Burqas vs. Bikinis

The blogosphere is abuzz about an item published this week in Slate's "Human Nature" column: "Are burqas making Muslim women ill?." Slate points to a June 2007 article in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition which suggests that conservative Muslim dress codes are causing vitamin D deficiency by depriving women of sunlight. In two studies of burqa-wearing Arab and East Indian women residing in the United Arab Emirates, researchers discovered that almost all of them were vitamin D deficient.

Among the many comments made about this study, I was particularly interested in one made by sometime Ideas contributor Jonah Lehrer. At his science blog Cortex, Lehrer notes that studies like this make him skeptical about reductionist evolutionary biology theories that would explain away all of our cultural practices as byproducts of natural selection. After all, writes Lehrer,

it's hard to construct a biologically rigorous theory of culture or religion that can explain why someone might willingly cloak themselves in a black covering (in an area dominated by hot deserts) and put themselves at high risk for a variety of serious illnesses caused by vitamin D deficiency.

I have a psychological, not biological, burqa theory of my own. In the mid-1940s, the psychologist Anna Freud described "identification with the aggressor" as a neurotic attempt to avoid punishment by internalizing the values of one's oppressor. It seems to me that Americans are so worried about Islamofascist terrorists that we're slowly turning ourselves into conservative Muslims. I've even got proof, torn from women's magazines that I've perused this year:

Let me know what you think...

Thanks, Tom Nealon, for scanning the magazine pages for me!