Lasting Fulfillment in a World of Endless Temptations – Jamiatul Ulama KZN
The online world as we know it has become a ground where everyone engages in a cutthroat competition for one thing: attention. With a large chunk of the human population being present online, figuring out the most optimal way to hook them and reel them in towards your services like a fish has become a skill of its own. And in this online global market, the best seller wins, which often tends to be those who are most successfully able to capitalize on human desire. And what is more desirous for a human than an extremely attractive member of the opposite gender? This is especially the case for men, who are more visually oriented than women.
And so, the Internet and social media are flooded with images and videos of both extremely attractive men and women, though there is significantly greater focus on women, with such media usually being subjected to a lot of editing and manipulation in order to make these individuals look unrealistically attractive.
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This digital manipulation can be so insecurity-inducing that, as a result of trying to attain such unrealistic standards of beauty, some men and women also undergo external modifications in the form of expensive plastic and cosmetic surgeries, with countless women turning their beautiful God-given faces into puffy duck-shaped monstrosities and men injecting themselves with harmful steroids in order to amass muscles that no natural lifter could ever achieve even if they had trained their entire life, at the cost of things like testicular atrophy and “roid rage.”
This online attention-capturing whirlpool is also obviously why pornography is mass-produced in the way that it is and why it is also such a profitable industry. Countless beautiful women are sexualized on these platforms in order to hyper-stimulate the users’ brains, and every kind of degenerate fetish is made available visually. The result is men who have been so over-exposed to looking at nude supermodel women performing all kinds of explicit acts that they no longer become aroused by them. And so, like a drug addict, they have to find something even more stimulating, more extreme, which leads them down a dangerous rabbit hole of unspeakably vile degeneracy. This is also how some men turn to homosexuality, as the female body no longer attracts their over-stimulated addict brains.
This process is a recipe for disaster when it comes to marriage, something that is supposed to create a strong bond between a man and a woman; and a divinely ordained arrangement whereby the two are supposed to derive pleasure and enjoyment from one another. Unfortunately, due to the fitnah (trial, tribulation, temptation) of pornography that plagues some Muslims as well, these men aren’t aroused by their halal (lawful) living, breathing wives, as their brains have been hard-wired to only be stimulated by a manipulated attractive combination of lifeless virtual pixels.
Men and increasingly even women who are affected by this fitnah fall into a pit of deep depression and all kinds of mental illnesses that only few are able to escape from in order to have healthy, functional lives. And the quantity of these recovering addicts will most likely drop sharply in the near future, as AI takes pornography to a whole new scale. The result will be that these men won’t want to engage in finding a real, breathing woman anyway, instead falling deeply in love with their lifeless robot “waifus,” customized exactly according to their chosen specifications. No woman on Earth will be able to compete with the combination of physical beauty and unconditional obedience that these female androids bring to the table. However, the women might not be as fulfilled with male androids, no matter how shredded they may be. Why? Because a woman judges a man by his drive and ambition, as well as the level of success they lead to, be it social, financial, or even personal. A lifeless bot has no room for growth, nor did it work hard to achieve anything. It is merely a tool, a slave meant to be ordered around instead of being the authoritative leader. Thus there is little satisfaction to be had for women from such androids, apart from the sexually dominating features that might be integrated within them.
And even men will eventually get tired of female androids, as, at the end of the day, they too are simply nothing more than toys. Perhaps the ultimate toys, sure, but they will never provide the love, warmth, support, connection, and faithful companionship that you get from a real woman. Once again, even the ultimate AI tools will lead to nothing but depression and a lack of purpose and motivation. This time, however, the vortex will be inescapable.
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And if we add technologies like brain-computer-interface into the mix, then it might be possible for men to acquire the ultimate woman of their fantasies inside their own heads, and they can spend the rest of their days dreaming away in a pod. The same goes for women. But after going through such experiences, a normal human being will never again be good enough for them, not without serious therapy and rehabilitation.
We don’t even need to go that far into the future. Even now we have many examples, not just with pornography but even things like attractive women on billboards, on social media, on thumbnails and brand images, in movies and TV shows and even animations, and the social acceptance of women wearing less and less clothing with more and more jewellery and makeup that they plaster on in order to attract as many eyes as possible. All of this culminates towards perverting the male gaze, something that is meant to be guarded.
Someone who ogles at Ferraris all day will never be satisfied with a boring old Toyota, even if the Ferraris that he sees are only on Google images and YouTube and the Toyota is the actual car he owns and drives in real life.
Similarly, a man who ogles at unrealistically attractive supermodels all day will never be satisfied with his actual beautiful lawful wife, unless she is at least as physically attractive as world-class supermodels who spend most of their day exercising, barely eat anything, have stylists, make-up artists, etc., glamming them up for hours on end, which the vast majority simply aren’t and don’t have the luxury of being.
The simple and straightforward solution is to lower one’s gaze. Guard it as though you are guarding your very life, as it too, is something Allah has placed under your care and made you responsible for. By averting our eyes away from the fitnah that constantly surrounds us in both the virtual and the real world, we also guard our brains and our normal sexual functionality. For a man who guards his gaze, it doesn’t matter if his wife isn’t considered by others to be the most beautiful woman in the world. However, since she is one of the only few women that he looks at regularly, to his untainted eyes she will be extremely beautiful. His standards would not have been drastically warped by admiring hundreds of women that he compares her to in every feature and detail. This will make both the man and the woman feel satisfied and content, and it will lead to a long, fruitful, and healthy marriage.
The same holds true for the woman. She must also lower her gaze by not looking at men, and the best way for her to do that is for her to cover herself up properly when outside to ward off unwanted attention, avoid gender-mixing, and stay inside her home. By doing this, her entire periphery is filled by her husband, and she is naturally attracted to him alone. She won’t compare his every aspect to all the other men out there. This way, he guards his gaze, and she guards her chastity, and both become like a protective and serene covering for each other. The woman doesn’t have to be a 10/10 supermodel by the standards of those who watch and look at thousands of women, and the man doesn’t have to be a bodybuilding 6-foot CEO of a multi-million dollar corporation. Both are grateful for the blessings they’ve been given by Allah, including each other.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that a married couple becomes so comfortable that they let themselves go completely and become stagnant, obese, unkempt, etc. That is the opposite extreme which technology leads to nowadays by making people complacent and apathic. At this end of the spectrum, there is once again usually a huge risk of the marriage falling apart. Islam strikes the perfect balance wherein a man and woman have reserved themselves and their gazes for each other alone, while at the same time maintaining themselves and looking pleasing for each other, the woman not turning into a smelly repulsive whale and the man not turning into a lazy deadbeat hippo. And of course, gratefulness is extremely important here, as well as constantly keeping in mind the bigger picture—that this world is a temporary test, and what awaits in the Hereafter for those who are successful is eternal happiness, pleasure, contentment, and bliss. That is the true cure to modern illnesses like depression. It is the model that Islam has brought for humanity to follow, a model that is superior to every other way of living.
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