How to Attract an Arab Boyfriend (for real)

When I was a baby belly dancer in New York City, a woman almost ten years my senior in age and in dance wanted to learn something from me. It wasn’t a dance move or even a makeup hack—quite honestly, I didn’t have much to offer in either department at that age. Instead, she wanted me to teach her how to attract (and more importantly keep), an Arab boyfriend. You could imagine the quizzical look on my face as I listened to her request. For starters, that anyone would consider my 23-year-old self an expert in ANYTHING was flattering. Not gonna lie. Then of course there was the fact that I had been hitherto unaware that the…“phenomenon” to which she referred was a thing. It’s true, I was already on Arab boyfriend number three at that point in my life (two Syrians and one Egyptian), but not due to any deliberate machinations on my part. It just happened. All I can say is that my look and temperament seemed to attract Middle Eastern men. Probably more the latter than the former. Or let’s say it was my look that attracted them and my temperament that kept them around. Almost fifteen years later, the looks part remains the same. My temperament, not so much. I’ve learned a few things about boundaries and self-respect. Still, at the time, I didn’t perceive myself as possessing any special skill set, much less one that others would covet. Nor did I think snagging an Arab boyfriend was any different than snagging any other man, black, white, or anything in between.

The instant boost to my ego that resulted from being seen as an authority was indescribable. However I must confess that I derived an extra layer of satisfaction knowing that the dancer who asked me this strange question—let’s call her Jessica—was the same woman who knowingly stole my Egyptian boyfriend a few months prior only to lose him to me in a matter of weeks. But I digress…

If I remember correctly, Jessica and I were sitting at a table in the Lafayette Grill, a Greek-owned restaurant tucked into lower Manhattan that functioned as a sort of Broadway for belly dancers and other practitioners of ethnic dance; tango was their other big thing. We were both probably waiting to dance in a show—quite possibly a show I was producing for two visiting dance instructors from Egypt I had invited to teach workshops. It was then that she asked me about my unusual “talent.” It’s not that we had become friends. That would have been unlikely considering the circumstances under which I had learned of her existence. We did, however, learn to coexist, as best as two women in an incestuous niche dance community with limited performance opportunities could. It was this state of mutual toleration, let’s call it, that allowed us to converse about matters of such importance.

And now I’m going to disappoint you. I actually don’t remember how I answered Jessica’s question. Or if I even did. I may have evaded it altogether, using my need to get costumed and made up before my performance as an excuse. Knowing myself, however, and seeing her question as an opportunity to rub her loss of my boyfriend in her face, I most likely did answer… if only to cement my superiority in something so important to her. Unfortunately for all of us, I just don’t remember what I said.

I will say this, though. More than ten years later, an American belly dancer with whom I had become friendly towards the end of my decade-long stint in Cairo made a similar observation about my penchant for dating Arab men. Only she didn’t think of it as a skill, let alone one she needed to learn. She called it a fetish.

That was a new one for me. I never thought of myself as sex crazed. And I sure as shit don’t have any fetishes. It might be more accurate to say I have a type. The classic tall, dark, and handsome type. Well, maybe not always handsome, but always hairy. And macho. Be that as it may, I realized that my unbroken track record of dating Arab men struck others as unusual. Even my father once asked me, in his signature Brooklyn ex-cop way of speaking after witnessing more than a decade of this, “What’s da maada? You don’t like American men?”

Ok. Here’s the deal. It’s not that I don’t like men from other backgrounds. They’re just not in my orbit. They haven’t been for the past twenty years. That’s what happens when your life revolves around belly dance, and in my case, advanced-level studies in all things Middle East. Ten years in Egypt doesn’t help either. How could I possibly not find Arab men there? This would be the first part of my answer to people’s comments about my dating preferences. It's not a completely honest one, though. I suppose if I really wanted to, I could have hooked up with a non-Arab guy. Even when I was in Egypt. They were there. Or moved to a non-Arab country. But the reality is that I’m hopelessly attracted (as well as attractive) to Middle Eastern men. (Actually, I can expand that to include Mediterranean men in general. Greek, Italian, southern Spanish, bring it on.) However, it’s more of it being my comfort zone than it is a fetish. Even when that comfort zone is everything but comfortable. Don’t for a second think that loving a high testosterone alpha man completely untamed by western notions of gender equality and monogamy is a stroll in the park. It’s torture. Masochism of the first order. I readily admit. Then why do I keep doing it. Habit? Deeply entrenched neural pathways? Childhood issues and trauma and all the shit therapists like to talk about? Maybe it’s biological. Apparently women subconsciously choose men who physically resemble their father figures. In my case that would be tall, dark (an effect of good old Italian hirsutism), and handsome. Who knows. Chalk it up to whatever you want. For me, it is what it is and I’m no longer on a mission to fix it. Because to fix that, I’d have to fix myself. Like, completely-reconfigure-my-wiring type of fixing. I’m not about that right now. I would cease to exist as we know me.

