Here’s an interesting piece from Al-Arabiya TV’s website. It’s an opinion piece that looks at how sexual stereotypes mold behavior, starting at an early age. The article, which originated in Dubai’s The National, reports on a study conducted in Jordan. Jordan, not the hyper-sensitized Saudi Arabia. Jordan, the country that has had active and outward Queens for the past 20 years or more.

I shudder to think of the results had this study been conducted, say, in Buraidah or Hail.

When boys want to be boys and girls want to be … er, boys
Tala al Ramahi

Much has been written on “the other”, whether it is literary texts on orientalism, imperialism and such, yet there seems to be a peculiar species living among us that we still barely understand: the other … sex.

Abdul Salam Darwish, head of Family Reconciliation at Dubai Courts, recalls a social experiment conducted recently on fifth graders at a school in Jordan. The pupils were told: imagine you woke up tomorrow and you had been magically transformed into the opposite sex. The results were unintentionally humorous, and telling to say the least. The 10-year-old boys who imagined they had woken up as girls provided responses such as: “I would kill myself”, “I would go to the hospital and ask them to switch me back” and “I would never leave the house”. The girls’ reponses to their hypothetical sex change were more positive: “I would be the happiest person in the world”, and “I would have a big party and invite all the other boys”.

Despite advances in the cause of women in the region, it seems that being a boy – even a “boy” – is still preferable to being a girl. Differences in lifestyles are so pronounced, it seems, that even fifth graders are subconsciously aware of them.
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