Driven by Curiosity…

I will wander a bit here, and am being so unfocused… but I just thought of a The Map of Love by Ahdaf Suief. Where she said in the words of an English lady who was in Egypt at the beginning of the century, that the English came to Cairo and mixed only with the Egyptians who worked for them, and she said imagine someone going to France and mix only with the maids and servants. Since they never mixed with the other, the real , everyday Egyptians, they never knew what they were missing on. Now to connect that to what I was saying earlier. My friends fell in the same trap, They wanted to be in certain areas, with certain people… not realizing that they were missing on the real , human, everyday London.
 Back to my story, I was walking there, when an older gentleman stopped me to ask me about something. I did not know, I smiled politely and started to move on. But he stopped me again, and started telling me right there about me, about my life! I was completely taken aback, but of course my curiosity won over and I ended up spending a while standing there talking to him and asking him questions!

First I hope to God that several people would not read this post! Because I am reacting a recent incident or incidents and the people involved will know exactly what I really think of them. By the way this post was originally called the Bitches of Amman, but it changes last minute to Witches of Amman. 

There is something that BOTHERS and IRRITATES me in some of the Ammanite Women; especially the well achieved, smart ones. Who worked hard and actually managed to make it. I mean behind it all I do admire them and that they made it against all the odds… but there is a problem; many of them are bitches! Truly bitches, they work against each other, backstab each other and compete at every level.  As long as no one is better and as long as none of them surfaces higher than the others then everything is ok.  This phenomenon becomes worse when there are younger women in the picture. The typical attitude being ‘Banat akher Zaman think that they can come to our level!’ which translates to the girls of these days think they can come up to our level.

However the phenomenon is seen at all age groups in Amman. Fierce competition, insecurity, especially if they are unmarried, and I am not sure whether marriage has anything to do with it.  Obviously not all of the women are like that… but a lot are!

The thing is women in our society have puzzling attitudes; most women highly value female approval and friendship, relying upon each other for support and understanding. However there is also mistrust, dislike, and cruelty toward each other. We judge each other harshly, hold grudges, and gossip about each other very bitchily.

Let’s look into this scenario. Let’s ask any man to describe a woman. Men will usually make global statements. She’s tall. Pretty. Funny-looking. Women, on the other hand, dissect their subject into tiny fragments: “She’s got beautifully big eyes, but she wears way too much mascara, and her left eye is few micro-nano-millimeters bigger than her right one, but that is not as bad as my nose…..” well if that is not competition, then I don’t know what is?!
 

As some people know, I love the cave man analogy.  I first became fascinated with this cave man thing, when listening to a mathematician. He is  virtually one of the smartest people I know, and he was trying to explain to a common friend why her new born baby had a reflex actions as if he was going to fall down… he related that to the  human- monkey theory, and how when we were monkeys, we fell  from trees! The mother was offended that her cute son was in the same sentence with a monkey, and I thought that this was about the funniest thing I heard at that time of my life, most probably because of the personalities of these people Anyway…moving on swiftly….. Based on this analogy, competition between women is a survival instinct that developed at a very early stage. Women developed jealous feelings from other females to protect the male. Defending the male ensures that the mate stays around to help defend the offspring, and provide meat for the family. Also, it could be explained by natural selection. If a caveman is strong; his children will have a better chance in life. So feeling jealous of the “short skirt bimbo” may be the way of trying to catch the best male, and then keep him, so that the genes live on.

Now to translate that to our time, we have internalised this instinctive need to compete, and since we live in a patriarchal society that allows polygamy. Women grow up feeling insecure that they could be replaced easily, and even if this does not affect us directly, we grow up watching our mothers, aunts, grandmothers and neighbours, who were affected by this and learn or internalize their attitudes. From very early ages, little girls are taught the importance of looking good and are socialized into competing on a visual level and all levels really.  Before we realize it, we grow up mistrusting all women in our orbit. What is the result? This ugly backstabbing race from women I admired and thought, I hope I would have achieved as much as she did when I am her age, she is my model… you know what… f*** that! This is truly sad, because this contradicts women’s built in capacity for forming relationships… just one look around… in many cases women are the one who keep families and communities together… and this jealousy and competition is driving our society back into the cave man age!