From the very moment that I landed in Amman, I was struck by the inferior place that women are regulated to in this society. To be sure, last week the Jordanian Parliament repealed the Article 308 from the national constitution (an article that pardoned a rapist as long as he married his victim and stayed with her for at least three years) and it was a great news for the Jordanian women in general. However, the ‘Arab Machismo’ culture, that becomes the main root of the rape cases in the first place, is not going away anytime soon.
Indonesia, from which I come from, is a Muslim country where women may wear hijab and certainly experience sexism in their daily lives, but women are nevertheless able to exercise some level of agency independent of men. They can go about their business in the cities, be it at work or while shopping or at school, without feeling unsafe or victimized. I thus was expecting a similar situation in Jordan.
But as soon as I landed I began to learn that there are a different set of rules here. On my first night while walking home from the Qasid Institute (the place where I got my Classical Arabic training from) after dark, a man started to follow me for no reason down the street. He offered me a drink and was incredibly persistent, to the point where I feared for my safety. After getting home, I learned that women did not typically walk the streets alone after dark here. That was considered unusual and men saw it as an invitation to harass any such woman. The fact that I am Indonesian and do not look like anyone else here made me a particular target for these harassers.
This was my first encounter with the culture of sexism and patriarchy that is very much alive here in Jordan, and I would soon learn the other ‘rules’.
For instance, it is considered risky for a woman to get into a cab by herself. Horror stories abound about cab drivers driving women off to who knows where when they do so. This means that I, as a woman, am left with few choices in terms of mobility. I can either travel with a man or go with groups of other women. Travelling by myself, as I regularly do in Indonesia and America, is simply not an option if I want to avoid harassment
More than that, rules and etiquettes concerning gender dictate all aspects of Jordanian society. When travelling with my significant other, it was a rule that he should sit up with the cab driver in the front seat while I had to remain at the back. He did not speak a word of Arabic of course, and found this to be very annoying, but a man had to sit up front. That was the rule and not following it could result in conflict.
By violating these ‘rules’, it seems many Jordanian men think that I am inviting comment and harassment. For instance, I have learned to change the route I take when walking between Qasid and my home. This is because when I walked on the main street, men would approach me and say things like ‘how are you sweetie?’, often quite aggressively. The presence of a woman by herself, even in broad daylight seems to paint a target in the minds of these men, which indicates the fact that male power is more or less unquestioned here in Jordan.
No man seemed to fear that they might get in trouble or suffer any repercussion at all when engaging in this behavior. Indeed, it seemed that the only time they were deterred is when I happened to be walking with another man. This means that I, as a human being, was dependent on the presence of men in order to simply go about my business unharassed on the streets.
For some of the Jordanian women, street harassment seems to have become a part of their lives. I have seen Jordanian woman respond to crude and demeaning comments shouted at them from cars and random men on the street with smiles and patient indulgence.
To me, this is the most discouraging aspect of my experiences living in Amman. Many cities, from Jakarta to Chicago, have problems with men who think they can degrade women, but in those cities there are at least some potential social consequences to behaving in such an idiotic fashion. In Amman, however, this idiocy and indecency is the norm and has come to dominate the public sphere. Women here thus have a significant uphill battle to change this behavior and reclaim the streets.
Still, what this teaches us more than anything is that the feminist struggle must continue until behavior such as this becomes unacceptable, no matter where one walks on the globe.