Sex and the Citadel (11 page)

The public response to
Jasad
, and to Haddad, has been mixed. Social conservatives condemn her assault on conventional morality, while sexual rights advocates lambast her as a skin-deep radical who makes a big deal about her sexual defiance but whose challenges
to social strictures are superficial and, coming as they do from one of the elite, do not reflect the restrictions facing the vast majority of women. For her part, Haddad criticizes those who “are zealous to preserve the hymens of the eye, the nose, the ear, the throat, of language, of the imagination and of dreams, and of anything else they can dream up to protect.”
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Yet
Jasad
is not censored in Lebanon and is widely distributed across Beirut, albeit wrapped in plastic and slapped with an
ADULTS ONLY
sticker; elsewhere in the region, circulation is by subscription only.

“I’m receiving lots of insults, threats, and stuff like that: I’m corrupting new generations; these are not our values; I’m importing values of the West and the East; God will punish you—you know, the usual stuff,” she says. The threats are financial as well as physical: advertisers shy away from
Jasad
—something that baffles Haddad, given how well sex sells elsewhere in Lebanon, and makes publishing a struggle. Nonetheless,
Jasad
also has fans. “I have folders in all my e-mail accounts called ‘
Jasad
Congrats’ and ‘
Jasad
Insults,’ ” Haddad told me. “And I can tell you that the ‘
Jasad
Congrats’ is a lot bigger than the ‘
Jasad
Insults.’ ”

Haddad is an unusual woman when it comes to sex, in that she openly says what she does, and vice versa. And this despite conservative roots. “I’ve been brought up in a Catholic school: you have sex just to have babies and that’s it. I should have had a whole country by now.” She laughs. She married twice, the first time when she was nineteen—her route to independence, she says. She had a relationship with the man who was to become her second husband before she was quite through with the first. “So I’d been living in ‘sin’ even before I got divorced. And even after I got divorced, I’ve been traveling everywhere with him, going to parties with him, socializing together like a couple. All people knew we were lovers. I loved it. We got married on a technicality.” Not surprisingly, her marriage is a little unusual. “We decided not to live together. We are both free-spirited. When I say this, people look at me as if I am coming from Mars. What kills a relationship is not only the decayed institution of marriage, but living together, the lack of breathing space, confusing love with ownership.”

Haddad takes an equally unconventional approach with her two sons, from her first marriage. She encourages her kids to pick up
Jasad
, although to her regret, they are not big readers. “Sometimes I think I should have hidden some books on the top shelves and told them, ‘Don’t go there,’ ” she says. But unlike her own parents, who preferred silence on the subject of sex, she has made a point of talking it through with her boys.
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I can’t think of many mothers in the Arab region who would feel comfortable advising their sons on safe sex, but it’s no big deal for Haddad. “And now I am insisting on condoms and safety awareness,” she added, recalling one mother-son chat. “He was so alert and informed. ‘Don’t worry, Mum, I’m going to put on five, one after another!’ ”

Although Haddad is bending some boundaries in her personal and professional lives, the big picture is unchanged.
Jasad
, her poetry, and her translations of foreign erotica are opening a sliver of space for sexual expression—but that’s still largely on paper and mainly for a cultured elite; so few people in the Arab world read novels or poetry these days that censors are not as concerned with sexual content in print as they are with it on-screen or even on canvas. Haddad’s goal is not wholesale social reform, but to rehabilitate Arabic language and literature. “If you go back to the tenth and eleventh centuries, you would find wonderful texts in Arabic, even obscene. And that talked about the body in such a wonderful way. And then something happened; there is a missing link. Starting in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we started going backward, with a few ups and downs,” she lamented. “How did we get from that early high point of liberty, of talking about sex so naturally, to our constipated present-day reality? I wonder.” Haddad often asks herself: “When did we start sliding down the hill of taboos?”
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GOING DOWN

