Sex and the Citadel (33 page)

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.
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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.

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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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“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 occupational hazards is all too common.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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.
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