Also, while I usually refrain from judging the work of writers based on their personal beliefs, sometimes their very writing is so very thick with their personal attitudes that it’s impossible for me not to judge. I’m talking about D.H. Lawrence in specific who, as far as I’m concerned, is a misogynist and and a prick. It pisses me off when bloggers I respect post his quotes. The biggest talent that man had was denial and an inability to embrace his homosexuality. So, yea, fuck D.H. Lawrence.
Having lived in the Middle East myself, and having experienced no special sort of harassment singular only to the Middle East, I should think what you need to be looking for faults in is yourself. No, I don't mean to insult you or call you deficient. I just find it maddening, and saddening, that people with appreciation of words and literature, the stuff that rips people's cores open and lays them bare, that provides PERSPECTIVE, would still hold narrow-minded views like the ones you expressed.
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.
(via mythrys)
Fucking epic. The one about the uterus and government is brilliant.
By Stevie Nicks (via ceedling)
