Women....Why so complicated?!

This was meant to be published in the March issue of Campus magazine but it wasn't because of technical reasons. So there you go.

“This month’s theme is women” – said Wessam, Campus Magazine big kahuna by day, Cairo city Batman by night.

“How original” I thought in silence, since its March with Mother’s day and all.

So I started my monthly quest of picking up a topic to write about and compile a thousand to fifteen hundred words of eloquent coherent thought, incredible wit, being sexy but not trashy and with a potential to...oh wait! You get the point... A good piece that the reader would somehow enjoy reading.

The quest started and most cheesily my first thought was writing about strong women and portray in an indirect way how women are equal to men and even better. I even transcended the cheesiness of the notion and thought of writing about the greatest strongest woman I ever came across in my life, my Mother, that brave single Mother with her inspiring struggle story, uncompromising principals and the shining beacon that she is. That was until I sat down to write and realized the cliché den I was entering and how uninteresting it is for a magazine reader to read an article about a boy praising his mommy.

I then decided to call Wessam and ask him for topic suggestions. The conflict arose between the ever-asking for a topic suggestion that is me and the ever-so-generous to leave the topic selection liberty to the writer that is Wessam. This time I won and I got two suggestions and here’s my take on them.

First: Why are female superheroes such losers with a constant need to be saved?

Well, most of them do suck big time! I mean think of Faten driving Aphrodite in Mazinger. The awesomeness was about two rocket-boobs less effective on the bad guy than actual good old saggy boobs, matter of fact, boobs can be quite effective as a weapon (think that body guard in ‘the dictator’). Anyhow, Faten always ended up in need of saving which means that she is a constant liability, dead weight that mighty Mazinger desperately needed to get rid of!

Now I’m no expert on superheroes or comics in general, but all I know is that super-heroines are there to look sexy and sex sells!

Second: Teachers during our adolescence.

I was expected to write (matter of fact Wessam thought I was submitting an article about that) about teachers during mid and high school, how sexy they were and how we as guys/kids in that critical age dealt with them. The pranks the peeks the gibes the gabs. I told him that such a topic would end up obscene and belonging to Hugh Hefner’s Playboy magazine, his response was that coming from me it wouldn't be. Well, at one end I was a rather good boy, shy and polite, during my school days. However I do hardly remember one teacher, an employee in the school rather, who came across as a proper MILF, mind you the term wasn't coined by then; and it was her, and only her, who I ever dropped a pen to sneak a peek or stared at her cleavage during school days. Then again my experience at that wouldn't compile a thousand words for an article. I could definitely borrow a tale or two from a friend or make up one but still I had the problem with maintaining that fine line of becoming trashy so I passed.

Now that’s it. My ideas are unoriginal and Wessam’s are...well they’re cool and all but they didn't exactly work for me. And I’m stuck again with the deadline fast approaching where out of nowhere I stumbled upon a great article by Omar Taher, my favourite contemporary Egyptian writer, he wrote a short story/article about women in Islam and the style was beautiful; the idea I already shared, which was about the proper definition of a verse in the holy Qur’an that spoke of men’s superiority over women due to them being breadwinners and all, where in reality the interpretation of the verse spoke that men were merely considered servants or helpers rather and how that word or term interprets a divine trait that god described men with to exert on women which is a responsibility and a liability rather than superiority. So that inspired me write about women in Islam and how people look at it from a wrong angle and how women pre-Islam were in a terrible shape and the prophet came and freed them of the medieval life they led. But I got stumbled upon linguistic issues this time, Islam as it is complex to describe in its own rich language, and I’ll definitely need to interpret a lot of verses and research material and that just was not going to happen with the deadline looming in.

So running out of ideas and running out of time I met a friend and started telling her my predicament and how it’s bloody hard to write about women so she suggested to me to write on relationships, we had a laugh since I mostly advise on the matter and almost always fail at it. But the topic was so last month! And while speaking with her I remembered Anis Mansour, the great writer, the very person who lured me into reading at the first place, and how he was so entertaining while sometimes speaking about nothing in specific, just like a friend chatting with you, albeit a very entertaining and rich-with-experiences friend. He also had a very complicated relationship with women. He adored and hated them, spent all his life with one woman but always spoke of his flings, always defamed them for their complications.

And with that I realised that my quest for a topic to write about was long enough to be put into words, and I decided to write about that.

If there’s anything to get out of this, and it wasn't meant to have an inspiring message, is that women are hard to get and rather complicated. I spent ten days trying to pin point a topic and keep it interesting and failed, whether that is down to my own incompetence or not is yet unclear, but checking my track-record I’ve never had that severe problem before. And my take on women generally is not exactly about equality, feminism power or else, it’s just that god created us differently, men have certain areas where they are naturally better at, and women as well have areas that comes more natural for them but these are not absolute rules, they are more like general elastic frames that bend easily with enough will power.

I finished writing the article and realised I missed mentioning that women can’t parallel park to save their lives. So there you go. Mischief managed.