NET EFFECT
Enter Marwa Rakha, Egypt’s agony aunt for the online generation. “Walking media” is how Rakha has described herself; she’s been dispensing personal advice and spiky social commentary in print and on TV, radio, and the Internet since the mid-2000s. Women like Tahrir Square Sally consider her an inspiration. “Many girls were liberated because of Marwa Rakha. She helped and supported them, because of her very strong presence in the social networks. These wild women, they make a difference in the younger generation,” she said admiringly. Every week brings Rakha e-mails and Facebook messages from lovelorn, angst-ridden youth across Egypt and the wider Arab world, seeking her counsel on everything from straight-up premarital sex and conjugal life to sadomasochism and stalking. If you want to know about sex and the single Arab, talk to Rakha.
Rakha’s standard disclaimer to correspondents is that she’s neither a physician nor a therapist. “It’s just that I’ve been in so many relationships. So I know where it’s going, so I can tell people,” she explained as we sat on dusty plastic chairs at a sidewalk café in Borsa, Cairo’s colonial-era financial district, now pedestrianized in a brave attempt to claw back some space from the relentless traffic. “Every story I hear relates to something in my life. I’ve been in their shoes and I understand their fears.”
Rakha started out as a successful, but ultimately dissatisfied, marketing executive. “I was really bored, and this kind of boredom led me to all sorts of relationship problems, starting with picking the wrong guy, to plaguing the guy, to nagging the guy, to building a whole world around the guy, to eventually [being] just heartbroken in no time.” From such experience, she began helping friends in similar straits, who encouraged her to publish her advice. “When I saw my name on [my first article], I panicked. Should I publish that? It’s like stripping naked in the street. I can’t tell people I’ve had my heart broken that bad, and I can’t tell people that I’ve suffered that much. I just can’t.”
Rakha overcame her reservations, however, and began blogging in 2005; in what was then a new trend in Arabic publishing, these soul-baring posts were collected in her first book, The Poison Tree. From there her career took off, with magazine columns, her own show on satellite TV, and a regular gig on Internet radio, as well as a website, a Facebook page, and tweets followed by thousands. Rakha tells it as it is and has little time for those who want her to soften the line. “I’m not an entertainer. I don’t go out there to strip to entertain the guests. I have a mission and I have a message, and if we are not on the same wavelength, so be it.”
Rakha’s openness, let alone the details of her own dating history, marks her as a taboo breaker in Egyptian society. “Her face is unveiled and she’s on her way to untying her hair” is how my grandmother used to describe daring women of her own generation. Rakha is often mistaken for—or rather, accused of being—a foreigner, her unconventional attitudes rendered all the more alien by her fair complexion, hijab-free chestnut curls, and perfect English. “A lot of people think I have lived all my life in the States and that I come here with a Western culture trying to change our culture.” Rakha took a long draw on her shisha. “I’m a typical middle-class girl. I’m not bint balad awi [hoi polloi]. And I’m not the elite thing. I’m somewhere in between.”
Now in her late thirties, Rakha found religion in her youth, in the late 1980s. “I was veiled for six years, when I was fifteen until I was twenty-one. I didn’t know it was part of Islam or Qur’an. I just put it on and I looked nice. And I had all those nice colorful scarves that would accentuate my eyes. How could I know it was religious? At the time, it was quite unheard of. It wasn’t like now at all.” She laughed. “Then I got really, really religious. Like really religious. No TV, no pictures on the wall, no this and no that. I became kind of an extremist in my life. I was listening to this shaykh [on cassette tape]. I was one of his devout followers. It was fear, fear of God. The tapes I had were all, ‘You’re gonna die.’ He used to tell us that women who are not veiled are gonna be in hell and they’re gonna be hanging from their hair. Two years fashion, and the other was this.”
By the time Rakha reached university, the fundamentalist appeal had started to fade, and after graduation she removed her hijab. “In my last two years of college, I got busy with my studies and reports and stuff. So I kind of loosened up a bit and I wasn’t listening as much [to the tapes] as I was before,” she said. “And then after I graduated [and] I got my first job, it just felt wrong. It was like I was wearing something that was very conservative but I was the person talking to you now. I was a mismatch.”
