Islamization
When I was in Paris, one of my numerous sex partners and I came up with a kinky cross-dressing fantasy which involved me wearing a burqa and her dressing up like Nikolas Sarkozy. Then she would take me out to an intellectual cafe, bend me over her knee and sanctimoniously tell me what an unenlightened little wench I was, all while spanking me lightly. Given that I was a philosophy major, being referred to as unenlightened would be really humiliating and I would get turned on in the process. With this game in mind, we dressed up accordingly, left our hotel near the Invalides and began walking towards the Seine.
At first it was difficult for me to get adjusted to walking in heels. (They were a parrot green Dior set.) Every few steps on the cobblestone I kept reaching out and holding my “boyfriend.” After a while my equilibrium figured itself out and I was able to walk just fine.
The next major hindrance was the burqa itself. It covered my entire body and I became very hot. I kept trying to let air in from various street-side exhausts, but that simply made the cloth billow out and prompted a rebuke from my companion.
“You are supposed to be modest and demure,” my She Sarkozy barked. “What is this slutty Marilyn Monroe behavior?”
“I’m sorry Mister Sarkozy,” I said with my eyes lowered to the ground, in the way that every Muslim woman, ever, has been trained to do.
“That’s President Sarkozy to you,” said my companion and began walking six feet ahead of me. “Now follow me as chattel must.”
I smiled underneath my veil. This game was really turning me on. I loved the way my companion was being bossy and authoritarian. It was like she knew exactly how to channel the Bonapartist component of Sarkozy’s diminutive stature.
*
We walked for a little while, passing small cafes with brown curtains and red awnings where nine dollar Cokes were being served in wine glasses. In the window of the electronics shop next to the cafe, a model-turned-singer was butchering a song once performed by Edith Piaf, and in her video she was eating pint-sized men, breaking their penises and then their noses. We passed by two performance artists. One was a mime who started screaming as soon as he saw the depth of my servitude. The other was an accordion player who started belting out a French liberation song to remind me about the oppression I was under. My companion gave both men a scornful look and we continued moving forward.
We cut through a small square where pencil sketch artists were drawing the cityscape. Upon seeing me they pulled out a fresh pad and started making inkblots. Then they held up their pads up in the air and wiggled them at me to remind me how I looked to them. That, based solely on the fact they could not see my face, they could render me inanimate and intangible—and otherwise deny my agency as a human being—really turned me on. This was the kind of arousal that my companion and I had wanted to evoke. My erection became pronounced.
Such a reaction by me brought even more attention to us—after all, in the entire country of France there were only 432 total women who wore the burqa. Soon, a pair of police officers, named Le Hen and Blinders, came toward us. Le Hen was old, almost undead in appearance, while Blinders was younger. Even though he was clearly of dark-haired Indo-European heritage he had bleached his hair blond, and the big bush blocked his eyes and prevented him from seeing anything.
“Halt,” said Blinders putting his hand to my chest.
Since I was still in role I shrieked—because aside from squawking that is all Muslim women are capable of—in some unknown guttural language.
“You are in violation of City Ordinance 1789. You are violating your own liberty,” he said.
I did not know how to respond.
Thankfully my companion, still in her Sarkozy state of mind, came back towards the officers and rapped them both on the back of the head. “What is the meaning of this? You buffoons!”
“President Sarkozy?” Blinders stared.
“The same!” replied my companion.
“Wh-wh-what are you doing here?”
“I am escorting this fine Muslim woman to the river so that I may bend her over and spank her.”
“S-s-sir,” said Blinders. “We had no idea! You know this woman?”
“Indeed! She is my whipping post.”
This brought a gleeful chuckle from both Le Hen and Blinders because like me and my kinky companion they also approved of humiliating Muslims. Now all three of us had erections. Both the officers began looking to compare who was longer. They couldn’t figure it out and turned to Sarkozy and asked him to adjudicate.
With her hands folded behind her back, my companion walked around us thoughtfully, looking down to inspect our comparative lengths. “I find that this Muslim woman has the longest penis among you.” She Sarkozy made this pronouncement very loudly and the entire group of people gathered around us began laughing.
“How in the name of…!” shouted Le Hen, visibly ashamed.
“Impossible!” said Blinders. “She is a woman…how can her…be longer…!”
“It must be something her parents did to her when she was a youngster,” said She Sarkozy, unwilling to rouse the officer’s wrath.
As my companion was saying those words, one of the clips that was holding her long brown hair pinned underneath her wig snapped off, and suddenly it was revealed that she was not really President Sarkozy, but a woman wearing a disguise.
“Imposter!” shouted Le Hen.
“Arrest her!” said Blinders whipping his hands to the handcuffs.
Underneath my veil I tried to form words but nothing came out. One of the consequences of being a Muslim woman is that you become incapable of speaking for yourself and have to let others represent you. Thankfully my companion still had her wits.
“There is no need to arrest us,” she said to the officers. “My partner and I are simply engaged in a game of erotic roleplay. I am a woman, you see, and my partner is actually a man. From America. An unknown and unread writer from New York. I would tell you about his books but no one has heard of them. We were simply playing out a sexual fantasy. We are headed to a cafe near the Seine for some public.…”
“What sort of sick sexual fantasy is this?” Blinders said.
“How the world has sunk since my youth!” Le Hen said with a hint of sadness in his voice.
“This is a clear case of Europe losing its way to the Muslim savage!” Blinders said. “Next thing you know they will be telling us that our well-regarded directors cannot rape 13-year-old-women! Or that our ministers cannot go to Thailand to pay boys for sex! This is a clear case of Islamization!”
“No, no,” replied my companion deferentially. “This is not Islamization. My male companion is wearing a burqa for purely sexual reasons. It humiliates him, which in turn arouses him.…Why do you bring Islam into it?!”
“You lie!” said Le Hen, becoming even more strident. “I was not aware that Islamization had gone so far that even men were wearing burqas now! What is next? You Muslims will convince pure European men into changing their genders so they can then have female genital mutilation performed upon them?”
“So what must we do?” I finally managed to croak.
“Remove your burqa at once!” said Blinders.
“I am naked underneath!” I squealed. “There are children all around. They will see my long flopping phallus!”
“It does not matter,” said Le Hen. “By covering yourself you are damaging our enlightened European values. Next thing you know you will be bringing the Ottoman Empire back to rule over us.”
“Do you have any other solutions?” I inquired.
“You could pay a minor fee to the city,” Blinders said. “A sort of tax for the veil.”
I spread my hands to inform him that I had no money. This prompted Blinders to take out his handcuffs and throw me against the wall.
“Wait,” said my companion, trying to prevent any further escalation. “Please! Is there a compromise possible? I understand that our erotica is not allowed in your wonderful city. We will take our sex elsewhere. Tell me, is there somewhere else we can go where people can wear what they like?”
Le Hen and Blinders thought over the offer. They looked at each other and then back towards my companion and me.
“If you would like to wear the burqa then you should go to a Muslim country. How about Egypt?”
I shook my head. “Not possible. The burqa has been outlawed there.”
The French police officers uttered a humph and then consulted with one another. They eventually came upon a solution.
“America!” they said with a hint of contempt on their face. “The Yankees do not make a distinction between veiled and unveiled. Backward people! They are the only ones left that think all people ought to be treated the same.”

Ali Eteraz is the author of Children of Dust: A Memoir of Pakistan (HarperOne 2009), available now.