Headscarves and Hymens (20 page)

Still, despite the thrill I was finally experiencing, it did not take long for the guilt to push through in a drip-drip that was impossible to ignore. I was not free of my upbringing. I was not free of tradition. Like the young men and women during the protests who feared their parents’ anger more than they did Mubarak’s police force or the military junta, I was more scared to talk to anyone about my new sex life than I was of the state security officers who threatened to jail me when I didn’t reveal a source for an article.

The Algerian French physician and author Malika Mokeddem writes of these feelings in her book
My Men.
Her first lover was a fellow Algerian, whose family scuttled their plans to marry so that they could arrange for him to wed someone from his tribal background. “The tyrannical forces of tradition got the upper hand in that love affair, but they also forced one certainty in me: I needed a man who was free,” Mokeddem writes.

In my case, it was not the man I was with, an Egyptian, but rather I who was not free. The “tyrannical forces of tradition” got the upper hand over me. He wanted to get married and have children, and I would tentatively agree, only to withdraw my agreement because I could not trust that after marriage he would remain as he was. Perhaps I also did not trust that I would remain as I was. I did not have the energy or the power to fight our cultural and religious baggage surrounding marriage and family. He understood that I would never give his proposals a yes that would last beyond a week, so he ended our relationship.

Despite all that I had achieved so far, despite all the fights and all the feminism, I was not free. I could not do with my body what I wanted without feeling the weight of guilt, culture, religion, and “fornication.” How different, really, was I from the women who I thought had developed split personalities—one that reveled in achievement, the other in being the “good girl” who obeyed upbringing and tradition?

In search of a free man, Mokeddem embarked on love affairs with several non-Algerian men. Not long after I broke up with that first lover, the Egyptian, I married a white American. The turbulent two years we spent together taught me that marriage—to anyone, regardless of culture or religion—was not for me, and helped me to understand that a man’s personal attitude toward women is more important than his cultural background. Those
two years of marriage also sealed for me the issue of children. I learned that I did not want any. I respect and honor the maternal instinct that many women heed by having children, but I was never moved by it, and I am happy to be child-free. I do wonder, sometimes, if I had had a daughter, how I would have brought her up. How—when it’s taken me so long to unlearn the things I believe are most damaging to the cause of women’s liberation and equality—would I have raised my daughter to disobey?

Having resolved through my own trial and error the issue of marriage and children, I still had to reckon with the men of my cultural and religious background. I’m forty-seven now and have spent the past eighteen years fighting against sexual guilt. It still lingers at the edges—I have had to fight hard to keep these paragraphs in, knowing that my family will see them and disapprove, but this is my revolution. It is how I am finally reconciling my political and personal and, at last, using my words as weapons in even the most difficult and intimate areas of my life.

When I returned to Egypt for our revolution, I wanted to inhale Egyptian men. There is no other way to describe it. I felt a visceral need to take my guilt-free self—older and better able to withstand the cultural and religious freight under which I had once keeled—and try to find a man who had undergone a similar reckoning. It was well and good to march together, to risk our lives
confronting the regime, but what would happen after the protest was over? How would the impeccable politics these men held toward the regime hold up where the social and sexual revolutions were concerned?

Yet so many of the revolutionaries failed to embrace any revolution in sexual politics. I was reminded of the words the Spanish anarchist and resistance fighter Lola Iturbe wrote in 1935 in “Tierra y Libertad,” which I first encountered in
Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women,
by Martha A. Ackelsberg: “All those compañeros, however radical they may be in cafes, unions, and even affinity groups, seem to drop their costumes as lovers of female liberation at the doors of their homes. Inside, they behave with their compañeras just like common ‘husbands.’ ”

Amira, a thirty-two-year-old whom I met at the Egmadi event in Cairo, echoed those words when we discussed whether the Egyptian revolution had transformed the home. I asked, is the revolution at home yet?

“I don’t think so. Not yet,” she said. “Because some of the men who participated in the revolution who act like liberals outside the house, inside the house they are no liberals. They don’t even know what religion says. They think, I have to rule you, not, I have to take care of you, support you in your life.”

Still, I sought out, and found, men whose love of female liberation crossed the threshold of the home, men
whose gentler sides mitigated the violence women faced in public space, where so many of our bodies were hurt and violated. I found men who rejected our society’s hypocrisy and double standards over female and male sexuality. I found men who were willing to be comrades in our sexual revolution, who were willing to renounce the privilege that allows them the lazy option of sexual double standards. These men were my allies against any who would leave the revolution outside the bedroom.

It was not an easy search. Some men were still struggling with the chains it had taken me so long to unclasp, and I found myself moved by their personal revolutions. I would remind myself that men also struggled against sexual guilt and a socialization that produced a warped and unhealthy attitude toward women and sex. I believe—and my experience reaffirmed that belief—that girls and women bear the greater burden of this socialization. But in getting to know Egyptian men better, and in sharing my frustrations with the way our culture and practice of religion had filled us with guilt and stripped us of understanding for each other, I learned that our best allies are those men determined to free themselves of sexual guilt and refuse the false ease of gender double standards.