By then, she also had a boyfriend, a further catalyst for change. Although, as we’ve seen, it’s hard to get a statistical grip on such relations in Egypt, an evening stroll along the corniche in Cairo or Alexandria, weaving between canoodling couples, is enough to show that young people are not waiting for marriage to get to know the opposite sex. But just how carnal is their knowledge? Does having a boyfriend also mean you’re having sex? Rakha set me straight on middle-class Cairo’s mating rituals. “For a growing number of men, sex is an expectation in a relationship; if she doesn’t agree, he’s going to move on to another girlfriend. But for others, it’s still a test.” These men, she said, will make overtures—try to hold a woman’s hand or grab a kiss—as part of their assessment. “You fail if you’ve had relationships.” Rakha sighed. “They want to make sure she’s never had, and she never will.”
That’s not to say that women don’t. “Of course it happens all the time,” Rakha continued. “Making out, kissing, cuddling, having all those little getaways. Boyfriend-girlfriend is happening, always happening. Everything still happens, they just throw dust on it.” The Internet has made hooking up a lot easier for the minority of young Egyptians who are online, part of a rising tide of surfers post-uprising.7 “Even those girls who don’t go out, they’re online, chatting with four or five men at the same time,” says Rakha. She should know: Rakha spent a year on Adult Friend Finder—“the world’s largest sex dating site and swinger personals community,” so it describes itself—exploring how Egyptians, hundreds of thousands of whom are registered on the website, meet and mate in cyberspace (though not without risks, given that popular police pastime, Internet entrapment). Posing as “Jenny,” she was swamped with requests from Egyptian men, and women, looking for fantasy role-play, group sex, or other spice lacking in their relations in or out of marriage.8
In Rakha’s opinion, virtual cruising is not some elite diversion. Men who can’t afford a computer at home can go to an Internet café. Women, whose movements are more often supervised and circumscribed by their families, lack this easy access. In Egypt, while more than half of young men say they use the Internet outside the home, over 80 percent of young women have their connection under the family gaze—although their wealthier peers across the region, with their own rooms and laptops, have a little more latitude. For those lacking such privacy, there’s the mobile phone, prize possession of more than half of young men and around a third of young women in Egypt, with near blanket ownership among the most educated and wealthiest urban youth.9 Technology-assisted flirtation is a Pan-Arab phenomenon. Indeed, in more overtly segregated societies, like that of Saudi Arabia, Bluetooth has proved a boon to those looking for a little action: just head to the mall, switch your phone to “discoverable” mode, and wait for the messages to pour in.10
Just how connected youth are in Egypt and across the Arab world became clear during the uprisings that began this decade, when social media—from Facebook to text messaging—mobilized millions, even as governments tried to pull the plug on the networks.11 The foundation for this electronic outpouring was laid in less tumultuous times, in bedrooms and Internet cafés across the region. Connectivity has soared since 2011; Egypt’s Facebook generation is no longer just young people but their parents as well. A “robot leash” is how some women describe their mobile phones, which allow anxious parents to keep regular tabs on their movements
. Nonetheless, technology allows young people at least a chance to slip family moorings, if only in cyberspace, and in the wake of the uprisings, a growing number are testing the waters of personal and sexual expression.
