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One badrona—who, unlike her three employees, was seasonably dressed in a woolly blue burnoose—explained the system to me. A client pays the badrona TND 7–10 which she splits with the sex worker; in exchange, the sex worker gets room and board. This might not sound much like a road to riches, but as one of the working women explained, in the privacy of her room, those who agree to a little extra, like anal sex, can make double the base rate in tips, which stay in their own pocket. The clients are a mix of mainly young, single, working-class Tunisians, with the occasional white-collar professional and assorted visitors according to location: Tunis, for example, welcomes an international selection, including sub-Saharan African clients; while Sfax, farther down the coast and famous for its hospitals and doctors, sees Libyans crossing over for a spot of medical and sex tourism—a flow that continued even as their country plunged into civil war. As for daily traffic through the house? The madam whistled. “Oh a lot, a lot.” A young, attractive woman can have up to a mind-boggling hundred clients a day, several of the sex workers told me, but the average is around a quarter of that. Sex here is a strictly in-and-out affair, ten minutes tops; nothing as time-consuming as kissing or fondling is on the program.
Rue Guech is not a place for lingering discussions. Time is money, and with rents above TND 3,000 a month, madams are keen to keep the customers flowing. The women themselves are equally bent on work. Many of those in Rue Guech are divorced, with families to support. Some women start out in clandestine sex work but switch to the legal trade when financial pressures mount. While you can find the occasional university graduate in Tunisia’s legal brothels, the majority of women on Rue Guech have made it only through primary school. The financial attraction is clear: in a country with around 30 percent unemployment in the under-twenty-fives—one of the key triggers of Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution—there’s a guaranteed income if you quite literally work your ass off.
While Rue Guech is largely staffed by locals, elsewhere in the country women have tended to travel to other cities to work in legal brothels; their families think they’re doing something else, and no one wants to be recognized by a friend or relative on the job, or vice versa. It doesn’t take much to register with local authorities to get a position: one must be unmarried, be age twenty or older, freely consent, and have a clean bill of health. Women usually stay three to five years in one house before moving on when clients get bored and business drops off. There are no fixed contracts, but the rules on the job are clear: women are allowed sick leave with a doctor’s note, including a week’s rest when they’re menstruating. Aside from that, there’s a day off a week to go to the hairdresser or hammam. These are strictly holidays; if legal sex workers are caught by police turning tricks on their days off, the consequences can be severe.
“Sincerely, in my experience, I believe the legal system is the best alternative for these people—for clients and women,” says Zahaf. The women receive biweekly medical exams—a quick peek with a bright light and a speculum to check for symptoms of sexually transmitted infections—and monthly HIV testing. While the majority of women say they use condoms, sheaths are often more honored in the breach than the observance.25 Towns provide free supplies and encourage legal sex workers to use them, but if clients are willing to pay a premium for condom-free sex, it’s hard to refuse.
Zahaf points to other benefits of the system: the women are at least guaranteed payment and a roof over their heads and have less chance of being beaten up than out on the streets.26 Nonetheless, life is tough. “There are lots of mental problems. Almost eighty percent of them are on tranquilizers—they take them to sleep, they take them to calm themselves. They drink a lot, they smoke a lot,” says Zahaf. “They all end badly. I don’t know one, up until now, who was left unscathed—either the badrona or the prostitutes.”27
Zahaf is not hopeful for the future of the legal trade; the number of legal sex workers has dropped by more than half over the past few decades. “In my opinion, in five to ten years’ time, there will be no more legal prostitution,” he predicts. It’s the same old story across the economy: when it comes to customer service, free enterprise wins every time. Clients prefer clandestine sex workers, Zahaf says; although they’re more expensive, there’s more freedom to do what you like, how you like it. Meanwhile, social and economic changes mean the number of willing providers has risen sharply, in his opinion. And there’s no shortage of takers: according to one study of more than twelve hundred Tunisians under twenty-five, roughly a third of the sexually active men had exchanged money for sex in the preceding year.28 “It’s like a market: there is the law of supply and demand. Now there is the legal, it is recognized by the state, but more and more people are going to the other. We can’t exactly advertise.”
But Zahaf has other ideas: “If we could make it like Holland, with windows, with welcoming conditions, it would be like promoting legalized prostitution.” He wants to see brand-new houses, built by the municipality, which would not only improve working conditions but might also bring down rents, thereby allowing more money to flow to the workers themselves. Other improvements include more time off, documents entitling the women to free medical and psychological treatment, and social security, as well as loans to start their own tiny businesses and job training. “They want to get out [of this life], but there is no money. What’s the point of offering them a job for a hundred dinars a week when they can make four hundred to five hundred doing this?” Zahaf is not optimistic about change. “No one wants to talk about it.” He sighs. “I’m always depressed when I think about this situation.”
Life became a lot more difficult for Tunisia’s official working girls after the Jasmine Revolution. When the regime of Ben Ali fell in 2011, decades of political suppression went with it, and as in Egypt, this included lifting the lid on the country’s Islamists. Given the vast array of problems to contend with in rebuilding Tunisia, legalized sex work might seem low down on the list of national priorities, but some Islamic conservatives have the country’s state-sanctioned brothels squarely in their sights. Street protests against, and attacks on, legal brothels put employees everywhere on high alert and shut down operations in provincial cities. The immediate upshot was an extra day off a week for the women still in the business—Fridays are no longer part of the working week on Rue Guech. “No to prostitution in a Muslim country” was the protesters’ slogan, mustering religious arguments with a feminist twist against the commodification of women’s bodies. Other voices, however, have defended the system, pushing back against what they consider creeping Islamism.
