Bonk (25 page)

Thankfully, the pay phone (Ringo brand) has not disappeared from Cairo, and with the help of Shafik’s faithful factotum Margot, I arrive on time for my first meeting with the man who dressed lab rats in leisure suiting.

A first encounter with Ahmed Shafik is a joyous experience. I am seated on a sofa in his office when he appears in the doorway. He stops in his tracks and stretches out his arms as though in benediction. “Welcome!
Welcome
to Cairo!” Then he steps up and shakes my hand. It’s a grand, swinging handshake that begins, like a golf swing, up by his shoulder and finishes in a decisive smacking of palms.

The reflex demonstration is scheduled for the following day, and so we drink coffee and chat. I ask him how he is able to do the sort of work he does in an Islamic country. “First of all,” he begins, “I don’t publish here. I publish outside. Especially nowadays. In all Arab countries, I don’t know why and how, conservative people are coming up greatly.
Greatly!
” He is referring to the recent electoral sweep by the Muslim Brotherhood.

Shafik gains access to women more or less as one does in the Agriculture Museum: baksheesh. The women are prostitutes, and he pays them to participate. He pays them in cash and in free medical care—for them and for family members.

“I know a lady, and she helps me. But it is with effort.” The research is done in “special flats,” where there are also gambling tables. “I go at one or two in the morning. I work the whole night.” Not without risk. Prostitution is illegal in Egypt. The Ministry of the Interior is sufficiently worked up about it as to have an entire Department for the Prevention of Prostitution. While there is nothing on the books about the legality of paying a woman to let you penetrate her with a balloon, it can’t be a simple or pleasant thing to have to explain to an agent of the DPP at two in the morning.

Shafik agrees to put me in touch, via email, with one of his subjects. I contact her several weeks after I get home, with Shafik serving as go-between, sending my questions to her and her answers back to me. The woman refers to the “special flat” as the Home for Prostitutes. The name, as well as the ages of Shafik’s subjects (most are in their late thirties), makes it sound like a sort of retirement home for the trade. It’s not. Prostitutes in Egypt are older than they are in the States; many are middle- and even upper-class women who have been divorced and left with no child support. Raised in an era when women received no education, they turn to prostitution as one of the few options to keep themselves afloat and fund their children’s educations.

This is not, however, the case with the divorced woman with whom I’ve been emailing. She does it “simply for having sex.” It had never occurred to me that under a religion that forbids sex outside of marriage, prostitution might attract the occasional widow or divorcée. But this is not the reason she lay down with Dr. Shafik’s condom balloon. She says she had seen Dr. Shafik on TV and felt that her participation might help women in some way: “I felt very happy when I thought of my participation as my little achievement for science. The peak was when Prof. Shafik showed me the results of the experiments printed in a journal.” She clearly holds Shafik in high regard—referring to him as a “world famous surgeon and scientist” and “world-wide well-known Egyptian doctor and researcher”—so much so that at one point I began to picture him, and not her, sitting at a keyboard tapping out the replies.

When I ask this woman to describe the experience, she writes that she was “pretty scared with the sight of the electric apparatuses…and with the idea of the needles that were to be inserted into my genital organs and the balloons that were to be placed and inflated in the vagina.” As for the test itself, she says simply: “I was not comfortable.”

Both religious prohibitions and the law force medical researchers in Muslim countries to take extreme measures. “Even more difficult,” says Shafik, “is when you want to do research on a cadaver.” Shafik uses a French pronunciation, the accent on the first syllable—CAD-averre. From his mouth, the word sounds foreign and vaguely classy, like a name made up for a car. The Toyota
Cadaverre.
Because of Islamic edicts, there is no tradition of body donation in Muslim countries. Occasionally, Shafik lays hands on an unclaimed corpse, that of a person who has died with no known kin, but more often he has bribed graveyard employees. He is careful to point out that he puts the body back in his trunk and returns it for burial when he is finished.

The conversation trails off, and in that moment I have a realization. I realize that Dr. Shafik’s shiny, luxe, peacock-blue suit trousers are synthetic. I can’t help myself. I lean forward and pinch a pant leg between my fingers. “Polyester!”

