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Tuesday, April 30, 2013

What Kind of Girl?

What kind of girl marries a guy like Tamerlan Tsarnaev? 

According to Roosh's blog, Return of Kings (link to manboobz here, no reason to give ROK any more page views), she's a typical all-American slut, because "here in America we have women rushing with open legs into the crotches of abusers despite a legal system that is designed to 'empower' them."

I had been waiting to see what the Rooshophiles take on the Boston Bombing would be.  Aside from some grudging admiration for the way "the kids went out with both guns blazing" and Roosh's twitter that those "Chechnyans don't mess around... real Scarface stuff," nobody said much.

It's a bit awkward, I suppose, since -- like Roosh himself -- the bombers were the socially estranged children of Muslim immigrants, "losers" in their uncle's words, who "couldn't settle themselves [assimilate]." 

While I expected Roosh and his gang would find a way to blame women for this, I figured the villainess would turn out to be the brothers' gimlet-eyed, fanatically religious mother, Zubeidat "Ma Barker" Tsarnaeva.  It never occurred to me that they would target Tamerlan's wife, of whom almost nothing has been printed or speculated about in the media (and rightly so, since she appears to have been entirely innocent in knowledge and action).

Leave it to the manosphere to crucify the reputation of the pretty, young American girl who (as far as I am aware) had the simple misfortune of falling in love and marrying this crazy MF. 

What kind of a girl marries a guy like Tamerlan Tsarnaev?

I know nothing about her (except her name now, courtesy of ROK).  At the same time, I can't help feeling I know a lot about her.  I've met this girl before.  I could have been this girl myself.

Back in the late seventies, I attended a large midwestern university.  This was the time when petrodollars were sending thousands of middle eastern (and Venezuelan) kids (mostly boys) to the U.S. for "higher education."  The campus was blooming with dark, exotic masculine specimens and sweet, fresh-off-the-farm coeds.  Opposites attract, right?  Naturally enough, it was not uncommon to see a blue-eyed blonde lass on the arm of a handsome Persian youth or snuggled next to a Saudi "prince" in the front seat of his brand new Trans Am.

Sometimes these were real love affairs, and sometimes the girls married the boys.  Post graduation, they returned to their grooms' homelands, or the boys easily found jobs in the States with their newly minted green cards.  I am willing to bet that few of these marriages endured over the long haul, at least not happily, but it happened quite a lot.

I myself was infatuated for months with an Afghan grad student.  I begged him to marry me and sweep me off to what I imagined would be 1001 Arabian Nights.  I was crestfallen when he refused.  "You wouldn't be happy," he repeated firmly.  (A few years later, when I visited him in Kabul, I realized he had been absolutely right.)  I never got pregnant, though -- I wasn't that besotted.  I had Big Plans For My Life.  I had my own destiny to fulfill. I wanted to travel and experience and achieve, and I wanted to do it all under my own steam.

But the dreams of many of my girlfriends were different.  They wanted to Get Married and Have A Baby, the sooner the better.  Their foreign boyfriends seemed so much more interesting and worldly and passionate than the familiar homegrown American guys they'd grown up with. Language and cultural differences deepened the mystery.  Of course, neither party had any way of knowing who they were really marrying.

I had a friend I'll call Leslie.  She was heart-breakingly pretty: big blue eyes, high cheekbones, long smooth corn silk hair, rosy lips that were always smiling, exposing a row of teeth as perfect as chiclets.  However, she was always about thirty pounds overweight despite her constant efforts to diet.  She came from a long line of stout German peasants, so her body type was quite normal by her community's standards and certainly her family never considered her anything less than perfectNevertheless, Leslie considered this avoir dupois to be her greatest obstacle to happiness. 

One day, Leslie met Gazi, and I'll call him Gazi because that was his name.  He was very bright, attractive, and ambitious.  He could be charming when he chose to be, but mostly he was angry.  He'd grown up in a Palestinian refugee camp, so he had plenty to be angry about. 

Leslie fell madly in love with Gazi, and Gazi fell madly in love with getting a green card.  Her parents couldn't have been pleased about their sweet young daughter marrying a glowering Arab with terrorist ties, but they relented and threw the couple a beautiful wedding on the ol' Nebraska homestead.

Gazi constantly complained about Leslie: her weight, her lack of interest in all things academic, her haphazard housekeeping.  His constant harping and disrespect read like "Authority" to Leslie.  She became convinced that she needed Gazi to be "tough" on her so that she could achieve her potential.  

