing. Dr. Lim’s dress is also a way of her controlling her own message. For her, female sensuality is power, and I, too, embrace this view.

In a light, self-mocking, first-person novel called “Meet Me on the QE2!” Dr. Lim describes what she calls the strategic power of the dress, bright and playful to the eye but not as benign as it seems. (How strange that my beloved friend the QE2 has shown up this morning. All of our Anne of Carversville muses are arriving for duty.)

Lim knows that her cheongsam has a ‘come hither’ look to it. Indeed, her dress symbolizes her power and potency as a woman who is also one of the few women in Singapore with a basic knowledge of quantum physics.

Catherine Lim has no desire to conceal her brainpower, not even in what she calls the macho, patriarchal, nanny state of Singapore.

I laughed reading about quantum theory and tight dresses, because I, too, have a passion for Brian Greene’s ‘string theory” and Stephen Hawkings, too. Dr. Hawkings is a great inspiration to me.

Writing on her website catherinelim.sg, this deeply sensual, moxie woman must be reckoned with, a woman who is more than a mosquito, a feminist liberal writing in Singapore, under the nose of her government.

When not telling tales of her life on cruise ships — of course wearing her cheongsam — Catherine Lim posts essays like this one: ‘Sir, would you send in the army?”

Like Lubna Hussein and me, too, I imagine that Catherine Lim is considered a ‘prostitute’ by the Islamic hardliners in Sudan and also the government of Singapore.

My dear Pixie is the good woman, and I respect her for her choice. Also, she is no pushover, as we’ve learned reading her own comments about Lubna’s case.

We Smart Sensuality ladies never did too well at taking orders. In the case of Lubna, being much younger than Lim and myself, she could be a holy terror when she hits 50. (Pixie is the youngest of the four of us — truly young and full of spunk.) Then we have Lubna’s daughters to deal with — goodness knows what she’s teaching them.

In this photo, perhaps Dr. Lim is sharing her astonishment with a fellow university woman in Singapore, because she’s just read our post about her.

No, no. The two women are examining a far more important document, created around the year 2000 by the University Women’s Association Singapore called “Project Year 2050 - Women’s Future, World’s Future”.

Dr. Catherine Lin and colleague look at book “Project Year 2050 - Women’s Future, World’s Future”I suspect that Catherine Lim, Pixie and Lubna Ahmed Hussein would enjoy a good cup of tea together, and I’d be happy to serve it — even donning an apron for the occasion.

Don’t tell anyone, but I’m actually a good cook. I once cooked a sit-down dinner for 150 people, with only one assistant, and I wouldn’t let her touch a pot on the stove. She did cleanup and ran back and forth to the grocery store.

Yes, indeed, I wield a pretty sharp knife in the kitchen. Chop; chop; chop.  Anne