I almost lost it today…

We were about to listen to a conversation in class about asking about someone’s family. I felt that it was necessary to explain to the class that it is very common to talk about our families to our friends and acquaintances. As a man, I would even talk about my mother, my sister, or my wife and even mention her name. Here in Yemen, you do not tell men about your mother, wife, or sister. You certainly never tell another man her name. There’s a perfectly good reason for that of course. You see, as soon as he told me her name, I would rape her in front of him and his entire family… Just for you non-native speakers reading this, that last sentence is dripping with sarcasm, go look up what that means. Who do they think they are? Keeping “their” women wrapped in secrecy, like they were some sort of valuable commodity that might be stolen offends me deeply. Women are, indeed, sentient and are perfectly capable of maintaining their morals on their own, there’s no need for them to be sequestered away to the point where people can’t even know their name…

Seriously, it’s incredibly stupid, degrading, and insulting to women. Asking a guy what his wife’s name is here would at the very least result in a black eye. With some hot-heads, it might result in a gunshot wound. I do not, and to be honest, will not, understand the secrecy about women relatives here. But what can you do? It’s a deep part of their culture and it’s not going away. It’s best to simply accept it as a given. So I explained how our cultures are different in this regard and told them not to be surprised when people just tell you the names of their mother and sister and actually introduce their wife. I also told them that they shouldn’t be surprised if they want to know the names of their mother, wife, and sisters.

One of my students interrupted me and said, “That’s because you eat pork.” I understood immediately. For those of you that are not intimately familiar with this culture, or for those of you that think in a logical fashion, let me explain what that comment meant. It is a widely held belief here that if you eat pork, you will not care if your wife has sex with another man, and you will in fact start cheating on your wife. You also lose any interest in your sister maintaining her “honor.” Yes, many people think that eating pork makes people promiscuous and we lose our capacity to be jealous or even care about the sexual exploits of our sister/wife.

I have heard this many times. Usually, I just laugh it off and tell them that they have obviously never met an Italian or a Puerto Rican. Those men are famous for both their pork intake and their insane jealousies. This time it was different. I was already seething beneath the surface about the whole, “I can’t tell you I have a mother” routine, but his comment sent me over the edge. He was saying that not only was it a bad thing for us to blithely tell people our sister’s or mother’s name, but that somehow what we eat was to “blame” for that terrible sin.

I’m surprised my lip didn’t start to bleed I was biting down so hard. I will tell you what went through my mind. A word of warning, if swearing bothers you, skip to the last paragraph… Right, eating pork is what makes us so loose with “our” women. I guess eating salta (a uniquely Yemeni dish) is what makes you so fucking stupid. In your eyes, we may be “immoral” in the west, but we don’t treat women like possessions, we ended slavery back in the 1880’s. I assume that your God forsaken, pathetic excuse for a culture is only maintaining the moral high ground, protecting “your” women from God knows what, by assiduously avoiding eating the flesh of swine. Usually we say you are what you eat, but you’re a big enough idiot to become what you don’t eat. Fuck you, fuck you and your whole smug, pathetic, insular, ignorant, abomination of a culture.

OK, so I wasn’t that coherent at the moment. Mostly, it was just “Fuck you, fuck you and fuck you.” I was seething and I briefly fantasized about walking over and making him lose a couple of teeth. When someone starts at a level that I despise and then uses a moronic excuse to tell me how bad my culture is, violence does indeed spring into my head. Maybe I could beat some sense into him… If he had said that Americans didn’t know God, or didn’t have the correct religion, I’d think he was crazy, but at least he wouldn’t sound like a total moron. Blaming our “shortcomings” (how dare we include female relatives in our conversations?) on eating bacon is the height of idiocy. What drives me nuts is that so many people here are stupid enough not to question the causation of sexual promiscuity on eating pork. I’m not even going to go into the absurd jump from telling people the names of female relatives to them whoring around. Usually, this culture assumes that men are total animals and cannot control their sexual urges but apparently women are totally helpless if you know their name. If a man knows a woman’s name he can apparently see her at will and we all know that the only thing that men and women can do together is have sex. God, this culture is so screwed up…

Anyway, after all that bile went through my head, I told him that that was the stupidest thing I had ever heard. I was about to go on, but I decided that I probably wouldn’t stop. So I went back to the present continuous tense and object pronouns. I need to get out of here, their idiocy might turn me into a sociopath…