People talk about marriage a lot more in Bolivia than they do in Quebec. People will ask if you're married in the same kinds of situations in which they ask where you're from and what you're doing here. Most guys who seem to be interested in me will ask pretty early on in the conversation whether i´m married.
This is kind of surprising, in a way, because every woman i know who has kids is a single mom. The lady who cleans our house is a single mom. My boss is a single mom. I see partnerless moms on the streets asking for change all the time. I thought both the families we lived with were single mom families. It turns out one lady, who was visiting for a month and a half, actually has a husband in la paz. None of us ever saw him around here. I talked to my roommates about this and they were at first surprised and then thought about it and realized the same was true for most of the women they knew.
I think the way society percieves sex and marriage here is really unequal, as far as gender goes. There doesn't seem to be much pressure on men to deal with the consequences of their actions, ie actually help raise the children they father. But at the same time, there's this obsession with marriage, which seems to apply a lot more strongly to women, which seems to imply that sexual freedom for women here is kind of weak.
When guys ask me if i'm married, i guess this is a way of sounding out whether i'm available. I find this super weird, because the question, in my mind, should be whether i'm interested in them, not just whether i'm available. It seems like these guys care a lot more about whether or not some other guy has already laid claim to me than they do about my own volition.
Alright alright, patriarchy, objectification, blah blah blah, i'll stop before i start frothing at the mouth.
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2 comments:
Heya, i'm from sucre, but i live in Dublin now, i read your blog and i think is great discover the third world, isn't it?, but some commentaries need take other way, if you want to exchange ideas, i give you my mail.
masalladeaqui@hotmail.com
i will return Bolivia in december, i hope you are still there and speak about Bolivia, kisses
Juan Kutipa
This is really funny cause it's sooooo the opposite in Montreal. I think out of girls I've dated here there was you and maybe one or two others that weren't in relationships when I started courting them. The girl I'm seeing now just broke up with her boyfriend after a night togethre which actually kind of surprised me, I thought she would just not tell him. My questioning has always been towards "do you like me?" cause if she does what does it matter if there's some other guy? Of course this could be just a way to not get shot, there's really no fear of that here.
-Ben
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