Jillian Keenan - Sex with Shakespeare: Heres Much to Do with Pain, but More with Love

It was on my mind again.

I tilted my head past the edge of the curtain and scanned the room. I was alone. Even the owner of the Internet caf had run to the mosque across the street to pray. It was a holy moment in Oman. It was prayer time. All around the country, men and women paused their work to speak with Allah.

I needed to speak, too, but not with God. He was probably busy during prayer time. And I wouldnt want to make Him uncomfortable. I needed to talk about sex. I needed to be a little bit weird. And in His Majesty Sultan Qaboos bin Said al-Saids Sultanate of Oman, the few minutes of total privacy after the call to prayer were my best chance.

I slid a pair of black sunglasses under my pink hijab and retreated back to my computer. (The sunglasses were excessive in the dark caf, of course. But they made me feel cool.) Safely ensconced behind a partition, I minimized a PDF of an article on postcolonial interpretations of The Tempest and opened a new browser window. After another quick glance over my shoulder to confirm that there was no one behind me, I typed the word spanking into the search bar and clicked enter.

I didnt want to communicate with God, but a higher authority wanted to communicate with me. This time, it was Omans highest authority: the government. More specifically, it was the Omani Telecommunications Regulatory Authority. One of the TRAs stated missions was to protect social values.

In other words, they censor porn. And they were onto me.

I could only understand a few words of the Arabic warning that popped up on my computer screen to block me from my unsavory search request. But in my heart I knew what it said. My imagination filled in where language failed.

Hi, Jillian, it read. What the fuck is wrong with you?

I scrunched my face into an old apple and ran my tongue across my teeth.

Oh, Omani Telecommunications Regulatory Authority, I thought, sighing. I dont know.

You just tried to access sadomasochistic sexual material from a public Internet caf, the Arabic script replied. Youve gone off the deep end. Now every moral authority in the Middle East is coming to arrest you.

Not likely, I thought. But I left a handful of rials on the front desk for the shopkeeper to find when he returned from prayers, and I fled anyway.

I walked home and sat on the edge of my bed. With a sigh, I reached up and pulled off my hijab. My ponytail spilled over my shoulder, and I absentmindedly pulled at the end of it. Minutes passed. Maybe hours, I dont know.

The porn blocker had a point. What the fuck was wrong with me?

A knock on the front door startled me out of my malaise. It was Sabihah, an elderly neighbor who had taken it upon herself to absorb me into her family when I arrived in her apartment building months earlier without male protection. I didnt have much choice in the matter. Sabihah insisted that I eat dinner with her each night and that I report my daily plans to her each morning. When she saw, to her horror, the collection of jeans in my bedroom, she even started to make clothes for me on her sewing machine.

Were you with a man? Sabihah demanded as soon as she saw me.

I smiled. It had been a while since someone had taken such a detailed interest in disciplining my choices. I didnt want Sabihah to worry about me. But it was a comfort that she did.