A liberal bridge too far

A neighbour in our rural area recently needed a doctor in the early hours. The family doctor's answering machine diverted to a locum service and two hours later, a small van pulled up in the yard, writes Kathy Sheridan.

The doctor, a young woman wearing a hijab, trousers, and a tatty fleece with the logo of a herbal supplement company on the back, got out of the passenger seat and approached the door where the neighbour and his excitable little dog were waiting.

Suddenly she turned and legged it back down the long, dark avenue, hotly pursued by frantic neighbour and dog, the neighbour roaring that the dog wouldn't hurt a flea, while back in the house, his wife - the patient - was finally convinced that her head was exploding and she was doomed to die alone. The doctor's male driver sat impassively in the van.

Only when the neighbour locked up the dog did the doctor return. Later (after charging a staggeringly modest €60 fee for a sound job and the 35-mile round trip), she explained that her concern was that the dog might touch her clothes; her religion decreed that those clothes could not then be worn for prayer.

This generated some lively argument around these dog-loving parts. Was it just a funny incident on the great journey to our multicultural Ireland? Should the neighbour lock up the dog when expecting any visitor? Or, asked the unamused patient, should a doctor "with such views on any of God's creatures" be serving an Irish rural area in the first place? Was it not her duty to fit in with her host population rather than vice versa?

It was only a matter of time until someone murmured "racist", which banished all polite discourse.

Was the remark inherently racist? The "debate" continues.

But if that was confusing, they had only to look to France to be terminally scrambled. Over there, the debate over the government's decision to ban the Muslim headscarf from schools (voted through on Tuesday) was moving into overdrive.

There was the spectacle of liberals rushing to defend the right of adults to force schoolgirls as young as four to declare their difference from their host society by wearing a veil. And they were ably supported by clever, young professionals pictured in pretty, lace-trimmed hijabs declaring that far from being oppressive, the hijab is in fact a cool tool of active empowerment.

I cannot begin to understand this and in admitting it here, am probably laying myself open to charges of racism. Then again, I have equal difficulty understanding why lapdancers and Page 3 girls are portrayed as the epitome of empowered womanhood.

This reached its zenith in recent weeks with the promotion of Jordan and her silly great mounds of silicon as mighty embodiments of feminism (mostly by female columnists, sad to say). Why the ability to provoke a male erection should be viewed as a uniquely clever deed is surely one of modern life's great mysteries.

One had only to glance at the first issues of two new men's magazines, Nuts and Zoo, to get a handle on just how "unique" a deed it is. Zoo had 41 pictures of breasts, Nuts had 21 (plus, by the way, 46 guns). Their purpose and effect, presumably, is comparable to your average lapdancer's.

What happens next, to the erection and its owner, is something over which all involved, oddly, tend to draw a veil.

Some who work with rape victims speculate that the growth of everyday soft porn might be partly responsible for an increase in the physical brutality and perversion of sexual violence. Common sense suggests that it must be so. Increasingly horrific stories of murderous sexual perversions, fuelled by the internet, confront us, the most recent being the English necrophilia case.

Is all this an argument for the right of good French Muslims to send their daughters to school in a scarf? Or is it a story of two extremes: one, a multi-billion dollar industry, permitted by western society to proceed, unhindered, unregulated, regardless of the fallout for the most vulnerable; the other purportedly a religious and/or ideological manifestation, but in fact a political statement - there is nothing in the Koran to oblige a woman to cover herself, according to many Arab commentators - forced on the most vulnerable of young girls?

Ultimately, this is as much about boys as girls. Just as thinking men might be more conspicuous in the battle against sexual violence (note that the woman-centred Dublin Rape Crisis Centre was the only organisation to question the recent suspended sentence involving a male rape victim), should they not be equally disturbed about the subtle insinuation of the Muslim veil: that men are helpless slaves to their appetites, prone to arousal at the mere glimpse of female hair?

And - returning to our local "debate" - is it okay to talk about all this without being branded a prude, redneck or racist?