"Come on guys, think about it [...] It must have been an intelligence operation [...] [Algeria] is bothered by the idea of a handsome, successful Moroccan singer..."
Commenting on the October 26th arrest of Moroccan singer Saad Lamjarred by French police for sexual assault, journalist Youssef Jajili stretched his imagination beyond belief. It did not matter that Lamjarred was previously arrested in the United States for beating and raping another woman, and that he fled to Morocco after posting bail. Lamjarred was one of ours. As such, it was our duty as Moroccans to support him in his ordeal. His fans, including women, cried foul. #WeAreAllSaadLamjarred was trending on Twitter. Even King Mohamed VI sent his personal lawyer to Paris to bring his beloved pop star home. But unlike what their American counterparts had done in 2010, French law enforcement did not budge. Mr. "handsome" will not be leaving France anytime soon.
Watching such a national disgrace unravel from the United States, I tried hard to rationalize my anger. Beyond the obvious fact that sexual assault is unequivocally reprehensible, there was something unusually paralyzing about my reaction. Maybe it was the fact that as a Moroccan journalist I could do nothing about it, now that I was thousands of miles away.
But then I remembered. About a week earlier, the country I proudly call a second home went through a similar scandal. Caught on tape bragging about grabbing women from their genitals, now President-Elect Donald Trump explained it away as "locker room talk." His supporters seized on the explanation, normalizing it in public consciousness. Back then as well, I could not identify the reason behind my blind rage.
Clearly this had nothing to do with Lamjarred’s or Trump’s irredeemable character. I was making whatever they did about myself.
And then it hit me. It was not anger I was experiencing, but deep shame. As a Moroccan male, I was embarrassed at an upbringing that was destined to make me indifferent to any abuse directed at women.
When I feel this way, graphic memories from my childhood and adolescence start piling up, quite unexpectedly. I remember Islamic Education professor Bounit, explaining the creation of Eve from Adam’s limb by the Almighty’s preference of men over women. I think of Math professor Ouazzani, calling me out for smiling at a female classmate by loudly exclaiming that “girls are the devil’s sisters.” I still have vivid recollections from the Ramadan soap opera Hajj Metwalli, casting a wealthy merchant struggling to dodge the “wickedness” of his four wives. Then in my Moroccan college, there was that girl who one morning ran to campus security to report a rape. When she mentioned that she was drinking the night before, the case was dismissed.
This, and much more, is what Moroccan boys my age grew up learning as the natural order of things. As men, they were entitled to feel superior to women. As such, they had no qualms about acting on that entitlement. I witnessed what Trump calls “locker room talk” extend beyond the locker room to coffee shops, study sessions, video games, mosques and even father-son interactions. Absent from such conversations, women, their bodies, and their character were spoken of in the most demeaning of terms. And they’d better be absent, for boys will be boys.
In many ways, I was lucky. I earned a scholarship to the only liberal arts college in my country and had the privilege to be mentored by some strong women. Well-intentioned, determined and caring, they worked hard to reform the minds of an otherwise troubled male youth.
But tens of my childhood friends were not that fortunate. My guess is that superstar Saad Lamjarred was not that fortunate either. Yet I cannot bring myself to sympathize with any them. The recollections of what it takes to make a misogynist are of the painful kind. They are still fresh in my mind.
Explaining why she so passionately fights male entitlement in her motherland Egypt, activist Mona Eltahawy once wrote: “[I was] traumatized into feminism — there’s no other way to describe it.” It is a sentiment I and numerous other male feminists share.
But shock must not be necessary to learn what is right. If I ever have a son, I will at least make sure he knows that.