Author: Michelle

Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. To pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee, is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns.
–C.Brontë

Let’s just get the scary word right out there in the open: feminism.

I’ll say it now: I am a feminist. And no, it isn’t a synonym for man-hating lesbian. It doesn’t mean I think women are just like men. It means that I think that women should have social-political-economic rights equal to those of men. It means that I think that women should be free to determine what they want to do with their own bodies and minds.

How does that tie into the body image stuff?

Be fat or thin.
Have a full bush, shave little hearts into it or go bare.
Have natural breasts or get those silicone cantaloupes glommed onto the front of you.
Be a virgin or be a whore.
Be a stay at home mom, a nun or a doctor.
Get your entire body tattooed so you look like a lizard, or enjoy your skin without adornment.
Wear false eyelashes to the gym, or shun makeup completely.
Write hard core porn, or poems about butterflies and rainbows.
Be an intellectual or a ditz.

Do anything you want to do. Be anything you want to be. Even things that most of us would find objectionable. Just…think first.

As you are making a decision about how to handle yourself out in this great big world, here is some advice: take into consideration how much outside influence is going into that decision before you make it so it’s as much your own as it can be.

Try not to let the voice of the world make your decisions for you. Try not to make decisions just to please someone else.

There is a huge difference in my mind between deciding to get breast implants because you’ve made a carefully considered decision that you’d like to have bigger breasts and doing it because you think your boyfriend will break up with you if you don’t, or because you won’t be able to work as a stripper without cantaloupes strapped to your sternum.

Hell, be a stripper if you really want to. Be a prostitute if it’s really what you want and you’re honestly doing it on your own terms. In my opinion that is extremely rare. (Never mind my squeamishness about more value being placed on our bodies than on our brains in our world, and what that does to Women as a whole in society.)

Sexual self-determinism is a big topic. It’s hard to make a decision about living a radical sexual lifestyle without it being impacted by adverse elements in our lives. Rape, abuse, drugs. It’s possible, but it’s difficult.

It’s also very prone to being judged. Sometimes literally judged, like Oscar Wilde. Sometimes you could end up being an outcast. If it’s what you want, for yourself, and you’ve considered it–go ahead.

My concerns about many body modifications are more about how they play into the possibility that people, especially women, could gradually become less accepted if all of their body parts are real. That we are possibly setting each other up for being considered substandard if we do not modify our bodies and behavior to match an ideal that comes from…where does it come from? Not from us. From outside. From men. From the media. From those who do not necessarily want what is best for us.

Think about it. That is the point.

I don’t care what you do unless you wear pajamas in public. That’s tacky.

When I was in college, I spent a lot of time with a group of Saudis. The ones I mentioned in a post a few days ago. I hung out with them after class, ate dinner with them nearly every night, drank with them, danced with them, fucked some of them.

Their family had been sending kids to school in Eugene for years, so they owned a house on the golf course near the Oakway mall. It was a sort of second home for most of the time I was in college. It was one of the most unusual relationships I have ever had with a group of people.

Cultural differences abounded.

None of them were overtly religious, but they all shunned pork for the most part aside from pepperoni. Although that seemed to stem from a bit of willful deceit on the part of one of their American girlfriends.

Almost all of them drank alcohol. None of them prayed on a regular basis.

None of them were sexually chaste.

They adored their baby cousins and nieces.
I was banned from the house when their mothers and sisters visited although they did arrange to introduce me when I ran into them “accidentally” at the mall.

Their fathers all had multiple wives and the family relationships were complicated and close. I never quite figured out how some of them were related. Some of them were both half-brothers and cousins.

Their family was wealthy-they owned one of the only dairy companies in Saudi Arabia. They were all well traveled, but somehow unsophisticated. They were a really nice group of guys, and all about my age.

They all knew a lot of people our age or younger who had died. Car crashes out in the desert, mostly. A lot of stories about speeding. A lot of stories about smuggling booze from Bahrain. Leukemia. I was still in my teens, and only knew one or two people who had died. They all had multiple close friends, brothers, cousins who had died.

Like everyone, all of them who met my Mom thought she was wonderful. The main test for anyone I know.

Did any of this matter? Not really.

