My Friend the Jinni

Hundreds years ago, when people were still living in large communities, when the word “individual” had not yet entered any language, the human beings and the jinn were living in harmony, each accepting the existence of the other in this world. Suddenly, things took drastic turns. The human ambition and lust for power, wealth and fame exceeded all limits, changing the face of the world. This tore a large hole between the two worlds; the world of the man and the world of the jinn. The man progressed and developed leaving the jinn behind to continue their old simple life. Soon the jinn became dwellers of the imagination, fantasies, fairy tales and boogieman stories and little did anyone believe in their existence anymore. This, however, is about to change when one hot summer night a man and a jinn meet again – a meeting that will be the beginning for a very interesting and unusual friendship between the two.
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Not Yours

Not Yours

Lay down your weapons,

 Your swords,

Your axes and stones

And leave from civilization’s open door.

Don’t throw your holly books

Holly verses

And holly rules at me anymore.

I’m not your slave.

I won’t dance on that same old song.

Put your hands down

And seal those preaching lips,

Spare me all the advice you don’t follow,

All the rules you always break

And the trials you hold with no judges,

Or juries

Or a law.

Don’t wait for another story, Shehrayar

On the night one hundred thousand, I found out,

That your hangman is a statue,

And his sword is of blunt tin.

Kept at sight to make me stay

And entertain.

I’m wide awake now

An eternity of silence has come to an end.

 I will take off the dress of shame,

Purity and death you’ve put on me

And crush with my bare feet,

All the presents with my freedom you purchased me.

Genitals, is all you see of me, you blind fool!

I am human,

Train your ears, your eyes and lips on this truth.

I am human,

Just like you,

and sometimes even better than you,

You, who led all the wars,

To gain nothing but losses,

You, who climbed to the top,

To find yourself crawling in dirt

You, who owned the world,

To find yourself begging for some love

You, who satisfied all your desires,

To find yourself filled with emptiness

You, who stuffed your God with humanity’s blood,

To find yourself dying of loneliness and guilt

You, the wretched slave of darkness,

You, haunted by the shame of a weakness,

You hide behind your bodily strength.

You, the blind and deaf servant of illusions

You take for the ultimate truth.

You, oh poor you!

I’m telling you once for all:

My freedom is mine

Not the tool to achieve yours.

My choices are mine,

Even if they don’t comply with your rules

My future is mine,

And not an extension of yours

And my body,

Yes, my body,

Is mine,

Not your blood-thirsty idols',

Not your cannibal tribe's

And not yours.

As a Female-IIX

A Curse!

I hold a Masters degree and a PhD degree in Politics and Public Relations. I have a lucrative job that provides me with enough money to have everything I need. I drive a fancy car and have a fancy house. Yet, if I walk down a street alone, men stare at me and verbally harass me. With their luscious looks, they strip me off my clothes and rape me.

I thought if I get married and wear a wedding ring, men may stop acting like that with me. I bought a very big ring so that it is going to be noticeable and eye-catching. To my surprise, the ring changed nothing and men still behave in the same way.

I thought if I am with my husband, men will not dare to stare at me anymore. This is a patriarchal society after all. Ironically, I still get stared at; especially by men who are accompanied by their wives.

If you are a man who is reading this, you’ll probably be thinking that I don’t wear decent clothes, that’s the reason why men stare at me like that. Huh! What a good excuse men use to harass women and even rape them! But no, you are wrong! You may be surprised to know that I actually wear very decent clothes; never anything tight, or short or sheer. It has nothing to do with men. I just respect my body enough not to expose it in that disgraceful way.

I sometimes get phone calls from men who want to have fun and spend some “lovely time” on the phone with a girl. I yell at them and ask them to never call again, but they never listen to me and keep calling until they hear the voice of a man answering my phone.

I aspire to become an MP in the future, and I work towards that, but I think even then, I will not be able to escape any of the problems I face as a woman every day. A friend of mine is already an MP. She is a widow and in her fifties. A man one day called her and said that he wanted to meet her and “talk” to her. My friend has given up on men long time ago and she’s faithful to the memory of her husband whom she loved very much. When she received that phone call, surprisingly, she found herself yelling “Don’t dare to call me ever again, otherwise I’m going to tell my brothers.” She said that she could believe that after all these years and after being an MP, she still felt like she had to use a man as a way to threaten someone who was disturbing her. However, I don’t really blame her for reacting in that way. No matter how many achievement we make in this life and how many high posts we fill, the curse of being a woman is always going to be following us and men are always going to give themselves the right to verbally or physically harass us. All this for one reason: Being a women.

