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
The suffering is not entirely one-sided; men can have their hearts broken too. Ghassan is a hotel employee from Luxor, a tall, dignified man in his midfifties. “We have a saying in Egypt,” he told me one morning as I was breakfasting at his hotel. “All you need for happiness is water, some land, and a beautiful face. So I am happy.” He sighed, fixing me with a glance while sweeping his arm toward the river. With such a flair for flattery, it didn’t surprise me to learn that Ghassan had been married four times, once to Linda, a Scottish divorcée ten years his senior, whom he met while working on a cruise boat in Upper Egypt. It was a real romance, he said, and they had an unofficial, though shar’i (that is, Islamically sound), marriage. While Ghassan’s mother and sister were in the know, he preferred not to inform his Egyptian wife. “I didn’t want to scratch her feelings, because this not for [financial] benefit. This for love.”
Ghassan and Linda used to meet a couple of times a year when he had time off and she could fly in to visit. He told me the secret of his success: “Egyptian men are emotional. They say nice things to a woman, they are open, they make her blood move. Western men are very rough, direct, always working.” He and Linda got along swimmingly, especially in bed. “She [was] happy. Egyptian man [is] very strong sexually, she told me this. She [was] married [before], but not feeling like that. I treat her like a baby, hold her on my heart. In my experience, I make her love me by emotion; she take[s] everything, she enjoyed everything, and then dealing with her [was] excellent. In London, her first husband, just …” Ghassan pulled a long face, the sudden sagging of his features a telling commentary on Linda’s ex-husband’s sexual prowess, in keeping with his peers’ widely held views on the weakness of Western men. “Maybe because the weather is cold,” he suggested charitably.
Ghassan’s romance lasted three years, but then Linda went back to the United Kingdom, never to return. Ghassan called and wrote, but no reply. “I don’t know what happened. Maybe she [is] dead but nobody told me.” He sighed. Ghassan married twice again but still pines for his foreign wife. “I love her, and until now I love her. I am dreaming to catch my Linda anywhere. For me, a lady foreigner [is] good. I would do it again.”
Clamping down on intercultural summer-winter unions has the support of prominent religious leaders. Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the famous Islamic preacher, reckons that such marriages should be banned, even though the Qur’an allows Muslim men to marry (or take as concubines) Christian and Jewish women. Al-Qaradawi argues this provision is invalidated by the social corruption these marriages cause—namely, that by draining the pool of available men, they decrease the chances of marriage for local women, thereby raising the likelihood of them going astray. And some locals in coastal resorts are starting to grumble that foreign women, who, thanks to rising unemployment, find it increasingly hard to get jobs back home, are stealing not only their precious men but also coveted jobs in hotels and restaurants once they marry Egyptians and secure work permits.
Not everyone is against these unions, however: some Egyptian families—even wives, who might otherwise lose their men to long stretches of work in the Gulf—are willing to accept an older foreign partner as a local moneymaking alternative.16 At the end of the day, when it comes to sex work, double standards still apply. When Egyptian women, like Samia, take money for sex in tourist marriages, it is seen as exploitation and authorities are, belatedly, up in arms. When men do the same (albeit under economic pressure, rather than direct family coercion), society largely turns a blind eye to what is considered just another day’s work.
RULES AND REGULATIONS
On the broader question of the future of sex work in Egypt, there are a few urging an alternative to denial or denunciation. One of the most outspoken is Inas al-Degheidy, a director famous for her films on love and sex beyond the borders of conventional morality. In 2008, al-Degheidy raised hackles by giving her fellow Egyptians a quick history lesson. “Prostitution is everywhere in the world. It was a recognized profession in Egypt before the [1952] revolution, and the neighborhoods where it was practiced were well known,” she observed on a TV talk show, to the fury of conservatives. “But today it is a secret, at a time when these girls may be carrying serious diseases they could pass on to others.” Her solution: state licensing of sex workers. “When I called for licensing the profession of prostitution in Egypt, and annual renewal of licenses, I’m not saying there are a lot of women engaged in t
his profession. But at the same time, it’s not a small number either. We have to face reality rather than escape from it, and the first step is to protect society, regardless of how satisfied or dissatisfied it is with the existence of this profession.” 17
For centuries prostitution in Egypt was a regulated affair, for one simple reason: taxation. In early Islamic Cairo, from the tenth to thirteenth centuries, for example, there were established areas of the city where women plied their trade, sitting outside storefronts in shifts and trademark red pantaloons, all under the watchful eye of a supervisor, who recorded their business and collected taxes from them on behalf of the regime. In the early sixteenth century, following the annexation of Egypt by the Ottoman Empire, the regulation of prostitution became part of the imperial bureaucratic machine, and so working women (along with dancers, snake charmers, hashish sellers, and other public purveyors of pleasure) fell under the empire’s rapacious taxation system.
