For several years in the '90s I was in a relationship with an Arabic woman called Lana, who had come to England from Saudi Arabia to study. It was an intense, mostly fantastic, and positively life-changing relationship for me; from the first moment I saw her, I thought she was one of the most beautiful women I'd ever seen.
The following incident - which I won't go into great detail about; I just want to focus on a brief conversation I had about it afterwards with a male friend - happened about seven or eight months into our relationship.
Our sex life, to put it bluntly, was absolutely fantastic. I was around 24 when I met her, and at that point in my life I thought I knew what good sex was. But with her I discovered a whole new level of sexual experience that transcended anything I'd known before. We were very sexually active, very sexually open with each other, and keen to experiment and try new things.
She'd been in England for six or seven months when I met her, and prior to that she had spent her entire life living in Saudi Arabia, which was, for her, an unbearably oppressive and repressive regime. Although she had come to England ostensibly to study, her main motivation was one of escape, and enrolling on a post-graduate degree course in England was one of the few routes out of Saudi Arabia open to her.
In England, she experienced a level of freedom for the first time in her life. Freedom to be herself, to dress how she wanted to dress, to go out in public and use public transport alone, to learn how to drive a car, to openly say what she wanted to say, to openly believe what she wanted to believe, to basically be a free and equal human being, to have basic human rights, to be an autonomous individual and not a second-class citizen whose sole role in life was to be owned and subjugated by a man.
With these new freedoms in her life came the freedom to explore her sexuality, and she had a burning curiosity about all things sexual, a hunger to explore her sexual boundaries, and a keen appetite for sexual experimentation.
So, about seven or eight months into our relationship, a relationship that had been monogamous up to that point - and this wasn't an 'assumed' monogamy; it was something that we frequently discussed and agreed on - we were in bed and discussing sexual fantasies, and she, her face flushed, started talking about how hot she found the idea of being fucked by two, or more, men at the same time.
The discussion moved on from just describing a fantasy to actually imagining it as a reality, and it ultimately reached a point where she asked me how I'd feel about having another man join us, just once, just so she could try it. I thought about it and I answered honestly that I felt a bit weird about it; having sex with another guy there, I just didn't feel comfortable with it.
She accepted this without any argument and understood how I felt. Then, after a few moments, she said, 'What if we included another woman too?'
My ears pricked up at this. Of course they did. A threesome with another guy did not really appeal to me, but the inclusion of another woman made it a whole different proposition.
And she hadn't mentioned including another woman just for my benefit. She was extremely bi-curious and had a burning desire to have sex with a woman - something she'd never tried. She saw this neat solution as a way of fulfilling two fantasies - one, of getting fucked by two men at the same time, and the second, of experiencing sex with another woman for the first time.
The thing is, her birthday was approaching, and we were discussing this as a potential birthday treat for her. She had a man in mind to ask, an old friend of hers, with whom she'd previously had a sexual relationship. He lived in the Middle East and was engaged to be married, but his relationship with his fiancé was an 'open' one. She liked him and trusted him and thought he'd be a good person to ask, rather than taking a gamble on someone neither of us knew very well.
For the woman, she had a college friend in mind, a fellow student, a German woman. She said she was hugely attracted to her, that she thought I would be too, and that her instinct was that this friend seemed like an open-minded person who might just be interested in joining our little adventure.
Basically, the birthday 'treat' did happen, but I'm not going to go into any great detail about it here. It would take thousands of words for me to write about that day, and maybe it's something I'll return to in a future post. Suffice to say that the day went ahead with mixed results. The German friend was ok with male attention, but wasn't as keen on experimenting with another woman as my girlfriend was, which led to some awkwardness.
But overall, it was a worthwhile experience, I'm glad we did it, and after it was all over it led to Lana and I having the most transcendentally amazing sex, just the two us, that we'd ever had together.
