IN THE KINGDOM
“Don’t you want to escape?” Amani asks dryly, “That’s one of the most offensive ones I get.” As an up-and-coming filmmaker who often travels for work, she is used to a certain line of questioning whenever she reveals her nationality abroad.
Given the image that is broadly projected of her homeland, it is not hard to see how such assumptions are formed. Saudi women are seen as oppressed, trapped, and terrorised.
In short, it is not often viewed as an attractive destination for a single western woman (as family and friends tried fervently to persuade me). And yet this odious caricature, pasted together from clickbait headlines and stock images of veiled figures, always seemed too flimsy to me to carry the weight of any human society. I