As in much of North Africa, it was colonization that kicked organized prostitution in Egypt into high gear. Shortly after marching into the country in 1882, British authorities issued regulations requiring all prostitutes to register with police and present themselves for weekly medical exams to check for venereal disease, the results of which were noted in certificates the women were obliged to carry on them. Such medical attention was not primarily intended for their benefit but to protect, first and foremost, the legions of British soldiers pouring into the country.
By the early twentieth century, registered prostitution in Cairo was officially confined to particular neighborhoods, while the unregistered (and therefore illegal) variety knew no bounds. The most famous of these state-sanctioned precincts was an area called Clot Bey. In the early 1940s, my father and his friends used to sneak onto a tram to a less spiritual spot than Al-Azhar, one that took them downtown along the district’s main artery, Clot Bey Street. In those days, it was a wide avenue bordered by trees, lined on either side by whitewashed two-story buildings in the colonial style, with shady arcades of shops and cafés on the ground floor and, above, French windows that opened onto balconies.
It was here, and in the tiny, twisty lanes that snake off the main avenue, that many of Cairo’s thousand or so registered prostitutes went to work, for up to fifteen piastres a pop. “A stroll through its narrow and crowded lanes reminded one of a zoo, with its painted harlots sitting like beasts of prey behind the iron grilles of their ground-floor brothels” was the unsentimental view of Thomas Russell, better known as Russell Pasha, head of the Cairo police and the man in charge of keeping order in the brothel districts for much of the first half of the twentieth century.18
As a nine-year-old clinging to the side of a tram, my father had a boy’s-eye view of the action on Clot Bey Street. He knew, more or less, what was going on there, from snippets of conversations between my grandparents. Then as now, prostitution wasn’t exactly polite conversation for Egyptian couples, but it was a matter of professional interest for my grandfather. He was a civil servant, an administrator in the Office for the Protection of Morals, and Russell Pasha was his boss. I knew my father’s father only briefly—he died when I was a child—but I do remember a kind, soft-spoken old man who seemed very much in the shadow of my larger-than-life grandmother. So it’s hard for me to imagine him in the business of routing rowdy servicemen out of brothels and reading the riot act to their residents—but it was all in a day’s work liaising with the British military police.
By the time my father was on that tram, however, the days of legalized prostitution in Egypt were numbered. From the early 1940s, orders went out to start closing down brothels, and by the end of the decade, state-licensed establishments were shuttered. Successive laws in the 1950s and 1960s prohibited all prostitution—to little effect. There had been crackdowns on prostitution before; century after century, whenever plague or famine struck and men of religion started blaming widespread debauchery for God’s wrath and the country’s misfortunes, Egypt’s rulers tightened up on public pleasures, only to let the good times roll once the trouble blew over.19 This time, however, calls to stamp out brothels were linked to the drive to free Egypt from British occupation. Like today’s rejection of homosexuality as a Western import, the fact that organized sex work had been a feature of Egyptian life long before the coming of the British was conveniently overlooked.
If Egyptians want to know what regulated sex work might look like, they don’t have to turn back the clock half a century; they can just take a three-hour flight to Tunisia. While Tunisia’s legal code takes as hard a line on commercial sex work as Egypt’s—up to two years in prison and a fine of TND 200 (around USD 120) for both sex worker and client—there is one notable exception. To find it, take a walk down Avenue Habib Bourguiba, which runs like a backbone through central Tunis. Although named after Tunisia’s freedom-fighting, postindependence president, this boulevard is an unmistakably French creation, its central promenade punctuated by onion-domed kiosks and wrought-iron lampposts and lined with clipped box trees that stack up like vertebrae along an urban spine. On either side, smaller streets curve out like ribs, and in between, a connective tissue of zinc-topped tables, wicker chairs, and broad umbrellas at the Café de Paris and a dozen others pulses with life.
