by Wendy Jones
Two years ago I invited Amir to my birthday and he came. He was delightful. Delightful and delighted. It had been twenty-three years. Then I invited him to stay with us in our house in the Seychelles. And he said to me, ‘Yes, but Margaret is coming,’ and I met her and I liked her. It was very healing because I realised she was not better than me! But she was very different. He was still very attracted to my way of being because I’m combative: we were very combative. Whereas Margaret will say, ‘All right, Amir.’ That was never me. I was never, ‘Okay,’ I was always spitting. I’ve seen them since and I like Margaret very much so that was a very healing experience.
I have wanted to sleep with people since I got divorced but they haven’t been around. I haven’t slept with anyone for twenty-six years. I remember thinking at the time Amir left, maybe I would never find anyone else but I really didn’t believe it, because I was forty-five. I thought I was old but looking back, forty-five is not old. Before, there was always someone in the wings. There was never anybody in the wings after that. Now I’m self-aware to know that wasn’t about there not being anyone. It’s about me being different. From my twenties there was always somebody ready to come and have sex with me and then there just wasn’t. And I wondered what that was about. I was in therapy three times a week for nine years and that changed my life. I have understood why I behaved like that as a girl, as a young woman. I think it was a need for affection.
I’ve been on my own for so long I’ve had to look after myself sexually. My sexual fantasies are often historical because I’m very interested in history. It would be in an Elizabethan house. Henry the Eighth would come to the door and he would want sex, and whatever queen it was would go ‘Oh my God!’ because she was still feeding her child, she was already pregnant; it was too much. She would pass him on to her maid whom, unbeknown to the queen, he’d already had sex with anyway. And the maid was pregnant, everybody was pregnant: there was just no end to this man’s need for sex. I’ve had the fantasy about Henry the Eighth for years and years.
There is another fantasy where the man is really old. And his wife is also very old. They’re on a farm in America and she’ll be in the barn and he will creep up to her. And take her. From the back. And I’ll be watching that. They’re very peasanty, farmer types and she’s got a long dress on because he has to lift this dress up. Maybe the animals are standing around. It’s always done when she’s not expecting it. I’ve had that one for a while as well. I must have got that from a book; I read it and thought, oh, that’s interesting. There’s another one where this man is driving in a big car and he picks up this woman to take her to work. Is that right? Let me think, because somehow the wife is left? Then on the way to work they stop and have sex.
My fantasies are very sneaky. It’s someone and there’s always a wife involved. But it’s always rough-and-ready sex. It’s never loving sex. There’s another fantasy that is really fun – I don’t know where I get these from. It’s a cloakroom. The man is handing his hat in. The girl is a very prim girl and she’s wearing an amazingly short skirt and when she reaches over to put the hat down he somehow or another is there, and again he has her from behind. He unzips his trousers and … I can bring myself to orgasm in about two minutes. Whereas it would be ages to get an orgasm with a man. Very rarely was it joint orgasm. Because I didn’t come. It’s much better without a man. I have absolutely no difficulties whatsoever in having an orgasm; once the scene is in my head, it will happen very quickly.
In my fantasies I am always watching. I don’t want to be having sex with the men. I didn’t watch in my younger life, I participated. I didn’t think much either; I just did it. I didn’t have any reservations. I’d have a one-night stand if I met somebody at a party. When I look back now, especially being a feminist, I think, how could I? How could I not think for a second about the wives and the women? I took no responsibility for that whatsoever. None. I thought it didn’t matter. There was a way of splitting it in my head. I could have sex with somebody’s husband then I would be talking to the wife and be really pally with her. I didn’t ever feel guilty. One of the women I was really friendly with, who was such an attractive woman, said, ‘You led my husband astray. I thought that was terrible what you did to him.’ Looking back I did some terrible things; and my children think I did terrible things. Going off to Mexico for a month and leaving them with somebody I hardly knew. I would sleep with whoever. Maybe I thought so little of myself it didn’t matter who I had sex with. Pregnancy, sexually transmitted disease and health didn’t seem to be issues then: it was a different world. Once my coil was in I thought, ‘Oh my God!’ But that would not have stopped me: my sexual feelings were so strong I was just going to do it. I mean, looking back it was the sixties. I think, ‘Oh, well, it was the sixties; we did everything in the sixties.’ This is an excuse. You know, maybe people didn’t.
