I instinctively crouched over, covering my head with my hands. I guess because I had been in Lebanon for a day and had seen so many buildings with bullet holes in them, my monkey brain assumed it was a bomb or that the gargantuan chandelier finally gave up. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a woman in a hijab running toward me. She begged me in Arabic to do something, but I didn’t know what. Did she need me to rescue her? To protect her from an abusive man? Was she coming to me for help? Did she need me to bring her back to America so she could live her best life? Ooh! Did she want a photo with me?
Tom and I finally realized that this woman was desperate for me to cover my head with a hijab. I looked around and realized I was the only woman in the mosque without a headscarf on. According to the alarmed expression on this woman’s face, this was a big mistake.
Clearly there was a misunderstanding, I thought. I tried to clear it up by speaking clearly and loudly: “I’m American! I’m not Muslim!”
The woman looked at me like I was insane. I mean, I was insane back then, but she didn’t know that. She dragged me to the entrance, and rather forcefully I may add. Another stereotype debunked: In addition to Muslim women not being mentally weak, they’re not physically weak either.
Once we were in the lobby area, she ran into a room and came back holding up a black hijab. My heart sank. Not only because it was made of the cheap black fabric I found so depressing, but to put it on felt like a betrayal of women, progress, and everything I believed in.
On top of that, this ritual just felt arbitrary to me. It was okay to take photos and videos in the mosque with the most modern technology, and post them on Facebook with dumb emojis? That wasn’t demeaning to the culture, but for a woman’s head to be exposed was? I couldn’t understand why my side part and ponytail was upsetting to this religion. I mean, I may have had the least insulting appearance there given some of the tourists were wearing cargo shorts paired with Teva sandals. One guy was wearing a Hard Rock Hotel T-shirt. As far as I’m concerned, the male tourists were the ones that should have had to cover themselves. It didn’t make sense to me that Crocs with socks are okay but my forehead is where they drew the line.
I quickly realized this wasn’t about logic, reason, or justice. It was about tradition and my chromosomes. I was a girl and this was the deal.
I thought about refusing to put it on. Maybe I would resist and make some news headlines that got into the papers, then to women who weren’t allowed to leave their homes. The only problem is I was thinking about all these brave heretical ideas as I forced a smile and wrapped the hijab around my head.
I don’t know what’s to blame for me succumbing so quickly to the tradition; maybe it was being shamed, maybe it was my codependence, maybe it was my aversion to conflict, maybe it was mirror neurons. I couldn’t begin to understand the intricacies of being a woman in the Middle East, but my motivation for acquiescing was ultimately that I just wanted to be respectful of the woman begging me to put it on. She had probably endured so much of her life being disrespected that I didn’t want to be yet another person dismissing her existence. Maybe I was wrong to think that way. Maybe the most respectful thing I could have done for her was to refuse and set an example, showing her that she, too, could refuse to put it on if she wanted to.
For the first couple minutes, the hajib felt very weird. It was itchy, I was tripping over it, I couldn’t get to my pockets with ease, and black is not a flattering color on me. I’m so pale and awkward that I looked like the Grim Reaper with a knee injury.
Now, the scariest part of all this was not that the lady screamed at me, or that I almost tripped over the cloak-like contraption numerous times. The scariest part was that after about ten minutes, I totally forgot I was even wearing it. It went from annoying and cumbersome to weightless, even comfortable.
That night we did the show for Beirut. Perhaps as a mini revolt against having to wear the hijab that day, I wore a short-sleeved button-down, revealing my forearms with aplomb. However, that night I felt less victorious. I felt like a phony. Earlier that day I had acquiesced to covering myself with an oppressive symbol of misogyny, and that night I was onstage, talking about how strong and empowered I was.
The shows went well, and again I was surprised that the same country that hours earlier made me cover up in a mosque was the same country that found it hilarious that I was talking about balls. The whole dichotomy was exhausting. I needed this region to just make up its mind already: Were they sexist or not?!
I left the next day without saving anyone. All I had were some stories I didn’t know what to make of yet and some trying-too-hard photos of myself trying to look cute in front of old jaunty fountains.
A couple years later I did a network TV show and had the same impulse to use my platform to set an example for women. I wanted to create complicated female characters that challenged their circumstances and didn’t conform to what society wanted them to be. I wanted them to find strength in vulnerability without depicting them as overly needy and sensitive. But if they were overly needy and sensitive, the guy was tolerant and understanding of it, instead of exhausted and annoyed by it, which is a stereotype I feel is sexist toward men. Trust me, women can be exhausted and annoyed by needy women too. I tried to make a show in which the gender roles were reversed, where the guy (played by Chris D’Elia) wanted to get married, and the girl (played by yours truly) didn’t. I thought maybe it could be progressive, subversive, or at least funny to flip the script: to depict a man as emotionally intelligent, sensitive, and capable of true love and a woman as impulsive, commitment-phobic, and uncomfortable with vulnerability. Since stereotypes of women and men are so deeply ingrained in our psyches, my character was often thought of as “crazy” for having a masculine side and Chris’s was often thought of as “a pussy” for having a feminine side.
The show seemed to be taking off well. It tested well with focus groups; it made emotionally numb comedy writers laugh; it even made some emotionally dead comedians laugh.
Imagine my surprise when, once we got picked up, I learned that I couldn’t say most of what I had planned to say on TV. A lot of the stories I wanted to tell were “too dirty.” On network TV we can’t say Jesus, God, ejaculate—basically nothing people text about after ten P.M. You can’t show a Coke if Pepsi is a sponsor; you can’t have a sports jersey on a wall without jumping through numerous legal hoops. If you mention the NFL, I think you immediately just get stabbed in the neck. You also can’t say something is “inside you.” That rule alone killed like half the stories I wanted to do. After going to the Middle East and being able to say whatever I wanted onstage, I was very confused about being censored back in America the free.