In
My Men,
Malika Mokeddem includes an open letter to her father in which she claims that “to write about
men loved freely, in spite of everyone and everything,” was the best way to speak against the conservatively religious men—she calls them “the forces of darkness”—who insist on policing women’s lives:

Writing about being loved “freely, in spite of everyone and everything” is too rare a thing in our culture. Very few people in the Arab world are willing to talk about sex that is not between a husband and a wife, and even less about sex that is not between a man and a woman. When an Egyptian friend of mine came out to me as a lesbian, she also explained why—despite long
years of activism against the Mubarak regime, despite the ways she’d risked her life and career as part of that activism—she was not ready to come out to her family or the public. I told her I supported her and whatever she felt was best for her at that time, and I was honored she trusted me with her confidence. As a sexually active woman, she was challenging many of our country’s most sensitive taboos already, I knew, but with the added risk of the complication and censure that come with having sex with women in an intolerant society. There were so many forces pressing her into silence, into rendering that part of herself invisible.

During my first trip to Beirut, in 2009, I spent my first evening at an event I had never imagined I would attend in the Middle East. At a theater on Hamra Street, two women who openly identified as lesbian took the stage and read, in Arabic and English, from a book about to be released called
Bareed Mista3jil
(Express mail). It was a collection of oral narratives from lesbian, bisexual, queer, and questioning women, as well as transgender people, in Lebanon. The stories involved women from across the country—rural and urban, of different faiths and sects. Some stories were about the difficulty or impossibility of coming out. Some were by people who had immigrated to Western countries only to find homophobia replaced by anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia. One of the passages described the particular challenges that lesbians face in their own culture:

Bareed Mista3jil
was published by Meem, a support community for lesbian and bisexual women formed in Beirut in 2007. “Meem” is the phonetic pronunciation for the first letter in the Arabic word
methleyya,
a relatively recent addition to the Arabic lexicon that literally means “same,” as in “same sex,” and refers to lesbians. (For gay men, it would be
methli.
) Until the introduction of those words, the only way to refer in Arabic to someone who was homosexual was with slurs, such as
shaaz
(“deviant”) or
khawwal
(“fag”). These new words are a reminder of how a culture can be led away from loaded and discriminatory language—and the on-the-ground discrimination they inspire—with the introduction of new words. For a long time we had no word for
feminism
in Arabic, and then
nasawiya
was introduced, helping us to refute the lazy accusation that feminism is a Western import. We need so many more new words in Arabic.

Lina Ben Mhenni, the Tunisian feminist and activist, asks what the word
freedom
means. “When people took to the streets in December 2010, it’s true they were calling for employment, freedom, dignity,” she said. “I think they weren’t really ready to accept that freedom means all freedoms, including women’s freedom, sexual freedom, individual freedom; all freedom. They’re not ready for such a revolution.”

A simple but explosive way to speed the sexual revolution would be the introduction of sex education in our region’s curricula. According to a 2007 report from the Population Reference Bureau, only Algeria, Bahrain, Iran, Morocco, and Tunisia include reproductive health in their national school curricula. Currently, the topic gets a cursory (if that) mention in some textbooks, depending on the country you live in and whether you go to a state-funded or a private school. Even in countries that do have sex education, teachers will often be too embarrassed to teach that section and will assign it as something students must read by themselves. Also, parents in some countries have complained that they don’t want their children, especially their daughters, to be taught anything about sex.

Most parents in the region are also extremely reluctant to discuss reproduction with their children. According
to a 2006 survey in Algeria by the Pan Arab Project for Family Health, 95 percent of male respondents and 74 percent of female respondents learned about puberty on their own, without instruction from parents or teachers.

So where do our young men and women get information about sex? Nowadays, there is at least the Internet and pornography. But depending on what kind of porn they watch, viewers could be imprinted with degrading gender stereotypes and develop an understanding of sex that places male desire and pleasure at the center of sexual encounters.

Many young people learn about sex, love, and married life from television and radio, particularly from talk shows in which clerics (of wildly varying degrees of qualification) answer questions from viewers. Sex and relationship questions are common on these programs, but the clerics inevitably address the topics with sanctimony and misinformation, and address taboo topics (contraception, homosexuality, and extramarital sex) not at all. (To get an idea of the kind of “advice” that awaits women callers, recall my father’s anecdote about the cleric who asked an abused wife what she’d done to merit her beatings.)

Without sex education that presents sex as a positive experience—and that mitigates taboo and “dirty” associations—and without easy access to contraceptives or even basic information about birth control, sex will continue to pose a great danger to the most vulnerable in our societies: girls and women.

A physician who specializes in obstetrics and gynecology in Cairo told me that many of her patients in both her university hospital clinic (lower-income patients) and private practice (more affluent patients) present symptoms of sexual frustration but are unable to say so boldly and clearly. When she suggests exercises the women can do with their husbands, most women say they would rather die than propose them. The women worry that their husbands will think they’re questioning their virility or, even worse, that the men will believe the exercises are not from a doctor but rather from previous sexual experiences, meaning the women were not virgins when they married. In a culture that enshrines domestic violence, women risk chastisement, beating, and even death by beginning such discussions.