It was somewhere on this downward slope that I came to be explaining the finer points of clitoral vibrators to Azza and her sisters. If
you know only Arabic, don’t have the money to consult a specialist, and lack easy access to the Internet, your options for explicit advice on sexual matters are limited—all the more so if you’re a woman. Unlike Haddad and her feisty literary sisters, Azza and her circle were at a loss. In their desperation for details, they turned to me for help. “
Ya
Shereen, they have so many problems,” Azza said. “They are not satisfied with their husbands, but they don’t know what to do.” I thought toys might add some fun, even though some sex therapists are firmly against them. “I don’t recommend them for Middle Eastern people,” Kotb warned me. “They would be attached to toys and just let down their wife, and the other way around. If I had toys in my own office, I would be a millionaire. I am always for sex with Islam; in the days of the Prophet Muhammad, people were the happiest, over their history, sexually. And there were no toys.” Interestingly, sex toys do not feature prominently in the long history of Arabic erotic writing, for all their treatment of almost every other sexual practice under the sun.
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Just finding suitable toys turned out to be a task in itself. Although there are a couple of shops in Cairo that discreetly sell a few items, supply is sporadic; one shop owner described to me the customs gauntlet he has to run to bring back, tucked away in his suitcase from overseas trips, even the few subtle vibrators he has in stock. In any case, Azza would rather die than be caught buying this stuff in public, so I asked her and her sisters to look on the Web and give me a list of items I could pick up on my next trip abroad. They struggled with the assignment. Part of the problem was timing, as Ramadan had begun and they were reluctant to delve into such worldly matters, given the prohibition on sexual intercourse during the hours of fasting.
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The bigger obstacle, however, was their complete confusion at the online world of adult entertainment. For all Azza’s near-perfect English and the lavish product illustrations, they simply could not make sense of a “buzzing clit bunny with twirling shaft beads” and similar devices.

Together, we worked our way through the catalog. Dildos were out; Azza warned against anything too phallic, which might make husbands feel dispensable. Interestingly, lubricants were not required,
but flavored massage oils were high on the list. Ben-wa balls—essentially a pair of Ping-Pong balls inserted into the vagina for strengthening and stimulation—posed a particular problem. “How do you get them out?” Azza asked. “Well, there’s a string attached. You remove them just like a tampon,” I explained. But it turns out that Azza and her circle don’t use tampons. Traditional beliefs about the impurity of menstrual blood, and the perceived health risks of letting it linger in the body, make tampons an unpopular choice with many women. But there was more to it than that. “My friend wanted to try them before she was married, but her mother wanted to kill her: ‘You will lose your virginity!’ ” Azza said. But surely, after a couple of kids each, this was no longer an issue for Azza and her friends? “They are afraid to touch this area. My sister-in-law says when she washes down there after sex, she has fear. This area is always forbidden us, even after marriage.”
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One item Azza and her friends were on top of was lingerie. Before I left, Iman, her sister-in-law, showed us her latest purchase: a pair of red lace crotchless underpants. Azza was agog. “So do they work?” she asked eagerly. “Yes, he loves them.” Iman smiled, recalling her husband’s response. Iman bought her astonishing undergarment in downtown Cairo, in one of the many tiny lingerie boutiques that line its once-grand boulevards. While the shopwindows are provocative, the sheer luridness of the stock inside is breathtaking. Mere words cannot do justice to the fevered imaginations that would create thongs adorned with plastic scorpions or a bra whose daisy-decorated cups play a tinny version of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” on contact.
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When I went shopping for my own trousseau, I was a little surprised to find myself in the company of so many
muhajjabat
, women wearing hijabs. If these women cover their bodies as a sign of Islamic piety, what are they doing buying such frankly tarty stuff? The lingerie designer whose elegant, filmy creations I chose for my own honeymoon (sadly for my husband, a world away from the chocolate-coated G-strings of the region’s “eat-me” school of design) explained the seeming contradiction to me. “Here, women are bottled up about sex. All women, in spite of the culture, are
afraid their husband will run after another woman. So that’s why, even if they are conservative, they need to seduce their man,” she said. “So long as there is sex, there will always be this market. There is no [financial] crisis in lingerie.”

