Heeeeeere's Jordan!

“Oh, wow, it’s beautiful,” is the first thing that I said when I saw Jordan – an uninspired sentiment, but true. Through the plane’s tiny window the multicolored lights of Amman looked like tiny Swarovski crystals scattered across black velvet.

“Did you see the fireworks?” asked the girl beside me, fashionably dressed in a thermal tee, jeans, and a gauzy purple headscarf. She was seventeen and had just graduated from high school in Chicago, where from what I could understand she’d spent a lot of time salsa dancing in talent competitions and being horrified by her fellow students’ penchant for pajamas and fetish gear. She’d come with her mother and grandmother to visit her relatives in Palestine, but was afraid that, since she’d been away for seven years, they might not let her enter the country.

“No, I didn’t,” I said. I stared for another minute, but couldn’t find them. Still, for a few seconds I enjoyed the conceit that Jordan was celebrating my arrival.

Right away, there were differences. They didn’t spring from the airport itself, which looked like any other boring, bare-bones airport, or from the treatment of the officials, who were more perfunctory than most but kept the line moving. No, like most Westerners, the first thing I fixated on was the women’s clothing.

I notice women’s clothing a lot anyway, no matter where I’m going. This can be a boon for my fashion sense but is more often personally tragic, as when I went to Disneyworld and came away with the conclusion that the idea of covering up one’s sagging, wrinkled, unpleasantly jiggling bits has a lot to recommend itself. So my scrutiny wasn’t atypical, but the immediate results upon my subconscious were. Gazing constantly at women in headscarves and loose shirts that covered their rears, I was outright startled by the tall woman striding confidently past in a tight-fitting pantsuit. So struck was I by the nipped-in waist of the tailored jacket that I turned to watch her leave, and stared – God help me – straight at her butt, which was clearly exposed by her perhaps slightly-too-small trousers.

That I stared at her ass does not worry me. I have stared at many asses in my lifetime, both in aesthetic admiration and in lust. What worried me was the thought that accompanied the look: “Sheesh, that’s really out there, isn’t it? No wonder Western clothing is frequently seen as too sexual.”

One the one hand, I’m pleased that I’ve managed to “empty my cup” enough to empathize with local attitudes. On the other, I’m not happy at all with how easy a conclusion it was to reach. I’m a Westerner who’s perfectly happy to frolic near-naked in the sunshine, and I’m already hypocritically condemning Arab women for wearing clothing that wouldn’t even be noticed in the States. Peachy.