'Tis the season of university students showing up at the college for their student teaching practice, an annoying time during the which I have already received one emailed declaration of undying love. Another university student keeps stopping me wanting to talk about politics, which I would rather not, if only because my first meeting with him gave me severe panic, as he yelled at me "your embassy is being attacked!" I jumped to the conclusion that it was the embassy in Dar, and the time frame was right now. Even had he phrased this to more clearly mean the embassy in Libya a week ago, this is still not as pleasant an introduction as, oh I don't know, "hello, how are you?"
After he told me that "you Americans you have a problem with Muslims" to which I could only protest that there are 350 million of us Americans, more or less, and while I personally am not pleased with the existence of such a dumb movie as the trailer of The Innocence of Muslims made the movie appear to be, I will defend to the death the right of people to make dumb movies that offend people, and the proper response to such a thing is never ever to kill people. There is, of course, a caveat that I will regard with anger and scorn these filmmakers for using their rights of speech in such a way that they personally do not have to suffer the consequences. Other people died, while they sat smug and safe with their rights and clearly no ability to use that safety and those rights to any good purpose.
That seemed to be a satisfactory way to dispose of the subject and the young man then started complimenting me on my clothes. I wear fairly traditional Tanzanian clothing, mostly because fabric shopping and bringing it to a dressmaker is fun, easy, cheap, and since a dressmaker who routinely charges me less than the usual price opened a shop very close to my house, far too convenient. This, combined with other teachers who have started noticing how much I like clothes and bringing me fabric that they think would look nice on me, means that I now have enough clothes that packing to move to Mbeya is going to be a little difficult. To return to the narrative, our student teacher wanted to express his displeasure that, while women visiting from Europe (they all think I'm from Europe) adopt Tanzanian clothes, women from Tanzania who visit Europe often return wearing miniskirts, and as a man who will never be judged as a slut based on what he does or does not wear, he disapproves. I told him that I did not understand the extreme attention paid to women's clothing, and really, as a man who will not be affected by this, he should try to have empathy and not restrict the freedom of others to wear what they like. He then tried explaining to me that "morphologically, our African women should wear clothes that are long and tight around the thighs and" [trail off into confused embarrassment.]
Let me explain here that the typical traditional skirt is long but extremely tight at the top. The reasoning being that every movement of the woman's rear should be clearly visible but should she show her knees, she is a whore. I have noticed this, but this is the first time I have had it blatantly explained to me that this is because men in this culture want to see a butt more than a knee.
I decided to ignore this, however, as I am not quite up to calmly saying to an entitled man that the job of a woman is not to look attractive to men. The job of a woman is to be a person, and that entails things that differ depending on personal preference, ideology, and religion if applicable. Do no harm, however, might be a fairly good universal starting principle. For example, treat people as people, more important than what they wear or what they look like. Which is the part that I said. This was countered with claims about men's sexual arousal, which apparently always trumps women's freedom. To which I gave my favorite rousing speech on how men are better than that, they are better than animals who cannot control themselves and certainly better than to need to restrict the freedom of others for their selfishness.
My interlocutor told me my problem was that I was too logical, and I couldn't understand things like culture. Umm, okay, so what now? Once logic is off the table for a discussion, what do I do? Say "giraffe" and walk away? Claim that god or the ghost of Alan Turing told me to think like this and therefore I'm correct? Say that women have been dressing immodestly in other cultures since the dawn of time and therefore it's good (probably true by at least 1 person's standards of immodesty)? I ended up excusing myself from the conversation on the grounds of having to prepare myself for class.
In happier news, this. I monger peace, not violence, but since no lasting damages were done to any involved parties, I'm willing to call this awesome. Take that for policing women's bodies and clothes instead of greeting them and then minding his own business like a non-sanctimonious person!
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