On reflection, it stands to reason; it is because women like Azza are bound by conservative codes of Islamic modesty that they buy such over-the-top underwear in the first place. You might argue that outrageous lingerie is just another tool of male oppression, turning women into frilly, frothy sex objects, but Azza and her circle don’t see it that way: lingerie is one of the few means at their disposal to signal their sexual desire.

To help them make the most of this desire, I also picked up some British “instructional” DVDs during my overseas shopping expedition; even if they couldn’t understand the earnest Open University-style voice-overs, at least the women would get the gist from the curiously unarousing videos of couples demonstrating various positions and techniques. But choosing the right DVDs was a problem, because the more I watched, the more I began to appreciate the boundaries of sexual life in the modern Arab world. One video, for example, encouraged couples to caress over a glass of wine—something the
Encyclopedia
covered more than a thousand years ago. But Islam takes a strong stand on alcohol, and while this certainly doesn’t prevent followers from knocking back a glass, the conservative Islamic climate that surrounds Azza and her friends means they are in no position to suggest it to their husbands.

“Sex out-of-doors has its own special appeal,” the narrator enthusiastically observed. “Seaside sex comes high on any list of romantic settings,” the voice-over continued, as shots of a naked couple making passionate love in the water flashed across the screen, “though the realities of mixing sand and sex are rather more sobering.” Too right. While the DVD was referring to sand in uncomfortable places, the realities of sex on the beach in Dubai, for example, can run to three months in prison, as one British couple discovered in 2008. The only appeal this was going to have for Azza and her friends was the kind you make to overturn a conviction for public indecency.

Beyond holding hands, or an arm over the shoulder (more visible—in Cairo, at any rate—after the uprising), public displays of affection between men and women are generally frowned upon in Egypt. This public reserve can translate into a private awkwardness as well; while Azza’s husband is the cuddly kind, her sisters complain that, honeymoon over, their spouses rarely show them much physical or emotional affection, and there is precious little companionship on offer.
Ana bahibbik
(I love you) is the catchphrase of a million sappy songs and music videos that saturate urban Egypt, but in Azza’s experience it’s not something spouses say beyond the bed. “I swear, no one of my friends, her husband says ‘I love you.’ Only the first year of marriage. They feel that this is shame, to say ‘I love you.’ Men feel they are very weak when they say ‘I love you,’ and women feel they are begging.”

So much for the Arab lover of twenty-first-century romance novels.
The Sultan’s Virgin, Bedded by the Desert King, The Sheikh and the Pregnant Bride
, and variations on the theme are big sellers in English-speaking markets. The Arab hero is predictably tall, dark, and handsome—sometimes a carefree playboy, sometimes a caring surgeon or daring secret agent—with a brooding arrogance and explosive virility. Think Heathcliff in headdress. The heroines are pale beauties, usually American or English, occasionally with Arab roots of their own. They are also feisty, full of “Western” ideas about love, freedom, and equality that their Arab suitors, despite having lived and loved across Europe and America, imperiously reject.

The first desert romances, which appeared in the early 1900s, were full-blooded; the most famous, E. M. Hull’s
The Sheik
, was the inspiration for Rudolph Valentino’s screen icon and includes a lively prelude to serial rape: “Her body was aching with the grip of his powerful arms, her mouth was bruised with his savage kisses. She clenched her hands in anguish. ‘Oh, God!’ she sobbed, with scalding tears that scorched her cheeks. ‘Curse him! Curse him!’ ”
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And so on, fade to black. Today’s books continue the list of human rights abuses, including abduction and forced marriage. But the sex is more explicit, and rapturously consensual. “With crazy, unbelieving
joy she stroked the marvelous body, felt how the strong back, the clenching buttocks, the powerful shoulders and thighs moved under her hands, felt how the hard masculine sex moved within her.… At last more pleasure than her system could hold burst through her.” So the story goes in
Sheikh’s Honour
.
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