Sex and the Citadel (23 page)

The central deficit here is trust, the absence of which is a feature of authoritarian regimes—from national politics to personal life. As the largest demographic cohort, young people are seen, and increasingly heard—as recent political upheavals clearly demonstrate—but they are not necessarily to be trusted, especially when it comes to making decisions about their own lives. I know from my own family just how fiercely protective Egyptian parents can be, but that is not the same as preparing children for life, particularly when it comes to the means of reproduction. If democracy is, one day, to take root in Egypt and across the region, then young people need
access to the tools of transformation—and the faith that they will use them well—in all areas of life, including sexuality.

Education is the place to start. When I ask teenage and twentysomething friends and family about their priorities for change in the coming years, education (along with employment) tops the list, and their anecdotes of classroom calamity are supported by surveys in Egypt and across the region.
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“In the government school, it’s not just bad, it’s the worst education ever,” one Cairo business school student turned protester told me, her hijab flapping in indignation. “The problem is the teacher, the way they deal with students, the equipment. It was awful, awful. Those years, I want to take those years off my life.” Her frustration is reflected in the grim standing of Egypt’s educational system in international rankings and by the countless reports on its shortcomings, among them underpaid staff, overcrowded facilities, stultifying curricula, and the unequal opportunities for those who can afford private tuition and those stuck with what the public system can provide. The winding down of Egyptian education is, in many ways, a mirror of the country’s fortunes over the past sixty years, from the high hopes of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s opening it to the masses to today’s mass failure.

Among the sorriest subjects in the schoolroom is “reproductive health,” as sex education is delicately called in Egypt.
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Few can forget the fiasco of their near brush with the topic: that infamous lesson on reproductive anatomy that teachers are supposed to deliver in biology class but are often too embarrassed to communicate, instead sending students—especially girls—home to read on their own. Sexual topics are also covered in religion class, but it’s more dos and don’ts in the proper practice of Islam than practical advice for the modern teenager. Studies show that only a tiny fraction of young people in Egypt, including those in the wealthiest and most educated circles, get their information on puberty and reproduction from the classroom.
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Egypt is not unique in its discomfort with sexual education; there are plenty of other countries, developed and developing, that are squeamish about, if not downright hostile to, teaching youth about sex, even in its most mechanical, least arousing aspects.
However, Egypt, like most of its Arab neighbors, has ratified a number of international agreements, among them the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which enjoin nations to provide young people with accurate and adequate information on sexual and reproductive life—though such agreements are under scrutiny by Islamists in the post-Mubarak period.
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In my father’s day, there were no such global covenants, but nor was learning about sex a big deal. Even citified families like ours preserved the umbilical cord to the ancestral village, and my father learned the facts of life from long talks with country cousins and by keeping a close eye on farmyard animals.
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With the shift away from the land, however, few young urban Egyptians have access to nature’s classroom anymore.

Parents are proving a poor alternative. For all their dependence on family, most young people I know in Egypt—indeed, across the Arab region—operate on a “don’t ask, don’t tell” basis with their parents when it comes to love and sex. According to the recent national youth survey, a majority of young women cite family—that is, mothers or aunts—as their main source of information on puberty and reproduction, but only around 5 percent of young men consult their elders on such matters, preferring to rely on friends, who are in much the same boat.
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The upshot is that men, the most sexually active as youth, are also the ones with the least access to reliable information. Not that parents are a particular font of wisdom on sexual and reproductive matters; in Egypt and its Arab neighbors, studies show that many mothers and fathers, for all their desire to be closer to their kids than they were with their own parents, are either themselves sketchy on the details or hesitant, for various reasons, to broach the nitty-gritty.
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Almost half of young men and women surveyed in Egypt claim to be dissatisfied with the information they’re receiving.
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SEX ON-SCREEN

