Entropy

I was born there and lived in Cairo  for years, but do not currently reside there. 

I’m so happy you think so

I’m glad you find me interesting and hope you’ll live a long time! =)

*blush* thank you =D You made my day.

thank you so much!

As much as that is terrible, I will not judge their music by their opinions and actions. Political correctness has nothing to do with music I find beautiful and that’s that.

?!

That’s so sweet of you and I’m thrilled you enjoy my posts!

LOL.

Just. LOL.

You call that first-hand knowledge? Seriously? Like, seriously?

Thanks for the laugh.

And what Muslim culture and Egypt are like. Not is.

I would just like to keep traveling from one place to the next like a nomad, running toward myself or the horizon or some mythical city nobody else can see.

But in terms of an actual place, I’ve always wanted to try living in Australia.

1) Neither. I finished school a couple of years ago then worked a little. Right now I’m basically focused on getting an M.A. or teaching come fall.

2) Yes. I’ve been published five times. more info?

I’ve been told more times than I can ignore. I’ve been put in situations where my gender was held against me.

I am not, not in any way whatsoever, attacking Islam and I never would. It’s a beautiful religion which is being massacred on daily basis by misogynistic pigs to suit their own perverted needs or ends. But you will never hear me attacking Islam.

Living in the Middle East is nowhere NEAR being Middle Easterner. Do you know that women aren’t even aware they are supposed to take pleasure in sex?

Another example: our cleaning lady had a daughter who—at fifteen—was engaged. She died. Three months later her fourteen year old daughter was engaged to the same man her deceased sister was to marry and is now pregnant at 15.

Another example: my maternal grandmother was taken out of school by her parents when she was 12, because she was supposedly the prettiest of her sisters and so it was easier to just marry her off. At 16.

Another example: my paternal grandmother was married at the age of 13 to my grandfather who was a widower with two children from his previous marriage at the time. Fifteen years and eight children later, he dies leaving my grandmother to fend for all of them in her late twenties.

Another example: a classmate of mine, right after we finished high school and despite high grades, was forced to marry a man she’d only met twice because her father said so and despite the fact she was in love with her boyfriend of four years.

Now, I’m not special. These experiences don’t just hurl themselves at me. They’re the norm. So instead of being the exact, disgusting kind of foreigner who thinks they have any idea what this society is really like because they simply lived in the Middle East, get a fucking education.

"Wholly illegitimate". That’s funny. I definitely don’t think it is the norm in any culture for a strange man, one who didn’t even know me, to physically assault me (and I mean slap, hard) for being with my boyfriend, just cause he disapproves. I don’t think it’s the norm in a culture to be told repeatedly God said man is better than woman (especially when God did no such thing.) I don’t think it’s the norm that half the females in Egypt (at least) are genitally mutilated at birth in the name of tradition, because otherwise they’d be "whores".

This entire culture, more than any other, is practically geared against women in every way possible. Women are taught their bodies must be covered, that they should be pleasant, to choose family over career, to “obey” their fathers and husbands. They are not raised to be anything but what society wants them to be. And what’s disgusting is how sexism is practiced by women just as much as men.

I don’t care whether or not I’m the only Middle Easterner who wants things to change. I care about what they have been throughout my life and still are and how that has affected and continues to affect me every day.

So you can go on playing into this sick version of Stockholm syndrome and saying it’s as bad as all places. Fact is, sexism-wise, it isn’t. So I WILL single out the group I have EXPERIENCED and write about my experience. I don’t care about other cultures or what’s wrong with them. I am not comparing. I am saying what goes in here in wrong and disgusting and ruins women, regardless of what other cultures are like.

Whoever this is, I think you completely overlook the fact that I am Middle Eastern and have lived my entire life in the Middle East. If you’ve bothered looking through my blog, you’d see how much of my culture I appreciate. But, if we’re talking about living in the Middle East, my own experience existing here has been spent dealing with extreme sexism, enforced religion, rejection of anything and everything unorthodox and blatant verbal and physical harassment. So, dear imbecile, it is NOT Middle Eastern history and culture that I am against so much as society as I’ve dealt with it here.

I think yes, that’s mostly true. Because someone who knoews you, try as they might, will always have a bias and always give a subjective opinion. And also, sometimes, when talking about problems with someone who knows you, intentionally or not, a part of them relishes your problems as some sort of prize. As in, they tend to think “oh they trust me enough to tell me.” That sort of thing or variations of it. Which is only human I guess. A stranger—on the other hand—has nothing to gain and provides a sort of trust related to anonymity. But also, this largely depends on the type of stranger and their ability to disengage themselves from applying their own values to what you tell them—and by that I don’t just mean closed-mindness. In my personal experience though, never tell anybody everything. I’m sorry if I went on a tangent here, and I hope I answered your question :)