Curvaceous Lady

I’ve signed myself up for a ten-day photography course in Thailand with Jonathan Taylor, one of the top photographers working in this region.

Day one: The basics of composition. I’m being asked to find lines and curves and patterns of repetition that make a good composition. We get off the Skytrain and I begin my internal cheerleader monologue, trying to drown out the fear that I’m going to be a phenomenal flop: “You are a photographing genius! Your photos know no bounds!”

I spot a line of broken-down wooden structures lining a staircase. “Repetition” I think, “I’ve found it!” I do my best “I’m an arteeest” pose, crouching down to get that unforgettable angle … Nothing doing. The wooden repetition still just looks like rotting wood clumsily banged together. I start to get nervous. Jonathan gently suggests that I think smaller. Fixated with these planks, I walk up to one of the decrepit wooden things and try to think small - desperately searching for a line or curve. I spend the next 10 minutes obsessing over a nail in the wood. It’s a line! (This is NOT going well!)

I leave Jonathan to go and sit inside an air-conditioned mall while I search for inspiration. I begin to have an argument with the internal cheerleader … she was lying to me!

I round a bend and there it is, what I’ve been waiting for … a pile of bricks. What ensues is a ridiculous picture of me rummaging for 30 minutes among a pile of bricks, obsessed with the patters of 1’s and 2’s being repeated, trying to make the pile of bricks not look like … well, a pile of bricks. I eventually think I need to introduce Jonathan to this pile of bricks and proudly walk into one of Bangkok’s poshest malls, my black trousers stained orange. Giorgio Armani is shaking his head. “Come quickly … it’s astonishing!” Jonathan follows me patiently into the heat, but unbelievable, he seems less excited by my pile of bricks. I try pointing out the repetition of the numbers, the lines … It begins to dawn on me that I look like a mad woman and we’re only two hours into our ten days.

After some mini cakes at a posh little coffee shop, Jonathan takes me a few blocks away to a plaza lined with fantastic architecture. Here the whole concept of lines and curves finally begins to make sense, but Jonathan tells me that the police don’t like people taking photographs here. “Well,” I think, “The authorities be damned! I’ve got curves to capture and this day is not going as I had hoped!” I wonder off and begin snapping until a policeman comes and tells me to stop. I try my biggest, most charming, “Oh, come now dear sir” smile, but to no avail. We were waved off, but I had captured my first shot …

The X-chrome factor

Afghanistan is, as both real and stereotypical descriptions suggest, a thoroughly male-dominated society. Every aspect of public and private Afghan life is ruled by men and boys. Theirs are the dusty street corners, the businesses and the government offices. Theirs are the places of worship and theirs the rights to make monumental life decisions like marriage and divorce.

The expat scene similarly teams with Y-chromes, with a male to female ratio of about 3:1. These aren’t just normal men, either. These are super-testosteroned men! Ex-military, private security contractors … even the softer tree-hugging NGO workers seem to be pumped with an extra shot of man that makes them super adventurers, out riding their motorcycles through the city or hiking far-off mountain passes.

I have had friends suggest that this abundance of men makes for a great statistical dating advantage. There’s no doubt that it adds to the Kabul-cute factor – a bit like drinking goggles that make everyone look good, the dearth of women gives all of us a bit of a boost. But, while there are plenty of men, there don’t seem to be plenty of normal, balanced ones. The odds may be good, but the goods are odd!

Being a woman here means becoming accustomed to navigating the rules and norms of Y-chromed society. When I first arrived almost two years ago, I remember feeling a self-conscious awareness every time I was the only woman in a room of men. This being an almost daily occurrence, it has now become utterly normal and I barely acknowledge the experience.

While expat women certainly enjoy far more freedom than our female Afghan friends and colleagues, neither are we able to be females in the full Western sense. We are a third sex – neither really male nor female – we are allowed many of the liberties of men, without ever gaining either the respect or the leverage of our male expat colleagues. (It should be said here that expat men are often the biggest culprits of this subtle sexism as some take it on themselves to be particularly “culturally appropriate”.)

Taking up this quasi-male position in society, many expat women in Afghanistan seem to have lost a vision for what real feminine beauty is. (Now the following, I realise, is a generalisation. Not all women fit these categories ... not all to the extreem. But my time here makes me suspect the following trends.)

There are those who become hyper-sexual and their worth slowly becomes defined by the attention given to them by men. They move, detached, from one relationship to the next and the softness of their hearts becomes bruised and calloused. They are treated largely as bodies by men who seem just as broken and confused. Eventually this is all they expect and so it is all they receive.

At the other end of the spectrum, there are those women who embrace the hyper-modesty of Afghan culture so fully that they abandon the celebration of their bodies as beautiful and sensual things that are meant to be desirable to men. Draping themselves in swaths of dull-coloured fabric, they escape the intrusive eyes of men, but lose something of what God intended when he created the female body.

In the midst of all this mess and confusion, and the frequent temptation to fall into both extremes myself, I long to reflect a more whole kind of feminine beauty – one both defined by a soft and loving heart and by a modest, elegant celebration of the female body. I long for men and women around me to know that they are meant to long for and be longed after as whole, wonderful creations. Perhaps if we begin to embrace this, we will actually have something to offer Afghans in a vision of sexuality and gender. Before then, I'm afraid we only have another version of brokenness.