The women themselves are fearful of the future. Business had fallen off in the wake of the uprising, since money was tight and the Islamist pressure was on. “What if they close us down?” one badrona asked me. “Then what will we do? We don’t know how to do anything else.” Rising violence was adding to their anxiety. One independent operator, who kindly gave me a guided tour of her tiny, tidy room, showed me the iron gate she had newly installed to protect her from the men outside. “It was better in the period of Ben Ali,” she said. “The police were here. But yesterday the men from outside, seventeen to eighteen years old, they broke things, they made a mess. That is why I no longer spend the night here. Now there is no security.”
STREETS AHEAD
Whether Tunisia’s legal brothels will survive the coming waves of constitutional and legal reform remains to be seen. On the ground, though, it is clear that the old-school colonial approach to regulating sex work in the name of disease prevention has run its course. In the twenty-first century, however, public health continues to provide an opportunity—that is, money, tacit social acceptance, and a political blind eye—to reach out to sex workers, albeit in less of an assembly-line fashion.
In the name of HIV prevention, researchers are now able to take a closer look at the lives of those in the sex trade across the Arab world. In Egypt, for example, studies show that Jihane’s experience of drug use, violence, and other occupat
ional hazards is all too common.29 So far, HIV levels among female sex workers in Egypt, and in most other parts of the Arab region where there have been surveys, are significantly lower than those of their peers elsewhere in the world.30 But given the risky nature of their business—including sex with others also on the front lines of infection, among them injecting drug users and men who also have sex with men—the spread of HIV among sex workers in Egypt, and, by extension, to their clients (and their clients’ wives), is likely. All the more so since it’s an uphill battle on condom use: in one recent study, only a quarter of Cairo sex workers said they used protection the last time they traded sex.31 While condoms can safeguard against infection, they can also leave Jihane and her friends open to a different sort of trouble: grounds for arrest. “If a girl is walking on the street and stopped with condoms in her purse,” Jihane explained, “[she will be taken to the police station, where] there will be a report and [if her rap sheet is clean] the public prosecutor will discharge her next day. But if she has got a record, she is prosecuted for prostitution; she will get a prison sentence.”
Egyptians trying to improve the lives of sex workers, including reducing their risk of HIV, look westward, to Morocco. And with good reason: Morocco is a regional leader in dealing with HIV, with an extensive network of free, confidential HIV testing and a distribution system for free antiretroviral medicines.32 Although HIV infection is stigmatized across the Arab world, there is more openness to talking about it in Morocco, for all the touchy issues it raises: while Egyptians have shown themselves more than capable of taking to, and over, the streets in recent years, I can’t think of too many who would turn out, as they did when I was in Casablanca, for a public march to raise awareness and promote tolerance of HIV, carrying placards announcing I AM HIV-POSITIVE.
But it’s not just Morocco’s proactive stance on HIV that offers lessons to countries in the region. As I mentioned earlier, the Arab world abounds in sexual stereotypes, and one of the most pervasive is that Moroccan women are a little light on sexual morals. Or, as a leading Moroccan newsmagazine put it rather more bluntly on its cover: “Moroccan Women as Seen by the Arabs. In Two Words: Witches and Prostitutes”—sorcery being just another instrument of seduction in the sex worker’s tool kit, so the thinking goes.33 Moroccan women will tell you that wherever they travel in the Arab region, they are generally assumed to be sex workers until proven otherwise. “Moroccan … isn’t a nationality, it’s a profession,” the magazine observed. This reputation is not helped by such high-profile incidents as the indictment of former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi on charges of having paid for sex with an underage Moroccan “dancer” in Milan. Such impressions translate into concrete discrimination; in 2010, for example, the Saudi government refused to issue unmarried Moroccan women between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two visas to visit the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, their justification being that these women were more likely to be turning tricks than circumambulating the Ka’ba. Moroccans were predictably furious at this slur on their nation’s womanhood.
Nonetheless, sex work is big business in Morocco. According to one rough estimate, there are hundreds of thousands of women engaged in sex work of some description in the country. It’s such a popular calling that some observers talk about the country’s “prostitution economy,” illegal on paper (as a sop to Islamic conservatives) but tacitly permitted (to relieve unemployment, encourage local spending, and keep the minds of disgruntled young people on sex rather than politics, so critics argue).34
Rima and Najma are on the front lines of this particular trade. They work for ALCS (Association for the Fight Against AIDS), a leading NGO grappling with HIV, and their job is to get the message of safe sex out to the legions of Casablanca sex workers, one of more than twenty such programs across the country.35 By day, they do the rounds of the city’s markets, where “occasionals”—women looking to pick up day work as cleaners but agreeable to being picked up themselves for a quickie and some cash—gather. At night, the duo—one with platinum-dyed dreadlocks and the other in a hijab—takes to the streets downtown, handing out free condoms and hugely popular sachets of lubricant. (“By the end of the evening, the women get so dry from so many clients,” Rima explained.) The two have their work cut out for them: a map of the city, posted at local headquarters, is a rash of red dots marking the hot spots for sex work in the city.36
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.37
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, informatio
n 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.38