Summer vacation has started so I have some time to work on my blog. These entries are a few months old. Most of these are only rants and are not very coherent. They don’t have a point except to get things out of my system. I will post several.
When I moved here, it was the first time I had been single and felt really alone for several years. The population of the city and suburbs is around 10 million yet I was lonely despite having recently spent a year by myself in the desert with only my cats for company and not feeling lonely at all. I came here and quickly learned to rely on opiates to help me handle my loneliness and associated depression. By the time I had started seeing Fatima, I no longer no longer used opiates regularly.
I met Fatima at work. She is a medical doctor who practiced medicine in Saudi Arabia before she came to France to do medical research at the Institut.
I thought I would never again date somebody from work because what are you going to talk about when you get home? Since my freshman year in college, I have always been bored seeing anybody who is so much as in my own major. But she works in another lab, has a different project, and has very different life experience so it’s okay.
Fatima is married but separated. The reason she is still married, she explained, is that the divorce and property laws in Saudi Arabia are biased against women. I don’t understand the details beyond that, but the husband seems to keep all of the property and the wife can be thrown out onto the street and faces a life of poverty if her parents do not take her back. That is a common occurrence.
She is keeping me secret from her family who still live and work in Saudi Arabia. Although she has been separated for five years, seeing someone else while separated is still considered adultery in her country. The penalty for adultery is stoning to death for both adulterers. Her father is a minister of some government agency and as somebody who has a high position in the Saudi government, he is very conservative and religious.
It was not trivial for her to walk away from a marriage where she was treated like the property of her husband and cast aside to be replaced by her husband’s mistress, to take off her scarf and reject religious fundamentalism, and move here against her parents’ wishes. Not only that, but she is an activist for women’s rights in her country. Speaking out for women’s rights (I think of this as the authentic but rare form of feminism) is another thing that earns women fatwas over there. For the purpose of privacy, I refer to her as Fatima. Fatima is not her real name.
In my free time, I visit many cafés and restaurants here in Paris: Shakespeare and Co Bookstore to read and talk over a coffee with a friend, Café de Flore or les Deux Magots to sit and write all day, Maxim’s for dinner and many night clubs.
Last night, I took Fatima to a restaurant somebody had suggested called le Daniel’s. There is a dress code. The lighting was low and the seats were velvet. A DJ played house music, but it wasn’t too loud. About fifty people and as many women as men, mostly wearing jackets or dresses sat at the tables or mingled on the floor.
On one end of the room the barman was pouring drinks at a long bar. On one wall, a rack was stacked to the ceiling with bottles of wine. A mirror covered another wall. Tables and sculptures were scattered around the room.
Striptease Part II
The club is famous for strip teases. I didn’t know that until the performers came out. Suddenly, the music got loud. Here is a photo of one of the dancers:
Saudi Arabia doesn’t have strip clubs or bars. Women are required to be completely covered to the extent of wearing head gear. Fatima had never seen a strip show before, but she was cool. We watched the act and chatted. She didn’t say anything nasty.
Aelyssa, on the other hand, would have gone apeshit then and there. (Aelyssa is a the last girlfriend I had in the US). She would have stood up and said just loud enough for everybody in the whole bar to hear: WE NEED TO GO RIGHT NOW!
She would have stormed out, given me the silent treatment until the afternoon the next day, then chided me. (She is a school teacher and has a lot of practice scolding her students.) She would have given her neo-feminist rant. She would have complained that men were exploiting those dancers. Then she would have informed me that the dancers are whores and that I was objectifying women.
Then the jealousy would have completely taken over. The dancer happens to be thin and physically fit. She trains, has good muscle tone, coordination, and flexibility. Aelyssa, sadly, had not gone to the gym, ridden her bicycle, or done yoga one time in the last year we were together. She put on a lot of weight and looks like she has aged 10 years.
Aelyssa would have gone on about how whores like the dancers have been brainwashed and imprinted upon men that being thin and physically fit is an unrealistic expectation for women. It is her job as a Feminist to fight this, and it is my duty as her Significant Other to support her. To her, the Venus of Malta (a quasi-pornographic Stone Age carving of a naked women shaped like a pear.) is the natural body type, and the media and whores like the stripper have brainwashed men. The fact that 3 out of 4 Americans are overweight is her proof that fat is the normal and ideal body type. Yet, until the 1950s or so, only around 1 in 10 or 1 in 20 Americans were fat. Even today, only 1 in 10 are overweight in France. Body size is an easy way to spot an American, Australian, or British tourist.
A couple of vacationing middle-aged women were sitting beside us. They were from the Central Valley in California, and they looked like it. When the dancers came out, they suddenly looked very uncomfortable as though they had just realized they were in the wrong place. They made the obvious comment about the girl’s butt being on the bar and they were afraid they would get a disease. The barman, however, wiped down the bar after their act. The standard 10% bleach solution restaurants use kills everything.
