For one glorious night in November, anyone with a television and a pulse could witness the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show, a display of flesh so scintillating that it's essence can only be captured with one word: "bling-bling."
Lingerie, ranging from carnal to downright masturbatory, was draped over models such as Heidi Klum. While men evaluate the satin and lace garments using several sinful criteria, it is nearly always sold to women, by women.
Sadly, not all women in the world can enjoy Destiny's Child singing a Christmas song in silk pajamas. This isolated world for women is, unfortunately, unavailable to the women of our controversial ally, Saudi Arabia.
If Afghanistan under Taliban rule was Jerry Fallwell, then Saudi Arabia is Pat Robertson. Within the countries rigid, fundamentally Islamic legal confines, women are not allowed to sell goods in public. Men must work as store clerks, even in lingerie shops.
It's a pretty safe bet that Saudi Arabian women, taught that baring a shoulder constitutes pornography, are more than slightly embarrassed to ask the assistance of strange men in sizing up their buttocks.
According to guerilla saleswoman Nema Basheer, most women are so embarrassed that they don't ask. According to Tuesday's New York Times, Basheer estimates that 85 percent of Saudi Arabian women are victimized on a daily basis by the improperly sized bras sold to them by blue-shirted men taught to repeat bra sizes only in a whisper.
Of course, back in the glory days of chauvinistic underwear vending, men were allowed to bellow the sizes of the undergarments as loud as they could.
This underwear oppression is only the extreme tip of the very large, oppressive iceberg that is Saudi Arabia (a country that we like to pretend is nothing more than our own personal airstrip and gas station).
Fifteen of the 19 hijackers implicated in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were Saudi Arabian. While the importance of this fact is in debate, there is no debate that had these 15 been Iraqi, Baghdad would currently resemble "Ground Zero."
The Saudi's tendency to receive Bart Simpson-like report cards grading human rights is also a concern. A report released by the U.S. Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor cites the Saudi record as "poor." Exemplary offenses include abridged freedom of speech, closed trials with forced confessions and continuing abuse of women and foreigners.
Those same offenses were cited in defense of our post-Sept. 11 obliteration of the Taliban. I am the last person to argue that the nature of the Taliban was not fundamentally repulsive. But I'd like to point out that the nature of the Saudi Fahd monarchy (not to mention that of the Northern Alliance that replaced the Taliban) is similarly bad.
Henceforth, anyone seeking to pursue a universally coherent and ethical U.S. foreign policy must accept one of two options. Either the United States should enforce an established and public set of democratic value enforcement equally throughout the world, or the U.S. should stop selectively choosing human rights abuses worth eradicating in order to justify bombings.
Alternately, one could argue that we already have a coherent foreign policy: the pursuit and protection of our economic and military interests around the globe. While this ideology certainly explains the hypocritical bombings of some evil dictatorships and simultaneous support of others, it also forces the entire notion of ethical political actions to crumble.
Once pesky ethics are pushed aside, it doesn't matter who's getting abused, as long as the particular country's religiously doctrinal smorgasbord permits someone to keep the oil flowing.
Solomon Rotstein is a humanities sophomore. Reach him at solomon.rotstein@asu.edu.
