The Demon Lover : The Roots of Terrorism

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Summary: The Demon Lover
Review: I was captivated by this book, which is incredibly timely though published 13 years ago. Morgan blends hard edged investigative reporting, sharp political critique, poetry and biography together in ways I found startling. Her analysis, especially of the Middle East's conflicts and how they affect the region's women, are eye-opening and surprisingly optimistic. She tells the stories and viewpoints of women who are usually left out of the "news." The book is definitely not for men who turn belligerent or squeamish when confronted with a sophisticated feminist critique. I recommend it highly.

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Summary: An incisive, important book
Review: The events of Sept. 11 make this book a vital read. Morgan's analysis is mind-opening and well-documented.

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Summary: Cash-in reissue of 1980s book: note subtle title change
Review: The terrorist atrocity of 9/11 spurred a lot of writers into thought. Unfortunately, the thought was usually something like this: "I've got a book in the works, or out of print, touching on terrorism, Islam, the Israel-Palestine nightmare, etc. Those topics are going to be huge, so with a bit of tweaking to link the book to 9/11..."

Fair enough; writers have to live. So here's Robin Morgan's 1989 book, reissued with a subtle title change and a few pages of post 9/11 stream-of-consciousness typing. But this book was already anachronistic in 1989. Most feminists had moved past the sloganeering of the 1970s, in which men and women were caricatured as (respectively) death-worshipping rapists with horrible yucky genitalia, and beautiful, loving, gentle, spiritual flower-beings. But Morgan's book was firmly a product of that mindset.

So Morgan will tell you that the cause of terrorism is simpler than you think. "_The terrorist is the logical incarnation of patriarchal politics in a technological world._ The terrorist is the son practicing what the father has practiced, and claiming to have found his own identity in doing so." [Italics in original.] "The phallic malady is epidemic and systemic."

So the cause of terrorism is those dreadful humans with bollocks. Morgan's prose is also not un-bollockular. Try: "He [heterosexual men] knows that his actions are supported by the twin pillars of the State of man - the brotherhood ritual of political exigency and the brotherhood ritual of a sexual thrill in dominance. As a devotee of Thanatos, he is one with the practitioner of sado-masochistic 'play' between 'consenting adults,' as he is one with the rapist."

Some "devotees of Thanatos" and their partners and children may wonder what Thanatos is. It's Freud-speak for a supposed human death-drive, except that Morgan took Freud's fantasy a step further by declaring that "Thanatos" is exclusively male: Men are from Thanatos, women are from Eros.

Morgan's pop-Freudianism doesn't end there: sometimes a cigar is just a thrusting, phallic weapon. Morgan reveals: "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."

But this feels wrong, as well as tiredly shallow. Does a suicide bomber really feel sexual about the cylindrical objects he, or she, straps to her, or his, body? Other mental processes, involving religion, politics, hate, cycles of revenge, seem more relevant, more causative, than Morgan's pop-Freudian phallus fixation. Even in the 1980s, Morgan had to turn a blind eye to female terrorists like poster-girl Leila Khaled and others, whose actions were inconvenient facts Morgan dismissed as "tokens". And since Morgan counts military action by male heads of state as terrorism, she also had to turn a blind eye to the military activities of such bellicose political leaders as Meyer, Thatcher, and Indira Ghandi, whose wars were recent history when Morgan was writing. But the current terrorist wave has brought a feminisation of terrorism; increasing numbers of women suicide bombers make Morgan's focus on willies as the root of terrorism now seem quaint.

Morgan also claims that you can gauge a culture's potential for producing terrorists by assessing the status of women in that culture: the higher the status of women, the lower the potential for producing terrorist acts.

But Morgan rightly condemns US Government agencies for sponsoring wars, dictatorships, terrorists, the overthrow of democracies, and so on, particularly in the 1950s through to the 1990s. (I'm leaving Afghanistan and Iraq out of this picture, with ambivalence, though Morgan wouldn't.) But the status of women in the US is among the highest in the world. Ditto France: supporting genocide in Africa, "Rainbow-Warrior-Boum!", etc, plus childcare. While more patriarchal cultures like Thailand, Tonga, Switzerland, etc, produce somewhere between very little terrorism and none at all. Of course patriarchy is an evil; it's just not the _only_ evil in the world.

A more relevant distinction is between cultures that have universal, cheap, secular, education and those that don't. If you won't fund decent education, plenty of bad people will be glad to fill the gap, teaching hate and terrorism. There is certainly also a nexus between terrorism and the subjection of women, not only in relation to Islamism but strongly concentrated around Islamism. But Morgan's shallow book is useless as a discussion of that nexus.

There is one other problem with this book. Morgan writes about men with enormous and unrelenting disdain: she has said that she thinks hating men is proper, and (as a joke, though she expressly denied that she was joking) that perhaps heterosexual men could help the world by ceasing to exist. Me, I don't really like being hated, especially on doctrinaire grounds by someone who doesn't even know me. That's just my vested interest, of course. Still, I can't help thinking the world has enough hatred, and that Morgan's own contribution in that regard is perhaps more part of the problem than part of the solution.

Finally, there's the subtle title change. The book was originally published as _The Demon Lover: The Sexuality of Terrorism_. The new edition is called _The Demon Lover: The Roots of Terrorism_.

I can see why the original title had to go; in the English-speaking world, post 9/11, potential buyers might be irritated by Morgan's linkage of sexuality and terrorism, also the apparent implicit hint that terrorism is sexy. The new title makes the book sound more sensible, and for that reason it is a less accurate indication of the kind of book this is.

Cheers!

Laon