Image via Solitice Retouch

After saying I needed another account like I need exposure to Ecoli, I signed up for Pinterest. Call it peer pressure, or my mind’s need to indulge in the very visual after hours of wrestling with words, I’ve been pinning my heart away. My boards (the groupings of images I select) reflect my interests or intended projects: a Yum-o! list of recipes I’d love to try for my well deserving family, a Family Wedding collage of ideas for an upcoming celebration, and a Writing Projects smatter of snapshots of dresses,and  faces (including Robert Downy Jr.) who remind me of my characters. Getting slightly into it, I created a few more: one for research about Laos for an upcoming novel, another with Books Worth Reading in my heaps of free time, and Word! (Sayings I Love) for those times I need to dwell on the positive.

Revealing my Type-A personality, there’s this other board, Random, where I capture things that are interesting but don’t fit any of the others. “Random” for things that don’t On this board, I put a fairly innocuous image but one that stood out to me nonetheless (left).

I was respondent number three after two other women who commented on how much looking at photo itself made their feet hurt. I pulled together the sum of my feminine experiences and threw in a drop of my feminist inclinations: “So bad for you! Modern foot binding anyone?”

Someone said “this makes me dizzy,” which made me laugh, because if you have ever worn shoes like this, it is difficult to balance while walking. Then a male then commented: “Yes but we all know that in the flesh they probably look awesome.” Six people later, one woman said exactly what I was thinking: “Only the man comments that they look good, figures:).”

The deluge of comments that followed was astonishing; I almost left Pinterest because of the volume of notifications that flooded my inbox. Not because everyone took issue with the male, or agreed that his sentiment was why millions of us wore such high heels calling it fashion. There were many, many women who agreed, some who even defended him, that it wasn’t just men’s fault that we wear things regularly that are chipping away at the bones of our hips, legs, and knees.

And not to be left out of the debate, he felt emboldened enough to comment again: I am sorry you think it’s all men’s fault. I guess I must say I don’t really agree. Pintrest is conservatively 80 percent women posters and I would venture to guess that in the women’s fashion section 90 percent of the posters are women… Lots and lots of :3 posts on shoes that seem pretty tall… But yep it’s all because men like them. Ok. My whole gender is screwing up yours. I apologize for the collective. He deserves an award for exhibiting that special ability men have to turn around something that they are implicated in and blame it on women’s complicity.

Which of course we are. As someone else pointed out even later in the chain: “Statistically, for office jobs, a majority of interviewers prefer women in heels to women in flats. (Same for women with make up vs no make up). First World Problem eh?”

As a professional woman living in the Arabian Gulf, I do wear heels, though many around me wouldn’t consider them as heels because they are under the five inch height at which many female nationals use for their everyday wear.  That’s not to say everyone wears them, but Qatari women who don’t wear heels are often thought of different or not interested in fashion. A friend of mine was even told by her boss to wear heels to the office, so entrenched in his mind was the connection between Qatari women and high heels. She carried on in her loafers.

Since the days of working at the national university, where you have to trek between buildings in the hot sun, my everyday wares are more like one or two inches; I draw the line at three (I do have a pair of the size in this photograph, but I last only about ten minutes standing up). I’m in flats as I write this because today I have no one to impress and I want to get where I’m going quickly. But when I dress up? Heels, without a doubt. And I’m short, so in most cases when you see me at home, you’re surprised at my real height.

Even though I know from experience you can’t do any kind of heavy labor, or even walk long distances or stand for long hours in heels (nor squeeze pregnant feet into them), they’re the first thing I dig out if I have an important meeting. So is it okay to pick and choose when we use these prescriptions of beauty?

Can we, as some of the other posters said, wear them because they make us feel sexy, good, dressed up, without participating in the other ideas that restrict women’s movement?

Can we ever escape the cult of beauty? Or is beauty, as someone said on this ever increasing chain, inextricably linked to pain?

In an age where diversity is defined as relations between the races and women’s struggles are thought of being long over, I raise a hand in dispute. I constantly have to draw my own boundaries and define myself – not allowing others the permission to apply other words, particularly a word so ineffective as cuteness. The fact of the matter is, cute is not an innocent word.  Hold on, you’re saying. Hold on. I like cute things. Okay – let’s play this game, then. Describe the cute things you like.

Kittens you say. Kittens are cute. And puppies. I just adore puppies. Yes, I agree. Kittens, as well as puppies and babies are cute – adorable even.

But women are not. At least not those who want to be taken seriously.

