Sex and the Citadel (21 page)

For their part, I heard parents complain, time and again, before the uprising about their children’s lack of maturity. “I always used to say before, this generation has nothing to do but stay on their computers and play,” one father in his fifties, a former army general, lamented to me. The 2011 uprising, spearheaded by the country’s youth, changed that. He and his twentysomething daughter spent days in Tahrir Square, a bonding experience that altered his opinion. Many older Egyptians, my own relatives included, have been rattled by recent events and find change hard to accept. Not the general, though. “I was very wrong,” he told me, no easy thing for an Egyptian man, and father, to admit. “At the beginning I was very surprised by the demonstrators, the decency, the civilized way they presented their ideas. This generation has proved to me that they have plans for the future and they know how to work for it.”

Subsequent events have taken some of the gloss off that admiration. Making way for young blood—be it in political or domestic decision-making—is a long-term process. Whether young people will be given a chance to take the lead, and have the wit to use it well, is another story. One test of this new entente cordiale will be how easy young people—particularly young women like Al Haq—find
it to strike out on their own in the years to come. Al Haq’s mother now allows her to stay alone in the family flat in Cairo, for example, something that was out of the question before the revolt. But this freedom doesn’t come easy: leaving your parents’ place is less a rite of passage and more an ordeal by fire for the minority of unmarried people across the region who can afford it. “If you go to any shaykh and say, ‘There is this girl and she moved out,’ they will say, ‘Ah, bad girl!’ She would be, like, cursed and damned,” says Rakha.

She should know. Life changed for Rakha when she started working in her early twenties. “When I earned my first salary, I realized having my own money makes me happy. And it gave me this little freedom that even if I want perfume or a dress, I don’t have to go to my mom and get her approval for what I’m going to be wearing,” she told me. “This is where the independence started. I’m not happy where there is a man; I’m happy when I do things for myself.”

By her late twenties, Rakha had decided to get her own apartment. “My mom thought if I move out, I’m gonna fail and I’m gonna move back home. So she let me go, and she was shocked I survived,” she recalled. “When I was home, I didn’t do anything. I slept until eight [p.m.] and then I went out with my friends. Moving out, the house has to be clean. It’s a whole different thing. I was ready for it. Thing is, I didn’t want this package with a man. I needed to just do it on my own.”

Such self-reliance is more of a black mark than a badge of honor for Egyptian women, in Rakha’s opinion. “For a man, there is usually a question mark: ‘Why did you leave your parents’?’ If a man replies, ‘Because I wanted to grow up, because I wanted to learn to be responsible,’ that’s perfectly fine in the society. But most men don’t want to move out; they want somebody to cook and clean for them. It’s the girls here who want their independence; they want to prove themselves apart from their socially accepted posts.” Rakha is all too familiar with this sort of thinking, which starts at home. Parents are worried about keeping up appearances, and daughters who fly the coop are accused of shirking filial responsibility. “I’m going to tell you my mom’s version of it,” says Rakha. “First of all,
she feels I’m ungrateful. Like, instead of being with her, and supporting her, and comforting her, I moved out. My counterargument always was, ‘What if I got married? I would leave you.’ ‘But that’s because you’re married.’ So what—now I’m being punished for not being married?”

When I meet an intelligent, ambitious, and professionally successful woman over thirty-five in Egypt—indeed anywhere in the Arab region—I don’t expect her to be wearing a wedding ring. While the vast majority of young women in Egypt are married by their late twenties, the proportion of those still single at thirty or older is more than three times higher among those who have gone on to higher education than those with less than a high school diploma.
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Some unmarried women I know would happily consider a Western spouse (provided he was of the same religion), while others have turned to their faith and a fatalism that allows them to chalk up their single status to God’s will. But many of them have simply given up on their countrymen as husband material. There are a number of social and economic factors to account for this state of affairs, but Rakha has a straightforward answer. “When women got educated—college, university, whatever—their brains opened up. Men, they go through the same process, but it’s like their brain is somewhere and their career is somewhere else,” she said. “So you meet this great guy, this successful guy, glamorous guy, well-educated guy, traveled guy, but in his head, he’s still stupid guy.”

