Whether Amany and her generation will, in fact, behave any differently from their parents in matters ranging from family life to Egypt’s political future is the big question. Opinion polls suggest that on many issues—particularly as they relate to gender and sex—young people across the Arab region are even more conservative than their elders. But talk to these same youth in private and they express dreams and desires that belie such stern appearances. Young Egyptians—especially young women—continue to walk a fine line between public conformity and private fulfillment. But for one spectacular moment, in the uprising of 2011, public and private aligned.
The postrevolutionary reality has not turned out as many had hoped, and old men are once again in charge, having deftly out-maneuvered their less experienced sons and daughters. But just because they are not out in front does not mean these youth are out of sight; if they play the next decade right, study their societies, build their knowledge, and hone their tactics, then they could well bring about the change that Amany dreams of for herself and her children—starting, as we’ll see in the next chapter, with a few foundation stones.
4
Facts of Life
A clever woman can spin yarn with a donkey’s thighbone.
—My grandmother, on making the most of what you’re given
In a blood-red basement in Cairo, I walked in on a beautiful young woman on the phone, talking sex. “Trust us,” she wrapped up with a caller. “We are dealing with people from different levels. No one will know anything.” It’s a pity he could only hear her voice, because she really was a sight: flawless olive skin and full red lips, her beautifully manicured fingers brushing back a lock of thick, glossy hair from jet-black, almond-shaped eyes. Imagine Nefertiti on toll-free. It was a quiet night, she told me; usually, there are around forty calls a day. A lot for masturbation, she said. Oral sex too, and anal intercourse from time to time.
Now, if you have a mobile, and money, in the Arab world, it’s not hard to find a woman willing to provide a little aural stimulation. A good place to start is the back channels of your TV. For those tuned to an obliging satellite, surfing the far-flung spectrum brings a wave of dial-in sex ads, much to the public fury of Islamic conservatives who threaten to pull the plug. Many of these ads are foreign—Turkish, German, Thai—but there is plenty on offer in Arabic as well: Arab Sex Club, Arab XXX, Arab Babes. It’s a fairly standard service: still shots of busty, ivory-skinned nudes in various states of arousal, playing with themselves or going down on each other. For the more traditionally inclined, some of the women are wearing hijabs or niqabs—and nothing else. In a rare display of Pan-Arab unity, the flags of most countries in the region flash across the screen, accompanied by local numbers. The sound track features sample conversations—“Ah, ah, habibi, more, more” and similarly encouraging words.
Back in Cairo, however, that lovely young woman at the end of the line was part of a more specialized service. She’s a doctor working with Shababna (Our Youth), a telephone help line to answer young people’s questions about health in general and sex in particular. Six days a week, twelve hours a day, two physicians—one male, one female—are standing by to answer calls and texts from across the country. “You can’t imagine the misinformation available. It’s tremendous,” said Mamdouh Wahba, a grandfatherly gynecologist based in Cairo, who founded Shababna. Wahba is head of the Egyptian Family Health Society, an NGO specializing in reproductive health, and has spent much of the past decade trying to dispel the fog of youthful confusion over sex and reproduction. It’s no joke, but you can’t help laughing with Wahba when he recalls some of the misconceptions he’s had to deal with: “They don’t wash underwear of girls and boys together just in case they get pregnant. Of course the menstrual blood is rotten blood that the body has to get rid of every month; if you don’t have your period, you are poisoned.” And then there is the stern warning that some girls, especially those from rural areas, receive on the perils of drinking tea and coffee, thought to excite them into unseemly behavior. Not to mention that old chestnut, masturbation (known as al-‘ada al-sirriyya, or “the secret habit,” in Egyptian Arabic) and its perils, including blindness, madness, impotence, and God’s wrath.1
At their tiny call center, Rania and her colleague, Ahmed, were at the ready, laptops fired up to surf the Web for additional information should young callers tax their already impressive body of knowledge.2 These two take their jobs very seriously. “We still have a taboo around our sexual life. As a community, we believe this is our culture. And this is a big problem in our society,” said Ahmed. Rania is proud of her job: “I am here to provide service to young people, and to change wrong ideas about relationships, especially in Egypt.” Still, she preferred not to talk about her work in any great detail off the job: “I don’t tell my family. I just say I talk to teenagers about their problems.”
