A Different Culture

Over spring break, I had the opportunity to travel to the Middle East, in specific the city of Amman, Jordan. This was especially interesting for me due to the fact that I was taking this course in gender studies at the time. I have traveled extensively through Europe and the United States, and have always considered those two cultures starkly different. However, compared to the culture in the Middle East, they almost seem to be one and the same. Please note that these observations are purely my opinion and should not be considered as facts of truth.

One of the most fundamental feature of the Jordanian culture turned out to be that it seems extremely faith-based. The United States prides itself in trying to separate church and state, yet that separation in Jordan is nearly impossible if even some of the most basic and most commonly used expressions have roots in religious meanings. For example, instead of saying "we'll see" as a response to any questions asked, one often hears "inshallah," meaning, roughly, "if God wills it." Greetings are also always religious-based, and the entire mentality is based on the belief that one does not have so much control over their destiny - instead, God controls the majority of it.

This mentality seems to let especially women live their lives happily. Even though it is common knowledge and obvious that women do not have the same privileges as men do in the society, women seem to accept things the way they are without having much desire to change it, since God, after all, willed their lives to be that way.

But even though this sounds depressing and degrading, it does have its benefits. For example, plastic surgery is seemingly of no concern in the country to the female population. Even though homosexuals seem to be equally as oppressed, if not worse, than women, it is not necessarily injust for them not to be able to comfortably display signs of affection in public, because heterosexual couples are also scorned at for showing such signs in public.

Yet everyone seems to not mind the situation they're in, because they've been growing up being used to such a system, to the point that anything else would feel estranged and foreign to them. In short, ignorance seems to be bliss. This is one of the most interesting and difficult concepts to understand if it's not seen in person. This explains to me Simone De Beauvoir's question of why women have no desire to organize themselves to fight oppression, simply because familiarity feels comfortable. It's an interesting issue that I would like to explore further in the future in much greater detail, to see exactly the reasons behind this lack of organization and lack of desire for change.