She was careful to define her terms. “Someone my age or older, he’s a complete piece of shit. Traditional and baggage, shit everywhere. Insecure; ‘I hate women, they’re so bad, controlling’; intimidated by anything, everything.” Rakha gets a lot of e-mail from anxious men across the country, and she has a ready explanation for their behavior: “All the shit that they do [is] out of fear. They are scared. Scared little boys. That goes from the age of thirteen to thirty. Scared of everything, scared of being judged. Scared of being rejected. Scared of saying or doing the wrong thing. Scared of being dumped. Scared of being cheated on. They all have these insecurity issues. Everywhere.” What this means, in the mating game, is a mismatch between prospective husbands looking to control
and prospective wives searching for autonomy—one reason for the growing ranks of unmarried women.

BATTLE OF THE SEXES

These tensions go beyond private relations.
Taharrush jinsi
—or sexual harassment, ranging from ogling and lewd remarks to flashing, public masturbation, and outright physical assault—plays out on the streets of Egypt and across the Arab world. The recent national survey of Egyptians aged ten to twenty-nine found that more than half of young women living in towns and cities had experienced sexual harassment—mainly salacious comments from strangers.
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But there is plenty of evidence of far more violent incidents, and not just on dark, deserted streets but in jam-packed daylight. Visible minorities—Sudanese refugees, Asian domestic workers, Western tourists—are particularly vulnerable, their harassers egged on by stereotypes of sexed-up foreign females.

Cairo is a concentrate of Egypt, so it’s no surprise that sexual harassment is most extreme in the capital. It was here that the phenomenon first made the headlines in the mid-2000s, and over the years public celebrations—particularly religious holidays—have become something of a free-for-all for sexual harassers, notorious for swarms of young men cornering passing women.
⁷⁰
Now sexual harassment and assault even feature—along with political unrest, dodgy water, and dangerous driving—in foreign governments’ travel advisories on the hazards of visiting Egypt.
⁷¹

Mu’aksa
, or male flirtation, used to be a gentler sport. “
Ya helwa, ya gamila
” (“You sweet, beautiful thing”) and “
Ya amar
” (“You are like the moon”) were the sorts of honeyed phrases my aunts and cousins used to hear in downtown Cairo and Alexandria in the 1960s and ’70s. Then there is the Egyptian equivalent of a wolf whistle, also used to attract cats, a soft hissing noise like a tire leaking air—not, to my mind, a particularly promising association for a man on the make. Today, however, the come-ons are a lot less courteous: “
Ya labwa
[You bitch]” is how one of my friends, in full
hijab and modest attire, was greeted by a carful of young men when she stopped at a traffic light. “How I wish I had two beds so I could sleep with you twice.”

Many people pin the blame for such “impolite” behavior, as Egyptians call it, on economics: unemployed youth with time on their hands and sex on their minds, thanks to TV and the Internet; parents working round the clock, or fathers toiling in the Gulf, leading to a breakdown in family surveillance and moral upbringing. Without marriage, and therefore an easy sexual outlet, this libidinous energy is spilling onto the streets, so conventional thinking has it. At the same time, the argument goes, women are increasingly in the public domain, and men are being provoked beyond endurance by their daring dress and bold behavior. Not surprisingly, with this sort of wisdom doing the rounds, many men believe that women actually welcome these attentions.
⁷²

It’s not just self-confessed harassers who subscribe to a blame-the-victim philosophy: more than 60 percent of the most highly educated women in the national youth survey, and three-quarters of their least literate counterparts, believed that “provocatively dressed” women are asking for it.
⁷³
Although more than 90 percent of young women in Egypt cover up—over their heads, up to their necks, and down to their wrists and ankles—there are plenty of ways to sex up this uniform: eye-catching headscarves in fantastical arrangements; layers of makeup; flashy wrapround sunglasses; tight jeans and curve-molding tunics, Lycra being God’s gift to Arab men.
⁷⁴
These
dolce hegabbanas
are deftly upending today’s conservative rules, technically covering up their
‘awra
(parts of men’s and women’s bodies to be concealed from public view, according to Islamic principles) and buying themselves a little more freedom from parents, all the while flaunting their femininity. And yet, as these young women wistfully recall, their mothers and grandmothers were able to go out with flowing hair and far more flesh on display—short skirts, bare arms—and pass unmolested.

