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God created sexual desire in ten parts; then he gave nine parts to women and one to men.
—Ali ibn Abu Taleb(the fourth leader of the Islamic
world after Muhammad)
The house in Tehran smelled of jasmine, the same scent that my grandma brought with her wherever she went throughout the years. Behind the olive tree, a path led to six low-rise houses that surrounded a large courtyard. Each extended family had these houses, where the Great Mother lived with her sons, their wives, and their children, as well as her unmarried daughters. When the daughters got married, they moved in with their husbands in their extended families' homes. The courtyard was the children's kingdom, where all of the cousins would meet daily near the fishpond. The house's most important structure—the kitchen—stood in the middle of the courtyard, a common kitchen that was shared by all the families, though only women were allowed entry.
What is the relation between the kitchen and forbidden desire? The first sin involved food and sexuality, when Eve seduced Adam into eating the apple. Preoccupation with food, then, is about not only body image but also what we are allowed to take into our bodies and what we are not—desires and prohibitions. Referring to food, Janice Lieberman says, “This is where the erotic is, and this is where the forbidden is. And while sex isn't forbidden
anymore, desire is.” She adds, “The thing I see clinically and I see around me is that the need to eat is perverted, that the biological need for nutrition, for sustenance, is perverted, and it gets redirected. What I hear is an obsession with food, with sweets, with cookies, with candy, ice cream, with what's forbidden.”
Over the years, the image of the woman in the kitchen has become a nonsexual image of a homemaker, invisible, one who feeds others' needs but maybe doesn't have her own. I would like to introduce here a different kitchen, one that contains hidden parts of women's sexuality. With awareness of our cult