Saudi teen has escaped a timeless oppression
The smile on a Saudi teenage girl’s face as Canada rescued her from torment at the hands of her family and her nation was a moment of bright light. For the odds hadn’t been good.
If it weren’t enough for Rahaf Mohammed to have been born in one of the most women-hating nations on Earth, her mother and brother would join in beating her until she bled, she told reporters. After she cut her hair shorter, making her look too “manly,” she was imprisoned in the house for six months.
We don’t know what punishment she would have faced if she had been handed back to her father and brother at her Thailand airport hotel. Beheading? Dismemberment? Did she even know the fate of the Saudi women who had campaigned for the right to drive? They and the men who backed them were flogged and given electric shocks, hung from the ceiling and sexually abused, Amnesty International reports.
I was struck by Mohammed’s tale of being kept inside her family’s house and by her sealing herself in her hotel room with a mattress and furniture. Imagine a girl trapped, the screams ignored, calling foreign embassies, finally tweeting for help, at the mercy of the men around her.
Some men do seem to imagine precisely that. Alleged Wisconsin killerkidnapper Jake Patterson, 21, did. He saw Jayme Closs, 13, on a school bus and chose her, the New York Times reports citing court documents.
Patterson is charged with murdering her parents and kidnapping her. He reportedly kept her under the bed in a filthy basement in his remote house. She spent 88 days enduring horror, fear, grief and whatever sexual torments Patterson devised.
This is news but it isn’t new. Good men seek certain qualities in a woman, say, smart, funny, likes Jack Russell terriers, has a secret passion for the band Rush. Other kinds of men seek different qualities as they build their little dungeons.
They like their women sedated (Bill Cosby), vegetative (a raped Arizona coma patient recently gave birth), anesthetized (Dr. George Doodnaught sexually assaulted women as they underwent operations at North York General Hospital), trapped in a dungeon (Austrian Josef Fritzl gave his daughter a live burial lasting 24 years), or blindfolded and mute (Col. Russell Williams tied up women for days of photographic examination and rape).
Eerily, Patterson built his dungeon in Barron, Wisc., not that far from Plainfield, Wisc., where the notorious killer Ed Gein lived. The inspiration for the movie Psycho, Gein liked his women in pieces, to be worn as body suits or used as wastepaper baskets in his wretched cabin. He liked his victims so passive that he preferred the ones already dead and buried. They did not resist.
These particular men like a woman to be silent, entirely unresisting, and most of all, enclosed. The Saudis run their nation this way, a sexual apartheid with women head-to-toe in black robes and unable to see properly, and kept in their homes like camels in a shed. No wonder they resent Canadian freedoms.
Control and enclosure are common themes that run through male crimes. I do not know why or how this seed is planted. Maybe boys are trained by years of watching women abused in bad porn. Or they were bullied and now seek their own victim.
The new Gillette ad deploring U.S. toxic masculinity is very good, those small boys learning from good fathers that bullying is wrong, and men telling other men not to catcall or grope women. Are young men raised to be grandiose? Is it this, combined with size and strength, that turns them toxic? Mohammed knows just how lucky she is. She likes Canada, the unfamiliar cold a reminder of her freedom. “I want to be independent,” she says. “Travel. Make my own decisions on education, a career or who or when I should marry. I had no say in any of this. Today, I can probably say that I am capable of making all of those decisions.”
She is 18. She is flying.