A Damascene anecdote courtesy of: KABOBfriend and covert KABOBoperative Sarah (with deep epistemological inclinations on physical space and hegemony of discourse).

At a recent house-warming party, a friend and I got into a discussion of how much we disliked middle-aged men in the Middle East—although the phenomenon is certainly found all over the world, I’ve had to politely listen to enough semi-sermons delivered by aging men here who welcomed neither a second opinion nor input on their thoughts—to last a lifetime. My friend told me that she envisioned all middle-aged men as wrinkly creatures with enormous potbellies, and if anyone younger than them tried to say anything intelligent they would use their paunches to belly-butt the interloper out of the way. Another classmate who was listening in agreed: “That happened to me in Turkey!” he said, explaining that a shopkeeper there who tried to pass off a blank CD as a DVD had belly-butted him when he tried to refuse to buy it. “It was very degrading,” he said. “I wished he had just tried to grope me or something.”

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