the gender question

i had a conversation with a colleague in the village this week that left me feeling not only frustrated and injured, but also confused. it started out as a brief lesson in palestinian culture from one of the mothers, but quickly developed into a heated discussion of religion, gender and sexuality between me and my friend. he is twenty-three years old. last year he graduated from birzeit university, the most prestigious palestinian university and one of the more respected universities in the arab world, with a degree in psychology, and now works as a youth advisor in the village. he comes from a refugee camp in ramallah, but he and his brother both live here in bethlehem. he is engaged to a young woman to whom i give english lessons, and the couple has invited me to their wedding in july.

we started discussing the many double-standards that exist in this society for men and women in all aspects of daily life - dress, studies, household responsibilities, manners, posture, socialization, everything. according to some (though not all, and not always universally considered accurate) readings of islam, women are required to wear the mandil (head scarf) and dress modestly, are forbidden from socializing with men except in academic settings, are expected at a very young age to take on household responsibilities that men and boys are not asked to complete. when male guests enter a home, more conservative women will retreat to the kitchen or bedroom so as not to socialize with a stranger; many women wishing to enter the work force will begin to cover their hair to protect themselves from male scrutiny; when i eat dinner in the village houses, more often than not the girls clear the table and do the dishes, and the boys play outside or start their homework.

these rules and separations, or at least the visible ones, don't apply to all women in the society. many women do not cover their hair, wear western clothes, study at university, obtain high-level degrees, work as doctors and lawyers, party at nightclubs. but the less-tangible, underlying inequalities are in many ways more frustrating, because they are harder to question and fight.

i come from a society that is very quick to condemn this kind of power-imbalance, and to be honest, though i like to consider myself an educated and open-minded person, many of these traditions irk me as well. because i am an outsider, the manifestations of this double-standard seem obvious and often barbaric to me, but in certain ways they are no different to the perhaps more subtle imbalances that exist in the united states. today, women enter the workforce at almost the same rate as men, and yet men still control nearly all upper-level management and decision-making positions in the government and large companies. a greater percentage of working women (compared to working men) occupy service positions (waitressing, house-cleaning, secretarial, cashier, etc.) than their male counterparts. even though anti-discrimination laws are in place today, its still a well-known fact that an employer would rather hire a man than a woman, based on the fear that she may choose to have a baby at some point and would then be entitled to maternity leave. it seems that the government is actively looking for a way to take away a woman's right to control her own body.

i'm in no way trying to argue that the situation for women in the united states is as difficult as it is for women in arab countries. it's not even close. i am saying, however, that our society is still quietly patriarchal and bears remnants of a gender imbalance that still exists in full force in much of the world.

so back to my conversation with my friend. eventually we started talking about sexual relations between men and women, and for the first time the realities of these gender standards became real, tangible, and unspeakably disturbing to me. women in this society (as in most societies in the world) are expected to be virgins when they are married. if they are not virgins, they are considered to be unchaste and "damaged goods", and can suffer any number of punishments at the hands of male family-members. this is not a secret - particularly in the arab world, it is a well-known and hotly disputed (by newly forming women's rights groups) fact. i asked my friend what he would do if he found out that his unmarried sister was in a sexual-relationship. he told me he would kill her.

he considers himself to be a women's rights advocate, so he would not only kill his sister, but first he would kill her lover, under the assumption that its just as much the male's fault as it is the woman's. so he would kill twice. but if he found his brother in the same situation, he would not kill him, but would disown him. if the woman's family killed his brother, my friend would say that they had the right.

so, here is my friend, to use a bad cliche, among "the best and the brightest" of his generation in palestine, and he would be willing to kill a family member to protect the family's honor.

a critic of palestinian activism...or perhaps a critic of jimmy carter's book, would argue here, "how can you advocate for independence in a society where this kind of barbaric practice is condoned?" some days i'm not sure. the truth is, the society here is not perfect - no society is. it bears remnants of ages and loyalties and traditions past, and its complexities make it both fascinatingly beautiful and unimaginably frustrating and tragic at the same time. yesterday i had a lot of trouble getting out of bed in the morning, thinking about the conversation and its implications for all of the people i know here. i hadn't really learned anything new during that hour - everything my friend said i had read in a book or heard about in a class or even heard about as "a friend of a friend..." here. and yet to hear it from a friend, a peer, and someone who considers himself progressive was, and remains, very difficult for me to process. how can i throw so much of my personal support and energy into a society that condones what i can only understand as violent sexism? can i ever adjust myself and adapt to these gender relations? do i even want to? the answer to this last question is no, i don't want to, and i won't.

this part of palestinian culture is something that i do not and will never approve of. in the past few years a number of progressive women's groups have formed in palestine, as well as in other arab countries, and are beginning to ask these questions and challenge the power structure. like all cultural change, these adjustments will have to come from inside - democracy is not a blueprint that can be placed on the ruins of a broken dictatorship, and gender-relations cannot be tipped to equality simply by evening a scale, particularly not in a society whose cultural integrity is constantly threatened by extinction at the hands of occupation. as an activist seeking peace in the region, i can advocate for national independence while also supporting minority movements (gay and lesbian voices are only beginning to whisper in the region, but their presence is known if not acknowledged) and hope that peace and stability will eventually provide a stage upon which these fringe groups can fight for social reorganization according to their own dreams.