Although reluctant to admit as much in official surveys, many young Egyptians are, unsurprisingly, gleaning their scattered fragments
of sexual knowledge from TV and the Internet—movies and, in particular, porn being prime resources. In Cairo, for example, it is easy enough to find sexually explicit material, especially if you’re a man, illegal though it is. For those without the band-width—or privacy—to view online, there’s always the possibility of a trip downtown to a kiosk selling blockbuster CDs and DVDs, and a bit on the side. Even more convenient, you can send and receive short clips on your phone, thanks to Bluetooth and Egypt’s ever-expanding mobile network. But the locally produced material I’ve seen has a homemade feel to it—poor lighting, bad staging, and muffled sound. There isn’t much professional-quality porn from the region these days.
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Mainstream movies are another story. “Let me show you something.” I was looking at the Nile from an expensively furnished apartment in one of Cairo’s high-rises, my gaze drifting downriver, when my host called me back to admire a different watery view. He popped a disc into his DVD player, and a giant flat-screen TV suddenly filled with the video of a voluptuous woman in a shower, water cascading down her long black hair. It was Marwa—a Lebanese pop star—usually seen revealing her talents in assorted music videos. But never quite as exposed as this, naked and clutching her luxuriant breasts, eyes flickering up at the camera.

The scene was from a movie called
Ahasiis
(
Feelings
), which played in cinemas in Egypt and across the Arab region in 2010. The film portrays sexual frustration and infidelity from the perspective of four women, complete with lashings of melodrama. “In the movie I discuss the issues of men who practice sex with their wives without preparing women before and this leads them to betray their husbands,” the director Hani Girgis Fawzi told me as we sat in his living room, watching outtakes. There were a lot of them: a couple making out at the beach, another embracing in bed, and endless showers—ritual ablutions serving as useful cinematic shorthand for sexual relations. In the final release, there was no frontal nudity, no lingering kisses, and some pretty tame nods to intercourse, but sexy stuff nonetheless compared with movies of a few years earlier. “I cut maybe half of the scenes and they [the national censors]
made [rated] the film only for adults and there was someone standing in front of cinemas to check IDs. Particularly for this movie, there are very strict rules.” Fawzi sighed, his
HEAVY METAL
T-shirt crumpling. “I do not know why especially me and my film.”

While other countries in the region have their own film industries, Egypt is the center of big-budget production, churning out movies and soap operas that saturate screens big and small across the Arab world. Over the past decade, Egyptian cinema has increasingly depicted sex—not the act itself, so much, but many of its associated taboos, including premarital relations, sexual harassment, and sex work. And this against a backdrop of official censorship, religious conservatism, and a political regime not exactly famous for freedom of expression.

These films diverge from the fashion of “clean cinema,” a recent trend in Egyptian filmmaking. In the 1960s and ’70s, sex was a part of cinema, and it was no big deal—bedroom scenes, sexual themes, and plenty of female flesh.
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But with the rise of Islamic conservatism at home, as well as new audiences in the oil-rich, socially conservative Gulf states, came a tendency in mainstream Egyptian cinema to eschew sexual subjects and risqué material (though extreme violence, including slapping female stars clear across the screen, is apparently clean enough to escape such scruples). Actresses made a song and dance of rejecting roles that required revealing costumes and so-called hot scenes; some went so far as to give up acting altogether, putting on hijabs and beating a high-profile retreat from cinema.
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Clean cinema came in for a polish with the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafis after the 2011 uprising and their push to edify Egyptian popular culture—that is, strip sex from movies, TV series, and music videos.

