via: katemiddletonforthewin.tumblr.com

I should be writing a new script. So that I don’t fall behind on my student loans (on can dream, anyway), and so the husband and I can stay fed this summer (the baby, presumably, will have the breast – just like in the “Lady Madonna” song). This naturally means that I am busy participating in useless online debates at Feministe. In the course of one such debate, I have discovered that – egad! – expressing pity for Kate Middleton’s utter loss of anonymity is problematic, ya’ll (I’m beginning to loathe the word “problematic,” btw: it’s right up there with “privilege” and “trigger”).

I don’t know what it’s like to be a diamond tiara-wearing international celebrity, but I do know what it’s like to experience a partial loss of anonymity. When I lived in Amman, Jordan, in the years 2008 – 2009, I couldn’t step outside and walk down the street without shit going down. At all. Seriously. I was a young foreign woman, and a conspicuously Slavic foreign woman on top of that, in a country where ladies like me are too often associated with being “easy”. Even some people who weren’t interested in getting a piece of me felt that they had every right to point, stare, make comments, and sometimes even follow me around as I tried to, say buy tampons or whatever. People took pictures of me with their mobile phones. Entire tables full of people would get curious, sometimes even viciously curious, if I wanted to have a drink at a restaurant at night. Girls made comments about me in club bathrooms, unaware of the fact that I could usually understand what it was they were saying about me in Arabic, so that I couldn’t even pee in peace.

We all lose our privacy when we go outside, but my loss of privacy on the streets of Amman was nearly total. I wasn’t a person – I was a curiosity at best. A lot of factors contributed to this – not just my gender, appearance, and age. I had a halo of vulnerability around me. I couldn’t get used to what was happening. Unlike some other people who find themselves in similar situations, I couldn’t cope with the situation, which only increased the attention.

Even kind attention, people calling me beautiful in an attempt to make me feel welcome (both men and women did this), devastated me. I moved about the city from safe space to safe space – house, gym, expensive hotel bar, friend’s house, etc. – tensing up every time I had to mix with “ordinary people.” The worst was being intruded upon in places I had initially decided were safe. I had felt comfortable going on shopping trips, and then the first time a group of grown men started making comments and pointing their fingers at City Mall, I went home and cried for hours. The same thing happened when I discovered that the guys who worked at the gym I attended had tried to get the women’s locker room attendant to covertly snap pictures of me with her mobile when I changed (when she had refused, they pestered her with questions about my body – what did it look like naked? When she told them they were being assholes, they were shocked, she said, because to them, what they were doing was completely innocent – they never even imagined that to someone like me, what they were doing amounted to a colossal, total betrayal).

Incidentally, I was pampered in Amman. I never had to hustle for money like I do in Moscow. I didn’t have to borrow at the end of the month, or delay medical procedures while I waited for a freelance fee to come through. I didn’t lie awake at night, wondering what on earth I would do when my savings ran out (as they’re about to, again!). I ate great food. I took mini-breaks at great hotels. Ladies were paid to put expensive pumpkin goo on my face and massage my back. I certainly never cleaned my own bathroom or cooked. I still have fabulous clothes and accessories from that period of my life, vestiges of past luxury: delicate cashmere scarves, sparkling Donna Karan dresses, pearls, giant sunglasses, golden keychains, designer tunics that now nicely contain my baby bump. I rocked that shit, yo. I was queen of it.

But the price was too steep. There were other factors that contributed to my ultimate decision to leave, many of them private, but the mere fact of my day-to-day existence in Amman had exhausted and worn me down to the point that I, little miss spoiled, went all the way to the crazy former USSR in order to get my shit together and heal. Seriously. I found healing in a place where the metro gets blown up, for God’s sake.

Incidentally, I had moved to Amman for love. That love was very much a real thing, which is why it chaps my hide to hear people make snide comments about the “real” reason why Kate Middleton married William (what do we officially refer to him as, now? Do I care?). Considering the Middletons are rich, I seriously doubt that money was at stake. Despite my own feelings about the British monarchy, which are conflicting, I think there’s actually a whole lot of sexism and snobbery involved in subtly making the claim that this girl is a damn gold-digger. Seriously, people, even royals, even rich folks, meet and fall in love – and then have to make sacrifices for that love. It happens, and I view Kate Middleton’s loss of privacy as a pretty giant freaking sacrifice.