When I moved here, it was the first time I had been single and felt really alone for several years. The population of the city and suburbs is around 10 million yet I was lonely despite having recently spent a year by myself in the desert with only my cats for company and not feeling lonely at all. I came here and quickly learned to rely on opiates to help me handle my loneliness and associated depression. By the time I had started seeing Fatima, I no longer no longer used opiates regularly.
I met Fatima at work. She is a medical doctor who practiced medicine in Saudi Arabia before she came to France to do medical research at the Institut.
I thought I would never again date somebody from work because what are you going to talk about when you get home? Since my freshman year in college, I have always been bored seeing anybody who is so much as in my own major. But she works in another lab, has a different project, and has very different life experience so it’s okay.
Fatima is married but separated. The reason she is still married, she explained, is that the divorce and property laws in Saudi Arabia are biased against women. I don’t understand the details beyond that, but the husband seems to keep all of the property and the wife can be thrown out onto the street and faces a life of poverty if her parents do not take her back. That is a common occurrence.
She is keeping me secret from her family who still live and work in Saudi Arabia. Although she has been separated for five years, seeing someone else while separated is still considered adultery in her country. The penalty for adultery is stoning to death for both adulterers. Her father is a minister of some government agency and as somebody who has a high position in the Saudi government, he is very conservative and religious.
It was not trivial for her to walk away from a marriage where she was treated like the property of her husband and cast aside to be replaced by her husband’s mistress, to take off her scarf and reject religious fundamentalism, and move here against her parents’ wishes. Not only that, but she is an activist for women’s rights in her country. Speaking out for women’s rights (I think of this as the authentic but rare form of feminism) is another thing that earns women fatwas over there. For the purpose of privacy, I refer to her as Fatima. Fatima is not her real name.
In my free time, I visit many cafés and restaurants here in Paris: Shakespeare and Co Bookstore to read and talk over a coffee with a friend, Café de Flore or les Deux Magots to sit and write all day, Maxim’s for dinner and many night clubs.
Last night, I took Fatima to a restaurant somebody had suggested called le Daniel’s. There is a dress code. The lighting was low and the seats were velvet. A DJ played house music, but it wasn’t too loud. About fifty people and as many women as men, mostly wearing jackets or dresses sat at the tables or mingled on the floor.
On one end of the room the barman was pouring drinks at a long bar. On one wall, a rack was stacked to the ceiling with bottles of wine. A mirror covered another wall. Tables and sculptures were scattered around the room.
Striptease Part II
The club is famous for strip teases. I didn’t know that until the performers came out. Suddenly, the music got loud. Here is a photo of one of the dancers:
Saudi Arabia doesn’t have strip clubs or bars. Women are required to be completely covered to the extent of wearing head gear. Fatima had never seen a strip show before, but she was cool. We watched the act and chatted. She didn’t say anything nasty.
Aelyssa, on the other hand, would have gone apeshit then and there. (Aelyssa is a the last girlfriend I had in the US). She would have stood up and said just loud enough for everybody in the whole bar to hear: WE NEED TO GO RIGHT NOW!
She would have stormed out, given me the silent treatment until the afternoon the next day, then chided me. (She is a school teacher and has a lot of practice scolding her students.) She would have given her neo-feminist rant. She would have complained that men were exploiting those dancers. Then she would have informed me that the dancers are whores and that I was objectifying women.
Then the jealousy would have completely taken over. The dancer happens to be thin and physically fit. She trains, has good muscle tone, coordination, and flexibility. Aelyssa, sadly, had not gone to the gym, ridden her bicycle, or done yoga one time in the last year we were together. She put on a lot of weight and looks like she has aged 10 years.
Aelyssa would have gone on about how whores like the dancers have been brainwashed and imprinted upon men that being thin and physically fit is an unrealistic expectation for women. It is her job as a Feminist to fight this, and it is my duty as her Significant Other to support her. To her, the Venus of Malta (a quasi-pornographic Stone Age carving of a naked women shaped like a pear.) is the natural body type, and the media and whores like the stripper have brainwashed men. The fact that 3 out of 4 Americans are overweight is her proof that fat is the normal and ideal body type. Yet, until the 1950s or so, only around 1 in 10 or 1 in 20 Americans were fat. Even today, only 1 in 10 are overweight in France. Body size is an easy way to spot an American, Australian, or British tourist.
A couple of vacationing middle-aged women were sitting beside us. They were from the Central Valley in California, and they looked like it. When the dancers came out, they suddenly looked very uncomfortable as though they had just realized they were in the wrong place. They made the obvious comment about the girl’s butt being on the bar and they were afraid they would get a disease. The barman, however, wiped down the bar after their act. The standard 10% bleach solution restaurants use kills everything.