As a Female-III

Somebody

As a young girl, I admire anyone, but myself. Those gorgeous celebrities are all ways better than me. They are semi-gods and I am no body. I am some plain girl. Yes, I am going to college. Received good education. I have a close loving family. I am healthy. I have a good reputation and people respect me because I am responsible but… that is NOT enough. That is NOTHING… I am still NOBODY... Inner beauty is a myth. A celebrity with a pretty face and a sexy body whom everyone knows is SOMEBODY... Is EVERYTHING.

My hair is natural. No colours. No extensions, but it is still so boring and hideous compared to the gorgeous hair of some celebrity with a different hair-cut and different hair length every day. It is fake hair. I know. Your hair will not grow overnight but who cares? They are knockouts. Aren’t they?

My skin is terrible. Well, it is natural and fresh. Duh! I’m young.  But it is either too white that is so dull compared to some celebrity’s fake tan or it is too dark compared to some celebrity’s fair skin that I know without makeup is covered with freckles and she has a red nose but who cares?  Makeup does miracles and these ladies are drop-dead gorgeous with makeup. They are on magazine covers. They are popular! They are SOMEBODY!

My lips, not plump enough like some celebrity that I swear she used to have thinner lips in the past. True, sometimes her lips look heavy and painful from all those fillers, but who cares? Those are sexy lips and look perfect with lip gloss. So give me that! Fill up my lips with chemicals! Make them numb. I don’t need to feel kisses anymore. As long as they LOOK pretty!

My body! Don’t mention it please! Not thin enough. If thin, not feminine enough. My breasts are either too small or too big and don’t stand right. I work out and get an athletic body instead of a feminine sexy one. But how to get a slim body then? I don’t know how some celebrities do it! They have big boobs and nice tight butts and yet really flat abs. They claim they work out every day and drink a lot of water. How can they exercise with those big boobs and what water? That flat tummy will swell a bit even if you only drink water. Mine does and never gets that flat because a tummy is not flat anyway so how they do it? Liposuction? Perhaps! Temporary treatments? Who knows!? But still, I want that, that ridiculously flat tummy. Those big boobs that seem to defy gravity and remain hung in the air without a bra. That tight butt with no chunks. I want that and who gives a damn about health concerns and surgery pains!? Such body will make you SOMEBODY!

I am too imperfect compared to all those gorgeous knock-out girls. Well, they do all have issues. Almost all of them have been to rehab a couple of times. Got knocked up and had a bastard child. Or a sex tape of them spread out on the web. They got a divorce or two. changed multiple partners.  Got arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol. Their IQ is less than that of a dolphin. They are always half naked. Have millions of scandalous pictures on the web. They have a terrible history and there seems to be a hole in their hearts that only a d*** can fill, but… they are pretty. They are gorgeous. They are popular and their pictures are everywhere. It is always about them. They are SOME BODY! Isn’t that enough? Isn’t that what matters? Or what?

As a Female- II

# 2 A Girlfriend Only

Friends: We all need friends to survive this life's atrocities. A friend is always needed to share both the happy and sad moments with. A friend is needed to teach us giving, forgiveness, respect, patience and other good things we thought we never had in the first place! But sometimes, friends are a bit overrated. If you are a girl and in a relationship with a guy who has many or some close friends, you are going to understand what I am about to say here.

Sometimes your family members can be your best friends that you don't feel like you need any close friends or at least you don't feel like you have to have many friends. And we definitely don't need so many fiends to live a happy life. Whether it is your family, a complete stranger or anyone who is your friend, we, girls, when in love with a guy, want one thing more than any other thing in this world which is to be best friends with the guy we love. Therefore, when we are in love with some guy, we put them on our priority list and we always treat them better than our best friends because we think "c'mon! he is both my love and my best friend!" But have you ever noticed how different guys can be when it comes to this? how they change into a different person when they are around their friends. They are more cheerful, they take things less seriously, they are more relaxed, they complain about nothing, they have more jokes and they are so crazy and funny. For example, if their friend messes up and takes a wrong turn while driving, it's something to joke and laugh about while if you do that, it's the end of the world. Don't you hate how if a friend of his upsets you, he always defends the friend, finds him excuses and asks you to take it easy while if you are the one who directly or indirectly did something bad to their friend, they are ready to point it out immediately and reproach you as if you have touched something very sacred to them! It's just so frustrating when you think of it! You are in a real dilemma. You can't compete with the friend and try to replace them because you are a girl and you can't be everything they are. You are a different person. But you can't live harmoniously with the friend in your life because it's so painful and offending when you know how you are categorized as a "girlfriend only" while the friend is a best friend. Even when he says that you are his best friend, you know it can't be true because you can't be a best friend when he shares with the best friend all he never shares with you and when he treats his best friend more kindly and with more forgiveness and patience than he treats you. Yes, how frustrating it is when your love opens his arms to your love while he turns his back to your friendship! How sad it is when you know you can never be close enough to be best friends. What an ugly place to be: girlfriend only….

