In the last two posts, I touched on the touchy subjects of sexual harassment and the marriage lottery. What happens if you don't want to play the game?  In a word, retaliation.  Insults are flung, outrage is expressed, and the whole thing is your fault as woman.  You lack good humor and inner beauty and are not pleasing to men.  Your job is to leave your house each day with the intention of making all men happy to be around you and offering some titillation in their boring workaday worlds.  When you fail to do that, you are defying a basic principle of the universe.

The thing is, Moroccan women do handle this demeaning treatment with smiles and laughs and tolerance.  They do provide the beauty and titillation.  They don't like it, but accept it as normal male behavior and right.  When you come from another place that tells you women deserve respect and equal treatment and have the God-given right to say NO, it's confusing to see the opposite happening around you.  Especially when these same men, in charming mode, tell you how the world lies at the feet of mothers. They pump up the fantasy of how a woman is respected in the home and glorified by motherhood.  Fact is, like women everywhere, they are working mulitple jobs with about as much appreciation as those donkeys you see in the street.

Foreign women have a special persona in the world of sex, love and marriage, too.  Thanks to internet porn and satellite TV, it is well-known fact all foreign women are sex-hungry and indiscriminate about how they feed that appetite.  Because they are not bound to Moroccan standards, they can be free and act like men.  It's easy to charm them into relationships.  It's easy to convince them of how unfortunate and unfair life is to the average hardly-working man in Morocco.  Foreign women are happy to trade their money and their passport for some pleasure in the sack.  The true general perception is that foreign women only like trash and prefer men who are poorly educated, dirty and unemployed.  Of course, a well-educated man with a decent job and a life isn't going to be trolling the streets or the internet looking for a woman to get him out of Morocco.  He doesn't need a helping hand or a woman to support him, so he just isn't going to be available. 

Cross-cultural relationships are difficult at best on many levels.  When the basis of the relationship is you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours, I have to wonder about the tears and heartbreak later; the ranting about the unfairness of it all because the men are trash.  There is actually a Facebook page about trash men in Morocco. You get what you pay for and that applies to everything in life.  The question is, should you be paying to begin with?