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By All Means Step Over My Cold, Dead Body and Save Yourself, You HARPY!

by makeupandmirtazapine on April 30, 2013 in Family, Sex, Dating & Relationships

“Being with an insanely jealous person is like being in the room with a dead mammoth.” ~ Mike Nichols

A couple of weeks ago I introduced you to The Imposter from My Life As Imposter. She talked about her life as a British Asian, and how she struggles with the Muslim Guilt Monster over matters of love and sex. Now she’s back to tell us about how her older cousins and other family members reacted to her impending nuptials.

No no.. by all means, step over my cold, dead body and save yourself you HARPY.

Hello hello.So I had a very strange dream last night. I dreamt that my three eldest cousins and I were thrown into an Olympic sized swimming pool and forced to battle it out in a Gladiators/Celebrity Death Match sort of way. Every time we reached for the rails or the steel steps at the edges of the pool, all the screws unravelled and they came away in our hands.The dream basically ended with everybody banding together, drowning me, and using my body as a stepping stone to clamber out of the pool to safety.

It sounds crazy but this sort of underlying resentment is actually quite common in Asian/Pakistani culture.

The cousins who featured in last night’s dream escapade are 34, 35 and 37 and all unmarried. To me, this really doesn’t matter at all, in fact, I really couldn’t give a shit when or if anyone chooses to marry or not.

But what you have to consider is that culturally, and particularly when it comes to marriage, Pakistanis are old-school and traditional. Not in a cave man sort of way, more in a wafting fans, blushing brides, lovely Jane Austen sort of way.

Everyone is very proper about the whole thing and the engagement is a very formal step one takes when at the appropriate age and generally involves families at a much earlier stage than western courtships. Like the Jews, we tend to marry young (early 20s) and anyone left over after the age 30 is looked upon lovingly and with a great deal of sympathy.

Things aren’t quite as extreme as this in my family as my generation were all born in the UK. Everyone expects them to figure their own shit out and bring home their boyfriend/girlfriend when they want to tie the knot.

But what I find interesting is that some of the old ideology seems to have rubbed off on the women in my family. As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, I’m one of the youngest of all my cousins; so apparently this means everyone needs to get depressed and hate me if I marry before them. They have just become so goddamn bitter about it, as though I am robbing them of something. I am therefore avoiding all family events at the moment because I just get the stoniest glares and icy receptions.

One of my aunts (mother to the 34 and 35 year olds) actually grabbed me by the elbow and shoved me out of her way at the last family function. I turned to look at her, horrified, and she immediately started yelling, “I NEVER TOUCHED YOU… WHAT DO YOU MEAN??!!” (bearing in mind I hadn’t spoken yet) until one of her horrible henchman daughters sidled up to her asking what was going on, staring at me surreptitiously ready to pounce. I quickly had to smile and say, “Oh, nothing, I’m sure it was an accident!” and carried on making small talk with everyone while they secretly plotted my demise.

What the actual fuck? Who does that to their niece? She was fine with me before I was engaged, now it’s like I murdered her puppy then stole her daughters’ ovaries.

What is wrong with these people?? These girls are very attractive women. I’m sure they would have no trouble finding boyfriends……. So why haven’t they ever found boyfriends?? And why do they actively begrudge other people happiness? I have never understood this, “let’s compete and break each other down” mean girl mentality. And it’s an accepted thing to do… be scathing and difficult and outright bitchy and I’m expected to smile and glide through it all like a social ballerina.

Apparently the latest news is that my female cousins refuse to adhere to the dress code at my wedding because they “don’t want to do black tie” and were giving my mum shit about it over dinner one night at my aunt’s house.

Honestly… you can show up in a monkey suit for all I care. Even if you show up in a white dress I doubt I would notice you and your pathetic attempts at being obtuse and trying to get a rise out my family; because I’ll be marrying Bob not thinking about you at all.

Why on earth do they feel the need to actively bate my family with this crap? It’s such bad manners. Keep it to yourself people! Sometimes I just want to stand up and yell this, in true “Bridesmaids” style, at the top of my lungs:

I wonder whether, as progressive as they are, their families are just different to mine. I think my aunts and uncles are very concerned with their children marrying a Muslim person and, perhaps, enforce this fervently. Whereas my mother just wanted us to marry someone that was raised the same way we were. Obviously she would have preferred me to marry a Muslim man for simplicity’s sake, but she couldn’t have been happier about my relationship with Bob and the fact that he’s Jewish. It really doesn’t matter to her, as long as I don’t lose my identity.

I celebrate who I am and where I’m from and Bob does too; and that’s how we want to live our life together.

I am not sure that the girls who drowned me last night would be able to say the same and I therefore think it has bred a great deal of resentment towards my mum’s family.

I honestly think this wedding is going to make things a lot worse in terms of my relationship with my female cousins.

But, in the end, that’s just something I’m going to have to accept…

And smile through….

And gracefully pull the daggers from my back….

Whilst singing a little song.

Like Mary Fucking Poppins.

Fin.