I did feel social pressure! Very much! Good girls don’t have sex. I grew up when everybody did the same: you only had one boyfriend, perhaps two boyfriends, you went to the cinema and then you went to each other’s houses and then you got engaged and had presents and then you got married. Nobody was wild – but I think nobody was wild except me. My friend, Anne: one sexual partner in her life. I think, ‘Oh my God, how could you not have other partners?’ Because it’s so attractive. I had a really wild life. Compared to the rest of my family I was wild. So, a lot of sex. About forty men. Compared to my friends in their seventies, that’s very, very unusual. I would never tell my children that – they don’t want to know about it. And my boys are not at all like that. My two sons are from my first husband and there is not a strong sex drive there. My granddaughters are young – God Almighty, they’d never behave like that. If my granddaughters were doing that, I’d be worried to death about them. Anything might happen. No, I wouldn’t want that at all for them.
My adoptive mum and dad were not sexual people. They didn’t have children; I think that was because she had something wrong with her womb. I probably got my sex drive from my birth mother. I went and found my birth mother when I was twenty-seven. She was combing her hair in the car outside her house and I went up to her and I said, ‘Hello, I’m your daughter.’ She went, ‘Oh, you’d better come in then.’ She didn’t know I was coming. Looking back, that was an attack, because I was angry with her, I didn’t know I was angry with her. She gave me this picture of her and my birth father. When I was born my birth father went to see my birth mother in hospital, but then he went up the hill with a gun; he was going to shoot himself. What he actually did was he volunteered to go to Java and was captured by the Japanese and was shot there. So my coming into the world …
I was in my twenties during the 1960s. The sixties did affect me. In pictures of me in my early twenties at the boys’ christenings, you’d think, ‘Shirley was middle-aged.’ In my early twenties, I was middle-aged. When I got divorced that was all thrown off and I was a hippy! I went to university, I was a feminist, I had long earrings, long hair, long loose clothes, sandals, no make-up. In the eighties I went to Greenham Common when my son was a few months old. Feminism didn’t affect my sexuality. Not really. But there was a terrific solidarity between the women. Women would visit and not be active but they’d bring a cake or wire cutters and look after my tent while I cut the fence wire, and it’s a good job they did because one night while we were out cutting the wires, some drunks from Newbury were going to steal our tent, and the baby was in the tent and he started to cry. There was terrific solidarity; that feeling of being women together was terrific. I believe women are equal to men; that’s why I’m a feminist. I’m not keen on injustice and I can see it’s still there.
Something in me blossoms when I go to Spain. Two years ago I’m on holiday in Spain at a little place I have there. I’d gone to an open-air classical music concert. I’m sitting next to this man, I’ve got a wonderful view of the mountains, and he said, ‘Are you American?’ and I said, ‘No! I’m English!’ and then he was just so nice. He told
me he was a sculptor from Belgium, and I thought, ‘Oh my God!’ You can imagine. It was just up my street. He speaks French. Oh! That’s it. I said, ‘Are you coming to the concert tomorrow?’ and he said no he wasn’t. The next night he came and he was obviously looking for me. Well, I was so girlish, I can’t tell you. I was sixteen again. Totally. He’s very tall, attractive, sixty-two. Interested in music. And I’m there in my Biba dress with my hair up, waiting for love, I suppose. Crazy. We went for a drink that night. I thought, ‘Oh my God, after twenty-five years somebody actually finds me attractive. That’s fabulous.’
Then I went to see him in Belgium. This was mad. I obviously haven’t changed or learned a thing. Even though nothing much was happening there was something in my head about, ‘This could be something … and it would suit me really well.’ He wouldn’t have to come here and live with me. I mean, I’m not interested in having someone come and live in my house with me; that’s my idea of hell. Can you imagine it? So I had this fantasy, I could go to Belgium every month. And spend a lovely weekend. My sexual fantasy with him was these visions of us having a terrific time. I thought, ‘Come to Spain and it will be lovely and warm and we’ll go to concerts and we’ll have this amazing sex and it will be fantastic.’ That’s what got me all going and girly.
