Читать книгу Sex Rules! - Janice Z. Brodman - Страница 9

I headed to India as a student in the ’70s. The sexual revolution had declared victory back home in Boston. Sleeping with an attractive stranger was de rigueur. Living with your lover was expected. Sex before marriage the rule. They were the innocent days before HIV/AIDS.

Never before more than two hundred miles from home, I flew from Boston to Athens, crossed Greece, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India by motor boat, ferry, train, bus, and hippie van. A free spirit!

My first bias, and the most wrong-headed, was that people everywhere are pretty much the same. I wasn’t a total fool. I knew some things would be different, like what you ate and how you dressed. I knew dating was forbidden in most countries. Parents arranged marriages, rarely with a woman’s input or assent.

I knew I’d have to adjust. Just not how much.

Early on, near the Red Sea, I took refuge from the sun beneath the canopy of a Moroccan family’s tent. I spoke no Arabic and they no English, so I held sketchy conversations with the mother in my shaky French. I must have made a good impression, because she soon asked how they could contact my parents. She announced—with an indulgent smile—that she and her husband decided to marry her son to me. Sitting nearby, he flushed, astonished. Obviously, no one had consulted him. The bride-price, she declared confidently: eighteen camels and six goats. Surely my parents couldn’t refuse.

I stuttered in fractured French: It was very generous of her, and of course I was delighted. But I—not my parents—would decide whom I’d marry. Although I liked her very much and thought her son quite handsome (I could say nothing of his intelligence and wit, as he’d been mute the entire afternoon), I was not prepared to marry him or anyone else.

She was patently skeptical.

The next day, I was pleased with my skillful handling of another culture. It didn’t take long to realize I didn’t have a clue. The extremes I was about to experience—in every direction—would enrage, awe, humble, and sometimes terrify me.

Weeks later, in Afghanistan, I entered another world. Even pre-Taliban, the women were specters eclipsed in full-length black cloth, their eyes trapped behind dark grilles. Despite the glaring heat, I had dressed carefully in a dark, shapeless, long-sleeved shirt, a loose, black, ankle-length skirt, and a scarf covering my hair. I was as sexy as a sack of rice.

Much good it did. When the public bus from Kandahar to Kabul stopped so we passengers could relieve ourselves, I followed the local custom and found a boulder that I could squat behind in “private.”

The man who jumped me was sure that I wouldn’t scream, and, even if I did, no one would respond. When I jabbed an elbow into his chest he dropped his hold, more out of astonishment than pain, as if, about to bite into a potato, it had shoved him away. I ran.

It was my first gut-level experience of women’s subjugation to men, but not my last. That many men expect, and get, utter compliance, was no great shock—except to my self-assurance.

Equally astonishing, and far happier, were the opposite experiences. They transformed everything I “knew” about women and men. Women ruling the seduction game, aggressively wooing coquettish men, setting (and resetting) the terms of marriage—were a revelation. “Normal” mating took on a whole new meaning as I came to know my neighbors around the globe.