Language, it is a powerful force; it is the ability to name and describe someone. Words are as central to our ability to communicate as humans and distinguish us from all other types of animals. When words like cute are applied to grown women or even little girls, they cease to be innocent. Name the last time a tall broad shoulder man, dressed in an Armani suit, silk tie, and was described as cute. A red carpet fashionistas would never describe Daniel Craig as adorable. We don’t use cute to describe serious male actors, or anything masculine because, rationale sputters, they aren’t cute. Right. Men aren’t cute – that’s reserved for small animals, children, and women.

It’s troubling that an adult human can fall into the same category as two other beings with little agency or self-sufficiency and in constant need of attention.  The essence of cuteness is that it defines our understanding of gender roles and how they function in our perceptions of ourselves and others. Cuteness will never allow a female student to achieve her full potential in a classroom or any other arena. After all, she has her achievement. She’s cute.

As a working woman from the age of twenty one, and holding a full time position while finishing a Ph.D. in Postcolonial Literature, cute was perhaps one of the most dismissive words to reduce my work and me, to rubble. Being young often added to this dimension of being a non-adult; the entire first year of my doctoral program I constantly found older students asking me if I was starting my Masters or even worse, a first year student. Celebrate your youth, you say: you may wish you looked this young.

Cuteness doesn’t only function as a limiting gendered term. Cuteness also covers ethnocentrism and a failure to understand products and people of other cultures.  The politics of cuteness negotiates our reaction to things, people, and places that are outside our normal frame of reference.  Since the normal frame of reference is usually a Eurocentric model, this means cuteness defines those things that are non-western by infusing them with an inability to be taken seriously.

Being a woman of a stature that in most cultures is considered small, (I stand at 5” 1’) little often directly translates into belittle. During the course of office repartee, my forays are noted by other staff members as coming from, “the smallest person in the department,” changed my conception of cuteness. It was a category that continuously defined me, constantly changing to shadow my scholarly work, my professional profile. This was a not-so-subtle form of discrimination dodging my steps.

Maybe my sensitivity is derived from a lifetime of being near a 4’ 11” woman: my mother. I laughingly describe myself as the fat giant of the family – I tower over my mother and sister, neither weighing over 100 pounds. People’s reactions to my mother illustrate the inherent problems with this language.

“Mohana,” they say. There’s a glimmer in the eye. “Mohana, you’re mother is so little.”

This is often said in an almost whisper as if it’s a secret. I nod and try to smile, a plastic tightening of my lips. Then a triumphant, “I’m taller than her!” as if this is a considerable achievement rather than an accident of nature. Then, almost without fail, as if on cue from some invisible script: men, women, even teenagers.

“She’s so cute!”

It often bursts out, head shaking in amazement, as if it never occurred to people that a body that small could birth three children.

It was no secret my mother has felt the pressure of cuteness her whole life; it would boil over in every family fight we had.

“You’re not listening to me because I’m small!”

There the accusation would hang and at about eight, I sighed and gave up trying to explain that it in fact was not because she was small. It was because she was our mother. But for her, the cuteness that pervaded her life diminished her in the world’s eyes. It wasn’t until I got to graduate school and learned expressive words such as performativity and subjectivity that I understood what was happening to my mother – and why I resisted the word cute when it applied to me. As a result of her height, people ascribed cuteness to my mother, which resulted in a one dimensional construction of her identity both as a person and as a woman.  My mother’s understanding of herself and her status as person, her subjectivity, was informed by this primary idea that she was different from other people, and that her cuteness led to not being taken as seriously as others.

Yet while resenting it, she performs this identity of cuteness in her interactions with other people. She answers the phone in a shy girlish voice, whenever she laughs it’s really a tiny giggle but she covers her mouth, she lets my father dominate social situations even though she loves meeting new people.  Cuteness constructs and defines my mother’s understanding of who she is and who other people expect her to be.

We undermine the meaning of women, and strip the meaning from beings when we place non-descriptive and unempowering adjectives like ‘cute’ onto them. Other words that fit into this category include ‘sweet’, ‘nice’ and I think we covered ‘adorable.’ To battle against this insidious form of discrimination, awareness, time and introspection are the keys to reprogramming these often visceral responses.

Now I pause when describing people and consider the adjectives used and think on them. Perhaps a question to ask yourself: would I feel empowered if this were used to describe me? And a follow up: the next time you do use one of those adjectives, ask yourself, what was it about that person/thing/place that I was glossing over? What didn’t I want to understand/appreciate/think about? Rather than label something in an effort to give it value, however well intentioned, ask a question instead. “Wow, that’s beautiful. Does that pattern have significance?” goes a lot further toward building bridges than, “I just love that fabric! It’s so nice.”

