Joelle Cowan wrote an article back in December about, of all things, “The Sexuality of Terrorism.” This was not Cowan’s invention, but rather the title of a course being offered by the Department of Women’s Studies at California State University. As Cowan puts it,

Most people never imagined that terrorism had anything to do with sexuality, but that’s not what those who study women think. But according to their materials, it would be more accurate to say that terrorism has a nationality, one that sounds a lot like American [sic].

The course is partially based on Robin Morgan’s The Demon Lover: On the Sexuality of Terrorism. Morgan’s thesis isn’t hard to predict. Cowan quotes her as writing that, “The terrorist is the logical incarnation of patriarchal politics in a technological world.”

Here’s a more extended bit of psychobabble from The Demon Lover,

The majority of terrorists-and those against whom they are rebelling-are men. The explosions going off today worldwide have been smoldering on a long sexual and emotional fuse. The terrorist has been the subliminal idol of an androcentric cultural heritage from prebiblical times to the present. His mystique is the latest version of the Demon Lover. He evokes pity because he lives in death. He emanates sexual power because he represents obliteration. He excites the thrill of fear. He is the essential challenge to tenderness. He is at once a hero of risk and an antihero of mortality.

And, of course, no feminist discussion of war could proceed without an assertion that war is simply sex by other means. According to Morgan,

A lack of ambivalence must be trained into a man. Can it ever be trained out of him? The war toy, the rigid penetrating missiles, the dynamite and the blasting cap-these are at first only symbols of the message he must learn, fetishes of the ecstasy he is promised. But he must become them before he is rewarded with what the lack of ambivalence promises him: a frenzy, an excitement, an exhilaration-an orgasmic thrill in violent domination with which, he is taught, no act of lovemaking could possibly compete.

After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Morgan’s publisher rushed a new version of The Demon Lover to press, and Morgan wrote an article on how the United States should respond to the attacks. Of course, any hint of supporting a war to remove the Taliban from Afghanistan was strictly off the table. Instead, Morgan urged her readers to,

Talk about the root causes of terrorism , about the need to diminish this daily climate of patriarchal violence surrounding us in its state-sanctioned normalcy; the need to recognize people’s despair over ever being heard short of committing such dramatic, murderous acts; the need to address a desperation that becomes chronic after generations of suffering; the need to arouse that most subversive of emotions — empathy — for “the other”; the need to eliminate hideous economic and political injustices, to reject all tribal/ethnic hatreds and fears, to repudiate religious fundamentalisms of every kind. Especially talk about the need to understand that we must expose the mystique of violence, separate it from how we conceive of excitement, eroticism, and “manhood”; the need to comprehend that violence differs in degree but is related in kind, that it thrives along a spectrum, as do its effects — from the battered child and raped woman who live in fear to an entire populace living in fear.

Yeah, Mohammad Atta was probably turning in his grave at the thought of radical feminists talking about the psychosexual politics of terrorism.

Sources:

Week 1: Ghosts and Echoes. Robin Morgan, September 18, 2001.

Demon Lover. Robin Morgan, Ms. Magazine, January 23, 2002.

The sexuality of terrorism? Joelle Cowan, The Contrarian, December 12, 2001.