Every human society has a dress code, including our own, and the puzzlement over the idea that Muslim women can wear a veil and still enjoy sex is particularly embarrassing. It is also extremely dangerous to the larger and important task of helping Muslims who want to modernize. Elites who claim to want to promote a better understanding of Islam should start by realizing that democracy and human rights do not require sexual libertinism. To suggest that in order to modernize, Muslim societies need to embrace the worst of the trashy commercialism of Western culture is not true and deeply self-defeating.
India, for example, is still a sexually conservative society (which censors french kissing), and it has maintained a developing democracy for 50 years. America itself was a free society for 200 years before the Supreme Court decided it could not distinguish between art and porn. Provincial Americans might step out of their narrow world to recognize that, in poor countries, where the family is still the primary source of economic security, wholesale dismantling of sex codes could threaten the economic well-being of millions of the most vulnerable.
Meanwhile, back in Tehran, students set up a wooden post and rope, attaching a sign: "His crime was revealing the truth." An Associated Press photo shows one brave Iranian woman student approaching a barricade of Iranian police. Clothed head to toe in full, modest Islamic dress, her hair completely concealed beneath a scarf, she points one finger at the soldiers.
To me, she looks just fine.