I am now in my thirties, a young mother, and happily married woman who refuses to let anyone dismiss me because of my age or appearance. In order to be taken seriously, I take others seriously and also work really hard. It doesn’t take long before people find out that I am someone they can rely on, trust, and confide in. Any one of those qualities they would take over someone who is known for being aesthetically cute.

Starting something new is a bit like regressing in age and revisiting your first kindergarten. You’re learning where things are, how everything works and who does what. 

The other hidden lessons are related to those friends or foes your new colleagues. What was interesting this week, as I ran through the gauntlet of introductory meetings was the various levels of helpfulness I encountered along the way.

A general measuring stick was how quickly someone followed through on sending documents that he or she mentioned during a given session. Men, I’m disappointed to say, were frighteningly prompt about sending through attachments that might be helpful as related to their particular areas. Why was I disappointed by the collegiality of my male counterparts? Because most of the women I dealt with were either standoffish or missing from their offices. Perhaps you feel this gender differential is unfair of me.

Okay, so let’s take another one, ethnicity. Why was it that on the whole, non-Europeans were the ones who stood up when I walked in the room, offered their hands, and also something to drink, during the course of a meeting? When the subject of another office or colleague came up, as happened in nearly all of these instances, why did the non-Euros tell me who to see but walk me to my destination?

Perhaps you now feel that ethnicity is also an unfair divider in the grand scheme of how to understand people, their motivations, and behavior.

I’m open. How can we account for the difference in warmth of reception and degree of helpfulness or interest across three days of consecutive meetings?

Have you noticed similar variations in your own workplace? Is it a question of style or lack of professionalism?

Is being attractive or likeable more important than being smart? 

Watching the US "veep" debates and the hours of analysis later, you might think so.  Apparently designer clothes, winks, kisses, and ‘shoutouts’ are what it takes to win the nation’s hearts and minds these days.

I’m tempted to wash my hands of the whole thing and say that they deserve what they get. But I (although with my campaign addicted husband) can’t look away from the TV. It’s like watching a train wreck or the reason why there is so much rubbernecking on the freeway. Bad news makes you stop, stare, and slow everyone else down.

Sure, I like perkiness. I like audacious claims. I even will use slang during important business meetings to show that I haven’t lost my connection to my ‘block.’ But lately I’m realizing how fallible these tenants of being ‘down to earth’ are. Sometimes it’s okay to be smart. It’s fine to use big words that I learned during graduate school.

Let me make this clear: we all want to see women advance in all fields, all over the world. But not just because they are women. I rejoice when people of color do well. But not just because they are people of color. What happened to liking someone because he or she was competent? Or, dare I say it, the best candidate for the job?

Psychology has proven that there is a ‘halo’ effect. That attractive people get more from life and from those around them. We are friendlier to those we consider attractive, give them more leeway, allow them more time.

Hopefully the American people are aware of this bias for the surface charm and will chose, not based on looks, or likeability, race or even gender, but on rationale, reasonable facts. Only 31 more nail biting days to go to see which wins out.

not just because living in the desert can make you appreciate human companionship more than nearly anything, but because visitors to the place you live can give you fresh eyes. This always happens in Doha when I host groups from North America, as I did recently for a three week summer program. There’s so much to say, so it’s likely this will be the subject of several entries.

For now I will focus on the one thing that many people don’t understand about life in the Middle East – gender relations.

The group I hosted was co-ed, or ‘mixed’ as we say here. This mixed group was the first mixed class held at the university where I work that has adjacent but separate male and female campuses. The ironies of this exception (because it was summer) were numerous.

What was most confusing for the North Americans – but not for the subcontientials also in their group – were the apparent contradictions in the Doha based group’s behavior. The female and male students would talk to the female and male student visitors, but never to each other. The local female and male students would sit next to, work with, and laugh in conversation with the visitors of both genders. But they remained invisible to each other, even when traveling as a small group of six back from a weekend trip outside the country.

Years of disciplined socializing ensured that these boundaries were never crossed.

Typically when confronted with something different, the visitors wanted to change this, insist that it didn’t exist, or read their own motivations into this clear delineation of gendered behavior.

As the hinge person between these two groups, I was often caught in the middle. What surprised me is my lack of desire to ‘change’ or ‘make right’ the situation. Perhaps because this is the start of my fourth year living in the Arabian Gulf. Or perhaps I truly am beginning to have more respect for the host country and culture. In either case, I found it natural.

But I am glad the program is over and I can go back to working predominately with the female students (who outnumber the male students in significant numbers). Now I don’t have to worry about who is sitting next to whom or who doesn’t want her photo taken or who is trying to shake the hand of a person who doesn’t shake with people of the opposite sex.

