Needed: an Arab Spring in sexuality

Men don’t see the broader ideas surrounding sex because it is a privilege they enjoy,” says British journalist-writer Shereen El Feki. “The challenge is in making men understand that promoting women does not take away their privilege,” adds the author of Sex and the Citadel, which looks at the sexual lives of people in the Middle East.

El Feki was in India last month to be a part of the MenEngage Global Symposium. An initiative of UN Women, the symposium looks at engaging men in bringing about greater gender parity. Welsh-Egyptian El Feki, who has a degree in immunology from the University of Cambridge and was a health correspondent, was drawn to the idea of looking at the lives of the people in the Middle East through their sex lives because of her interests in HIV and AIDS.

El Feki feels the challenges in India and the Middle East are too close for comfort. “India is a democracy, and yet in some areas the gender disparity is more overwhelming than in certain areas of Egypt.”
“India is in the throes of political change, and there must be greater sensitivity among male politicians in dealing with women,” she says. “Or else, how much political power will women acquire if they don’t own their own bodies, if their hymens are not their own
business?”

Discussing her research in the Middle East, she says she spoke to “a whole bunch of people — married couples, fundamentalists, the morally upright, sociologists, religious leaders and mostly the youth”.
“Yet, invariably women would have far more interesting stories. Mostly because they bear the consequences — especially biological — and the regulations. Laws are for women, family control is for women,” says El Feki.

Despite the moral uprightness, people are definitely doing things and breaking taboos all the time, she says. “There is this real resistance to facing this publicly, to have a full and frank discussion in the public domain about how attitudes are changing. There is a lot of reluctance in many quarters about accepting that the idea of the citadel of marriage, the only context for sexual life, really no longer applies to vast numbers of people,” she says.

There has been a systemic curbing of sexual freedoms in the past few decades in the Middle East, according to her. In the early days of Islam and the millennium that followed, there was a frankness around sexuality. “Especially since the rise of Muslim fundamentalism in the late 1970s, there has been a closing down around sexuality,” she says, adding that some of the finest work of erotica over the ages has emerged from Islamic scholars, who saw nothing abnormal in talking about pleasures of the flesh.
The Arab Spring, sparked off by the Tahrir Square protests, brought about some positive changes in dealing with sexuality despite the spate in incidents of sexual violence, she feels. In the first six months of the Tahrir Square protests alone, 91 women were reported to have been raped. A Danish journalist and a British journalist were raped respectively by jubilant mobs, with both survivors ending up in the hospital for serious injuries.

“Sexual violence was never even spoken of, but due to the violence during the uprisings, we suddenly have discussions on harassment and rape. And this has also helped us finally have people talk about what happens behind doors, which are untouched due to repressed ideas like family (read men’s) honour and a host of other complexities,” she says. “I would say that there were great hopes in the times of the uprisings, especially the ones in Egypt. There was a difficult push for democratic freedoms, and many hoped that we would see a bigger push for sexuality, especially for those who do not fit inside the citadel, like the LGBTQ community.”
The Arab Spring had also led to people talking about sex in general and the pleasures associated with it. “It was difficult for men to even find accurate information on sex on the internet. This year, a new website on sex, lovematters.com, was launched that talks about problems as wells as pleasures. This was unheard of,” she says.
The uprising was a last ditch attempt by people who were increasingly desperate for democratic freedoms, says El Feki. “But sex is more complex than politics and it takes longer to change sexual attitudes.”

“Sexual freedoms are evolutionary, not revolutionary. We need to take tiny, baby steps. If we take huge leaps like the Femen women, we will push back the revolution,” she says.
Over the years, the impact of the media has led to a convergence of ideas in Egypt, says El Feki. “Satellite dishes have sprouted like sunflowers all over Egypt. And yet, you will still see that the less educated and the less wealthy are still open to speaking about sex. In the 1940s, when my father lived in Cairo, the people in the villages would talk of sex freely, unlike in the cities,” she says.