“The Changing Face of Saudi Women”
“Saudi Arabia is the most profoundly gender-segregated nation on Earth, and amid the fraught, fragile, extraordinary changes under way in the daily lives of the kingdom’s women — multiple generations, pushed by new labor policies and the encouragements of the late King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz, are now debating what it means to be both truly modern and truly Saudi…
Somewhere along that complicated spectrum, improvising to suit her own ideas about dignity, Noof has established her personal requirements inside the company offices: no physical contact with men, please, no matter how incidental… Thus the nickname. “Mrs. Noof Not Shaking Hands,” Noof said, and laughed so hard that she almost fell over on the sofa. Noof’s laugh, which is rich, is one of the reasons we became friends. She’s quick-witted and tough. She makes fun of people who are officious or rude. One of her cell phones rings to music from Grey’s Anatomy. In her 20s she rejected alternative suitors preferred by her family because she was determined to marry Sami, whom she loved. She estimates that she saw Titanic at least ten times when she was a teenager; movie theaters are prohibited in Saudi Arabia, but popular DVDs are easy to come by, no matter what disapproving conservative sheikhs may say. (When I recalled that Titanic includes an enthusiastic sex scene featuring the not-yet-married heroine, Noof was unruffled. “Yeah, it’s OK,” she said. “It’s her culture.”)”
This was really interesting, thinking about history and culture shifts and norms.
Although, it’s always annoying when National Geographic writes an article about people next to one about, like, the unusual physiology of some fish. So this article is sometimes a little too… Western gaze-y? Unapologetically intrusive/otherizing?
But I also don’t encounter much writing about life in Saudi Arabia, outside of the way that people use the country as a scapegoat for sexism: “At least you can drive, unlike those poor women in Saudi Arabia!”
So I appreciate this.
Related: (to counterbalance) “Dear American misogynists: Afghan women are not oppressed for you”; “The Fetish of Staring at Iran’s Women”; “WHITE MEN TALKING ABOUT THE NIQAB: A BRIEF HISTORY”
Also -
An essay about Somalia, another place that I never get to read about (also Western-gazey)