In short, I’m excited about getting back to work.

A friend and I were at the mall recently and found ourselves discussing why neither of us wear shorts anymore. This is odd, particularly for me, the girl child who argued fiercely with her mother to wear the fashionable cut offs in high school that gave Daisy her “dukes.” She found it equally so since growing up in California, she often showed off her ballerina legs.

We were both used to living in the conservative culture of the Middle East for several years and perhaps that was the most obvious reason. That plus the slowing of our metabolism as we raced towards becoming thirtysomethings.

The truth is I loved wearing short things in my teenage years which I spent most of weighing no more than 100 pounds. And then, as I became part of a committed spiritual community in college, I gave up the short hems as anything higher than the knee was frowned upon. Thus it was that the wild child of adolescence willingly forsook the shorts, bikinis, and other scanty wear of young shapely women the world over as a twentysomething.

Now on the doorstep of thirty, living in the Middle East, unexpectedly finding myself eating, traveling, and sitting next to women in hijab, I’m reminded again how much in common conservative cultures the world over have in common, regardless of the religion. For hijab means so much more than just the headscarf that is so viciously debated (a senseless debate if you ask anyone, because you aren’t going to make anyone stop wearing it). Hijab means covering the ears, the neck, arms, breasts, and hips – in short creating a cloak of modesty which covers the woman.

Coincidentally these are very similiar to the areas I was lectured against exposing at various faith based conferences in college; we were urged to be modest in our dress and looked in sympathy on immodestly dressed girls at those same conferences. They would learn if they wanted to stick around.

Religions  all over the world want to cover women up – to encourage men to think on other things – and in addressing women’s clothing Christians, Hindus, Jews, and Muslims are surprisingly in agreement. Modesty, each of them preaches, is essential to social order, to well behaved men, to protected women.

Not that I support the direction that young women’s fashion has headed in the last few years. A woman does like to have some secrets, after all.

But where is the line between what someone chooses and what is enforced, either socially, legally, or morally? 
How do we develop our codes? From our families, our communities, or our own sense of what makes us feel right?
Some combination of all three?

As part of my job, I often design trips for students which require international travel. In the Middle East this is a new counter culture concept for many families who do not let their daughters out their sight. Most of my students have never traveled without their families and in the instances they have, they are usually returning to their countries of origin for a summer trip. Family travel can involve six or more people and is never a casual affair. Given the 40 days of annual vacation allotted to most employees in the Gulf, it stands to reason that traveling 10+ hours for a week seems like a tremendous amount of hassle for a short period of time.

Yet, these international trips are increasingly popular for the female students where I work because they too are catching the millennial fever to travel the world and see all that it has to offer.

What I found interesting, yesterday morning at the check in counter of the airport, was a father’s reaction to seeing me at the head of the group.

“It is only you going with them?” He asked me, eyeing me up and down.

I smiled and nodded.

“But there is a team of people on the other side to receive us,” I assured him. 

This is the second year that I have planned and taken students to Mauritania (a country in West Africa) to see how 
a Qatari created NGO does work with local people towards sustainability. The first trip was last summer and one of 
the best student trips I have ever been a part of.

“Are you Indian?”

This question surprised me, but it’s not unsual for people to assume your place of origin based on your skin color. With so many transplanted people in the Middle East, living outside their countries, Iraqis, Palestinians, Lebanese,
no one would have a country of origin if they got absorbed into their countries of residence. So you are where you come from.

“Yes,” I said, taking my American passport back from the check in agent, not wanting to get into a long conversation about my accent, dress, or years abroad.

“Don’t leave my daughters in Mauritania and go back to India,” the father said, laughing.

Now, this took me completely by surprise, as did the two hours it took for our group of seven to get boarding passes for our connecting flight in Tunisia.

At the end of the processing, one of the woman behind the counter was holding my passport.

“May I have my passport please?” I asked her, ignoring the fact that in the past two hours I watched two of the employees at this desk get into a screaming argument, another employee walk off her job to collect her children from an arriving flight, and accept the profuse apologies of the desk manger.

She nodded and held up one finger, Arab hand signal for WAIT.
She flipped to the first page of my passport, read something there that she found interesting, and flipped it closed. She nodded to her friend and something in a mix of French and Arabic that none of us watching needed a translator for.

“Not really American,” is probably what she said to her friend after reading my birthplace on the first page of the passport.

It appears that Americans are not the only ones who discriminate based on color.

Discrimination is alive and well the world over and yesterday’s reminders took my breath away.

Have you had cases such as these? Or feel that your identity is more complex than most people want to deal with? 
Share and join the club!