 

As a Female...

In this crazy modern world of intelligent technology, social networks, GM food, global warming, economic recession, terror, reality shows, media war and thousands of 

different stuff, it's still difficult to be a woman.

Well, I know to be defining myself in terms of my gender means that there's still something seriously wrong with the way the world still views women. As Simon De Beauvoir said, a man never has to start a statement saying "as a man", but anyhow, I'm not really going to discuss these philosophical feminist matters here. What I am mostly interested in is the amount of none-sense I have to deal with everyday just because I'm a woman.

These diaries can be the diaries of any woman or any girl on this planet. The diaries don't have one writer but basically they are all about how frustrating it can be to be a girl or a woman in this supposedly modern world. In fact, no matter how much humanity develops, we, women will always remain women; defined and limited by all the limitations the word bears.

Just before I start, I'd like you to know that in these diaries I'm not going to act like a real feminist and blame men alone for women's misery because women are also part of that misery. Women also give women such terrible times and help this unfair situation persist. So let's be objective people!

# 1 What to Wear Tomorrow!?

I know girls really care about details like your makeup, nail polish, accessories, bag, shoes and so on. Everything should fit and everything should be perfect but seriously, sometimes YOU ARE JUST NOT IN THE MOOD! However, once you ignore one of these, there's some bi*** to point it out. Let's be honest, guys never even notice these details and believe me, they'll never get over your body or if lucky, your face, to look at these things, unless they are gay which in this case shouldn't be something to worry about. We do all this for each other; to show off and try to look better than each other, but we eventually neither feel good about ourselves nor about others because there's always someone prettier than you. So just let it go! For heaven's sake! Do it if you enjoy it for yourself, not to show off or make a rival girl die from envy. Just admit it that sometimes you simply can't look good. Accept the ugly self too and enjoy it. I'm sick of applying those products to my healthy young face every day so that just because I don't look like a clown a bi*** won't say "Oh dear! Are you ill or something?" and I'm sick of thinking of what to wear tomorrow and how to match my clothes with everything else just because if I don't,  girls may mock me and I also won't make any girl jealous. I'm human, not a doll for display at some shop, everyday they make me wear something new! This is crazy but if I don't do it I'm either sad because of a death in the family or I'm living a failing love story or  I'm ill or I'm a weirdo or perhaps I'm a tomboy or just not girly enough! Nonsense! I'm me. I'm human before I'm a girl so stop defining me through all these beauty products, clothes and accessories and instead we'd better spend some time on something more useful so that next time I don't put on make up to work or school, there will be some girl educated and smart enough to say "busy with something important nowadays!?". Damn! It's 12.30 already! I've got to decide what to wear tomorrow! 

Woman and the Other-A Summary of the Introduction of The Second Sex

Woman and the Other

SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

"What is a woman?" (Beauvoir, 1949:p. 305) this is a question raised by the French existentialist, writer, and social essayist Simone de Beauvoir in an article under the title: Woman and the Other, which is originally an extract from the introduction of her book The Second Sex, a work of feminist philosophy which can be considered the starting point of second-wave feminism. The extract is published within a collection of critical articles and documents under the title of Literature in the Modern World edited by Dennis Walder and published by Open University. In this article, De Beauvoir sheds light on the deep rooted concept of femininity in the mentality and unconsciousness of humanity and the way this contributes to complicating women's problems of gender inequality and discrimination. She also questions women's position in the world at the time of writing her book and the future awaiting them.

 De Beauvoir questions the word woman; she argues that femininity is a concept holding within it certain qualities that society prescribes to women; the presence or lack of these qualities in a woman decide the degree of her femininity. If a woman has these qualities then she is what De Beauvoir defines as "the eternal feminine" (305) while if these qualities are missing, that woman is not considered feminine or she is not a real woman, as she argues:

All agree in recognizing the fact that females exist in the human species; today as always they make up about one half of humanity. And yet we are told that femininity is in danger; we are exhorted to be women, remain women, become women. (305)

From the beginning of the article, De Beauvoir expresses her disappointment at the feminist movements of the nineteenth century; she believes that a lot of time and energy had been wasted on the subject of feminism without being able to approach the subject properly, as she states "the voluminous nonsense uttered during the last century seems to have done little to illuminate the problem" (305).

