i'm just a girl

this blog seems to have ended up being a run-down on the exciting events in my life here, and then some musings about being a bint fi al-urdun (girl in jordan).

i realized that i think about gender here on the daily, which is something i'm not really used to. at home i'm one of the bros, and often find myself the only girl in a group of boys. when this happens in jordan, i'm forced to reassess. is this culturally acceptable? what do people think of me? especially on a thursday evening. (keep in mind prostitution is a problem here, and the prostitutes are usually white)

male-female interactions are more nuanced. when dave and i met with our ISP advisor and he drove us to a local environmental NGO, dave offered me shotgun. i realized i probably should have declined, as women always ride in the back of cars, or at least in taxis. sometimes i go to shake a man's hand and he politely puts his hand over his heart and bows slightly, indicating that he doesn't touch women. normally i wouldn't think twice about using a men's single-person restroom (i mean, come on, it's exactly the same as the ladies room!) at a gas station or in a restaurant, but here i've gotten several dirty looks from doing so.

more than that, all the women on this program have at one point or another experienced some form of harrassment. this has ranged from over-conversational cab drivers to my friend getting sexually assualted when we were in petra. my experiences tend to fall on the "sarah, i love you" side (i always say my name is sarah when a cab driver asks) or proposals so that the cab driver can get a green card. but i also had a disturbing groping incident on a public bus on my way to jerash (remember that solo trip i was proud of myself for? i actually spent about an hour of it crying in a bathroom by myself).

in these instances, it's natural to seek blame, whether it be yourself, the perpetrator, or the entire culture. granted, i should not have been traveling on a public bus by myself, but also that dirtbag should not have violated my person. i could have easily gotten angry with the entire culture: the way women are second-class citizens; the way minimal contact between young boys and girls leads men to developed a warped perception of what women are like as humans and instead views them as physical objects; the way sexual assault or harrassment is not dealt with openly and is seen as more shameful for the woman than for the man.

but i'm in a unique position as an american woman in jordan. do jordanian women recieve the same treatment as i do? probably not, and if they do, they are much better equipped linguistically and culturally to deal with it and defend themselves. for all the benefits of globalization, it has also led to america exporting probably the worst version of itself possible to middle eastern countries. women in american pop culture/media are highly sexualized, one-dimensional characters who fall as easily into bed as into love. if this is the only side of american femininity that arabs are getting, naturally a certain number of sexually repressed men are going to take advantage of a young naive american student in jordan. (maybe if we were exporting more sydney bristows to the world it would be a different story!!!)

yet it is still indescribably frustrating that i receive certain treatment not based on my actions but based on my identity alone. in many instances, there is nothing i could have done to avoid these unfortunate situations. what can i do? am i supposed to never take a taxi? never walk down the street? but i always have to be on my guard, and it's a constant source of stress. and the things that i normally do at home to relieve stress are the things that cause problems here in the first place (i.e. go for a walk). it's a stress that i'm sure the other women in my program feel too, and something that the boys will never really understand.

for more information on this topic, please refer to the the lyrics of no doubt's "i'm just a girl."