Culture and Respect for Women

I'm absolutely certain that Middle Eastern cultures have a healthier attitude about age differences in relationships than the West. I've written about this previously but it's perhaps less pointed than it needs to be for Westerners to really hear it:

He was Middle Eastern and sixteen and a half years older than me. When I sent him some sexy photo I found online he said "What the hell is wrong with you? She's young enough to be my DAUGHTER! What kind of a pervert do you think I am?"

As someone who was molested as a child and had BAGGAGE about age differences due to that, this comment was a really big deal to me and helped free me of a lot of garbage.

I have treasured that brief exchange for years. If I got nothing else out of the relationship, whatever time I spent with Navarre was well worth it for the one moment I pissed him off inadvertently and he fussed at me.

I didn't care about his age. He didn't much care about mine. That wasn't why we spent time together.

He was aware of the potential pitfalls of a big age difference and told me upfront I was too young for him. He said "I don't get involved with women under the age of forty." and I said "I guess we will have to wait a year for me to turn forty." 

We didn't wait a year and we barely ever discussed the age difference again. 

Neither of us is easy to get next to and we just hit it off. We talked for nine hours the day we met.

We had interests in common. He worked with GIS and I have a Certificate in GIS. This is an obscure enough field that in five years at a big corporation I only met one person I didn't have to explain it to.

My mother was descended from German nobility. Navarre was descended from Persian royalty. He had diplomatic manners similar to what I grew up with that I rarely run into.

It's another reason I expect to remain alone. If you have to be descended from royalty but not royalty to have manners I like, there probably aren't too many men out there capable of meeting that standard.

When I say diplomatic manners i don't mean superficial pretty words. He spoke English as a fourth language and wasn't fluent enough in English for THAT. 

Besides, I have a long history going back to my teens of having scathing attitudes towards superficial politeness like apologies not backed up by anything of substance. I wrote a high school paper about my contempt for empty apologies and argued with my sister about the topic.

I am more comfortable with people who do right by me without all the pretty words than with people who are superficially polite without being sincerely respectful. When I say he was diplomatic, I mean he had relationship skills like an international diplomatic for crossing cultural and personal differences.

Navarre was a growth experience for me because of the ways in which he treated me with respect to a degree I had never experienced before. 

Like the Japanese language, the Persian language has a single gender neutral pronoun. I've discussed this with people who know more about Japanese culture and language than I do and I'm quite confident Japan and Iran have a better track record in some important ways than the US for treating women with respect and this does good things for women who have paid jobs.

He told me and anecdote once about finally meeting a female colleague in person and telling her something like "You're younger and prettier than I expected." I said something about expecting that to have harmed his professional relationship with her and he said no, it did the opposite.

He did not indicate he had an affair with her. I assumed it harmed the relationship because in the US, men give compliments like that to treat them as sex objects and women get routinely treated like their looks matter more than anything else about them.

There was an episode of Doogie Howser M.D. where he consults with a woman who wants cosmetic surgery and he tries to talk her out of it because she is quite pretty and doesn't need anything fixed. An older doctor has a conversation with him telling him something like "Just do the surgery. It's better than (some alternative) and you can't fix crazy."

I got to see private photos of Navarre's family in a social gathering at a private enclosed garden where the women removed their public veils. I commented on how pretty his wife was and he asked something like "Did you think she's ugly (because I'm involved with you)?" 

No, I didn't. It's more like Westerners imagine women who are veiled must not be pretty because they don't have to make themselves pretty just to leave the house like they do here.

They were likely pretty in a different way from Western women because it was something more like basic good health physically and emotionally plus personal self esteem being expressed, not extreme pressure to conform to a standard of beauty that causes a lot of Western women to get surgery.

Barbara Streisand was told she should get a nose job if she wanted to be in entertainment even though she's a singer with a unique voice and surgically altering her nose would have destroyed her signature sound.

She was a bit awkward in her youth and it took her a while to figure out how to be comfortable in her clothes and the Western world responded to that by recommending surgery rather than a good hairstylist and wardrobe professional as step one.

I haven't seen a lot of private photos of Middle Eastern women, so I don't really have enough data to draw conclusions, but I certainly have enough to mentally ask questions about why this exchange between he and I went the way it did. 

I was involved with him for some years because I hungered for the kind of attention he gave me. It helped me see myself differently and helped me respect myself in ways American culture doesn't respect women.

Instead of respecting women, we have ranty inaccurate articles about so-called emotional labor where the Internet discussion of the piece on Metafilter dragged on for like a month and was over a thousand comments while women in the discussion complained endlessly about the myriad ways they get no respect. At least one man, either in the discussion itself or possibly in a discussion about it on Hacker News, was dismissive of those complaints as minor personal problems and not really a noteworthy cultural phenomen.

I guess slaves in the American Deep South were just whiny bitches too and also had minor personal problems and not a serious issue.

I knew Navarre several years before it came up that he likes very long hair in line with what you see in his country. He had never commented on it.

In the West, men are quick to reject a woman upfront for having a hairstyle they don't like and trend towards openly commenting on their preferences in looks. 

I spent a lot of time with him for several years. I'm quite confident this detail is a substantial and meaningful detail about him that casts light on cultural differences even though he was likely more respectful than average for his culture.