Sex and the Citadel (31 page)

Local NGOs, though, have had a little more success working inside communities, raising awareness of the medical and psychological risks associated with these sorts of marriages, and encouraging girls’ education as one step on the long path to empowerment. The key to getting families out of the trade is economics: there are projects to create community savings pools that women can dip into in times of trouble, as well as vocational training and other income-generating alternatives—though it’s hard to imagine handicrafts proving quite as lucrative as hand jobs. The best those working to eliminate summer marriage are hoping for, in the uncertainty of the new order, is to hold on to the few gains that were made in recent years.

The uprising did have an immediate, if unintentional, impact on the summer marriage trade, largely because the stream of Gulf visitors dried to a trickle amid stories of lawlessness on the streets of Cairo; Amir had scarcely a dozen clients the summer following the upheaval, less than a third of his regular clientele. But he was optimistic that recent events would, ultimately, prove something of a boon. “Summer marriage will take some time to recover. When the security [situation] is solved, a lot of marriages will take place. Because after the revolution, and being a democracy, a lot of Arabs will want to come and see what happened, so there is a better chance for more customers, more clients. Even if Egypt is a democracy, even if there is economic improvement, this business will continue,” Amir confidently concluded.

None of this bodes well for Samia and her peers, who are looking for a different sort of life. Even if the laws were watertight, they’d offer them little relief: since Samia is over eighteen, restrictions on child marriage are not relevant. Nor are the laws on prostitution applicable, since her relationship is covered by an Islamically
accepted marriage contract. And though, according to the letter of the law, she is being trafficked—by her own father, no less—the chances of her coming forward as a victim, or bringing a case against her father, are slim. It’s the same for any family shame, be it wife beating, incest, rape, or any of the countless other personal tragedies: the vast majority of women suffer in silence, as the director of one drop-in center for battered women in downtown Cairo told me, and will continue to do so until the price of speaking out no longer outweighs the costs of endurance. The ties that bind Samia to her summer job—financial need, family duty, and an Islamically grounded resignation to her lot—are hard to loosen, and for as long as Egypt welcomes a steady stream of Gulf visitors and their spending sprees, demand for her services is likely to continue.

“THE WHOLE COUNTRY IS IN PROSTITUTION”

Summer marriage is only one face of prostitution in Egypt. Sex work is arguably a success story of Egypt’s
infitah
, a triumph of private enterprise offering an array of services to suit all tastes and budgets—albeit with a heavy human price. Sex work is one of the clearest reflections of the ongoing power of patriarchy in Egypt and the wider Arab world, and a measure of just how conflicted individuals and their societies are over sex, proclaiming their Islamic credentials while ignoring, or indeed perpetrating, the exploitation and abuse of those who are in the business, by consent or coercion. In the Arab region, female sex workers carry a triple burden: as women who not only have sex outside of marriage but trade in it as well. This stigma, reinforced in law, leads them to keep quiet. As a consequence, sex work is both the most obvious and the most hidden aspect of sexual life in Egypt and the wider Arab world, and this makes these women getting their fair share of the prospective political, social, and economic gains of the region’s uprisings all the more difficult.

Just how many sex workers there are in Cairo, let alone in Egypt
as a whole, is a matter of guesswork. But a quick trawl through the International Sex Guide, “the Internet’s largest sex travel website,” where men looking for action swap tips, reveals a united nations of sex workers: Russian and Central European escorts, Chinese masseuses offering something on the side, Sudanese refugees and Moroccan migrants working the dance floor, Egyptian women available to pick up off the street or to order up by mobile phone in a playground stretching from the infamous bars and clubs of the main drag to the pyramids, and rented apartments in Mohandeseen to massage parlors in the leafy expat haven of Maadi to a landmark five-star hotel on the Nile where commercial sex workers—male and female—are not only tolerated by management but discreetly offered to guests as off-menu room service. According to one estimate, there are at least eight hundred hot spots for female sex work in Cairo alone.
⁹

“The whole country is in prostitution,” laughed Jihane, a chubby, bubbly woman in her midtwenties. She should know; Jihane sells sex to pay for her drug habit. We met at a private drug rehabilitation center in Cairo—one of the few to cater specifically to the swollen ranks of female addicts, who face even more stigma than their male counterparts. Jihane is on the more privileged side of Cairo’s social spectrum: she comes from an educated, middle-class family, her Arabic peppered with French. In her early teens, Jihane started taking drugs with school friends—first
bangu
(a form of hashish), then pills, and on to heroin. This graduation was prompted in part by economics; in recent years, the street price of heroin has fallen, all the faster after the uprising, to the point where it’s possible to pick up an eighth of a gram for around EGP 60—one of the few goods whose price has not skyrocketed in the years of double-digit inflation.

