This post isn’t meant to call for any kind of action toward achieving better results in terms of gender equality, and this post isn’t meant also to condemn current cultural heritage or social practices that pose challenge to Jordanian women lives. This post is truely and sincerly written to show my deepest respect and admiration to whom we consider to belong to the weaker gender and who prove day after day to be the tougher one.

I don’t know if it is just me or not, but I feel more humanity in Jordanian women in general than Jordanian men. Maybe it is their inherited tenderness mixed with their aquired toughness to meet up daily challenges that have been imposed on them through the years.

Throughout my life, I have been blessed to come closer to many Jordanian women and observe their different stories and struggles. My admiration is spread to cover every single woman I have met in my life whether she has been a woman who “fit” in the social norms or not; because both that one who “fits” had to work hard in order to fit, and those who don’t had also to work hard to stand up for themselves and pay the consequences of not fitting.

I feel like giving a hug to the woman who work hard to make a better life for her family, to the woman who endure an abusive husband for the sake of her children, to the one who do so because she fears life without him, and to the one who stood up for herself and demanded her freedom only to end up losing her children and struggling each day to make efforts to be closer to them even from a distance.

I feel like giving a hug to veiled women (spiritual hug) who deal with different social dynamics as well with their own internal characteristics.; those who are more at ease to break bridges than others and those who feel more at ease in building ones around themselves. I feel like giving a hug to non-veiled women, those who cover their body with a social veil and maintain their virginity to their husbands because society demands so, and those who try to manage and play with the space of freedom they allow themselves, and those who do break the boundaries of social freedoms and are strong enough to claim their rights to their bodies and their sexuality.

I feel like giving a hug to that Jordanian woman who is comfortable with her sexuality and who is mature enough to have sex partners based on her own personal desire and decision transending every inherited and imposed social rule around us. I feel like hugging that woman who identified herself to be a lesbian and who realized that the matching of the terms “Jordanian Woman” and “Lesbian” is a match from hell and still know her odds and proud of herself.

I send kisses to all of you, to every single one of you, to every hero of you, mothers and sisters, wives and daughters, the presumed weaker gender, the tougher one.

Cheers and happy Eid..