Shortly after all of this happened I was discussing it with a male friend. The day had thrown up all sorts of conflicting emotions for me, and I'd felt terrified going into it - but also very excited - and I was discussing all of these mixed feelings with him. I thought I detected a negative tone in his voice when he was talking about my girlfriend, a sense that he was judging her. I pressed him on this issue.
He eventually came out and said something utterly derogatory about her, about how little she must value our relationship if she wanted to have sex with another man as well as me.
This made little sense to me. In my mind what had happened was a sign of the strength of our relationship rather than the weakness of it. I tried explaining this to him.
I said, 'I love Lana, but I jumped at the chance to have sex with her and another woman. It doesn't mean I don't value our relationship.'
'That's different,' he told me.
'Why?' I wanted to know.
'It's different for men,' he said.
Even though I knew bullshit was going to come out of his mouth, I wanted to press him on the issue anyway. So I asked him why he thought it was different for men.
He came out with some utter toss about how women were different to men, how it was natural for a man to want to have sex with different women, but how it was unnatural for a woman to want to have sex with different men. He said sex was a more intimate act for a woman than a man. For a woman, sex was about romance and love, feelings and emotion, and that women didn't want to have sex in the same way that men wanted to have sex.
Now, I'm not knocking romance and love and intimacy - where would we be without them? And my relationship with Lana was full of all of those qualities. But her 'birthday treat' had solely been about bringing a sexual fantasy to life in a safe, consensual and controlled way. It was her desire, and I was thrilled to help make it a reality for her.
And I think this gets to the root of why it was a problem for him: that it was her desire.
I'm convinced that had I said to him that my girlfriend and I had had sex with another couple, and that it had been my idea, and I'd persuaded her to go along with it, then he'd have laughed and joked about it and considered my girlfriend to be a 'good sport' for doing it.
But because the idea originated with her, because it was her fantasy, her desire, then he considered her to be a slut. He didn't say the word, but that's what he thought.
I'm convinced that had my friend been able to be absolutely honest with himself, had he been able to rigorously examine his belief system, what he'd have discovered would have been the following: that he didn't think ill of Lana because she'd had sex with two men at the same time, but rather because she'd wanted to have sex with two men at the same time. The problem he had was with her desiring it, the raw manifestation of female sexuality that I maintain scares so many men, and scares society in general.
She'd acted in a way that contradicted his world view, and rather than examining his beliefs - about women, gender identity, and sex - it was easier for him to judge her. Because it's always easier to judge others than to examine ourselves.
And I don't think he was a particularly unpleasant or unreconstructed man. He was a very decent man in lots of ways. I suspect that the views he expressed would have been the views of lots of people at that time - and probably still are. He was probably just voicing what was considered to be 'common knowledge' about gender sexual identity.
And this gets to the crux of something beautifully ironic at the heart of all this.
Lana was from a culture where the societal female gender role was oppressive, restrictive and suffocating for her. She had not been free, and she knew this to be true. Her culture had been based on conformity and compliance, and it had a clearly defined role for how a woman should be.
Living in England, almost every little thing she did every day was a transgression against this societal conditioning. Wearing the clothes that she wanted to wear, leaving her hair uncovered, learning to drive - all of these were transgressions against her culture's definition of womanhood.
So, for Lana, all of her societal conditioning was crumbling to dust, and she was discovering who she really was, free of all societal pressures for her to conform to a certain stereotype or behave in a certain way.
The irony is that even though she was from such a repressive background, I believe she was actually more free - in her mind, her thinking, her self-examination, her burning curiosity and appetite for life - than most British people I knew.
The difference is that by living in a western democracy, we harbour the illusion that we are free. We can accept this freedom as fact, yet the truth is that we are slaves to our societal conditioning.
Because we think we are free, we don't examine this conditioning. Because Lana knew she wasn't free, she ripped her conditioning apart.
Lana, as far as I was concerned, was truly open-minded and on a journey of self-discovery. Contrast that with my male friend, who recited such stale, hackneyed - and offensive - opinions about women as though they were established facts. Irrespective of background, or country of birth, who was the free one now?
No comments:
Post a Comment