Sex and the Citadel (19 page)

For all this emphasis on male authority, when it comes to FGM, fathers tend to step aside, leaving the decision to cut, or not to cut, to mothers and grandmothers. In the communities studied, it was generally assumed that all girls had been circumcised, and so men hardly ever asked their wives whether they themselves had undergone the procedure. When pressed on the issue, many men admitted that, truthfully, they wouldn’t know one way or the other. But that is changing, thanks to globalization—more specifically, porn. Now that men can see what uncircumcised women look like, it just serves to confirm what they have always believed: uncircumcised
women—particularly Westerners—are sexually uncontrollable, and FGM is essential to keep women in check. “We are afraid if we don’t circumcise females, because as we see in the satellite channels, a female can have sexual contact with three men at the same time, and yet it is not enough for her,” one of the men in the study commented, reflecting the views of many.
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On the other hand, for these men, marriage is their big sexual breakthrough. “Sexual happiness represents 50% of marital happiness,” according to one young man.
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Anything that diminishes that experience is a problem. “I will tell you frankly, I got married six months ago, my wife takes a long time to come on and I do not know why,” said a Muslim religious leader from Manshiat Nasser. “I asked one of the shaykhs who knows about health/medicine, he asked me if my wife’s organ [clitoris] is long, I told him no it is short [circumcised], he told me this is why she takes a long time and he advised me to play a little and shake it before being together; it worked.”
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A minority of men in the study were acutely aware of the disadvantages of FGM, but practically speaking, the decision to circumcise was out of their hands.

The bottom line is that the connection between FGM and sexual pleasure is far from cut-and-dried. “It’s more complicated here than the ‘Western’ idea that the clitoris is so important, and that you can’t experience sexual pleasure without it,” El-Mouelhy explained. Research in Egypt has shown that many women tend to dissociate the clitoris from climax; they consider it a driver of desire but a bit player, at best, in orgasm.
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In El-Mouelhy’s opinion, some basic lessons in anatomy and physiology could go a long way to helping people understand what the clitoris can, and cannot, do. But if anti-FGM campaigners want to use sex as an argument in abolishing the practice, El-Mouelhy and her colleagues recommend that they address such messages to men, who are more focused on the mechanics of sex and may be more receptive to these ideas than are women, who see sexual pleasure in a broader context and often have a take-it-or-leave-it attitude when it comes to the clitoris and sexual fulfillment.

That being said, decades of campaigns, decrees, and declarations
have made a perceptible dent in FGM. While nearly all women in Egypt over the age of forty-five have been circumcised, around 80 percent of those between fifteen and seventeen have been cut.
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That’s a national average; if you look in certain populations, the figures are substantially lower, especially in wealthier circles and urban areas and among the children of mothers educated to secondary school or beyond.
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According to the national survey, over a third of ever-married women under fifty think FGM should be stopped; that may not sound like much, but it is more than double the response from the mid-1990s, and disapproval rates are even higher among young, educated, urban women.
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As one thirtysomething mother of three in Minya remarked, “I will not do anything to my daughter. Ever since we watched this on TV, I have made up my mind.” Should efforts continue at this clip—by no means assured, given the ascent of Egypt’s Islamists—it’s expected that less than half of eighteen-year-olds will be circumcised by 2025.
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VIRGIN GROUND

Just because FGM is declining doesn’t mean that premarital sex is any more acceptable in most quarters. Across the Arab world, female virginity—defined as an intact hymen—remains what could best be described as a big fucking deal. Just how big was demonstrated by a furious debate in the Egyptian parliament in 2009 over an “artificial hymen” from China—essentially a small plastic bag filled with red fluid, designed to simulate the resistance, and bleeding, of defloration. News that it might be making its way onto the Egyptian market was enough to send some parliamentarians into a frenzy and provided a convenient stick with which to poke the Mubarak government. “It will be a blot on the conscience of the NDP [the now-disbanded National Democratic Party] government if it allows these membranes to enter,” a representative of the opposition Muslim Brotherhood warned, arguing the product was a dire threat to Egyptian womanhood, tempting “vulnerable souls into committing vice.”
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Despite the best efforts of several young
women I know to find them, I have yet to meet anyone who has actually managed to buy one of these fake hymens on the local market.

The Qur’an makes no mention of the hymen (
ghisha’ al-bakara
, in Arabic) per se, but it does talk at length about private parts and the importance of protecting them from view. While virginity is, in principle, gender-neutral in the Qur’an, female virgins get special billing, the Virgin Mary coming in for particular praise.
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Then there are the
hur
, the perpetual virgins of paradise, “maidens restraining their glances, untouched beforehand by man or jinn,” whom Muslim men will marry as a reward for a righteous, God-fearing life, so the faithful believe.
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According to hadith, the Prophet is said to have joked with a newly married companion that he might have had more fun with a virgin than the “mature woman” he took as his wife.
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Female virginity became yet another tool to keep women in line, all the easier to enforce through its intimate connection to family honor, making it a matter of collective concern rather than a private affair.

Opinion polls show the line on virginity, in word if not in deed, holding firm, even in countries, such as Morocco and Lebanon, with a reputation within the Arab world for sexual openness.
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There are certainly some women who don’t care and some men for whom virginity is not a deal breaker. “I have a friend of mine who did it,” Rakha told me. “Before she got engaged, she confessed to her fiancé that she slept with two guys. And he married her. One of the few very respectable guys.” But I’ve met plenty of women across the region who distrust such seeming liberality, fearing their premarital experiences will come back to haunt them when marriage turns rocky and their sexual histories are thrown back in their faces. As my grandmother used to say, “The woman who trusts a man is like a woman who stores water in a sieve.”

