"I think today it would be fun to be a woman."

[highlyeccentric]

"I think today it would be fun to be a woman." So says Pashe Keqi, one of Albania's last remaining sworn virgins, women who forsook femininity, sex and children in return for the status and power of a man's role.

Pashe Keqi recalls the day nearly 60 years ago when she decided to become a man. She chopped off her long black curls, traded in her dress for her father's baggy trousers, armed herself with a hunting rifle and vowed to forsake marriage, children and sex.

For centuries, in the closed-off society of rural northern Albania swapping gender was considered a practical solution for families short of men. Keqi's father had been killed in a blood feud, and there was no male heir.

By custom, Keqi, now 78, took a vow of lifetime virginity. She lived as a man, the new patriarch, with all the swagger and trappings of male authority - including the obligation to avenge her father's death.

She says she would not do the same today, now that sexual equality and modernity have come even to Albania, with internet dating and MTV invading after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Girls here do not want to be boys anymore. With only Keqi and some 40 others remaining, the sworn virgin is dying out.

"Back then it was better to be a man because before a woman and an animal were considered the same thing," says Keqi, who has a bellowing baritone voice, sits with her legs open wide and relishes shots of raki. "Now Albanian women have equal rights with men, and are even more powerful. I think today it would be fun to be a woman."

No, none of this is getting my essay written, but it's interesting all the same.

ed: ooh, and from the second page:

She worked construction jobs and prayed at the mosque with men

.

Interesting, I tell you.

Comments

[sea-of-tethys.livejournal.com]

That's fascinating!

[areyoustrange.livejournal.com]

Ah, I read this in dead tree format. It's awesome.

[highlyeccentric.livejournal.com]

dead tree format?

[areyoustrange.livejournal.com]

Newspaper. :)

[highlyeccentric.livejournal.com]

ah

[kishnevi.livejournal.com]

Certainly a different approach from the Sister Wendy style of consecrated virgin.