I’ve got no doubt that Kate Middleton will be able to handle being a mega-celebrity. I’ve got good money on her! She rocks those tiaras! Still, unwanted attention can be a bitch for someone who still remembers what it’s like to walk down the street like a normal person. It can leave you feeling exhausted and bitter and hunted, and for anyone who thinks otherwise, I sincerely invite you to try it out for yourself.

During the question-and-answer portion of my talk, someone asked me which language I speak better, English or Russian. I said that I speak English better – though I’ve been catching up on my Russian since moving to Moscow, and eventually hope for my knowledge in both languages to be pretty much even.

The dreaded “who are you?” question was, thankfully, not asked. I identify as lots of things, after all. Sometimes, it confuses people. It even irritates them. They think my Whitman-esque desire to “contain multitudes” is a sign of “disloyalty,” or, worse yet, some sort of indifference to my roots. But my roots, both genetic and cultural, spiritual and intellectual, grow from all sorts of places. This isn’t rare. This isn’t weird.

“How do you figure fromness?” Chally recently asked on Feministe. The important thing is not letting anyone else decide the answer for you. It’s the same as trying to determine your work experience in a globalized job market, really – just on a more personal scale.

So for those of you who are, for some reason, dying to know what’s in my bag, here’s a rundown:

- Work pass & press card. V. important. We have a saying in Russian: “without paperwork, you’re a little bug. With paperwork, you’re a human being!”

- Wallet. This one was a present from my ex, from London. It’s huge, expensive and fabulously bourgeois – novacheck with a patent leather trim. I keep the usual wallet-y stuff in it, and I also keep more unusual stuff, such as two small, laminated icons of the Virgin & Jesus, a small cross threaded in gold on a tiny cloth pillow (of the sort one normally sews into one’s clothes, or a soldier’s uniform – a present from one of my aunts), and small amounts of currencies from all the countries I used to live in (Ukraine, U.S.A, United Arab Emirates & Jordan. Should probably stick a Soviet coin in there too.).

- Keys from two flats – one in Moscow, one in Kiev. A keychain of silver stars I bought in Alabama, and a keychain of a little red and gold bag that my ex brought me back from Dubai once. I feel a little wistful every time I see the little red and gold bag dangling. And so it goes.

- A bottle of mineral water facial spray. Because it’s Freaking. Hot. In Moscow. Sometimes, when I catch random people looking at me when I spray myself with it, I’ll offer to spray them too. They tend to say yes.

- My metro pass. Speaking of the metro, just look at what I had to put with this morning. Hades. This is Hades.

- Cosmetics, to keep myself pretty. There’s a mirror and eyeshadow compact in there, that my badass teenage BROTHER, of all people, bought for me. I told him I wanted eyeshadow for Christmas (as a way of getting him to not buy me anything – I didn’t want him to spend his money), he went into a make-up store with one of his equally badass friends, described my facial features and colouring to the saleslady, and picked out a compact. And it was perfect.

- Deodorant. Because it is Freaking. Hot. In Moscow. I really need to switch to some of that more natural crap, that won’t make my lymph nodes develop tumours. I really need to.

- My big fat Nokia phone. It belonged to my ex. I stole it in a fit of pique, after I discovered that it had a 5 megapixel camera. My ex had broken my camera a few months prior. I am still avoiding the iPhone. I think this is an issue of sentimentality.

- A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book. I avoided reading Byatt for years, on account of her dissing and dismissing J. R. Rowling in the NYT. No, really, I actually did this. Looking back on it, it might have been a tad silly. A tad.

- A pack of Parliaments and blue lighter to match. I don’t really smoke, of course.

- A long, silver scarf. When I lived in Jordan, I wore it as a hijab for a while. Nowadays, I take it with me when I plan to visit a church, like I did this morning. (There was absolutely no one there, it was just after a service but before they closed their doors. A few women were singing psalms in a corner by the iconostasis. One came out eventually and accepted the little paper on which I had written the names of people who needed prayers – prayers for health and wellbeing, prayers for souls who had passed on, and a special prayer to the Virgin, for two individuals who need extra help. One of those individuals being me.)

- Oversized purple  sunglasses. I bought them in London, after losing my other ones in a pub in Devon. As I recall, I got a huge lecture about switching from Vivienne Westwood to Ralph Lauren – from a person who is actually fashionable.