This avenue became a familiar sight to millions around the world when clashes between protesters, fighting for the removal of longtime autocrat Ben Ali, and the army replaced café society in the winter of 2011. Today, Avenue Bourguiba is back in business, and it is, once again, easy to forget, as you stroll past the art nouveau Théâtre Municipal on your left and the Cathedral of St. Vincent de Paul on your right, that you’re in Tunis, not Toulouse—until, that is, the avenue ends in a massive freestanding archway. It looks like a mini Arc de Triomphe, which the French called Porte de France, but it is actually a remnant of Tunis’s medieval city walls—a gate better known, in Arabic, as Bab el Bhar (Gateway to the Sea).
Beyond the gate lies the medina, the old city that sits at the head of the avenue like a brain atop a spinal column, its alleyways twisting off in all directions, folding deep into its interior like cerebral fissures. Compared with the ramrod order of the avenue, with its international hotels and its Zara and MAC stores, the medina is a riot of unexpected commerce—filigree birdcages, multicolored shisha pipes, frothy tulle wedding decorations—buying and selling that fires from tiny shop to makeshift stall like a storm of nerve impulses.
Follow one of the side alleys from Bab el Bhar, through covered passages and past bright blue keyhole-shaped doors, and you’ll come across trade of a different sort. Rue Sidi Abdallah Guech is Tunis’s official red-light district—well, street. The two dozen brothels here and on an adjacent alley are sanctioned by the government, their residents registered as sex workers on municipal rolls. Now, the medina can seem a forbidding place—its massive studded doors, high whitewashed walls, and tiny windows are designed to keep the public out of private life. Not in Rue Sidi Abdallah Guech, however, where invitation is the order of the day. Doors are wide open to reveal neat foyers lined in blue faience tiles, with a couple of rooms on the ground floor and steep stairs leading to the same above. Even on the brisk winter’s day I visited, women were sitting on stoops or standing in doorways—in G-strings or spandex leggings, breasts bared or braless in clinging tops, with dyed hair and brightly colored eye makeup—chatting with each other and chatting up passersby, the whole affair bathed in Day-Glo pink from lamps inside.
Rue Guech is all that remains of Tunis’s once-extensive network of official prostitution. As in Egypt, what began as a source of public finance ended as a system for public health. During the Ottoman period in Tunisia, officials collected from prostitutes taxes that were calculated on what can best be described as a “cosmetically progressive” scale: the better-looking the woman, the more she had to pay, although the exact aesthetic criteria used are unclear.20 When Tunisia fell under French “protection” in 1881, taxation was replaced by sanitation: prostitutes w
ere required to have biweekly medical exams in an effort to keep syphilis at bay. As the twentieth century wore on, state-registered prostitutes were subject to increasing regulation as to where they could work. It was a system the French rolled out across their colonial interests in North Africa, one that reached its apogee in the reserved quarters of Casablanca and Algiers: vast prostitution ghettos under tight police supervision—what one French historian has described as “sexual Taylorism,” the science of libido management.21 Tunisia was fortunately spared this sort of industrial park prostitution; under pressure from abolitionists, plans for a giant brothel-city were scrapped in the 1930s. Nonetheless, the state did introduce French-style maisons closes (brothels) and in 1942 issued a decree setting down the rules for legal prostitution.22 Such state-sanctioned activity survived calls to outlaw prostitution in Tunisia, resulting in today’s two-track system, in which “clandestine” pimping and soliciting are illegal, while the “public” (that is, state-registered) activities of Rue Guech are permitted.23
Today, legal sex work occupies something of a gray area in Tunisia; ironically, it’s more hidden than the “clandestine” activity flourishing around the corner on Avenue Bourguiba. “It’s not a secret, but it’s not widely admitted either,” says Abdelmajid Zahaf, a small, grizzled physician who specializes in public health in Sfax, Tunisia’s second city. Zahaf knows his way around a brothel, professionally speaking—his profession, not theirs—and gave me an insider’s view of how the system is managed. Before the recent uprising, there were almost three hundred legal sex workers in a dozen or so sites across Tunisia, tucked away in the twisty lanes of Sousse, Sfax, Gabès, and even Kairouan, the “holy city” of Tunisia and birthplace of North African Islam.24 Well over a hundred women were working in Tunis alone; a third of them freelancers who rent rooms on the street, and the rest organized into brothels, with two to five women per house. The women are mainly in their twenties and thirties; at fifty they are obliged to retire from active duty. Many stay on, however, as a badrona, or madam, renting (or, in some cases, buying) a house on the street.
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