During my last visit to Jeddah, my daughter and I went to visit her father, my ex-husband. He and his family had moved outside the city, an hour’s drive from my apartment in al-Balad through increasingly spacious, undeveloped neighborhoods where big-box retail stores were rubbing shoulders with the desert. Situated improbably in a rather desolate area of unpaved roads and eerie quiet, my ex’s house was a sprawling, dilapidated villa. My daughter, who had lived there for a few months, gave me...

There are plenty of things that might characterize Saudi Arabia for aesthetic effect—a Bedouin teapot, if we’re being cliche, or the outline of a mosque. But during my last trip to Jeddah, I found myself noticing what I would call a more wide-ranging aesthetic. It is a stark combination of minimalism and ornamentation, like a vast empty sky and a single, modern minaret, decorated in geometrical forms. Geometric patterns are technically Islamic—they show up all over the Muslim world—but in...

I took a pole dance class recently. I’ve done this numerous times in the past, but what made this class different was its focus on embodiment of the erotic, divine feminine. What this translates into is following what our bodies want us to do. It takes practice to not only listen to the cues your body provides, but to stay engaged with that listening and actively follow its advice. For years, I’ve taken dance classes and worked my way through them, Hermione-Granger-style, doing exactly what...