- A green little iPod Shuffle. My actual iPod recently fell in battle. The Shuffle was kindly donated by a famous philanthropist, i.e. my brother.

- A small bottle of perfume – the grassy, summery kind. “It reminds me of my youth,” someone told me recently. “But you are still young,” I said. “Not in that way,” he replied.

- The bag itself is a black patent leather tote, fabulously expensive, bought on fabulous sale as, to quote Disney’s Emperor Kuzco, “my birthday gift to me! I’m SO happy!” I’m not really happy, but stalking around Moscow with a great bag makes me feel imposing – which is good enough, I suppose. Our head news correspondent recently told me that one of these days, I’ll come back from the bathroom and both she and my bag will be halfway to the border with Belarus. I eagerly await further developments.

As I mentioned in my previous post – no, Boobquake was not a serious action. Neither was it inclusive. But it was also a preposterous response to a preposterous statement and as such, I believe it worked.

Ironically enough, one of the people to call my attention to Boobquake on Facebook was a Muslim friend who, although a fairly conservative dresser and not planning on participating herself, thought I might find it “fun” and “[my] cup of tea.” She read me correctly, of course. It certainly wasn’t her cup of tea, not by a long shot. While I don’t believe that trotting out one of your friends at a moment like this makes for any sort of argument – I did appreciate the sentiment behind this. This is a person who has intimate knowledge of just how badly I struggled with issues of both self-image and safety while living in Jordan. She knew I would immediately relate.

There isn’t one correct way to respond to slut-shaming, after all. People have different arsenals, and use them the best way they know how. Does this somehow negate white Western privilege? Well, uh, no. But it can lead to points of contact for us all.

Also, here’s a beautiful, wonderful, a little scary and fairly NSFW Monica Bellucci gif. Because, any excuse, really. Any excuse:

And people wonder why Le pacte des loups is one of my favourite movies of all time.

It’s odd for me to hear Letterman ask if Jordan was “foreboding.” I keep forgetting that many Americans view the Middle East as a generally horrifying place. It’s really unfortunate, particularly in the case of a country like Jordan, because it’s so beautiful. And yes, it was tough as hell on me, I didn’t like living there, I didn’t like the kind of negative attention I got as a foreign woman, and I did run away, far away, but for a male visitor in particular, Jordan is anything but “foreboding,” I think.

In other news, that is one hell of a deserved Academy Award nomination right there.

Intense “28 Weeks”-era Jeremy Renner agrees. Speaking of intense, this guy has never been in a romantic comedy, I don’t think. Let’s hope he never will be in a romantic comedy. (Not that romantic comedies are bad on principle, but come on, the last good one I saw was “My Best Friend’s Wedding.” I didn’t even have a driving license back then.)

I suck at making resolutions, though there are definitely people and things I’d like to say goobye to. Mostly to you and you. And Madeira. Holy crap, I am never drinking that again. I am also never standing on icy bridges, hurling dog tags into the water. I am putting a moratorium on dramatic text messages and little packages of salted calamari, embarrassing amounts of which I have devoured this year. I’m not going to be obsessed with the cheerful blandness of five-star hotels. I will not take powdered creamer in my instant coffee. I will not fight one-woman battles against unseen enemies. Good night ladies, good night, sweet ladies, and goodbye.

But if there’s one resolution I really ought to make, it’s pretending that everything’s Fucking Horrible. It’s a bit of a reflex with me. A superstition, even. “Don’t say that things are fine, because you’ll jinx them, and they will be un-fine.” I’m sure some of you reading can relate. You know what, though? Superstitions suck. And they are tedious as well. Going around an entire block because a cat ran into your path – who does that? Tedious people do. People who would like a semblance of control, when none of us have any (as Woland pointed out to Berlioz).

So in keeping with that, I am not going to say that 2009 was a bad year. It was a hard year, but “hard” and “bad” are not necessarily synonyms. Perhaps this is just another superstition, but moaning about how 2009 Destroyed Mah Life seems ungrateful. You never know, which agents of fate may be listening to you moan, or how short their tempers may be.