You Keep Using That Word, I Don’t Think It Means What You Think It Means

by makeupandmirtazapine on April 25, 2013 in Miscellaneous, Sex, Dating & Relationships

It’s probably inadvisable to read this post at work.

“I believe that sex is the most beautiful, natural, and wholesome thing that money can buy.” ~ Steve Martin

You remember those spam adverts and pop-ups offering me sex that I told you about the other day? Well, in addition to assuming that their offer presented me with my one and only chance of getting laid, ever – as though they were completely unaware of the millions of other spam companies out there – they were all also working on the basis that there was only one particular kind of sexual encounter that I could possibly be looking for.

They all promised me dirty sex, actually, downright filthy sex in a lot of cases.

And that’s got me to thinking; these spam sites aren’t the only places where ‘really dirty’ is seen as the pinnacle accolade to be given both to the act itself and to an actual, potential, or desired sexual partner.

I haven’t heard a single heterosexual male mention the actress Megan Fox without using the word dirty more than once. And almost everybody I know who’s seen Die Another Day used similar terms to describe Halle Berry.

But I don’t think that word means what y’all seem to think it means.

Sex isn’t ‘dirty’.

Unless you’re really covering each other in mud, or garbage, or something while you’re doing it.

Or coprophilia is your thing. Which I suppose it could be. According to Wikipedia over 17% of people have apparently tried it.

Maybe that is it, maybe everyone who tells me that the sex they had last night was dirty is really trying to come out to me as a coprophiliac – or a urophiliac – and I’m just being colossally insensitive in not sitting them down with a nice cup of tea, reassuring them that I still love them, and letting them talk about it.

And yet somehow I doubt it.

Or maybe there are just a lot of people around with a more straight forward desire for a partner who is lax in their personal hygiene.

Although I rather hope not. I’ve had quite a few men tell me that they imagine that I’d be ‘dirty’ and I shower as often as the next manic depressive.

And it seems unlikely looking at any random sample of the people you hear, ‘I bet s/he’s dirty’, hurled at. It’s just the wrong word.

You don’t look at Christina Aquilera in the video for her single ‘Dirrty’ and think, “Gee, she needs a shower.”

She looks obvious, yes. Also unattractive, tacky, and ridiculous.

But dirty? Not all. Her face is all made up, her hair is styled, and her clothes will have been new on for the filming.

I guess the idea dates back to the time when religion was more influential and oppressive and people allowed the clergy to make them feel ashamed of any sexual activity they engaged in with anything other than reproduction as its motivation or aim.

Unless they were pecattiphiliacs, of course. They get off on doing things that are considered to be sinful.

It was still the wrong word.

And, anyway, the only people I’ve so far come across who still feel that sexual feelings and activities are things to be ashamed of were the, now former, friend who thinks that the staff of sexual health clinics should make their patients feel as bad about being there as possible.

Which I would think would be counter productive to their aim of encouraging people to visit their gynecologist or andrologist as often as they do their dentist.

And the middle aged, racist, chauvinist gynecologist I saw on one of said visits, who felt that he was entitled to be offended that I’d slept with someone who was half Pakistani, an American, and an Israeli, in that order. Apparently it was against his religion and I should have thought of that before hand.

But the only people who can legitimately describe sexual activity as dirty are those with an OCD thing about germs and saliva.

Otherwise the touching, kissing, licking, or otherwise interlocking of your own body parts with those of another human being(s) in the consensual expression of a mutual feeling of the perfectly naturally occurring emotions of love and/or lust cannot accurately be described with the use of this particular adjective.

Neither can people you happen to find attractive.

Dirty is a meaningless word to use in this context.

And while we’re on the subject, the same goes for X rated. Although conversely.

Anything that you do sexually is X rated.

Anything.

That’s because films and images that depict people actually having sex, rather than just pretending, are deemed to be pornography. And at some point it was decided that we as a society didn’t want children and young teenagers to view pornography.

Not that that appears to have particularly stopped them.

So telling someone that you got lucky last night and that it was X rated is pretty much redundant.

Unless you filmed it. And you plan to make copies and sell it. In which case, yeah, okay, the film classification people will stick an X rating on it.

Otherwise you just sound a bit dense.

I’m not really going anywhere else with this, it’s just what you get for reading the blog of someone who’s pedantic about the wording of things for a living.

Guest Post: Love, Sex and Organised Religion

by makeupandmirtazapine on April 12, 2013 in Life, Sex, Dating & Relationships

“I believe in recognizing every human being as a human being–neither white, black, brown, or red; and when you are dealing with humanity as a family there’s no question of integration or intermarriage. It’s just one human being marrying another human being or one human being living around and with another human being.” ~ Malcolm X

My lovely friend The Imposter has a new blog. Well, it’s not all that new; she started it eighteen months ago, and then she took a year long break. But now she’s back, and you can find her over at My Life As An Imposter.

She writes about her life growing up in the UK as the daughter of Pakistani parents, and about her impending marriage to her Jewish fiancé, Bob.

The Imposter describes her blog as - ”Less ‘cuddles and a cup of tea on the couch with Oprah’ more, ‘a pinch on the bum from a drunk nun.’”

