What my education taught me about boys and girls

I know people in Saudi Arabia always complain about the fact that westerners keep talking about women’s rights as soon as they discuss Saudi Arabia. I hope you will give me credit for the fact that I have now posted a few articles and this is my first article on the subject.

I hope that in the next few years, women’s right will continue to progress, in Saudi Arabia and everywhere else, and that women will become fearless when it comes to going after their dreams. I hope that the rights will progress but I hope that the understanding of gender issues also will progress. It seems to me that women might be misunderstood, but men also are.

Allow me to say something about my own experience in this field.

About a year ago, I was involved in a conversation on social media about education principles, and this woman, a British lady, baffled me by saying that separate schools for boys and girls were the best and that we should return to it. It really baffled me. She explained how girls were distraction to boys, and vice versa.

There is nothing that annoys me more that this idea of separation, and while I can take it from an Arab who has grown up in a society ruled by such principles, it’s hard for me to hear it from a British lady, precisely because of the implied regression.

I am a mother myself and it’s been a challenge over the years to see that in toys stores in the Gulf, blue for boys, pink for girls still seems to be a thing.

I’ll be honest with you, living in the Middle East has made me grateful I got to grow up in France. I am not saying the Middle East is bad but over the years, so many times, I have seen occurrences of the misunderstandings between men and women, and I know those misunderstandings are due to the fact that compared to Europe, men and women live more segregated lives starting in childhood.

One of our my Arab friends once told me she liked to discuss her relationships with men with me, because she had the feeling I understood men and because, unlike some of her other friends, I didn’t tell her that all men were idiots we should stay away from as much as possible.

I thought it was funny she would say that, because I actually do think all men are idiots... until you teach them better, hahahaha. Just joking.

I have no brother but as a child, as a teenager, I was always around boys. They were my classmates, people I was around, people like me, except they were boys and I was a girl. My parents never gave me the idea that as a girl, I should be particularly careful with boys. I have realized in recent years looking back at those years what an amazing chance this education was.

I wasn’t really a tomboy but I was never a girlie girl either, and whether it was in sports or in academics, I was always competing with the boys. For a girl, it’s an amazing chance to be able to compete with boys. For a boy, it’s also an amazing chance to be able to compete with girls.

I remember in my final year of high school, there was this math contest, it was a national one. Maths wasn’t my forte, I was much better in French, in history, in English, but like everybody else, I took part in the contest.

You had to answer questions, you got points for answering correctly, but you also got negative points for answering wrong. And I got the best score in my high school. In particular, I beat this boy who was in my class, my friend Michael who ended up joining one of France’s best engineer schools. He had answered all questions, even the ones he wasn’t sure about. I had answered only the questions I was sure of the answers. And I won because overall, I got a lot less negative points than he did. My risk management strategy was better than his.

It doesn’t matter who won, there were no stakes, really, and probably that’s why Michael had answered all questions, even the ones he wasn’t sure about but I could still tell Michael was a bit annoyed that he lost against me. It probably taught him a lesson, I feel it still teaches boys lessons when they lose against girls.

But of course, the British lady is right about the distraction. At times, girls are a distraction to boys, and vice versa. In France, I guess half of high school is absorbed in this business. But it’s okay in my opinion because actually, it’s good to learn to handle the distraction from a young age before things actually matter, before you are expected to be professional.

If I want to be honest, more than once, going to offices and public administrations in Dubai, I have seen how some people who probably were not taught to handle the distraction in school were learning right there in the workplace, while I was sitting there, waiting for them to process some paperwork I needed.

I can’t even blame them that my paperwork seemed like a much lower priority to them because handling that distraction is probably one of the sweetest, most interesting things you need to learn in life.

But this education mixing boys and girls also taught me a thing, a lesson that, I realize, is very important and that I was, up to recently, not aware of.

In France, we have mixed education and in particular mixed sports classes, boys and girls together and back in those days, in my school, every 3 months we had a different sport. When I was 13, for 3 months, we had Greco-Roman wrestling. Greco-Roman wrestling is a sport of physical contact, it’s rough. You can look it up, it’s an Olympic sport.

Because I am tall and strong, the teachers would always put me to wrestle a boy. I don’t think the boys ever treated me like a little thing they had to be careful with because that is just not how boys are raised in France. In France, it doesn’t really matter whether you are a boy or a girl. In France, there is this idea that everybody fights with their strengths, some have physically strength, some are good at tactics, finding their opponent’s weakness, some are nasty, not playing according to the rules.

I guess I relied on reasonable physical strength and an above-average tactical sense. Observation has always been key to me. I would often beat the boys. And god knows some of them didn’t like to lose to a girl. Some of them also didn’t care because this rough sport, or sports in general, or even school, wasn’t their thing anyway.

To be fair, there was one boy I was really wary of. He was the shortest boy in the class. I didn’t like to fight against him because he had this habit of constantly going nasty, of being super-aggressive so that people don’t see him as weak. He was a good kid but he didn’t like to be reminded that he was tiny. That guy was honestly no fun to wrestle with but it taught me you should always stay on your toes with everyone. Sometime the shortest is the nastiest.

Overall, those 3 months taught me an important lesson that I only recently became aware of, with the #metoo mouvement. My entire life, I have never felt threatened physically by boys, or later men, because based on those sports classes, I knew that if the worst happened, if things ended in a fight, well, I knew I had my chances.

When the #metoo movement started emerging, I realized that most women weren’t like me. I realized a lot of women lived more or less with a constant fear, when they walk in the street, even when they talk to people.

It broke my heart to realize that.

The absence of that constant fear certainly is one of the greatest freedoms one can have. With that freedom, I have gone to places on my own, I have learnt a lot more things, being careful but rarely being scared. The world would certainly be a better place if every woman, and every man as well, had that particular brand of freedom.