Paul Little: Turned off by jihadi bridal march

Jihadi brides exist elsewhere, but no one knows if any are Kiwis.

The jihadi bridal march, it seems, is music to young New Zealand women's ears, its siren song luring them to very bad places.

The head of the SIS, Rebecca Kitteridge no less, has reported on the droves of sheilas shipping themselves into Iraqi and Syrian love nests. Kitteridge held John Key, Andrew Little and the rest of Parliament's intelligence and security committee spellbound as she reported on this development.

Of course, as droves go, this exodus - if you'll pardon the Hebraic allusion - is on the light side. Despite our magnificent spying apparatus - Five Eyes and all that - we don't know how many women are throwing themselves into the arms of beheading-happy hunks.

Pressed on the issue, Kitteridge said there were "fewer than 12" women concerned, which is tantalisingly imprecise. Would that be 11 fewer, perhaps? Ten fewer?

Nor did "we" know with any certainty why they went, Kitteridge admitted, or what they did when they got there, and she could not comment on whether any had returned to New Zealand. Of course, that doesn't mean we don't have Isis-trained killer brides roaming our streets. Maybe we do. Maybe we don't. She's just saying.

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When claims like this are brought up by those in power, it's fashionable to label them as diversions, intended to distract our attention from more relevant issues. I seldom buy that argument. Our attention spans are so woeful we don't need to be distracted. It's almost impossible to get us to concentrate on anything in the first place.

But in this case it's hard to see any other reason for bringing up the so-called jihadi brides. Yet it's such an exotic concept that we've become fascinated by it to the extent that we don't question how much substance it has.

"Why do young, educated women want to become jihadi brides?" asked a newspaper feature. Obviously, you could understand it if they were old and thick, but it sounds like some of these women - three? four? - are total babes with brains to boot.

The very use of the expression jihadi bride is obnoxious. Unthinking use of that phrase and the speed with which it has been accepted displays unconscious religious stereotyping and sexism. It also shows that whatever war is being fought, ignorance and prejudice have already won.

I've been doing some research, with the help of my tame archaeologist, into what life was like in the Stone Age. That's a period which, she tells me, roughly encompasses Paleolithic, Mesolithic (largely egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies) and the Neolithic eras, ending somewhere between 6000 and 2000BC.

Apparently, folks back then did things like getting wasted on humiss, fermented mare's milk. They began to keep pigs from about 10,000BC which tells us they ate pork. In terms of health and diet, men and women were roughly equal. Resources were shared fairly. We know from the discovery of female shamans' graves that women had an important part to play in religious life.

And here are some things they didn't do - have a hypocritical society which punished one caste for using alcohol but allowed a ruling elite to drink themselves senseless.

Their elites did not moor superyachts off Monaco and other playgrounds of the super-rich to indulge in practices for which the rest of the population would be executed.

They did not blackmail other societies into torturing animals on their behalf and building them abattoirs.

All of which tells me that when, as we often do, we describe the society of Saudi Arabia - the country we are bending over backwards to appease in the interests of commerce - as "Stone Age", we are being grossly unfair to the Stone age.