“Yes, yes.” Shafik admits it. I am hooting unprofessionally. “Yes, but I tell you…” He raises his index finger. “I tell you! Inside is
not
polyester! Underwear,
never
!”

i
tell you, there is more functioning technology in one Ahmed Shafik study than in all of Cairo. The ATM machines spit out my bank card like it’s gristle. Phone calls from my hotel room must be placed by the desk clerk, who copies down the number and then puts through the call as though I were Claude Rains in
Casablanca
, arranging night passage. The one pedestrian crosswalk I saw in Cairo features a perpetually blinking green man, whom you glimpse in the synapses between speeding cars.

As I walk to my appointment with Dr. Shafik the following afternoon, I try to imagine the scene at the Home for Prostitutes. I picture men lounging on cushions, smoking water pipes, and glossy-haired women with harem pants low on their hips. It is difficult to find a place in this scene for Dr. Shafik and his 12F condom-ended catheter.

We are meeting at his office. The mood is oddly subdued when I arrive. “Mary, I am sorry,” says Dr. Shafik in the tone he must use to tell families when operations have not gone as planned. “I asked the house where I go.”
Asked
is rendered in two syllables: ASK-ed. This seems to be a regional treatment of the English
k
sound.
Sphinx
comes out SPHINK-us. “To bring you there. I called them last night. They refused! Even the prostitutes, they are very afraid nowadays. I tell you, the religious people are rising up. Up and up! Sex, now, in this country is very secret. The women and the vagina—it’s something very criminal.”

I got a whiff of this yesterday. A crew from Cairo’s English-language TV station came to film a segment about Dr. Shafik. They interviewed me about why I had come to see him but cautioned me not to use the word
sex
. “Say ‘sexual intercourse,’” the reporter advised. “Make it sound scientific.”

Instead of going to the Home for Prostitutes, we are going one floor down, where someone on the hospital staff has apparently agreed to be a demonstration subject. Dr. Shafik has me wait in the corridor outside an empty ward. Behind the door, voices volley in agitated Arabic. The discussion stops, and Dr. Shafik opens the door. A woman in blue surgical scrubs stands in the corner with her arms crossed.

Dr. Shafik takes me aside. “I am very sorry, but our patient for the reflexes of the vagina…She refused!” I am at once dismayed and relieved. No one should have to endure balloon catheters on my account. In place of the woman in blue, Dr. Shafik has recruited a young man, also dressed in scrubs. The man sits on the edge of a hospital bed, looking bored. I cast my mind to the teetering pile of Ahmed Shafik sexology papers on the desk in my hotel room and try to recall which ones pertain to men.

I have a fond hope that Dr. Shafik does not plan to demonstrate the penomotor reflex. When the tip of a penis is stimulated—by bumping against a cervix, say, or the opening to a vagina (or any other orifice, for that matter)—several muscles contract reflexively. Among them are an anal and a urethral sphincter. The closing of the latter prevents urine from mixing with semen in the urethra during ejaculation. The closing of the two together—let’s let Dr. Shafik say it—“prevents leak of urine or stools” during sex. Thanking you kindly, penomotor reflex. In his study, Dr. Shafik used a “steel rod…covered with a sponge” to stimulate a subject’s glans. At the moment, he is holding a telescoping silver pointer. As queasy as this prospect makes me, it would be less awkward than a demonstration of either of the two ejaculation-related reflexes Shafik has published papers on.

One of Shafik’s best-known contributions to ejaculatory knowledge was an extraordinary experiment undertaken in 1998 to help determine what it is, precisely, that triggers it. One theory held that ejaculation takes place when the buildup of semen in the prostatic sector of the urethra pushes against its walls with a requisite amount of pressure. (This preorgasm buildup of semen, a sort of massing of the troops from testes, seminal vesicles, and prostate, is called emission; it is emission that creates the sensation of can’t-stop-now “ejaculatory inevitability.”) Shafik’s study cast heavy doubt on the pressure-trigger theory. He inserted a tiny, expandable bulb into his subjects’ urethras and found that an expansion of the urethra comparable to what typically happens during emission failed to trigger the telltale muscular contractions of ejaculation. (Roy Levin’s guess is that the trigger for ejaculation is the moment when “the summation of all the positive arousing stimuli becomes greater than the negative inhibitor ones.”)

