thoughts about moderation

I was musing whilst looking at an article linked by the inestimably great www.gatewaypundit.blogspot.com (point of disclosure: he's a St. Louis guy and an internet friend) of some women in the chador juxtaposed with a Western protest (maybe Ukraine, I don't know) where men and women freely mixed and it made me start thinking about the way that society treats women in both, ie usually pretty immoderately.
Sex is a powerful thing and, let's by totally frank, women are the gatekeepers. That is not to say we men are helpless walking phalli, but women usually control when and where coitus occurs. Islam has dealt with this power by almost completely obliterating it by subordinating women in every aspect from divorce to beatings to polygamy and most infamously displayed by the veil. It is not a very nuanced way of acknowledging the inherent power and beauty of women (and it's a damn shame because Persian women are amongst the hottest in the world) and reeks of insecurity and helplessness.
We in the west, in my opinion, haven't a much more nuanced attitude towards sex and women. The current strain of thought is that women are exactly like men, as best typified by "Sex and the City" and the "Vagina Monologues" exept that we have different reproductive parts. There is almost no thought that women are equal but different than men. There is no acknowledgment of the unique and miraculous role that woman, and woman alone, play in childbirth and child nurturing. We have taken sex and, instead of acknowledging its power, we act as though it's no big deal. Furthermore, the corrollary of this is that we act as though motherhood is only a "lifestyle" choice no different than becoming a doctor or teacher. Both are extreme positions, the utter breaking of the woman in Islam and the utter debasing of their sexuality and motherhood in the West.
I don't know if we ever got it right, but it seems as though the Golden Mean no longer exists in society. People seemed doomed to take things to their logical extreme rather than say there are times where we must say "stop." This could be said of abortion, war, the death penalty, taxes, or relationships. We need to study up on our Greek culture, where the Golden Mean was first proffered, if we truly are to tackle the infinitely complex issues we face today. Sex is one of them, and, some would say, the most vital.