It was through her friends at school that Jihane got hooked on drugs; at first she used pocket money from her unsuspecting parents, who, like many middle-class Egyptian couples, were too busy working to stop the family from falling down the economic ladder to keep a close eye on the kids. Eventually, Jihane dropped out of school, left home, and moved in with her dealers. Direct
bartering—sex for drugs—was how she managed to maintain her habit for a while, but then she drifted into the cash-only business, along with her friends.

Jihane’s crowd charges a client EGP 100 on up for full vaginal intercourse. According to Jihane, her more successful colleagues are making as much as EGP 4,000 a day, and virgins—some of whom are born into a family business—command even more at their debut. Most, women, however, come to sex work after losing their virginity through marriage, a failed love affair, or sexual abuse. Many in Jihane’s circle are working for pimps
—mi’arrasiin
, in colloquial Egyptian—husbands or boyfriends, but often other women too, themselves former sex workers, whose retirement plan consists of an apartment and a client roster passed on to younger women who use the flat as their workplace. It’s a well-established pattern of succession: “If the prostitute repented, she would go pimping,” so the Egyptian saying goes, referring to those—post-Mubarak era politicians, for instance—whose promises of change amount to nothing more than business as usual.

Because of all the obstacles to sex before marriage, I assumed that most of her clientele were single men, but Jihane set me straight. For her, at least, they’re mainly married men looking for sexual excitement lacking in their conjugal relations. “In America, a girl before getting married can watch a sex film and she will get experience; she may have sex with a boy, so she is not a girl [virgin] now. But the girl in Egypt goes to her husband’s house and she is virgin. And she does not watch sex films. When she gets married, she does not know how to do anything. The girls who work in prostitution, they have got more ideas and more experience. But if the wife has got this experience, the husband will doubt her behavior. And even if he tries to teach her, she will tell him it’s
‘ayb
[shameful].”

I asked Jihane what she and her friends could offer that a wife might not. She reflected for a moment: “A girl [sex worker] can go into different positions, but his wife may be overweight and she cannot go into these. She doesn’t know how to move with him.” Anal sex—which, as we’ve seen, is a bone of contention between spouses—is also on the cards: EGP 300 a shot, according to Jihane’s
price list. And that’s not the only extra. “The girls working in prostitution have means [techniques] like sucking [fellatio]. There is no sucking with the wife. There are some men who try to be friendly with their wives and do this, but it will be a very strange thing if the man asks his wife to do this. Even if the wife does sucking for her husband, she does not have the experience of one who is doing it all day.” The bottom line, says Jihane, is expertise and enthusiasm, feigned or not. “If she [the sex worker] is not enjoying it,” Jihane reasoned, “she is like the one [the wife] at home, so she is not going to get the money.”

As do many tourist attractions in Egypt, Jihane’s circle practices tiered pricing—one rate for Egyptians, and a higher rate for foreigners. The big money comes from Gulf tourists, but unlike Samia and her peers, Jihane’s clique also offers a rather more specialized service: same-sex intercourse. “Some girls know that some Saudi women like this matter and they go to the hotels and meet the Saudi women and they pay more than the men,” Jihane observed. “I know a friend of mine, she has got a Saudi client woman, she goes to her place, and she gets paid three thousand dollars for two hours.” According to Jihane, some of her colleagues owe their professional development in this particular department to the Mubarak regime. “Here in Egypt, when there is a girl sitting in a café, the morals police may arrest her when she is overexposed [revealingly dressed]. In the first case, if she’s arrested, she will be discharged, but if it is a repeat, the second time she may get three years in prison. When she goes to the prison, the women have sex together. And then when they come outside again, they use this ability to have sex with women. So when they are arrested, after they have contact with the police, they work in the lesbian field.”