I’m in too deep. Way over my head. I took this Middle Eastern stuff too far without throwing an anchor into the reality of who I was before I discovered this part of the world back in 2001. There are legit reasons for this which I won’t discuss here. But basically I let the undertows of curiosity and obsession with a foreign culture drag me away from the safety of the shores of my American existence. And there’s no turning back.

This amuses some people and pisses off others. And I’m not talking about the small, self-righteous segment of the human population that considers a “white presenting” this or that trying on new cultures to be guilty of a crime on par with murder. I have no use for such myopic thinking. (Plus I believe there’s an unexamined jealousy underpinning the phony self-righteous outrage directed at those willing to indulge the transcendental human impulse to expand one’s horizons. Not getting into that either.) The people I’m concerned with is my people. Like my mother. She just recently imparted on me how dismayed she’s been over my transformation into una arabe. To which I offered the following rejoinder. “But mom, I’ve been at it for the past twenty years. You just decided to have a problem with it now? After I came back from Egypt and settled down into a ‘normal’ American life?” She said she had always had a problem with it. She never liked that I “turned my back” on our culture. Cuban culture. That even after I got Egypt out of my system and returned to the US, I was STILL speaking Arabic all day long as though I were a first generation Middle Eastern immigrant.

She was right. Or rather, not wrong. I speak, read, and write Arabic at my nine to five. The vast majority of my colleagues are Arab. So are most of my friends. And guess what? We communicate in Arabic. When I dance on the weekends, it’s for Arabs. Which means I sing and dance in Arabic. Not to mention I teach Egyptian Arabic and translate Arabic songs in my free time. The whipped cream on that piece of baqlaawa is that even my (failed) romantic interests in the three years I’ve been back in the US have been Arab. Very Arab. Heck, even my dog is Egyptian. So yes, mom had a point. I’ve been living like an immigrant resisting assimilation into American culture at all costs.

None of this would bother her if I had created a life that revolved around my Cuban identity. But I haven’t. I’ll go to a salsa party every now and then, and I speak Spanish when I have to, but that’s about it. I’d much rather spend my nights belly dancing, smoking sheesha, and playing chess while smoking sheesha. Should I be persecuted for that? No. I like what I like. But I do understand how utterly disappointing it must be for a parent to witness their child transform into something so unrecognizable to them. And I’m painfully aware that most people have a problem with others who transcend the cultural paradigms into which they were born. To my parents, I’m a traitor. To the cultural appropriation police, I’m an interloper and a criminal who should stay in her lane. Either way, my answer is always, to hell with conformity. I don’t live for others. Never have, never will.

But wait. Let me throw a bomb at mom’s invective against my identity choices. If I seemingly have no problem resisting “assimilation” into American culture, maybe it’s mom’s fault? She, together with her Cuban immigrant parents, was the one who raised me like an immigrant child even though I was born in this country (my parents were divorced before I turned one). It was the three of them who insisted not only that we were Cuban, but that we were Cuban to the exclusion of everything else. As in, we were not American. Couldn’t be. Didn’t wanna be. Fuck the Italian side of me. They’re the ones who only taught me Spanish, so that when I got into the school system, I didn’t speak a word of English and had no friends because of it. They’re the ones who rejected American socialization. They hated what they what they perceived as the “anything goes” American way that made putas out of girls and estupidos out of boys. Given my upbringing, is it any wonder I do well with foreign cultures? Especially ones that identify themselves in opposition to everything American?

Now that I've successfully blamed my life decisions on someone else, the only other way I can explain the near-complete Arabization of my existence is with the term cultural dysphoria. I thought I came up with it myself until Google told me it’s a thing. Not an official thing—it’s not in the DSM as is gender dysphoria. And it doesn’t get a lot of attention on the Internet, either. But, the few entries on the Internet define cultural dysphoria this way: the uncertainty a person feels about where they fit in terms of cultural categories. The dissonance between the social expectations for an individual’s broad cultural performance or identity, on the one hand, and their desired embodiment of that culture, on the other. In other words, simultaneously identifying with and feeling distanced from a culture. This is helpful. But for me, I think of cultural dysphoria the same way I think of gender dysphoria. Identifying with or as a member of another culture. One you were not assigned at birth. Unlike gender dysphoria, however, there are no biological obstacles to explain away or get around. Just some small-minded individuals trying to shame you for doing what they were never brave enough to do—abandon their comfortable lives of western luxury to live in the squalor and danger of a third world country.

So there. I’ve diagnosed myself. And quite possibly made up a psychiatric disorder. I wonder if the DSM will eventually catch up with me. 

So. What does all of this mean for my history of relationships with Arab men? How would I, fifteen years later, answer Jessica’s question of how to attract and keep an Arab boyfriend? The answer is: I don’t know. Read this again and figure it out.