Those problems come fast and furious for youth—especially young women—who move beyond the social nucleus of sex within marriage. People are quick to blame them for religious or moral laxity, but to my mind, the real failing lies in the gap between the rhetoric toward, and the reality of, Arab youth. Over the past decade, there has been no end of official statements, glossy reports, multimillion-dollar projects, and high-profile conferences extolling the power and possibilities of the region’s young people. Yet those in authority, from parents to presidents, have failed to provide their sons and daughters with the basic tools of empowerment in key aspects of their lives, including that most private part—sexuality.
The fear is of the slippery slope: if young people were actually given accurate and accessible information to understand the risks and rewards of sexual life, if condoms and abortion were more easily available, if illegitimacy were less of a stigma, then this would speed the way toward zina—no matter the international evidence to the contrary. On this downward journey, it’s not just the ends, but the means as well that have come to be seen as haram; so that’s no to sexual education and condoms and abortion in many people’s minds, despite the scope of permissibility within Islam. While parents are clearly concerned about the influence of “modern life” on their young, from the sexual content of movies and the Internet to the decline of extended family surveillance, they are equally anxious about providing young people with the information and services to make sense of it all.
The central deficit here is trust, the absence of which is a feature of authoritarian regimes—from national politics to personal life. As the largest demographic cohort, young people are seen, and increasingly heard—as recent political upheavals clearly demonstrate—but they are not necessarily to be trusted, especially when it comes to making decisions about their own lives. I know from my own family just how fiercely protective Egyptian parents can be, but that is not the same as preparing children for life, particularly when it comes to the means of reproduction. If democracy is, one day, to take root in Egypt and across the region, then young people need access to the tools of transformation—and the faith that they will use them well—in all areas of life, including sexuality.
Education is the place to start. When I ask teenage and twentysomething friends and family about their priorities for change in the coming years, education (along with employment) tops the list, and their anecdotes of classroom calamity are supported by surveys in Egypt and across the region.3 “In the government school, it’s not just bad, it’s the worst education ever,” one Cairo business school student turned protester told me, her hijab flapping in indignation. “The problem is the teacher, the way they deal with students, the equipment. It was awful, awful. Those years, I want to take those years off my life.” Her frustration is reflected in the grim standing of Egypt’s educational system in international rankings and by the countless reports on its shortcomings, among them underpaid staff, overcrowded facilities, stultifying curricula, and the unequal opportunities for those who can afford private tuition and those stuck with what the public system can provide. The winding down of Egypt
ian education is, in many ways, a mirror of the country’s fortunes over the past sixty years, from the high hopes of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s opening it to the masses to today’s mass failure.
Among the sorriest subjects in the schoolroom is “reproductive health,” as sex education is delicately called in Egypt.4 Few can forget the fiasco of their near brush with the topic: that infamous lesson on reproductive anatomy that teachers are supposed to deliver in biology class but are often too embarrassed to communicate, instead sending students—especially girls—home to read on their own. Sexual topics are also covered in religion class, but it’s more dos and don’ts in the proper practice of Islam than practical advice for the modern teenager. Studies show that only a tiny fraction of young people in Egypt, including those in the wealthiest and most educated circles, get their information on puberty and reproduction from the classroom.5
Egypt is not unique in its discomfort with sexual education; there are plenty of other countries, developed and developing, that are squeamish about, if not downright hostile to, teaching youth about sex, even in its most mechanical, least arousing aspects. However, Egypt, like most of its Arab neighbors, has ratified a number of international agreements, among them the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which enjoin nations to provide young people with accurate and adequate information on sexual and reproductive life—though such agreements are under scrutiny by Islamists in the post-Mubarak period.6 In my father’s day, there were no such global covenants, but nor was learning about sex a big deal. Even citified families like ours preserved the umbilical cord to the ancestral village, and my father learned the facts of life from long talks with country cousins and by keeping a close eye on farmyard animals.7 With the shift away from the land, however, few young urban Egyptians have access to nature’s classroom anymore.
