runner reading your posts I always come to thinking that god hasn't treated you kindly. You seem so angry when one would think your faith would be uplifting for you.

'But to me the central point of the article is the fact that "men still try to make women feel obligated to fulfil men’s sexual needs".'

I don't see what's wrong with that! I try to fulfil my partners sexual needs, in fact since we are a partnership, and a team, and I have committed myself to our happiness togerther, I do feel obligated to fulfil her needs. I know she feels the same about me too.

What kind of screwed up relationship is it when on partner sees this as a problem?

Houellebecq

I think a debate about what might be wrong with a man trying to make a woman (or women in general) feel obligated to fulfil his sexual needs is what needs to occur. (Which is why going off on tangents about Islam or religion won't help much.)

When you say you don't see what's wrong with it, i suspect a lot of it comes down to how people interpret what words like "obligated" and "needs" mean. "needs" is often portrayed as being synonymous with "wants" or "appetite", while "obligated" is often portrayed as synonymous with "required".

I'd probably have worded the original sentence in the article a bit differently myself, but I was quoting directly from it as I saw it as the core point which was at risk of quickly becoming obscured being another flamewar about religion / 'godless' humanism, etc.

It is one thing to work out in a partnership how best each person can support and assist in meeting each other's needs. It is another for one of them to feel it is their duty to have to continually perform a role of relieving another person's sexual desires or 'needs'.

What a strange response from Leigh.

This topic is arguably one of the most important issues facing the entire world, and not just Western countries.

I read somewhere just yesterday that moves are being made (or already have been) in UN forums etc to make any criticism of Islam anywhere in the world a criminal offense.

If you expect anyone to "fufil your needs" for happiness, satisfaction or anything else you are placing an impossible demand on them, and you will sooner or later become dissatisfied in all sorts of ways with that persons (in)capacity to "fulfil your needs".

And thus begin to abuse that person.

In fact I would call such a demand a form of abuse in and of itself.

It's the intellectual depredations of a morally homely spineless elite that has allowed the antediluvian Sharia law to invade and ensconce itself in the land of Shakespeare.

http://kotzabasis11.wordpress.com

Actually, Andrew Bartlett, I was less having a dig at religion generally, than pointing out that there are those who are drawn to religion largely as means of control.

To reiterate, in the particular case of Dalrymple's comments on young men converting to Islam, he noted that they overwhelmingly seemed uninterested in those aspects of the religion that might demand most of one personally. What they were really seemed interested in was being able to exercise control specifically over women.

Which bears directly on what you see as the central point of the article - "that 'men still try to make women feel obligated to fulfil men’s sexual needs'", does it not?