How far filmmakers can go in Egypt is, in large part, dictated by official censorship. To receive government approval to record and release a movie in Egypt, filmmakers have to submit their scripts, and final edits, to the censorship bureau. The law exhorts censors to generally uphold “public order, public morals and the supreme interest of the state.” Various ministerial directives have fleshed out the details, prohibiting the presentation of “sin and sinful acts
or drug use in a way that encourages people to imitate them.… exciting sexual scenes that will offend polite behavior, as well as expressions and gestures which are impolite,” not to mention “calls to atheism or debasing heavenly religions” among other offenses.”
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While such regulations would appear to guarantee a halal ending, in practice, this charter gives the censor, and therefore filmmakers, considerable latitude. Ali Abu Shadi, a film historian and former national censor, gave me a rundown of hot-button topics: “Religion, then sex, then politics is the order of elements to be considered when cutting.” There’s no question that religion is the touchiest subject of all, and the highest religious authorities in the land—Al-Azhar and the Coptic Church—are given a chance to weigh in. Abu Shadi gave me an example of what happens when faith and sex collide on-screen. “A movie came to me in my office to censor and the story was about a
munaqqaba
[veiled woman] who runs a prostitution ring and chooses her assistants and clients through the mosque,” he explained. “I know the niqab is not a religious requirement, but to insult this group would be disastrous and provoke a backlash. I haven’t refused any movie on the basis of sex, but this one I did because of the niqab.”

As for sex pure and simple, the red lines are clear, said Abu Shadi. “I would never accept or permit any movie with scenes of sex or showing bodies of men or women,” he noted. “But I could accept it if the woman were covered under bedsheets.” Yet Abu Shadi sees the censor’s role not as limiting a filmmaker’s scope for expression but rather expanding it—what he called “creativity in censorship”—against conservative audiences that might otherwise raise a fuss and force controversial films out of cinemas and off the air. He has a point: in recent years, what has brought trouble on those pushing the boundaries of public sexual expression is community backlash first, law second. It’s not the state but a collective state of mind that is setting the borders of acceptability.

Such rules apply not just to domestic films and series but to foreign imports as well. Hollywood sex scenes are easy to cut, which means that movies with the occasional racy interlude can still slip into cinemas, and onto TVs, with discreet deletions. But there’s
more than one way to police a foreign film or TV show. When the action is clean but the talk is dirty, euphemism is a censor’s best friend. Historically, subtitling has been the rule for most foreign films and sitcoms playing in the Arab region, and plenty gets lost in translation. In the early 1960s, my father saw
The Sun Also Rises
, with Tyrone Power and Ava Gardner, at the Cairo Palace Cinema, which, with its crimson curtain, plush seating, and CinemaScope, was the last word in movie house glamour in those days. Set against the backdrop of the Roaring Twenties, the film’s star-crossed love story hinges on the nature of its hero’s wartime injury. In a pivotal scene, a doctor breaks the bad news: Power’s wound has rendered him impotent. The force of this disclosure was lost, however, on the Egyptian audience because the subtitles translated Power’s condition as
‘inniin
—a classical Arabic word that even my father, a young medical school graduate, couldn’t understand. Most of the other cinemagoers were in the dark on this vital point until someone piped up from the shadows,
“Ya’ni markhi, ya gama’a,”
roughly equivalent to “You know, guys, ‘can’t get it up.’ ”

Fast-forward fifty years and Arabic subtitles are as genteel as ever, creating just as much confusion.
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During one of my taxi rides in Cairo, I chatted with a young driver whose excellent English was entirely due, he said, to hours of watching American movies and back-translating from the subtitles. “Yes, I learn a lot of English this way. Like ‘fuck you,’ ” he said. I asked him the Arabic word he had seen in the corresponding subtitles:
tubban laka
, which is actually closer to “damn you” in English. I explained the difference, but it didn’t seem to bother him. “What about ‘son of bitch’?” he asked brightly.
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Subtitlers are aware they have a lot to answer for. “Once I was in a shop and the guy asked me, ‘What do you do?’ I said I work at a subtitling company, and he said, ‘You do a lot of mistakes—you never do anything right.’ Oh my God! They think we are stupid,” said Sara, one of a dozen young women glued to their flat-screen monitors at Image Production House, a media company in Beirut. Sara and her colleagues are in demand: in addition to dubbing and editing, IPH churns out subtitling for TV channels across the Arab
region: movies, sitcoms, talk shows—mainly prime-time American fare.