Parents are proving a poor alternative. For all their dependence on family, most young people I know in Egypt—indeed, across the Arab region—operate on a “don’t ask, don’t tell” basis with their parents when it comes to love and sex. According to the recent national youth survey, a majority of young women cite family—that is, mothers or aunts—as their main source of information on puberty and reproduction, but only around 5 percent of young men consult their elders on such matters, preferring to rely on friends, who are in much the same boat.8 The upshot is that men, the most sexually active as youth, are also the ones with the least access to reliable information. Not that parents are a particular font of wisdom on sexual and reproductive matters; in Egypt and its Arab neighbors, studies show that many mothers and fathers, for all their desire to be closer to their kids than they were with their own parents, are either themselves sketchy on the details or hesitant, for various reasons, to broach the nitty-gritty.9 Almost half of young men and women surveyed in Egypt claim to be dissatisfied with the information they’re receiving.10
SEX ON-SCREEN
Although reluctant to admit as much in official surveys, many young Egyptians are, unsurprisingly, gleaning their scattered fragments of sexual knowledge from TV and the Internet—movies and, in particular, porn being prime resources. In Cairo, for example, it is easy enough to find sexually explicit material, especially if you’re a man, illegal though it is. For those without the band-width—or privacy—to view online, there’s always the possibility of a trip downtown to a kiosk selling blockbuster CDs and DVDs, and a bit on the side. Even more convenient, you can send and receive short clips on your phone, thanks to Bluetooth and Egypt’s ever-expanding mobile network. But the locally produced material I’ve seen has a homemade feel to it—poor lighting, bad staging, and muffled sound. There isn’t much professional-quality porn from the region these days.11
Mainstream movies are another story. “Let me show you something.” I was looking at the Nile from an expensively furnished apartment in one of Cairo’s high-rises, my gaze drifting downriver, when my host called me back to admire a different watery view. He popped a disc into his DVD player, and a giant flat-screen TV suddenly filled with the video of a voluptuous woman in a shower, water cascading down her long black hair. It was Marwa—a Lebanese pop star—usually seen revealing her talents in assorted music videos. But never quite as exposed as this, naked and clutching her luxuriant breasts, eyes flickering up at the camera.
The scene was from a movie called Ahasiis (Feelings), which played in cinemas in Egypt and across the Arab region in 2010. The film portrays sexual frustration and infidelity from the perspective of four women, complete with lashings of melodrama. “In the movie I discuss the issues of men who practice sex with their wives without preparing women before and this leads them to betray their husbands,” the director Hani Girgis Fawzi told me as we sat in his living room, watching outtakes. There were a lot of them: a couple making out at the beach, another embracing in bed, and endless showers—ritual ablutions serving as useful cinematic shorthand for sexual relations. In the final release, there was no frontal nudity, no lingering kisses, and some pretty tame nods to intercourse, but sexy stuff nonetheless compared with movies of a few years earlier. “I cut maybe half of the scenes and they [the national censors] made [rated] the film only for adults and there was someone standing in front of cinemas to check IDs. Particularly for this movie, there are very strict rules.” Fawzi sighed, his HEAVY METAL T-shirt crumpling. “I do not know why especially me and my film.”
While other countries in the region have their own film industries, Egypt is the center of big-budget production, churning out movies and soap operas that saturate screens big and small across the Arab world. Over the past decade, Egyptian cinema has increasingly depicted sex—not the act itself, so much, but many of its associated taboos, including premarital relations, sexual harassment, and sex work. And this against a backdrop of official censorship, religious conservatism, and a political regime not exactly famous for freedom of expression.