It would be hard for me to define the relationship I had with these young men. Sometimes I think I was sort of a mascot. The eccentric American girl. I was the only girl “like me” who was ever around. Like me…weird. Not well dressed. Not chatty. Prone to either silence or saying odd things at inopportune moments. A lot of the time I would be the only girl around, unless there was a party.

A few of them had regular girlfriends, so they’d be around on weekends. I didn’t really have a defined relationship with any one of them in particular, but did fuck several of them on a regular basis. It was more of a friendly relationship.

If there was a big party at the house, which there often would be, there might be 20 men sleeping on the cushions on the living room floor. Sometimes I would sleep on the floor too, if I didn’t either sleep with one of the guys or go home. No one ever bothered me. I always felt very safe there, unlike a lot of other more “normal” dating type situations.

We didn’t ever go out individually. We went out as a group or we hung out at the house. Sometimes another group would have a party or dinner and we’d all go to that. There was almost always a party at the Hilton on Friday or Saturday night.

I did go out with a lot of other guys during those years, but these were the ones I spent most of my time with. I don’t think I actually dated any Americans until I was single in my thirties. No Americans ever asked me out. I didn’t notice it at the time.

If I did have a date, it wasn’t uncommon for me to stop by the house and have dinner first. Or just hang out for a while. Or even go there after the date, especially if it didn’t go well. Or if I didn’t feel like driving all the way back home.

These guys were all very sweet to me, except (somewhat ironically) the one who introduced me to them all in the first place. He was a cousin or something. We ended up having a big fight when he told me to get up and answer the door in the middle of the night. I refused, and he pushed me out of bed. He was being a prick, so I dumped the remnants of his drink on him and left. He told me never to come back.

A couple of days later, one of the cousins, the ones who owned the house, called to check on me. I told him that I’d been kicked out, and he laughed and said they all missed me and I should come back and have dinner. So I did. The other guy wasn’t around so much any more.

He tried, and failed, to get me kicked out of the other local Arab social gatherings, but for whatever reason the guys liked me. Even the ones I wasn’t sleeping with. I wasn’t sleeping with most of them.

I kind of felt like the resident weirdo. Maybe I was like their village idiot, only smart.

Maybe they just liked that I didn’t want anything from them. Because of the money, they must have gotten a lot of girls wanting money, drugs, cars. Because I didn’t care about anything, I was low maintenance.

I lost touch with them when I went to France. I suppose they are all married with dozens of wives and children. The family still owns the house in Eugene. Their sons probably live there now.

It was really the only sort of relationship I was at all equipped for emotionally at the time, so in that respect it was probably positive. We all sort of took care of each other.

A lot of them didn’t speak English very well, so there wasn’t a lot of pressure on me to talk. They just let me be. Somehow, even though I didn’t speak Arabic I could pick up what they were talking about. I’d speak English, they’d speak Arabic. Sometimes they’d talk about me just to see if I noticed. I’d just laugh at them. If other people talked about me, they’d make them stop and tell them I spoke Arabic.

I’d lay on the living room floor and do homework, or read. Watch soccer with one of the guys. One of them made great drinks, so I’d sit at the bar and talk to him all night.

Were they just treating me like a living doll? A sexual convenience? Possibly, but that isn’t how it felt. There were definitely plenty of other guys I saw during that same time who did act like I was just a sex toy. It didn’t bother me. Nothing bothered me much then.

One of their uncles met me on a trip to LA and wanted to buy me an apartment in Geneva. He said I was pretty and smart, and he liked that I spoke several languages. He thought I was funny. He was married, but wanted to have someone around when he travelled to Europe on business several times a year. When he asked me about it, I wondered aloud if he realized how socially awkward I was. He said he didn’t need someone to throw parties or entertain, just someone to talk to. I would be more than welcome to go to parties with him when I wanted to, but it wasn’t part of the deal.

Given how little I cared about anything at that point in my life, it surprises me in retrospect that I didn’t just tell him I didn’t want the apartment but He could fly me to Geneva any time. If he’d been my age, maybe I would have.

I wonder how it would have worked out?

What would life as a mistress have done to me or for me?

It’s weird for me to write about this whole time period. It feels floaty and disconnected. It was a lot of fun in some ways, but it was..a floaty and disconnected time for me. I was unhappy with myself in general, not dealing with several issues well, and these guys were always kind to me when a lot of others were not.