For all this subtle subversion, many women are reluctant to defy convention and mention incidents of sexual harassment to their families, let alone report them to authorities.
⁷⁵
There are a variety of
reasons for such reticence: some blame themselves for the harassment; others worry about damage to their reputation by admitting they have been hassled and about its attendant consequences, including being grounded by their parents. Moreover, many fear that police will not take them seriously, partly because it is difficult to provide proof of hit-and-run harassment, and partly because it has often been the police themselves who are the perpetrators.
⁷⁶

For all these obstacles, sexual harassment is one of the taboos now openly discussed in Egypt. There are a number of innovative campaigns to help women report incidents, deal with the fallout, engage young people of both sexes in community projects, and teach the next generation—especially boys—that hassling women does not make you more of a man.
⁷⁷
A small but growing number of women, emboldened by the uprising, have used existing laws on public indecency and sexual assault to turn the table on their assailants. There are also efforts by NGOs to secure a law explicitly criminalizing sexual harassment, although the experience of Tunisia and Algeria with legislation already on the books shows that legal loopholes are hard to close and that cultural change can be slow to follow. “Sometimes when we come to change the mentality of the people, we feel we move the sea with a cup,” joked Nehad Abu Komsan, a Cairo-based lawyer and head of the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights, a leader in the fight against sexual harassment.

One of the ways Abu Komsan and fellow campaigners have been able to move this sensitive topic out of the shadows is by taking the sex out of sexual harassment, making it a question of personal safety and government failings, rather than a question of women’s rights, which raises hackles with social conservatives. “We [are] not attacking men because they are bad people harassing women. We [are] not blaming society because it’s an ignorant society and say in the public what they not do [in private],” she explained. “You can attack the government if you are not happy with their policies: ‘It is your fault. You are not interested in people’s security; you’re interested about political security.’ But if you want to make social change, don’t attack the people.” While some worry that sexual
harassment may be used by Islamists to curtail women’s freedoms, others are concerned that the state might exploit this framing of the issues in terms of security and policing to strengthen its power in the name of protecting women, with the bonus of clamping down on political opponents in the process.
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But until there is a climate in Egypt where such issues can be addressed in terms of personal freedoms and rights, this approach is better than nothing. “It is about packaging,” Abu Komsan told me. “As they say, ‘You can put poison in a very nice glass and people will take it very happily.’ ”

Abu Komsan and others argue that Egypt’s epidemic of sexual harassment is more a function of political and economic oppression—which has men lashing out at those next down the line in the patriarchy—than an explosion of sexual frustration. Certainly, recent events have shown that when men feel a sense of empowerment and purpose, their behavior toward women shifts dramatically. Until 2011, mass gatherings of young men were dangerous territory for women. And yet in the marches in Tahrir Square, where tens of thousands gathered to protest against authoritarian regimes, past, present, and future, I and other women found ourselves able to move freely—well, as freely as you can in a revolutionary throng—as men made way and listened with respect. When I was running from tear gas, there were men helping me to safety, not taking advantage of easy prey. That’s not to say there was no sexual harassment of women in Tahrir Square—there was, for all the utopian myth that surrounds the 2011 uprising. As long as the youth in Tahrir were united in a pressing common goal, men and women worked well together, but as soon as that purpose drained from the square, a carnival atmosphere prevailed and the sexual harassment returned. On one of these occasions, I watched, horrified and unable to help, as a crowd of young men cornered a young woman in a hijab, pinned her up against a railing, and tore off her clothes. Under normal circumstances, men usually stick to the sidelines when women are harassed, but in this case a few were trying to rescue her, handing over their own clothes to cover her up and carrying her out of the mayhem.