Here's a guy who thinks that women are hairless apes, certain ones of which he feels a passing urge to "mate with".

How charming.

Never once does he mention love, or even really affection.

He speaks much of passing on his genes. But presumably children are not being being born from these fleeting encounters, so what's the point?

Children are usually born to pair-bonded couples, and men are "hardwired" to help raise and protect them--probably far more so than they are "hardwired" to jump every passing female they find attractive (think of the number of men who marry and raise kids as opposed to the number of men who remain tomcatting bachelors forever). Or at least, it's just as easy to argue that. Monogamy can be argued from a biological need standpoint as easily as promiscuity can. It's all B.S. really.

Has "Mystery" found any long-term companionship as a result of his endeavors? Evidently not. So what is it exactly he is supposed to be teaching us?

People jump into bed with one person after the other because they are hurting and needy and sometimes self-destructive. They think it is because they are top dogs and confident but usually they are not.

They can have sex, but they haven't figured out love, which is still the ideal groundwork for having those kids and passing on those genes--as though that's even the point for being in a relationship. All this social Darwinism crap people spew these days is just nauseating. Darwin, by the way, lived long enough to see his theory of natural selection applied to commentary on the social framework and he was horrified.

Scratching the back of her hand? I feel like Spartacus in his cell screaming "I am not an animal!"

In the movie, the young woman replies, "I too am not an animal". Then she is promptly hauled away to be raped by another gladiator, who evidently did not care to resist the bestial. Maybe he wanted to pass on his genes.

The difference between animals and men? As Katherine Hepburn said, "Nature is something that was given to us to rise above".

Mystery should watch some old movies. Might do him good.

these women in the upper class suburbs probably know several women who are infertile and undergoing expensive fertility treatment. In some upscale communities the number of couples who cannot conceive naturally approaches 25% (I don't know the reasons but they are professional couples, older than average which I think has much to do with it). So those who can get pregnant quickly inspire a lot of envy, and they evidently like that. Nothing better than to have another wife crying about the failure of her latest IVF and then to smugly say, "excuse me, it's time to breastfeed". I've actually seen this. Do not underestimate the total and complete bitchiness of rich women.

What bothers me is the notion of the children as property, the subject of the interview makes it perfectly clear that its all about HER, she is validated when people praise her kids behavior and appearance. It really comes across that she does not care about the children as people. That's what is making us angry, folks.

We'll be lucky if that monster's four children do not all grow up to have a lot of problems. I'm dead serious. Those are some serious issues in the making there...."mom had me because she was playing show off with her biking buddy".

The kids will end up spending all their wealth on psychiatrists, at the very least.

actually read Bengali? or Telegu, the language this last book was written in (which she attended the launch party in Hyderabad for on the 9th)?

If not they should reconsider their judgement. "She doesn't really write all that well" is a clever slur against her that is repeated so often that people unfamiliar with her work, or who read it only in translation, tend to believe it.

In reality she has transformed the Bengali language and will surely stand in the future as one of its greatest writers. If there were nothing more to her fame than Western hype and her rage there would have been one book, maybe. There are a couple of dozen, some better, some worse, a few highly praised. Her readers are not just Westerners nor are the majority of them even Westerners. As an author, she is the real thing. That can't be denied even if you don't like her politics.

thanks Salon. Many of us have been making similar arguments on these threads for months now.

Fundie cross pollination is an interesting topic, and I think Edis may be a tiny bit wrong about the extent of it. There are now Muslim flat earthers and geocentrists and they are basically just getting this crap off Christian fundie internet sites. Some of the materials read identically except that "Jesus" or "God" has been changed to "Allah". So I think it's very possible that many of the materials authored by the mysterious prolific scholar in Turkey are in fact written by Christian fundies.

And yeah, Muslims' world view is also starting to be influenced by a Tim Lehaye-like end times philosophy, sometimes even featuring the return of Jesus to usher in a Muslim version of Armageddon. There are Egyptian millenials who have been promoting this. Not to mention many (and I mean a LOT)of the American converts to Islam are former fundie Christians who bring their ideas with them.

What fun. Once an Islamicized version of Dominionist Christian fanaticism starts taking root in the impoverished third world, moving it from a fringe movement to a major social force, it is very apt to get us all killed. Kind of a shame. I sort of like people.