These films diverge from the fashion of “clean cinema,” a recent trend in Egyptian filmmaking. In the 1960s and ’70s, sex was a part of cinema, and it was no big deal—bedroom scenes, sexual themes, and plenty of female flesh.12 But with the rise of Islamic conservatism at home, as well as new audiences in the oil-rich, socially conservative Gulf states, came a tendency in mainstream Egyptian cinema to eschew sexual subjects and risqué material (though extreme violence, including slapping female stars clear across the screen, is apparently clean enough to escape such scruples). Actresses made a song and dance of rejecting roles that required revealing costumes and so-called hot scenes; some went so far as to give up acting altogether, putting on hijabs and beating a high-profile retreat from cinema.13 Clean cinema came in for a polish with the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafis after the 2011 uprising and their push to edify Egyptian popular culture—that is, strip sex from movies, TV series, and music videos.
How far filmmakers can go in Egypt is, in large part, dictated by official censorship. To receive government approval to record and release a movie in Egypt, filmmakers have to submit their scripts, and final edits, to the censorship bureau. The law exhorts censors to generally uphold “public order, public morals and the supreme interest of the state.” Various ministerial directives have fleshed out the details, prohibiting the presentation of “sin and sinful acts or drug use in a way that encourages people to imitate them.… exciting sexual scenes that will offend polite behavior, as well as expressions and gestures which are impolite,” not to mention “calls to atheism or debasing heavenly religions” among other offenses.”14
While such regulations would appear to guarantee a halal ending, in practice, this charter gives the censor, and therefore filmmakers, considerable latitude. Ali Abu Shadi, a film historian and former national censor, gave me a rundown of hot-button topics: “Religion, then sex, then politics is the order of elements to be considered when cutting.” There’s no question that religion is the touchiest subject of all, and the highest religious authorities in the land—Al-Azhar and the Coptic Church—are given a chance to weigh
in. Abu Shadi gave me an example of what happens when faith and sex collide on-screen. “A movie came to me in my office to censor and the story was about a munaqqaba [veiled woman] who runs a prostitution ring and chooses her assistants and clients through the mosque,” he explained. “I know the niqab is not a religious requirement, but to insult this group would be disastrous and provoke a backlash. I haven’t refused any movie on the basis of sex, but this one I did because of the niqab.”
As for sex pure and simple, the red lines are clear, said Abu Shadi. “I would never accept or permit any movie with scenes of sex or showing bodies of men or women,” he noted. “But I could accept it if the woman were covered under bedsheets.” Yet Abu Shadi sees the censor’s role not as limiting a filmmaker’s scope for expression but rather expanding it—what he called “creativity in censorship”—against conservative audiences that might otherwise raise a fuss and force controversial films out of cinemas and off the air. He has a point: in recent years, what has brought trouble on those pushing the boundaries of public sexual expression is community backlash first, law second. It’s not the state but a collective state of mind that is setting the borders of acceptability.
Such rules apply not just to domestic films and series but to foreign imports as well. Hollywood sex scenes are easy to cut, which means that movies with the occasional racy interlude can still slip into cinemas, and onto TVs, with discreet deletions. But there’s more than one way to police a foreign film or TV show. When the action is clean but the talk is dirty, euphemism is a censor’s best friend. Historically, subtitling has been the rule for most foreign films and sitcoms playing in the Arab region, and plenty gets lost in translation. In the early 1960s, my father saw The Sun Also Rises, with Tyrone Power and Ava Gardner, at the Cairo Palace Cinema, which, with its crimson curtain, plush seating, and CinemaScope, was the last word in movie house glamour in those days. Set against the backdrop of the Roaring Twenties, the film’s star-crossed love story hinges on the nature of its hero’s wartime injury. In a pivotal scene, a doctor breaks the bad news: Power’s wound has rendered him impotent. The force of this disclosure was lost, however, on the Egyptian audience because the subtitles translated Power’s condition as ‘inniin—a classical Arabic word that even my father, a young medical school graduate, couldn’t understand. Most of the other cinemagoers were in the dark on this vital point until someone piped up from the shadows, “Ya’ni markhi, ya gama’a,” roughly equivalent to “You know, guys, ‘can’t get it up.’ ”
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