Check it out: 2009 lavished me with brambles and hangovers at 4 p.m. It was a cornucopia of brown boots, bruised thighs, guns, pipes, and hanging out of the door, singing “Olena ne plach’” into the falling snow. It was a shitload of really good work. It contained collapsed volcanoes, doors to other worlds (conveniently located in Somerset), and Suberstar. It stomped a bloody hole in my chest, but the hole also let the light in. It gave me new friends and enemies, and it brought back and resurrected old ones. It gave me chances to terrorist-fist-bump my brother before he goes to bed at night. It let me lean on my family, and let them lean on me, and witness the bizarre miracle of nobody getting toppled. It made me blubber over an e-mail from someone I haven’t even met, but do so in a good, summer rain-y sort of way. It made me hold my own hand. It busted me, and made me grateful — “for every single moment of my stupid little life.”

Pretty good year. Hasta. Baby.

Don’t worry, though, ya’ll, I’ll be back to my regular bitchy self in no time. The people have come to see Tsarina, and she will not disappoint them, etc.

… Applebaum sees Polanski as one of the elite, with whom she self-identifies… Law and legal consequences are for the unwashed masses, not for the superior beings who hold sway in Washington’s celebrity circles. She certainly sees the girl as, at best, a DFH, who should have been glad to be drugged, raped, and sodomized by such a great man.

For more on the Polanski situation, see Jill’s excellent post about his famous apologists. Also, check out Daisy’s review of “Repulsion.”

I recently read “Dead Man’s Holiday” by Nick Seeley, and I am in love with the story. You should be too.

Speaking of Nick, he’s editor-at-large over at JO, and JO recently published my piece, “The Fake Muhajaba,” which is now online. It was difficult for me to write this. The sad thing is, I left Jordan for good this year. I made the decision shortly after the piece was published. There isn’t a lot I can say about it in this space, though a part of me misses Amman, and always will. It’s just that I could never have a life there, and that was something I had to face eventually.

In other news, Penelope Trunk is all kinds of awesome. Miscarriage is a part of life. So is abortion. It’s perfectly normal to feel relief when a clearly unwanted pregnancy ends.

I didn’t think I’d like “Obvious Child,” but I did. Bonding on the couch in an abortion clinic, on Valentine’s Day – what could be cuter? OK, maybe it gets a little too cutesy at various points, but at least there’s no PBR.

Zombie Research has a cool note up on zombies & rigor mortis.

Ren lost her kitten and is facing a huge vet bill. There’s a donation button on her old blog. Click on it if you can spare something. It sucks to lose animals, especially when they go while still very young.

Ex-sex – this was very sad, and very well-written.

On a personal note, I recently got a compliment on this blog from someone whose writing I admire. It felt odd and miraculous that it happened, because I have been thinking of nuking this enterprise. I’ve been questioning everything that I’ve been doing on here, obsessing about how pointless and stupid and embarrassing it is. I’m not of the “never apologize, never explain” school of thought, and it’s never been clearer than right now.

Things have odd lately in general. I’ve become the girl who sits at the far end of the table, stares down into her wine glass, and bums everyone out. I know it’s going to pass, but goddamit, when? My ever-helpful aunt suggested it will take about 6 years. Hah. And then she wonders why I never come over for pie anymore. Grandma’s been telling me to go to singles’ nights with all of these forty-something middle-manager types, and saying that I look “just like a girl” (I’m 25, grandma, in civilized countries, that’s still young), and I finally told her that I’ll shoot myself in the face if she doesn’t stop, which was a cruel thing to say, except that it worked.

The upside to all of this is that I’ve lost so much weight that my previously nice, tight jeans can now be pulled off me without undoing a single button. Which could potentially be hot. Or dangerous.

Still, I’m not nuking this blog. Or my face. “Not yet. Not just yet.”

Nabokov had it. Tori Amos has it. Yours truly has it, though she’s not nearly as awesome as the other two people mentioned here.

Seasons, months, numbers, days of the week, letters of the alphabet, symbols, mathematical equations – they all have different colours, styles, and attitudes. 11, for example, is very pretty and cold, and a jerk, but also honest somehow. And if you ask me to explain, I can’t. 11 is a complicated number, and we have a complicated relationship, is all. It’s as if all of these things are tarot cards, and I am forever reading them, arranging and rearranging them in my head.