A case in point is Aliaa Elmahdy, the “Nude Photo Revolutionary,” whose blog shot to international notoriety when she posted photos of herself naked.12 Although pictures of Arab women baring all are easy enough to find online, Elmahdy gave her unveiling a distinctly political spin, lashing out at a culture of censorship and “echoing screams against a society of violence, racism, sexism, sexual harassment and hypocrisy.” Rather than remain anonymous, Elmahdy tweeted her name, thereby revealing her identity as a middle-class student at Egypt’s elite American University in Cairo. The photos themselves, more Victorian postcard than Victoria’s Secret, nonetheless excited a firestorm of interest, with more than a million hits in a couple of days. As if that weren’t enough of a shock for local audiences, Elmahdy let it all hang out in an interview with CNN, in which she discussed losing her virginity, living with her boyfriend (a well-known Egyptian blogger and former political prisoner), fighting with her parents, and being an atheist.13
Comments on the photos swung from hellfire damnation to enthusiastic congratulations for taking charge of her own body and challenging the limits of expression, the attacks vastly outweighing the applause. A political youth movement said to be associated with Elmahdy quickly moved to squelch all rumors that she was a member and condemned her actions as a government plot to undermine their “liberal” reputation.14 Meanwhile, a group of young conservative lawyers lodged a case with Egypt’s prosecutor general to punish Elmahdy and her boyfriend for violating shari’a, corrupting society, and tarnishing the spirit of Tahrir Square.15 “Asking for sexual freedoms, they are giving the uprising a bad name,” said the group, calling for the full force of the law to be applied.16 The Elmahdy affair was reminiscent of an episode just two years earlier, in which a hapless Saudi Arabian in Jeddah talked frankly about his sex life on Pan-Arab satellite TV and ended up sentenced to five years in prison and a thousand lashes for “publicly boasting of sin.”17
Such public displays attract enormous attention because they remain so rare: research across the Arab region shows that even in the virtual world, social constraints still apply, especially to women.18 And no matter how daring they are online, how far women will go off-line depends on what they’re looking for, says Rakha. “There’s a big difference between a wife and a girlfriend. If you’re going to be a wife, and you have sex before marriage, you have a problem. You have sex before marriage, he’s not going to marry you. Because you’re loose, because you’re easy. Most of the girls in the A [upper] class I know, they would do everything with a guy, except for intercourse.” That everything includes what one Egyptian friend described to me as a “blue job” (which turned out, on further inquiry, to be fellatio). And where researchers have been able to ask the question—in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, for example—anal and superficial sex appear to be common enough practices among single Arabs as well.19
CUT AND CHASTE
Keeping women on the straight and narrow is more than a matter of “just say no”; in Egypt one common tool of enforcement is female genital cutting.20 It is an ancient custom, dating into the Pharaonic period, well before the arrival of both Christianity and Islam.21 Fast-forward to the twenty-first century and the practice is still widespread; according to the 2008 national survey of ever-married Egyptian women under fifty, more than 90 percent have been circumcised.22 Egyptians sometimes call the practice tahara, which means “purification,” but it is often referred to in English as female genital mutilation (FGM). Between these poles of beauty and butchery lies a more neutral term, khitan al-inath, which translates to “female circumcision,” but what we’re talking about here is a more complicated business than a quick snip of the foreskin. FGM can take many forms, but the standard procedure in Egypt is removal of the skin covering the clitoris, usually along with the clitoris itself, and often taking the neighboring tiny flaps of flesh as well.23 Girls generally go under the blade around nine to twelve years of age, with little warning, let alone consent. Depending on the skill of the practitioner, what’s left is a smooth opening to the vagina and vivid, often jagged, memories for many women.24
“I’m having my daughters done next week,” Umm Muhammad told me as we sat in her tiny, tidy living room drinking bottles of 7Up. Umm Muhammad lives with her handyman husband, her twentysomething unmarried son, and two young daughters in a two-room apartment on a dusty side street in Helwan, a suburb south of Cairo. Helwan is not exactly leafy: in the distance I saw what looked like gleaming towers looming over the scrappy main thoroughfare, but these turned out to be the smokestacks of the town’s famous cement works. Umm Muhammad is in her forties, a substantial figure in a plain blue galabiya and green hijab. She’s quietly good-humored, but she runs a tight ship. There’s no satellite dish to the family TV, and their aging PC does not have an Internet connection because, her son grumbles, his mother doesn’t want him watching “bad things”—meaning porn.