In Belgium he took me to this hotel he’d booked and the woman presumed we were together and he said, ‘I’m not staying! I’m not staying!’ Then he told me things like, oh my God, he suffers with sleep apnoea so he goes to bed with tubes and God knows what, and I thought, ‘Oh bother!’ I said some really sarcastic things back to him.
My sexuality has changed dramatically over the years. I’m not interested in sex any more – I am interested for myself – but not with someone else. Somebody I know, his wife died and he couldn’t live without a woman so he got somebody fifteen years younger than him and I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’d never consider sleeping with him.’ Maybe I just don’t want an old man. Maybe I want a young man! I can’t imagine meeting somebody I’d like to have sex with now, unless he was forty or fifty and then would he be interested in having sex with me? Therapy helped my self-esteem and now if I had a partner I’d be very fussy. Actually I’ve been thinking the significant other need not be a man. I wonder if that comes from me not being interested in sex now? A woman would be great. Just a person to share things. And to live with. Separately and together.
The life force is strong in me now. And I think I’m still a bit wild, to tell the truth. I feel wild. Being scared is not a feeling I feel often. I feel it more since getting older. I just breezed through life not knowing much, not thinking much of myself. That has changed.’
13
Muslim
Jannah, 19, west London
‘I don’t want him going to Hell because of me’
‘Okay, me. I’m in university in my first year. I’m doing a psychology degree in Westminster University and it was very hard to get there because I’ve got dyslexia. Shockingly, I got into university. Shocked everyone, pretty much. Then luckily I also found a job in Tesco the same day I started uni. So it was great. That’s pretty much my life: uni, work and trying to become a better Muslim.
Let me tell you my story. Before I tried becoming a more better Muslim I actually did have a boyfriend. He was a Muslim. I met him at school, we were like first lovers; we went everywhere together. My mum knew about my boyfriend, pretty much everyone knew about him. But something inside me wasn’t feeling right; it wasn’t feeling pure enough for me to carry on. Even when I was with him, I tried to become a better Muslim. So then one day after like – how many years? plenty of years… long time – I said to him, ‘Okay, listen. I want to become a good Muslim and I want you to be happy with the decision that I’m making and in doing so, I can’t be with you any more.’ I said that to him. And he was the most proudest person ever. He was so proud, he was like, ‘You know what, I’ll wait for you, I’ll wait for you,’ and this and that.
And there were some educations along the way, as I was trying to become a good Muslim. I was thinking to myself, ‘I need a husband who is at the same level as me.’ So I said to him, ‘Listen, for me have a husband I need a practising husband, I need a husband that’s a good Muslim,’ – not everyone’s perfect, don’t get me wrong – ‘but someone who prays, someone who’s God-fearing, who respects other people, someone who’s not into smoking, that’s not into alcohol,’ – not that I’m saying that my ex was, but I just stated that. And because he’s not at that same level I said, ‘I can’t compromise my religion for you. I cannot compromise my heaven for you.’ I don’t want him sinning over me either. I don’t want him going to Hell because of me. Because us having a relationship before marriage is a sin. It’s a plain, simple sin.
I wouldn’t say we were like crazy intimate. Not like in this society. What we did was dating: eat and spend time together. That’s how we were brought up; get to know the person first before you jump into something that you may regret. I’m a human being, life is not all about sex. What we did isn’t something I should really expose because that’s my past. I repented to God afterwards: ‘I’m sorry I was with him.’ Allah knows that human beings aren’t perfect, but He’s just waiting for us to go back to Him and say, ‘Allah, forgive me for what I did and I won’t do it again.’
When I let go of my boyfriend it was a weight off my shoulders. I did it for a good reason so why would I be heartbroken? I probably missed him slightly but then again it’s the Devil playing up: ‘You miss him, go back to him.’ Same age as me, he’s in university. He works. I think he has a car. If he doesn’t become a good Muslim I know for a fact if I follow my desires, our personalities would clash. He might want to go out drinking and smoking and I’d be like, ‘Look, I don’t drink and smoke because I want to please the Lord and preserve myself for you. I don’t think so! Not happening.’ If he was a good Muslim then it would be okay to be together – if we’re married. I would just say, ‘If you want me, marry me.’