Same-sex-inclined Saudis aren’t the only female visitors in Egypt looking for action. Commercial sex work is one of the few equal opportunity employers in the country and across the Arab region; even heterosexual men have their corner of the business, or
bezness
, as it’s called in Tunisia. From Agadir to Aqaba, where there are Western women on vacation, you will find local men at their service. With soaring unemployment, young men from around
Egypt have been making their way to Dahab, a resort town on the Sinai Peninsula, and other tourist destinations along the Red Sea in search of a decent wage to support themselves and their families—and some of the best money in town comes from female visitors looking for a little attention and adventure. While the stereotype is that of a fifty-plus woman on the prowl for a much younger man, women in their twenties and thirties are increasingly flocking too. The attraction is more than just physical. “In a romantic desert setting … most women prefer romance to sex,” noted Anne Cumming, an aptly named English housewife who slept her way across the Arab region in the 1950s. “They want ambience and all the little attentions. They like the by-products of sex rather than its stark reality.”
¹⁰

For men, the by-products of sex are equally appealing: gifts ranging from mobile phones to houses, money enough to buy a motorcycle or start a new business. For some, who officially marry their foreign lovers, it is quite literally a ticket to another world; marriages between Egyptian men and foreign women have almost quadrupled in Egypt since 2005.
¹¹
In a separate line of business, Summer Marriage Mahmoud is also approached by female Arab visitors looking to marry Egyptian men. The women are in it for a passport, so the marriages have to be official and registered with the government. And they don’t come cheap: these women pay up to EGP 60,000 to buy a husband. For all the money changing hands, however, Mahmoud considers it tough work. “To find a groom is more difficult than finding a woman.” He sighed.

For men who take the plunge, there are other benefits too. With the rising cost, and therefore age, of marriage, along with the taboo of premarital sex, libidinous outlets are hard to come by for some young Egyptian men. Sex with a foreigner allows them to assert a key element of their masculinity—sexual potency—in a context outside of social norms. Part of this is place: beach resorts in the Arab region are largely new creations where the “locals”—hotel staff, tour guides, shopkeepers, dive instructors—are mainly men from other parts of the country working far from home. “In Dahab, I enjoy the freedom which I missed when I used to live ‘down
there’ [in the south].… When everybody is having sex outside of marriage, I can also do the same,” one waiter from Upper Egypt observed. “There are not family restrictions, and the society here is different. We have our own culture here.”
¹²

Western women are themselves another country when it comes to sex, with practices (oral sex), personal habits (depilation and ablution after intercourse, obligatory for Muslim women, are seemingly optional for foreigners), and sexual behavior considered so different from Egyptian women’s that the normal rules of engagement do not apply. As one man from Lower Egypt, with a long history of foreign relations, explained: “Once you watch a video you can never go back and listen to the radio.… You cannot compare Egyptian women (radio) with foreign ones (video). There is a big difference. Egyptian women do not express their sexuality; they do not need long sexual intercourse. Maybe it is because of circumcision. While foreign women require longer time and ask even for more.”
¹³
Further suspending reality is the inversion of conventional gender roles in these relations; while men still do the initial running, once a liaison is established, it’s the women who call the shots when it comes to finances.

To be sure, some of these relations end happily ever after. But a quick glance across women’s magazines and websites, with their travelers’ tales of broken hearts and emptied purses, shows that plenty do not: “My dream of great happiness broke into a thousand pieces,” “After the wedding he dropped his mask,” and “Was it all just a lie?” are not exactly the stuff of Harlequin Romance.
¹⁴
Women, however, have been striking back: the Web is full of blacklists offering names, numbers, addresses, and other personal details of Egyptian men who have screwed female tourists in more ways than one. These individual outpourings have also crystallized into organized campaigns. The Community of Interests Against Bezness, for example, was set up in 2003 by Evelyn Kern, a German journalist who was herself swept up, and let down, by a holiday romance in Tunisia (an experience she later wrote up in an autobiographical novel,
Sand in der Seele
[
Sand in the Soul
]). The group has been offering information and support to women in trouble,
as well as media outreach to raise awareness, and lobbying German authorities to help women who have lost their savings to the
bezness
.
¹⁵