For several months, she ate when Gazi came home to feed her: a single 8 oz portion of steak.  She dropped a lot of weight fast, but only temporarily; the only real lasting effect was a weird vitamin deficiency which marred Leslie's porcelain complexion.  And after dabbling in several different majors, she never managed to graduate from college, preferring to spend her days "crafting," watching her "soaps," and dreaming of the day Gazi would let her get pregnant.

When Gazi graduated, he and Leslie went off to Saudi Arabia.  There, despite getting Gazi's permission to go off the pill, Leslie didn't conceive.  She believed it was because of her weight, and commenced a serious program of diet and exercise. 

I never saw Leslie during this period, but I was told she got down to a size two and was damn near unrecognizable.  Still no baby, though. (No one seems to have questioned Gazi's fertility.)    Returning home for a visit, family and friends congratulated Leslie on her stunning transformation.  "I've told her that if she regains a pound, I'll divorce her," Gazi said. He didn't seem to enjoy the attention Leslie was getting.

Of course, I expect that some of the weight began to creep back, but instead of divorcing her, Gazi began beating her.  Open hand at first, closed fist later, the usual progression of escalating violence.

And finally Leslie had had enough.  The shock of being physically injured finally galvinized her.  It was sad enough to find herself thirty and so far from her home and all her girlhood dreams, but she could never face her family if she allowed herself to be visibly maimed.  "It would have broken their hearts."  She packed her bags for a "holiday" and never went back.

And this, I imagine, is the kind of girl who would marry someone like Tamerlan Tsarnaev: a pretty girl with modest self-esteem, a naive girl with a sweet and trusting disposition, a girl who conflates "rigidity" with "stability,"  a girl with conventional dreams (loving leader husband, a clutch of adorable babies), a girl who would easily sympathize with a troubled young man, a girl who would be flattered by the notion that she (she!) could finally make him happy.  

In short, the kind of girl that most of the New Misogynists say they want and cannot find.


5 comments:

  1. " What kind of girl marries a guy like Tamerlan Tsarnaev? "

    A girl who fall in love and have developed a strong bond with him. I don’t know all the details but I think she got pregnant and he took responsibility. She promised him she will study Islam, so they got married at a mosque. A Muslim man is allowed to marry a Christian or Jewish girl only if she promise her husband she will study Islam and the husband think it’s his duty to help his wife to convert. After they married he probably expected she behave as a wife. They come from different cultural background, so they have different views about wife’s role. (A chechen wife don’t hang around with female friends if those girls are unmarried etc.)She isolated from her friends and become emotionally dependent on her husband who was controlling (tell her who she’s allowed to hang out with and where she’s allowed to go.She was a young girl in love who equated possessiveness with love and abuse with dominance.

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  2. Zosimus the HeathenMay 3, 2013 at 10:16 AM

    That was a fascinating (if tragic and disturbing) story. When were you in Afghanistan? I'd imagine it would've been before the Soviet invasion, perhaps back when the country was still under the benevolent dictatorship of Prince Daoud? From stuff I've read about the country, I heard it was actually quite liberal (at least in the capital) before the war, and something of a mecca for young backpacking types, but your experiences would seem to suggest otherwise.

    I've read a bit about Saudi Arabia too, much of it stuff that makes it sound like one of those places You Could Not Make Up. Having a huge influx of students from countries like that in American universities during the '70s must have been fascinating; it's stories like that that occasionally make me regretful I wasn't old enough to appreciate the part of that decade I actually lived through (I was born in 1973).

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  3. I was in Afghanistan the year before the Soviet invasion. There was already a strong Russian presence there. The family I was staying with was pro-Soviet, and -- as far as I can ascertain -- now dead by Taliban.

    It's funny how we tend to envy the earlier generations who got to experience things we didn't. I entered college a bit too late to experience the on-campus radical activity and really felt like I'd missed out on an exciting period.

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  4. Zosimus the HeathenMay 4, 2013 at 2:11 AM

    Sorry to hear about the likely fate of that guy you knew and his family. From what I've heard about the regime the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan was meant to protect, the Afghan Communists were certainly no saints, but still streets ahead of the Taliban, particularly when it came to women's rights (a bit like the situation with various other secular dictatorships in the Islamic world, past and present, and the Islamist groups opposing them).

    I have a maternal aunt who was old enough to have taken part in some of the radical student activities that took place on Australian campuses during the '60s. She actually ended up getting expelled from the university she was studying at as a result of some of the shenanigans she engaged in, which still pisses my mother off, as theirs was a rather poor family during that time, and her sister was the only member of it who was actually able to go to university (as a result of getting a scholarship there).

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