I just won and lost a beautiful girl by assuming that our connection revolved primarily around ideas when in fact it centered on trust. Even at my age too often I’m clueless . We communicated wonderfully but for me I was concentrating on the surface while she was judging my behavior: my manner, my confidence, my openness, my comfort with her.
Later she’d begun to test me -her description- and I’d gotten nervous, I began to grasp. Needing someone is not the same as liking or respecting them. She pulled away; I gave chase, briefly. But you can’t chase from weakness. I stopped and waved, she waved back and laughed and kept going.
Trust isn’t what you say it’s how you say it and in the end I was saying very interesting things badly with obvious ulterior motives. There’s a very solid logic to the girl’s decision-making process. Trust and Intimacy are not ideas.

The entire weekend revolved around sex and sexuality. Not cheap sexuality but the sexuality of intimacy or the possibility of intimacy. Gender roles -either in standard form of reversed- give structure to performance and allow people to read and recognize behavior patterns. I’m a formalist. But the distinction between methodology and ideology; that’s where it gets interesting.
Catherine Deneuve?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/28/books/28Sciolino.html?_r=1

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/books/review/Sciolino-t.html?_r=1

“Difference” feminism. Puritanism vs the feminine prerogative. What you’re looking at in these women is the sexual performativity of mediterranean culture. The best casual commentary on Iran in the press over the past years [the ‘serious’ commentary has all been by film critics] has been Elaine Sciolino in the NY Times, who spends half her time covering the Parisian glamour beat. Here she ridicules a former CIA officer and the model for the central figure in the film Syriana for his assumptions about Iran.
Here is her discussion of Azar Nafisi

Look at Pardis Mahdavi in the video: the make up on her eyelids, the way she moves her hair. Are you that unaware of the performativity of your own culture?
Glamour is conservative and Iran is a conservative culture. But when it works it works!
Has no man reading this ever had a beautiful woman blow smoke in his face?

And by the way the women of Saudi Arabia spend more money on lingerie than any other culture on the planet. A Saudi princess was given a court summons in Paris last month over payment of a 60,000 euro bill from one shop!
She coughed it up.

Hijab >< Hot … argh the political frisson!

Reading this brought to mind a quote of the immortal Homer Simpson, looking suitably mystified: “[MT], you and I are very different people!”

As outside observers, we get far too caught up in a simplistic dichotomy between “modernity” and “tradition”, which we map onto the politics. The reality is far more complex — yet another justification for anthropologists’ obsessions with local knowledges.