When I was growing up, FAIR AND LOVELY face cream was kind of a joke. After all, the whitening properties of the face cream, targeted at a South Asian female demagraphic didn’t apply to me. I was living in the U.S. where during the summertime, you’d see rows and rows of white bodies baking under the Florida sun. Trying to get darker.

But after a recent visit to Malaysia, I see that FAIR AND LOVELY has bigger aims. Their ads now target Asian women of all stripes: there are even ads on channels shown in Qatar.

The story is the same: the hard working, well deserving woman – model, designer, whatever – can’t get ahead with her assignments because her bosses all find her ‘dark’ skin tone unattractive. Introduce the cream, and VIOLA!, she’s on her way to being the next mega mogul.

I’m puzzled by these opposing long existing trends – white is desireable, but all white people  try to tan – which sreams of double standards and contradictions.

Why all the spray tans and ‘fake bakes’ if white people dislike browness?

Is this what is holding Obama back – a man who everyone admits has poise, confidence, and the momentum for a historical moment in the making – only he may also have a little too much brown in the face of Clinton’s whiteness?

My friend at the pool today suggested the mideval idea that white was a sign of class status: the fairier your skin, the less hard you were working, particularly with your hands in the sun.

But I suspect that a more malicious lingering of colonial ideology is to behind skin bleaching.

As my friend Allison used to say, “Here’s Moha, my little brown friend.”

And proud of it!

I’m working in my office and a student, wearing nikab, a face veil that drapes in front of the face and covers everything except a woman’s eyes, which a friend who lives here affectionately calls a ‘ninja mask.’ (in case you need a photograph: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/niqab/). 
A side note: many nikab clad women drive wearing these veils, despite the fact that the limit peripheral vision enormously. This is not just my un-hijabed opinion. When I was talking about this with another student, one who wears a shyla, a headscarf that covers hair, neck, and ears, she agreed and said this is an opinion that her father shares: women driving wearing nikab are not necessarily the safest (a whole new angle to women driving stereotypes).

But back to this particular day, she is wearing nikab and comes in to ask me to use my cell phone. She has to use my phone, she tells me, because her parents won’t let her have a phone. They think it’s “bad.” Yet, they think it’s okay for their daughter to walk into a stranger’s office (I have never seen this student before, expect on the first occasion that she came to use my phone) to ask to use the phone. This seems a discrepancy to the issue of modesty, which is what they seem concerned with, if her dress and lack of phone are any indication.

“You remember me?” She asked, as though surprised.

“No one else has asked to use my phone,” I respond. And it’s true. An area of the world where workers can SMS in to bosses that they aren’t coming to work, and people break up via mobile phones, not to mention use Bluetooth technology to make assignations with strangers in public, her not having a phone stand out.

Other issues?

At a mini-conference this week, I asked a few co-workers to help assist in taking microphones to audience members who had questions for panelists, I was confronted with the divide between acceptable forms of work and unacceptable forms of work. This is determined by status and image of course.

“Aren’t there any servants to do it?” One asked me.

Servants? Was work an extension of her home?

Let’s flash to the sight that greeted me as I got out of my car earlier this week: two women who work in the kitchen of our building, bringing tea and making copies, scurrying into the parking lot to get two grocery bags from staff in my building. The bas had the contents of the other women’s breakfast.  They were items that could have been stuffed into my tote bag that was slung over my arm. I watched as the procession, the staff in front, and the tea ladies in back, proceeded into the building.

Back to the microphone handler search: Of course I had to start with the women because the men were too dignified to do this task.

Of the few I asked, most pointed to their long abayas, the hems of which were dragging on the floor, and said they couldn’t run because they would fall. This is how dress marks us in our everyday lives here; the thobes and abayas don’t allow for running, pushing, lifting, or any other semi-manual labor. They make for great gliding however, as women’s feet are hidden, and girls from a young age learn to walk in small, mincing steps, designer handbags dangling from the crook of their arms. There isn’t any sense of the egalitarian idea of shifting identities – I may be a plumber during the day but at night I can be whatever I want, all I have to do is change my clothes – you are what you wear, essentially.

There were two volunteers, eventually however, and this was even more interesting. One was sharp: the microphone was right there when someone needed it. She moved swiftly (even in her abaya) and stood to the side as the speaker said whatever was on his/her mind. The other was much more timid. And although she stood against the wall and made to approach several speakers near her, she never did actually hand the microphone to anyone. She was shy and the distances too far for her to travel.

“I might meet my husband,” one person said, as I asked her why she didn’t want to help us out (it was a long day and these handlers were on their feet for an hour at a time).

In the end she turned me down; I guess he’ll just have to wait until another day.