Wednesday is cherry-coloured. Saturday has the sweet, grainy texture of Palestinian knafeh. E = mc2 is like a green scarf unfurling on the wind. The letter A is very forthright, the letter B is like an old relative, and don’t even get me started on the Cyrillic alphabet. These are not even exhaustive definitions, by far. They can go on forever.

It’s a pretty way to think and feel, but it can also get a bit crowded in my head. I think it’s why I like to turn off so much, just stop inhabiting myself for a while. I think it’s why I have such a temper too. The circuits overload.

It is said that synesthesia is associated with high levels of creativity. I certainly believe that. But there is a certain form of discipline that must come when you’re angling for genuine creative output, and sometimes, marshaling these numbers and letters can be tough. They make the margins of things crowded and fuzzy, and they can be distracting. For me, it’s why trips to so-called places of power are necessary. My head is cleared from the flotsam and jetsam when I’m up at the Glastonbury Tor or St. Cyrill’s church in Kiev.

I realized recently that I don’t have a place of power to go to in Amman. The closes I’ve gotten is my friend’s house, up on a hill, looking out toward Israel & Palestine. But I’m rarely up there, so rarely, that mind continues on its merry way, spinning tragic love stories between upper-class 5 and sweetly naive 9, for example. And then I wonder why Amman is even harder on me than it should be.

What is a place of power? I’m not sure. I think it’s something that bends time and space, or at least perception, a little bit. Where the atmosphere begins speaking to you, and it’s like tuning into a whole other wavelength, where everything becomes clear and clean, or as clear and clean as it can be, and a very strong current fizzes along and washes the insides of your mind and the cracks are patched up for a time being by invisible hands. It’s not necessarily a place of worship, but it’s beautiful, harshly or otherwise. You’ll laugh, but the freaking Mall of the Emirates was that for me in Dubai (and who knows? You can argue that malls are their own places of worship).

I don’t know if I didn’t look hard enough in Amman. Or maybe Amman is just a different place altogether, somewhere where my mind can never really come to rest. All I know is that the synesthesia overwhelms me there. Instead of a quirky gift, it becomes a weight I drag around with myself, along with all of the other weights. It becomes meaner too. 11′s jerky tendencies become downright cruel, for example. Saturday is so sweet that it turns into a sugar coma. Sundays become bottomless and desperate, like an enormous bat-cave.

So if you ever run into me in Amman, give me a number of a letter or a vague concept, and who knows what story might emerge?

Of course, the situation described is also very much gender-specific. I seriously doubt that a sister would get away with treating a younger, smaller brother like this. The violence of male relatives, however, is not an aberration, it’s viewed as something natural and right and, most importantly, it is supreme. “She’s my sister,” he says as he’s grabbing her, and we automatically think, “well, she must’ve done something to piss you off then, eh? None of my business anyway. Who knows what might happen to me if I get involved? Let sleeping dogs lie.”

The bystander effect only reinforces the given situation.

I wish I could tell you that the incident Luma has described is shocking to me, but it isn’t. After being in Jordan for more than a year, it feels oddly natural, the way a broken bone feels natural after a while, inasmuch as it’s still a part of your body. This is what happens in a society where women’s worth is tied to a completely arbitrary and convoluted idea of sexual purity, and men are meanwhile charged with upholding this idea of sexual purity at all costs. And don’t you dare interfere with their duties! These are all private matters! Look away, unless you want to get into trouble yourself. Don’t you dare question it! You just want to destroy the moral fabric of our society and turn all of our women into whores!

“She’s my sister” really means that “she is a thing.” The words are like a magic curse, turning a flesh-and-blood human being into a kind of rag doll you can publicly rip apart.

I don’t blame the male witnesses for upholding the brother’s “right” to publicly abuse his sister. It’s a survival tactic as much as anything. It feels better to look away and pretend as though the woman has earned such treatment. If you don’t look away, you might very well get into trouble. The brother’s right to harm his sister is practically sacred. After all, brothers are cast into the impossible and equally dehumanizing role of shepherding their sisters as if the latter are livestock.

I think that all of this warrants a closer look at to what being a part of a family actually means. Is in abusive family still a family? At what point do we say – “these are not the actions of a brother”?

Also a closer look at womanhood is needed. What defines a “good” woman? Is it her mind and her integrity, or is it her hymen? You can’t have it both ways.

