Woman Who Fell From the Sky - Jennifer Steil [137]
I dream that night that I have a good fairy who has been watching out for me. She looks like a middle-aged housewife, plump, with short dark hair, and she seems slightly annoyed.
“Well, it looks like things are now going exceptionally well for you,” she says, a touch resentfully. “So I am going to go find someone else to help, someone with real problems.”
THERE ARE PEOPLE in this world who can go for years without being touched. I am not one of them. I can’t survive more than a month of physical loneliness without wanting to crawl out of my skin. Which means that I’ve been wanting to crawl out of my skin almost since I got to Yemen. I am deeply physically needy, and I refuse to be ashamed of this. So when one of my closest Yemeni friends, a virgin, confesses to me that she also thinks constantly about sex, I try to reassure her that she is not an immoral freak. Don’t you think Allah gave us these desires for a reason? I say. That he gave us these bodies for a reason? This does not shock my Yemeni friend. In fact, she seems quite heartened. “This is true,” she says happily. “Why would we be given bodies like this?”
Shaima, on the other hand, simply buries her desires. One night as she drives me home from dinner, we chat about men and relationships.
“I have never kissed a man, Jennifer,” she confesses.
“Never?” Shaima is over thirty years old. I kissed my first boy in fifth grade. No, wait—first grade! I still remember his name. Bobby Woodward. Audacious tyke.
“Never.”
“So how do you …” I want to say, how do you survive never being touched? How can you bear the loneliness? But I swallow the words.
“Jennifer, I just ignore my body,” she says in answer to my unasked question. “I try to forget it is there.”
MY RESEARCH for our next health page gives me a little more insight into Yemeni sexuality. While searching for interesting new studies, I stumble across a piece in New Scientist on how oral sex causes cancer. Apparently anyone who has had five or more partners is about a trillion times more likely to develop throat cancer. While I am spiraling into despair about this, Jabr comes into my office. He is my only reporter not working on something.
“Jabr,” I begin cautiously, “do you think we could get away with a story on oral sex?”
He looks at me blankly. “What is oral sex?” he says. From the awkward way he forms the words, it is clear that he has never heard the phrase.
I am shocked. Most of my male reporters (according to Luke) are surfing porn sites every time I turn my back, so I thought they had a pretty graphic image of what oral sex is.
I start to explain, but for the first time in my life, I find myself too embarrassed to describe a sex act.
“Don’t be shy,” says Jabr encouragingly.
My stomach twists. “I’m not! It’s just …” It’s just that I don’t want to accidentally excite you, I think to myself.
Instead, I pick up the dictionary from my desk and read him the definition. Neither of us cracks a smile.
“Um, so, what I am wondering is, are we going to get in trouble for writing about this? Is it okay according to Islam? Between married people, of course!”
“Let me check,” says Jabr gravely. “I will read the study.”
A half hour later, I stop in the newsroom to find Jabr reading through everything Google has turned up on oral sex. He has consulted with Noor and Najma, neither of whom has heard of oral sex. All three reporters are single, so perhaps this is not surprising.
Noor turns to me and says, “We don’t have such a thing in Yemen as oral sex.”
“You don’t?” This cannot be true.
“No,” Jabr agrees.
“We are a conservative country,” says Noor. “We don’t do this.”
“Not even married people?”
All three shake their heads.
“But it’s …” A thousand