Sex and the Citadel (34 page)

I joined them for a night on the town, and we walked the streets for hours. It was a slow evening in Casablanca, just after Eid al-Adha, one of the most important feasts in the Islamic calendar, and most of the women had gone back to their towns and villages to see their families. “You should have seen it just before,” Rima said. “We had seventy beneficiaries [of our outreach] a night, working to get money for presents, the sheep to slaughter.” As we turned one corner, a middle-aged woman, dressed in a dumpy beige burnoose, ambled up to us and started exchanging pleasantries. I thought she was just a friend of the team until I watched her walk away and pause to talk to a young man. “She’s an old hand,” Najma explained. It took me a moment to grasp exactly where her expertise lay. “The young men, they like older women,” said Rima, trying to talk away my bewildered expression. “They like them after menopause. You don’t have the problem with the period, and they’re less demanding.” Najma laughed. “Yes, especially when the men can’t do the business.” Younger men are certainly good for business: according to one survey of Moroccans under twenty-five, almost 40 percent of young men make their sexual debut with a sex worker, and close to two-thirds frequent them off and on.
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Next we headed down a side street and into a neon-lit basement. Two girls, dressed identically in skintight jeans, short puffy jackets with fur-trimmed hoods, and pink headbands, sat in a corner, nursing a drink as some young men stared from the bar and pool table. The girls looked a little nervous as Najma and Rima approached, but the women soon put them at ease. “We’re from ALCS, an organization that looks after women’s health,” they explained, and quickly managed to gain the girls’ confidence. Their story was brief and blunt: both in their early twenties, the women were studying hairdressing but came from poor families and so could not afford to keep up with their more fashionable classmates. To earn a little pocket money, they took themselves off to Casablanca’s Atlantic Corniche and were picked up by men cruising in cars, offering sex
at MAD 300 (USD 30) on up, six times what the woman we had just passed working her corner was asking.

The team gently probed the girls’ knowledge of how HIV is transmitted and how they could protect themselves. No, they never used condoms, they said, for one simple reason: they specialized in anal and oral relations, so it never struck them as necessary since pregnancy was not considered a likely prospect. Vaginal intercourse was out of the question, as far as they were concerned, because both had their eyes on marriage, and virginity—that is, an intact hymen—was essential; if they broke that seal and their husbands got angry, their apparently unsuspecting families would start asking awkward questions. Najma gave them a lesson on condoms and urged them to visit the ALCS office for free HIV testing and other services. She handed over some business cards to remind them, and on our way out, the owner of the café asked for a few as well. “Some owners, they welcome us; they know we are trying to keep the girls safe and sound,” Najma said. “But others, they don’t want us; they say we cause problems with the police, we encourage prostitution.”

Gaining the women’s trust isn’t easy. Their life histories are full of hard knocks, and what with the violence, the sporadic police harassment, the financial insecurity, and the general stigma associated with their work, they are inclined to be initially suspicious of any outstretched hand, which, in the past, would have been much more likely to beat them down than to pull them up. “I tell the women they are young, they are beautiful, they need to protect themselves,” said Rima. “It’s a question of developing their self-esteem.” Among the many services offered by ALCS are legal advice, information sessions on sexual and reproductive health, discussion circles, as well as the occasional hair and makeup class, to help the women take pride in themselves, and parties, organized by the women themselves, to give them a sense of community and a break from an unrelenting routine. “Eighty percent of the women in the work, they want to get out,” Najma told me, but the means to do so, like financial and other assistance to open their own tiny businesses, is hard to come by.

Elsewhere, ALCS’s condom message had clearly hit home. Our next stop was a café full of men watching a football game on TV. Clustered in the back corner, completely ignored by the patrons, were half a dozen women in velour burnooses, drinking tea and smoking. It looked like a coffee morning of housewives, but the reality was a little different: all the women present, from eighteen to forty-five years old, were sex workers, on a break between clients. They eagerly took the condoms offered by the team and told me they insisted that clients use them. Money is tight for these women, who have little education and few other options; most were divorcées who took up sex work to make ends meet and support their children when their husbands left them high and dry. If a client refused to use protection, I asked, could they really afford to say no? “ ‘Go to your mother!’ we tell them.” The women laughed. So long as the group holds the line on condoms, those clients who refuse will find it hard to get laid anywhere in the vicinity. Although significantly higher than in Egypt, condom use is far from systemic in Morocco’s sex trade. Many women would prefer to use female condoms, but these are more expensive and hard to come by. Although most sex workers are aware of the benefits of male condoms and where to find them, they have plenty of reasons not to use them, including client objections and the fear that the mere suggestion of protection implies that they themselves are infected, which would be bad for business.
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While direct outreach to clients remains tricky, teaching the women how to negotiate condom use is key. “The woman, when she has confidence in herself, she wants to protect herself and to save her health. In this case, she can transmit the message to her clients,” Rima explained. There are other techniques of persuasion as well. Back at base I was shown an array of brightly colored plastic penises that sex workers use to practice putting on condoms with their mouths—one way to encourage clients to comply. But such advanced skills can fall foul of conservatives: when one ALCS instructor—in a hijab, no less—was broadcast on French satellite TV demonstrating oral delivery of condoms, outrage erupted at
home and she was temporarily run out of her neighborhood. The resulting publicity, however, raised public awareness, and, says ALCS, there has been a slight uptick in condom sales ever since.

Quiet efforts are being made to transplant the Moroccan experience elsewhere in the region, including Cairo. More than sixty years after my father took that tram down Clot Bey Street, I found myself in the very same spot, watching Cairo’s working girls go about their business. In a café up a narrow flight of stairs, a couple of women seated on divans were wrapped in close conversation; across the room, a pair of clients whiled away the time, smoking shisha and playing backgammon. It was a classic scene—one of Cairo through the ages—but for the ring of mobile phones and the subject of conversation: how the women could protect themselves against HIV and other occupational hazards.