In my experience, more men fall into the camp of Kassim, a Cairo pharmacist. “I’m twenty-nine years old. I’ve passed through university; those were the days. I’ve seen lots of girls and I’ve been with lots of girls, that’s a fact. Actually, they were my passion. After you finish class or lab, let’s go and find some girls,” he recollected
with a smile. But it’s not a given that getting a girl will get you laid, as Kassim explained. “Normally, in Egypt, let’s say 80 percent [of unmarried couples] no, not sex, but just having fun. They put themselves into the frame we are boyfriend and girlfriend, we can do whatever we can do, but not intercourse,” he observed. Kassim paused for a moment, lost in thought, then corrected himself. “Sometimes, yeah, it reaches intercourse. [But] it’s not for a fact if you have a girlfriend, you’re gonna have sex. No, this is never the fact.”

This is a source of frustration for young men, keen to get some sexual know-how before their wedding nights. “Normally, men seek for experience before marriage. I’m not gonna talk about [religiously] strict people, naive people; I’m talking about a normal person,” Kassim noted. “I would rather have this experience, at least let’s say how to kiss, how to unbuckle the bra by one hand, those are skills. I would rather do this instead of getting married, and I’m all of a sudden, Whoops, we need some help from some other third party. It’s a shame to ask one of my friends what to do.”

Kassim, who studied abroad, managed to pad out his sexual résumé with an Italian girlfriend, whom he contemplated marrying, though their relationship eventually foundered. However, he drew the line on premarital sex with the woman he eventually wed, the sister of one of his friends. “As an Egyptian, she has to be a virgin,” he insisted. Why the difference? “If she’s foreign, it puts the girl into a different classification other than Egyptian women. If it’s fine with me, [then] it’s fine with my parents, my family; they have nothing to do with this [decision],” Kassim explained. “[But] if I marry an Egyptian girl from an Egyptian family, this is where my mother and father come.”

And how. In Egypt, virginity can be very much a family affair, thanks to
dukhla
. The word means “entry” and refers to defloration of the bride on her wedding night.
Dukhla baladi
, so-called “country-style” defloration, was a time-honored custom in Egypt, for Muslims and Christians alike, in which the
daya
would pierce the bride’s hymen with her finger or a razor wrapped in a white cloth, with the groom looking on (or taking the lead) and mothers
in attendance. The bloodstained
laf al-sharaf
(sheet of honor) would then be shown off to nearest and dearest to demonstrate that the family had kept its good name and duly delivered a virgin bride to the groom.

When my father was a boy, visits to the family farm in the Nile Delta, north of Cairo, were punctuated by post-
dukhla
celebrations for women in the village. There was a special song, “Bride, You Have Whitened the Gauze”—that is, honored the family—sung by female relatives and friends as they paraded from home to home with the bloodstained sheet, collecting presents for the couple, laughing and ululating in celebration. Even as a child, my father knew exactly what had happened—it was a joyous event to be shared by all, not some shameful sex-stained episode to conceal.

In recent decades, however, a new kind of wedding night ceremony has gained traction:
dukhla afrangi. Afrangi
comes from the Arabic word for “Frank,” the term used to describe Europeans in the medieval period, and in days gone by, it was Egyptian shorthand for anything new or foreign.
Dukhla afrangi
essentially pushes bystanders out of the marriage chamber and replaces a finger with an exclusively male member to break the hymen—that is, straight-up sexual intercourse. The bloodstained sheet or handkerchief, however, remains part of the program, to be shown to the bride’s family and other concerned parties. Then there is what you might call
dukhla afrangi
2.0, which is what happened to one young woman I know, a scientist in her midtwenties who recently married. In the run-up to the big day, the prospective groom was bombarded with calls from her father, a Cairo lawyer, who insisted that his son-in-law text him right after the defloration to let him know that his daughter had bled as expected. The steady stream of calls and messages reminding him of this duty made the groom so anxious that he tried to take his bride to the cinema, instead of the honeymoon suite, on their wedding night to avoid the situation altogether. In the end, the newlyweds managed to consummate their union as required, the groom having turned off his phone. Undeterred, her parents turned up the next day to collect the sheet of honor. While slightly more private,
dukhla afrangi
still piles on
the pressure: on brides to prove their virginity and on grooms to demonstrate their virility—far from easy, given the wedding night jitters discussed earlier.

As for old-style
dukhla baladi
, personal accounts make it sound about as pleasant for the women at the center of the ceremony as their circumcision was years before, and particularly traumatic for those with hymens that don’t break as anticipated. Indeed, there are voices that condemn
dukhla baladi
as a form of sexual violence against women, a sort of family-sanctioned rape. From an Islamic perspective, some consider the practice haram on a number of grounds, among them that it violates the penis-meets-vagina definition of legitimate sexual intercourse. And for those who hold such notions dear, it also undermines the value of virginity, reducing what should be a focus on broader questions of morality and conduct to a bit of anatomy and a late-night performance.

Nonetheless, some young women in Cairo use
dukhla baladi
to their advantage. Among them are poor working women whose daily forays outside their communities, inevitably bringing them into contact with strangers, put their honor into question; others, whose families migrated to the big city, find themselves relative outsiders and unknown quantities to the families of their perspective husbands. For any woman whose personal history is in doubt,
dukhla baladi
is a form of exoneration, as well as a trade-off for a little more personal freedom, so long as she is prepared to demonstrate her virginity in so public a fashion.
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Indeed, research suggests that
dukhla baladi
is actually more common in poor neighborhoods of Cairo than it is in some rural areas, contrary to notions of the “modernizing” effect of the city. This is in part because the economic and social realities of urban life mean that families are unable to exercise the same vigilance over their daughters, and in part because many inhabitants of these neighborhoods, originally migrants from the countryside, find themselves clinging to rural traditions as the city’s powerful tide rushes in.
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