The post-mortem virginity tests on the bodies of honour crime victims are just another kind of violation, methinks. It shouldn’t matter if a woman was having an affair or not. Her precious life was deemed worthless, and that’s the only thing that matters.

Jordanian society is lopsided to the point of deformity. Men have freedoms that women simply do not, and they act upon them with impunity. Even when they are at a disadvantage economically. I mean, how many Jordanian guys who sleep with sex-tourists in order to get by fear getting stabbed to death by their family members? No matter the guilt and shame that some of these guys obviously feel, their lives still hold fundamental value.

Women, on the other hand, are treated as walking support systems for hymens. After being violently purged from this world, their memories are further sullied by the “did she or didn’t she?” inquiries.

So what if she did? What if she even enjoyed it? She at least partly deserved it, right? Women should expect to be violently punished for acting upon their desires. They are not allowed to learn from experience.

It’s not a mentality confined to Jordan. Up until recently, it was the sexually active girl who was stabbed to death in horror films, while the virgin outwitted the serial killer (a stretched or broken hymen automatically renders one into a complete idiot who runs upstairs instead of out the front door, it’s practically a scientific fact, right?). Even rape victims are routinely expected to take “the honourable way out” and die.

In Jordan, there’s nothing abstract about these ideas. The violence is right there, in your local paper.

It was a huge wake-up call to me when I realized that the guys who sexually proposition me have nothing to fear. The conservatism of Jordanian society only extends in one direction. It doesn’t serve as any kind of deterrent, in this case. At most, they have something to fear from my male relatives (of course, being blond and foreign, you are assumed to be “of no tribe” and hence fair game).

For men, family serves a different function altogether. Family is their place of support. In most cases, their choices will be upheld or at least forgiven. Women often have to deal with an entirely different set-up.

Last year, I was in Amman, talking to a friend about how weird it was for him to have to run into the uncle of his ex-girlfriend.

(A vast amount of dirty language follows. Don’t read if you think you might be offended.)

“I just want to tell him sometimes – I fucked your niece. I fucked your niece!”

I told him I had similarly weird feelings about running into the father of an ex-boyfriend of mine back in the States.

“It’s not the same, it’s not the same at all,” he said. “You didn’t fuck him. He fucked you! You’re the… girl.”

I made some harsh comments about how I’m not some passive receptacle. He just gave me a weird look. “You’re the girl!” He kept insisting. “You don’t fuck. You get fucked. And when you’re getting fucked, your entire family is getting fucked too… and it’s weird. Like, I fucked her, it’s like a fucked him too. I fucked him! Haha! She was a slut too, she liked it.”

I told him I felt sorry for him. If he saw sex as some sort of brutal conquest, he probably had issues. Judging a woman for responding to you sexually is a sure sign that the child ain’t right, as we say in the south. There’s a deep psychological complex there.

“I can’t help feeling it, I’m a man!” He kept insisting. “I’m a man!”

“You’re a boy,” I said.

We left it at that.

I’m not bringing this conversation up because I think it paints an all-encompassing portrait of Jordanian society (let’s start with the fact that a big percentage of Jordanian men would never feel comfortable discussing what we had just discussed, and with a woman no less). But the hatred, the glee, and the disgust with which he spoke of – I see the same hatred, and glee, and disgust in the eyes of men who harass women in Jordan. The same hatred, and glee, and disgust is injected into the conversation on sex. I see it in Nas’s famous “Sex in Amman” thread. I hear it when men begin discussing me in Arabic without realizing that – holy crap – I can understand some of what they’re saying.

Of course, this immaturity is just part of the puzzle. But it’s a big part, methinks. How many men do, in fact, feel like they themselves have been violated when a female relative somehow ends up with a reputation that doesn’t exactly paint her as a blushing virgin? Where are the tools to help them deal with those feelings without erupting into grisly violence – especially when they’re part of a community that practically urges them on? Surely there are some, as not all men turn into frothing-at-the-mouth violent perps.

But in order for this debate to become legitimate, it must no longer hinge on the woman’s hymen. Seriously, there are far more important parts to a person than their sexual organs – such as their brains, such as their souls.

And, once again, please don’t tell me that all problems will end the minute that all members of Jordanian society are transformed into angels and all sexual indiscretions, real or imagined, miraculously cease. We’re all corporeal beings, and live in the real world, last time I checked.