As a child I used to hang out with my father a lot, at first it was more about him getting out of the house than about choosing his company. But fairly soon I started to feel natural in the places he took me, like bars and fisheries, men-only cafés and male hairdressers. Shortly I began to favour the activities and discussions of men, they were easier for me to grasp than the secret, twisted discussions of women and all the social pressure they had to release in a single Qaada (traditional women's gathering), behind walls and curtains and half-preserved Berber metaphors.
On a good day, the men would offer me an overly sweet drink and a bizarre compliment about being a copy of my father; or a surprise quiz on the names of the fish they used to find in that part of the Mediterranean where only corpses are now found. While in the women's gatherings, there were no limits to my favorite drugs: sugar and tea—a fabulous pairing if you know the Chinese dark green tea box and the Baklawa recycled from the long-gone Eid, with more and more honey each time it is served.
But if I had to choose where to go, I would always go with my father, for nothing in the world would I have chosen the haze of pressure in a room full of oppressed and at times oppressive women. For nothing in the world would I have replaced the passive smoking that later gave me sinusitis with discussions about disguised traumas that later gave me depression.
At the end of the day, men go out because they want to, and because they can. Women go out when they desperately need to, but only when they can. This generalisation makes so much sense to me, it comforts me in my need to understand things that go beyond me, then unfairly shape me. I, who absorb emotions and intentions altogether, possess a greater appetite for the negative ones—a matter of familiarity in digestion.