De Beauvoir observes that although science had proven that the qualities ascribed to being feminine are not biologically inherent in women, in the unconsciousness of mankind the word woman still holds some conceptual meanings within it. De Beauvoir observes that it is a denial of reality when some feminist activists refuse to be called women because in De Beauvoir’s opinion, this kind of attitude is not going to make the conceptual meanings the word holds disappear. In some cases, this attitude only reveals those feminists’ sense of lacking and fragility as she suggests "the attitude of defiance of many American women proves that they are haunted by a sense of their femininity" (306), to support the previous statement, De Beauvoir provides an example about a "well-known" woman writer, whose name she does not provide, who refused to allow her portrait to be published among a series of photographs specified for women writers; however, this woman writer used her husband's authority to enable her to have her picture published among the pictures of the men writers. (306)

De Beauvoir discusses the situation and position of women in the world; as an example, she refers to language pointing out how in language the word man can represent all humanity while the word woman cannot do that. She claims that women are not regarded as independent beings with an identity of their own but they are rather defined in accordance with the rules of men. To support this claim, she quotes from Michelet who wrote "Woman, the relative being" (307). As De Beauvoir suggests, in the world man comes first and woman comes last; man represents all the good and acceptable values of humanity while woman is the representative of all that is evil, fragile, corrupt and incomplete; therefore, men and women are not regarded as equals; man is the origin of humanity while woman comes as an accessory or as some entity subordinate to him:

the relation of the two sexes is not quite like that of two electrical poles, for man represents both the positive and the neutral, as is indicated by the common use of man to designate human beings in general; whereas woman represents only the negative, defined by limiting criteria, without reciprocity.  (306-307)

De Beauvoir observes that it is very familiar to find women viewed with prejudice by men only because the male dominant society holds strong beliefs that to be a female is to be lacking a number of very significant qualities. De Beauvoir also refers to different cultures, beliefs and philosophies that define women as evil creatures or incomplete beings with numerous flaws, such as Aristotle whom she quotes from: "a female is a female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities" (307) she also quotes from St Thomas who defined woman as "an imperfect man", "an incidental being" (307).  Thus, De Beauvoir argues that a woman's mere function in this world is considered to be satisfying the man's sexual needs as De Beauvoir says, "And she is simply what man decrees; thus she is called ‘the sex’, by which is meant that she appears essentially to the male as a sexual being" (307)

The author then moves to the subject of the other; she states that women willingly fill the role of the other in the male-female relationship. She observes that naturally in all conflicts that occur between people of different nationalities, beliefs and so on each side considers themselves the right side or the one while they consider the opposite side to be the other, i.e., no side is willing to play the role of the other, still, as De Beauvoir suggests, women seem to have accepted to play this role willingly and here she questions the reasons and factors that led to this obedience and submissiveness. She brings forth a number of factors that can lead to this; however, she excludes each one of them providing explanations for that. For instance, the Jews or American Negros have been abused and exploited within the white or Western communities for many years because they were a minority and did not have the power to stand up for their rights, but this factor cannot be applied to women because they have never been a minority in this world, in fact, women have always formed half of the world's population. De Beauvoir concludes this argument by stating that it might appear to one that submissiveness is inherent in women, yet, she adds that nothing is permanent in this world and change is possible because an abused fraction of humanity such as the proletarians managed to start a revolution in Russia and fight against class differences, yet, women remain submissive and thus they are abused only because they are not taking serious action to change their situation. Regarding the rights women had gained at the time of writing her book, De Beauvoir claims: "but the women’s effort has never been anything more than a symbolic agitation. They have gained only what men have been willing to grant; they have taken nothing, they have only received." (309) this statement suggests that the rights gained by women are not the outcome of serious struggle and hardship but rather they were obtained because men were willing to give them away.

De Beauvoir draws a comparison between the situation of the Negroes in North America and that of women in the world in terms of how similar both cases are. She observes that both are enslaved and discriminated based on some false assumptions whether it be the "black soul" or "the eternal feminine" (310). She notes that the social class in power is the one that fabricates some terms and excuses in order to justify its exploitation of the other; it is striving to guarantee that the excuses it fabricates are convincing enough to abort the other's attempts to obtain their basic human rights. A good example of these excuses includes considering a woman who is relatively rebellious and disobedient as a woman lacking femininity.

De Beauvoir concludes that women cannot achieve change in their situation like the rest of the abused fractions of humanity such as the Negros or the Jews because they lack the required unity to help them work together for their cause. The reason for this is that they are scattered among the men of the specific social class or group they belong to as subordinate beings. De Beauvoir argues that it is an undeniable fact that at present women are inferior to men; however, the article leaves the readers with an open question through which De Beauvoir suggests that this situation needs to end some day in the future:

Yes, women on the whole are today inferior to men; that is, their situation affords them fewer possibilities. The question is: should this state of affairs continue? (310)

References:

De Beauvoir, S. (1990), "Woman and the Other" in Walder , D., (ed), Literature in the Modern World, Oxford: Open University, pp. 305-310.