As Umm Muhammad bustled about, her friend Magda—a small, lively woman, like a tiny sparrow in her neat brown gown and headscarf—filled in the details. Magda is the neighborhood expert on FGM, because it’s a large part of how she makes a living. She’s a twenty-first-century daya, an untraditional traditional midwife. Historically, the daya was the mainstay of women’s health in Egypt, but with the growth of the medical profession, much of a daya’s job—delivering babies, dealing with gynecological problems—has passed to doctors, particularly in urban areas. This includes FGM: three-quarters of girls under seventeen in Egypt have been circumcised not by a daya as in older generations but by a doctor or nurse.25 This is largely the consequence of anti-FGM campaigns, which stressed the associated health risks: infection, uncontrolled bleeding, severe pain, even death. As a result, parents have turned to what they consider a safe pair of hands—a physician’s—and found a willing set of practitioners, who, if not convinced on moral or social grounds, were understandably happy to supplement their meager public sector incomes with upwards of EGP 100 (USD 16) per procedure.
Magda learned to circumcise at the local medical clinic, where she worked as a nurse’s aide when her husband died, leaving her to support one young daughter and another on the way. When the resident doctor left the district, she took her tools and set herself up as a daya. She is proud of her professional approach to the business of FGM, which begins with a careful diagnosis. “A lot of women come to me to ask me for advice and to circumcise their daughters. I see the girls and I say if she needs it or not after I check her. If the lips of her sexual part are big like leaves and the shape is not good, she needs the operation.” Part of the concern here stems from a belief that uncircumcised, flapping labia may make penetration, and therefore conception, more difficult. “I commonly use a mashrat [scalpel], and I first give her bing [anesthetic], because I am a nurse, not like the others who cut with primitive tools,” she continued. Magda speaks from experience close to home. “My [eldest] daughter had the operation twice: the first time was not beautiful, so I took her to the doctor and he told me she needs to clean the shape, the place, so it was done [again]. My second daughter, who is studying nursing, I did her by myself because I learnt and I had the experience.”
The drive to circumscribe FGM has been running for decades in Egypt, but it picked up speed around 1994, the year Cairo hosted a pivotal international conference on population and development, one of the first concerted efforts to put sexual and reproductive rights on the international agenda. To mark the event, CNN broadcast a now-infamous video of an actual circumcision, which made for extremely queasy viewing.26 Since then, millions of dollars have been poured into fighting FGM, with nationwide campaigns assisted by an army of international agencies and local NGOs. National task forces were formed, fatwas were handed down, and the airwaves hummed with talk shows and TV commercials, reaching alm
ost three-quarters of Egyptian women, trying to persuade them to break with FGM.
The legal standing of FGM makes little difference to the ladies of Helwan. The deaths in 2007 of two girls during FGM in as many months put pressure on the Mubarak government to take action beyond the bans and restrictions that had been issued, and ignored, for decades. The following year, the government forced a law across fierce parliamentary opposition from representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood to punish those performing FGM (and by extension, parents, as their accomplices) with a fine of up to EGP 5,000 and two years in prison. Magda is skeptical that law on its own can do much to deter the practice. As with so much of the legislation relating to women and children passed during the Mubarak regime, the law is suspected by Magda and other FGM supporters of having more to do with outside influence than homegrown attitudes. To her, FGM is a private matter, not an affair of state. “In the villages, people make circumcision a lot and do not put in mind the government decisions. I believe there is no need to prevent circumcision. I see they [the government] want to do that [ban the practice] to be like Western countries.”
Law aside, FGM is traditionally a quiet affair, without the noisy celebrations that mark male circumcision. And so, Magda reckons, if doctors know and trust a family, they will be happy to pocket the money and do it under the table; unless something goes seriously wrong during the procedure, no one will be the wiser. But doctors, even freshly minted ones, are often as staunchly supportive of the practice as their clients.27 As a recent medical graduate explained to me, physicians themselves are under extreme pressure, from both fellow practitioners and local communities, to do the job. In any case, the law allows FGM on the grounds of “medical necessity,” which leaves physicians plenty of wiggle room. And if all else fails, mothers can always find a daya in a far-flung village—back to where it all began.
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