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 perfect.  Nevertheless, 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.