I say that her stories are warm, witty, and insightful, and that her blog is well worth a read. Not just for those who’ve grown up straddling two different cultures, but for anybody who has ever felt that they didn’t quite ‘fit in’ – particularly amongst their family.

This post is just a taster of what you can find on My Life As An Imposter.

Love, Sex and Organised Religion

It’s a very strange thing to have to straddle two completely different sides of yourself. I was born in the UK but was raised a Muslim. I can identify with Asian culture as well as the culture and traditions of the religion I was raised in but; I enjoy a good whiskey, smoke like a chimney, I collect really shit songs on vinyl like Bruce Willis’ timeless classic “Respect Yourself”, I love to knit, I make a killer steak and kidney pie, oh, and my fiancé is Jewish.

I suppose you could say I am as western as they come but I am still so proud of my cultural heritage. However, being 1st generation Pakistani and growing up in 80s-90s Britain was a real shit sandwich.

The constant racial abuse hurled at you when you were walking down the street was astounding and, thankfully, something that rarely happens to me today. In times when teachers didn’t care to learn the correct pronunciation of your name and children were not encouraged to celebrate their differences at school, one was left rather flummoxed when it came to marrying these two completely opposing sides of yourself and somehow magically producing a well rounded, balanced individual. Particularly when the thing that made you different was the focus of so much negativity.

I am grateful to my parents for sending me to a private school. In those days, it was one of the only ways in which the children I knew were given a bower to rest under and had a shot at developing and flourishing in their own time without the aggressive influence of racial abuse. I’m not saying it didn’t exist, but it was simply not tolerated and, thereby , never developed into something you just had to accept as part of being your lot in life.

I owe every ounce of incredibly inflated sense of self esteem to the schools my parents put me in – they fostered growth and expression and taught me never to apologise for who I am. They gave me time to figure out what my religious and cultural identity meant to me and allowed me to develop my own feelings about it that weren’t marred by negative experiences.

But it doesn’t work out this way for everyone, I see so many members of my wider family who still seems to implacably uncomfortable in their own skin, even in their 20s and 30s because they are still attempting that precarious juggling act between religion and their Pakistani culture and then, are trying desperately to fit in with western society too. Which brings us to the star of the show:

THE MUSLIM GUILT MONSTER

(For those of you that don’t know, it’s kind of like the Catholic guilt monster, but with more sandals).

Take the opposite sex…. Often in my life I have found myself at a crossroads where I have had to think long and hard about what I feel is the right thing to do and it rarely satisfies all three sides of my religious and cultural identity. It is no lie that I am a far cry from the blushing Asian introvert but unfortunately, this tends to make you go from nought to whore in 5 seconds in the eyes of the Muslim community.

There is no respectable line drawn in the proverbial sand when it comes to a woman’s reputation in both Muslim and Pakistani culture, you are either pure or ruined. And it seems that I would fall into the latter category. Even though I am a gentleman’s daughter, had a top notch education, don’t take drugs, don’t sleep around and have, in fact, only slept with three men, all of whom I was in committed relationships with and one of which I am marrying this year. All of this means I am doomed.

I’m not going to lie, it’s a difficult pill to swallow. It’s hard to find something pure and beautiful with someone you care about and then feel as though expressing that with them physically is debase and wrong. It seemed to me to be the most natural thing in the world.

So, one day, I decided to stop feeling like garbage about wanting to be Pakistani, British and Muslim and I just took the best bits of each of the different sides of my culture and fused them together in some unholy amalgam called “I have no idea what I’m doing”.

But that’s the whole point.. there isn’t really a precedent for this. I grew so tired of people telling me what is right and wrong for my own life, so I decided to stop pleasing people and stop feeling as though I ought to apologise for who I am.. because I rather like me…. Me does charity work and bakes cakes for people and likes to help others and smiles at strangers. I am a good person and I just got so tired of feeling horrendous. I was raised at a cultural crossroads and it was time to respect each strand of that, because it was responsible for who I had become.

All I knew was, I didn’t want to end up like one of my 30 year old friends who has been with his girlfriend for years and is currently buying a house with her and still hasn’t told Mummy and Daddy that they are even a couple.

I just think it’s insanity. What does that say about you that you can’t even stand by your own life choices and be proud of who you’ve decided to make a home with?

Don’t get me wrong, I do understand the myriad of problems dropping a bombshell like that on very traditional parents will cause, but you can’t half arse this stuff. If you are in, you are all in… and, yes, it’s confusing and there aren’t really any rules, but no one can tell you aren’t a proper Muslim if you have sex before marriage either because, guess what??? Your faith is your own fucking business and you can be connected to your God any way you see fit. I don’t believe my God will send me to hell for loving another person, for making a life with them and being happy.

But, it took me a long time to get there. I remember when I first started having sex with my first serious boyfriend, I was so wrought with guilt, I ended up in a Catholic Church of all places (as I assumed I wouldn’t find a sympathetic ear if I took this problem to a Mosque). In any case, this genius idea didn’t end well either. I was sat down by a lovely, benevolent Irish nun who gave me a biscuit and a nice cup of tea and then told me I was going to BURN IN HELL.

Not Ideal.

Fin.