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May 14, 2008
Greetings from Repressionland.
You've got to read the NY Times' series on the young people growing up in the bizarre environment of gender separation, subjugation of women, and extreme sexual phobia that is our super-swell Middle Eastern ally, Saudi Arabia.
18-year-old Alia just got engaged:
A cellphone picture of Alia’s fiancé — a 25-year-old military man named Badr — was passed around, and the girls began pestering Alia for the details of her showfa. A showfa — literally, a “viewing” — usually occurs on the day that a Saudi girl is engaged.A girl’s suitor, when he comes to ask her father for her hand in marriage, has the right to see her dressed without her abaya.
In some families, he may have a supervised conversation with her. Ideally, many Saudis say, her showfa will be the only time in a girl’s life that she is seen this way by a man outside her family.
...
The separation between the sexes in Saudi Arabia is so extreme that it is difficult to overstate. Saudi women may not drive, and they must wear black abayas and head coverings in public at all times. They are spirited around the city in cars with tinted windows, attend girls-only schools and university departments, and eat in special “family” sections of cafes and restaurants, which are carefully partitioned from the sections used by single male diners.
Special women-only gyms, women-only boutiques and travel agencies, even a women-only shopping mall, have been established in Riyadh in recent years to serve women who did not previously have access to such places unless they were chaperoned by a male relative.
Nader is 22, and a military communications officer:
[A counsin's] father agreed to let Nader marry one of his four daughters. Nader picked Sarah, though she is not the oldest, in part, he said, because he actually saw her face when she was a child and recalled that she was pretty.They quickly signed a wedding contract, making them legally married, but by tradition they do not consider themselves so until the wedding party, set for this spring. During the intervening months, they are not allowed to see each other or spend any time together.
Nader said he expected to see his new wife for the first time after their wedding ceremony — which would also be segregated by sex — when they are photographed as husband and wife.
“If you want to know what your wife looks like, look at her brother,” Nader said in defending the practice of marrying someone he had seen only once, briefly, as a child.
Strangest of all, however, is an account of an illicit night out with a group of teenage Saudi boys as they went "numbering"—
—chasing cars containing young girls and trying to give the girls their phone numbers via Bluetooth, or by holding written phone numbers up to their car windows. When a Saudi girl I knew told me that her friend’s older brother would be willing to take me out numbering with his friends, I leaped at the chance....
“There! There in the GMC!” Mohamed shouted. “Girls!”
Through the tinted windows in the back of the GMC, I could make out three indistinct black shapes. Thamer stepped on the gas, but a white Mercedes S-class containing four young Saudi men edged him out. The Mercedes pulled alongside the GMC, and the two young men in the back seat waved pieces of cardboard with phone numbers written on them.
“They beat us,” Fahad complained, as Thamer tried to pull up behind the GMC. “And they have a hotter car.”
I looked around. We were surrounded by several other cars, all containing young men and all trying to get the attention of the figures in the GMC, while simultaneously trying to edge each other off the road at high speed.
“Isn’t this getting a bit dangerous?” I asked.
“Yeah,” said Fahad. “Sometimes the girls get really scared, there are so many cars chasing them. Sometimes they’re in their car, crying and screaming for us to go away. It’s fun to make girls angry.”
Fifteen of the nineteen September 11th highjackers were from Saudi Arabia. Sounds like it's not just the girls who are growing up angry.
