Shoulders Special

Four days ago I joined a gym near my Sharjah apartment. Every day since, when I arrive at the tiny, tucked-away gym on the ground floor of a hotel, I feel like I witness something new and secret. I was unsure why I felt like this until today. Today, a man came to fix a machine during Women Only hours. The women working out ran for cover. It hit me then: for the first time in eight months, I was seeing the bodies of Arab women.

Not that they are naked in any sense. But these women wear tank tops and leggings (still no shorts) for their walks on the treadmill. It is the first time I have seen their shoulders, and had a sense of their shape, since I arrived here. I have seen the young women out in Dubai dressed provocatively, but these women at the gym are middle-aged, average people. They are the women I pass every day on the street. These are the women I see, shrouded in black, and I wonder if they are sweltering, wonder if they ever question the veiling, wonder what their lives are like.

I have seen millions of women in tank tops in my life, but I was oddly entranced by these bodies. One commonly cited reason why Muslim women cover themselves is the concept that by covering the body, it becomes sacred, special, a thing seen only by the lucky few (family – specifically, the husband). Today I felt the truth of this idea. I was viewing the fleshy, white arms of middle-aged women as special and captivating specifically because I had not seen them before. It makes sense that the husband, privy to only one pair of female shoulders in the world, would find those shoulders mesmerizing.

But, as I lifted weights in the empty gym, I kept thinking “They’re just shoulders!” While the desire to have your significant other find your body enchanting and take a particular delight in viewing it is understandable, the need to have me, a perfect stranger with no sexual interest, also give it special attention seems silly. I have always felt that, as a culture, we place too much emphasis on body appearance. Don’t we all have better things to do than analyze every aspect of each others’ bodies, and every flaw of our own? But the covering of women here takes the pointlessness to another level. If I have better things to do than analyze a nice body that I happen to see, then it is certainly a waste of time to stare at shoulders simply because they are there.

As with so many things here, perhaps these women’s relationships to their bodies are beyond my ability to fully comprehend. For these women, shoulders clearly are something to be guarded. They may not understand why, for me, the idea of shoulders as noteworthy is incongruous, or why I don’t need to flee the gym when the handyman shows up, or why I’m comfortable breaking a sweat, and am willing to run in thigh-bearing shorts. But as these bodies acquired importance to me purely because they usually are covered, I felt that I understood this culture’s thinking a little bit more than I usually do. The system sort of works, in its strange, shrouding way.

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Tags: body image, Gender, religion