I started to wear the hijab and the abayah when I was seventeen: for everyone it was a shock. The hijab is a long black material and I pin it round my head. I put a little cloth cap underneath first so my baby hairs don’t come out. Me, I like mine silk. Black is a simple, beautiful colour. I do wear other colours sometimes but I like to keep it plain and modest. I’ve gone from fashion colours to more of, ‘No, I want to please the Lord instead. More plain, plain, plain, plain, plain.’ The hijab is comfortable, and also there are rewards. They say that a drop of sweat on a summer’s day is very heavy on the scales of good deeds. So that keeps me content.
Think of a person, right, who is a rapist. If I was to walk past him and another girl in a miniskirt was to walk past him, who do you think he’s going to jump on first, realistically? Realistically? The girl that’s not covered: he can do something quick, simple, go. So we are protected in that way. We also do this prayer if we feel like we are threatened – for example, if a man is following us then we say the Ayatul Kursi prayer from the Qur’an and normally that works a treat all the time.
Everyone has sexual desires but men have something for women and they can’t help but look if they see skin, do you know what I’m saying? We are helping men in a sense: ‘You don’t have to look; we are covered.’ We’re covering up so unwanted men cannot see us in that perverse way. We don’t cover ourselves because men can’t control themselves. No. Men, they can control themselves and God tells them to lower their gaze. It’s not, ‘Because the men do this, we have to cover up.’ Nothing like that. We are valuing ourselves, valuing our beauty, that’s the main essence of it. God has honoured the woman, we are so honoured in this life, it’s like we are the queens, right? I feel really good as a woman. Well, I value myself. The hijab, right, we see it like this: when you find a pearl, you find it within its shell. My body, my hair, is a pearl so it has to be covered. I cover my head as that’s my beauty; I cover my body because that’s my beauty. We have to wear the hijab to preserve our beauty
because why would we show our beauty to any man?
Say, for instance, I was married now, I could show all my beauty to my husband, even my hair. Then my husband could see everything of me, my this, my that. I can show my hair to other women regardless of them being in my family. I can have any hairstyle I want but I like it long. I look different without the hijab. When my friends suddenly take off their hijabs or I take off mine, it’s like, ‘Wow!’ We say, ‘God praise you because you’re so beautiful, God made you so beautiful.’ And why would we share that with the world when it’s so precious and so valuable?
I would have an arranged marriage. I can get married whenever I want but I told my parents, ‘Personally,’ I said, ‘after my degree. I would prefer to get married slightly early so I can spend time with my husband before there’s any kids in the future.’ I’m a bit of a traditional sort of girl. My mum was married when she was seventeen. An arranged marriage. In Bangladesh. Happily married. She’s now a housewife, house mum, amazing mum. Two older brothers. And my dad is a waiter at the moment. He did education back home in Bangladesh but when my mum got him here he didn’t carry on with the education because he had kids. My dad, he’s a smart man but he had to work straight away but he did a grand job, my dad.
I trust my mum. It’s not like she’s going to pick someone from a list and be like, ‘That’s it, you’re going to get married.’ It’s nothing like that. It’s more like, ‘Oh, look, Jannah, I’ve found someone for you, would you like to look into it?’ I will ask questions to the person, like ‘So what do you do as your daily life? What are your goals in life?’ And be mindful what questions I’m asking because they’re going to be my soul mate. I have to see whether we match. Islam teaches us that love starts from marriage. You’re getting to know that person from marriage, nothing beforehand. Beforehand you will have desires – don’t get me wrong, you will – but God will see what you do with those desires. God gives us a way to deal with them so either you get married, you can do that – get married if you’re having those extreme feelings. Instead of getting into a relationship that is sin, just get married. It’s fine. Or you can fast. It’s good for the body as a whole, even scientifically. God says if you can’t marry, you fast and that helps the body control the sexual desires.