Happily, Shafik has in mind something nonejaculatory, something called the cremasteric reflex. He explains how the cremaster muscle automatically raises and lowers the testicles to cool or warm them, depending on the temperature. (The ideal for developing sperm is 95º F.) Shafik did not discover this reflex. It is well known and not the sort of thing one flies all the way to Cairo for. My guess is that he is showing it to me simply to have something to show me.

Shafik addresses the man on the bed, who stands and pulls down his pants. He holds his shirt up out of the way, his hand held flat against his torso. His head is turned to the side, and he gazes stoically into the distance. Despite the circumstances, there is something noble, almost Napoleonic, about his pose. The demonstration is over in a moment, and the man leaves the room. Later, in the lobby café, he will pass by my table and we will pretend not to recognize each other.

s
exually, Egypt today sounds like the United States in the forties and fifties. After the demonstration, I spent some time talking with Saffa El-Kholy, the Egyptian journalist who had come to interview Shafik. The previous year, she told me, she had produced a four-part series on sex that included an invitation to email the program with questions. Although the narration had made it clear that questions would be used anonymously, viewers would often open up a Hotmail account just to pose their questions. El-Kholy heard from women who’ve “had two orgasms in eight years and aren’t sure what the fuss is about.” Men who blame their impotence on their wives or, worse, try to keep their wives from having orgasms, so that in the event they (the men) ever become impotent, the wife won’t care. El-Kholy: “If you never eat a kiwi, you never want a kiwi.”

Though Shafik’s research is written up for academic journals, he is comfortable speaking in layman’s terms—and does so often for TV. I asked him whether people who hear about his work shun him or find him strange or immoral. “Yes, yes, of course,” he replied. “It doesn’t discourage me. It’s a challenge.”

Shafik is similarly untroubled by his low profile in the global community of sex research. Several researchers that I spoke with had not heard of him. In part, this has come about because Shafik does not attend sex-research conferences. And because he only intermittently responds to email. “He’s not a team player,” says Roy Levin, who long ago gave up attempts at correspondence. The exchange of ideas and the constructive critiques that lie at the heart of Western science make Shafik antsy. He satisfies his own curiosity on a given subject, and then he moves on. As he puts it: “I always never want to go back.”

Though Shafik’s isolation may compromise his science—or at the very least, his international standing—he is to be commended. As one of the few people in Egypt talking publicly about sex, Shafik performs an even more important role than that of the rogue scientist. If no one on Egyptian TV talks about sex, then no one will talk about it in the café or the bedroom or the doctor’s office. Misunderstanding and ignorance will spread. If five hundred unsatisfied women watch Dr. Shafik on television, maybe ten will be encouraged to talk to their husbands. And maybe one or two will eat more kiwis.

Monkey Do

The Secret Sway of Hormones

h
omo sapiens
is one of the few species on earth that care if they’re seen having sex. The impala is unconcerned. The dingo roundly flaunts it. A masturbating chimpanzee will stare straight at you. To any creature other than you and I and 6 billion other privacy-needing
H. sapiens
, sex is like peeling a mango or scratching your ear. It’s just something you do sometimes. This morning, sitting on an observation platform high above a playground-sized rhesus enclosure at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center with researcher Kim Wallen, I have watched a half-dozen monkey couplings, and I’m fairly certain that the situation has caused me more discomfort than it has them.

Wallen and I are here not because of the differences between the sex lives of humans and monkeys, but because of some surprising similarities. Wallen, whom we met in chapter 3, is a professor of behavioral neuroendocrinology at Emory University. He studies sexual desire and the hormones that influence it. Wallen’s Female Sexuality Project involves testing different combinations of hormones to see how they effect libido. The hormones are being given to rhesus monkeys, not because monkeys complain about dampened libidos, but because women do—and because monkeys and women have the same hormones, and these hormones affect them in many of the same sorts of ways.