This outreach program, sending “peers” (that is, former sex workers) to spread the good word, is even harder in Cairo than it is in Casablanca. There are scarcely a handful of NGOs in Cairo and Alexandria reaching out to female sex workers, and funding is forever tight. Most of the work is done behind closed doors, in drop-in centers offering legal, medical, and psychological support. For a time, the uprising made their job even tougher than usual. Before the events of 2011, Egypt’s vast security apparatus was a major headache for NGOs working with groups on the margins of society. Not only were sex workers regularly apprehended, and sexually exploited, by police, but the arrests often included outreach workers as well, whom government ministries were willing to have do the work in the shadows, but reluctant to publicly acknowledge with written authorization. “The police were dealing in a very rough way with all the people—sex workers, ordinary citizens, anyone,” one of the outreach workers told me, describing her various arrests. “I was supposed to be afraid and weep and beg ‘Please forgive me,’ but I didn’t do anything wrong, so I didn’t do this. He [the policeman] was upset and provoked and so I spent a horrible night at the police station.” This, however, was kid-glove treatment compared with other tales of police brutality, behavior
that put Egypt’s law enforcement personnel in front of the firing line when the uprising broke out.

The result, in the months that followed, was a far more passive approach to policing Cairo, which in turn brought new problems for outreach workers. “Before [the revolt], the girls would sit in a place and wait one or two hours for a client, so we would have time to work,” another member of the outreach team explained. “[But afterward] in public places, they sit freely and take clients, many clients, right away; the clients feel freer too. There is no police, no security. It is much easier for the women, but for us it is harder because they have no time for us.” Fewer police raids also meant sex workers could more easily move their operations into private apartments, where
baltagiyya
(thugs) and pimps make outreach a risky proposition.

Further complicating matters is the rising voice of Islamists. Some of the sex workers who turned up at the drop-in center in the months following the uprising were clearly targets of their more overtly religious neighbors. “One of the beneficiaries came one day wearing niqab, because they are having pressure on them from the wives of Salafis. They say, ‘Unless you believe in your religion, the Christians will be rulers, they will catch the authority in Egypt.’ So they try to convince them on the religious side, but the real target is politics.” There was considerable anxiety among NGOs as to how far this pressure might go and how their work might be affected by the political ascendance of Islamic conservatives. In the months following the uprising, one drop-in center was besieged by both Salafis looking to shut down what they considered an immoral operation and by a group of thugs looking to pick up girls; the result was a punch-up between the two opposing factions—a scene that pretty well sums up the state of post-Mubarak Egypt.

Despite the current climate, some reformers dream of change. “Decriminalization—I do have hope. Because the revolution was based on two pillars—social justice and human rights—this is a very supportive environment for change,” one young lawyer working at an NGO told me. “We can use the cause of HIV, especially
if criminalization is affecting outreach.” In global debates on the future of sex work, decriminalization—that is, repealing criminal laws around all aspects of commercial sex and replacing them with regulation under civil codes, like in any other business, with separate criminal penalties to deal with trafficking, coercive sex, and sex with minors—is emerging as the preferred option of those with an interest in the health, safety, and human rights of sex workers. Legalization, in which the state plays a key role in regulating sex work, as it does in Tunisia and a handful of other countries in the Global South, creates as many problems as it solves—even with the refinements Zahaf envisages. In any case, given the rise of Islamic conservatism in Egypt in recent years, neither option is realistically in the cards—and it will take time for the pragmatism that characterized the faith of my forefathers, and that found a way to reconcile the needs of the flesh with the exigencies of the faith, to find its place again.

In the meantime, the most expedient measure would be a de facto decriminalization, in which authorities turn a blind eye to the practice, halting arrests of sex workers and allowing the slow expansion of efforts to provide these women with medical, legal, and social services. For example, a couple of NGOs in Cairo have been trying to soften the law’s impact in practice, training sex workers on their legal rights and what to do if they’re arrested. The hope is to expand such services to other parts of Egypt and to strengthen their voice by bringing in other NGOs—those working on women’s rights, for example—which currently steer clear of such controversial beneficiaries.

There’s nothing exceptional about the situation facing sex workers in Egypt and their colleagues across the Arab region. As a member of the Global Commission on HIV and the Law, I heard testimonies from sex workers from around the world, and there is a sobering consistency to their stories: economic insecurity, stigma, discrimination, violence, police harassment and brutality, poor access to health and legal services, and medical and psychological problems are just some of the daily challenges in this line of work. One difference, though, between sex workers in Cairo and,
say, Kolkata is that while the latter are organized into vocal groups to fight for members’ rights, sex workers in Egypt, and indeed across the Arab world, are still in the shadows. Of course, before the uprising, it was hard to establish an NGO in Egypt around any rights-based issue, let alone sex work. But now that possibilities for change, however long-term, are in the air, the ability of sex workers to organize, mobilize, and connect to the wider world of sex work activism will be key to them getting a piece of the promised gains of the new order—employment, education, and prosperity among them.

In Egypt, however, all this seems a distant prospect. “You can’t change the culture of a whole nation in five to ten years,” one outreach worker told me as we sat on Clot Bey Street. “It’s the upbringing, how we are raised. [For example], the girl who is not covered is not a good girl, but it’s all about appearance.” At that very moment, a sex worker in a Saudi-style black hijab and abaya got up and walked past us to the door, with a much younger client in tow. The outreach worker looked to her, then straight at me when I asked if he expected any improvement in the situation of sex workers in the new scheme of things. “Not [in] five years, not fifty years,” he said matter-of-factly. “All this work will stay under the table.”

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Dare to Be Different