Sex and the Citadel (26 page)

But it’s a tough sell. Egypt’s condom consumption is less than a third of the market potential, according to some estimates. DKT saw its sales plummet along with the rest of the economy in the post-uprising doldrums, and the company has little hope of them bouncing back anytime soon, given restrictions on condom advertising and new regulatory requirements that would limit new brands coming to the market. Although population control remains a pressing concern for Egypt, with the rise of Islamism
some experts notice a subtle shift in official talk away from contraception and toward the less controversial notion of “birth spacing,” which does not bode well for condoms. “The government doesn’t like to encourage pleasure,” one DKT executive sighed.

Elsewhere in the Arab world, groups have been reaching out more directly to young people, condoms in hand. In Tunis, the capital of Tunisia—whose Jasmine Revolution catalyzed Egypt’s own uprising and subsequent political convulsions across the region—I caught up with some enthusiastic promoters on the back lot of a technical college. Four attractive young women in stylish black coats, formfitting jeans, and high-heeled boots were surrounded by a crowd of young men. One of the women tore open a packet and carefully removed a condom, holding it up for all to see. “We are going to begin with a demonstration of condoms,” another woman said into a microphone, her voice booming across campus. “It goes on top of the penis in erection. The reservoir goes on top. After relations, ejaculation, take it off carefully and then put it immediately in the bin.” A third woman was passing out condoms to the crowd.

In Egypt, a young woman with a condom in her hand is generally assumed to be holding a tool of her trade. But these women in Tunisia were professionals of a different sort: all medical students and volunteers associated with Y-Peer, an international program under the umbrella of the United Nations Population Fund to promote reproductive and sexual health for youth by youth. The surprising sight of four young women—angels, as they’re called—showing men how to use a condom (indeed, women showing men how to do
anything
in the Arab world is notable in its own right) was rendered all the more remarkable by the subsequent “condom race,” in which the women divided the men into two teams, lined them up, and had each open the condom he had been given, place it on the raised index and middle fingers of his neighbor, and then remove it without tearing it, in sequence all down the line.

The game is intended to both familiarize youth with condoms and get them to associate the product less with shady dealings and more with fun and games. I asked Meryam Guedouar, one of the angels, if embarrassment was ever an issue. “Yeah, a little,” she
said. She herself was uncomfortable when she started with the project, but her confidence grew with time, as did that of her audience. “It takes charm. They learn better when it’s a woman. They imagine … but they learn.” She laughed.

Guedouar and her colleagues fielded questions from the audience. “Superficial relations? No, they don’t protect at all [against HIV and STIs]. Even without penetration,” she responded to one student’s query. Further advice included where to go for free and confidential HIV testing, what types of condoms were available and how much they cost, and how to read the expiration date on the packet. And they deftly handled what seemed to be one of the students’ most pressing concerns. “As for size, let us show you how big a condom can take,” said one of the angels, sticking her arm into a sheath. “XXL!”

While the college itself is mixed, the condom crowd was almost entirely male. A few female students, all
muhajjabat
, were hanging around the fringes but seemed reluctant to take part. “They didn’t dare approach us,” said an angel, who runs information sessions with young women. “It’s a pity, because they have questions you cannot imagine,” she continued. “The other time, one thought she could get pregnant by going to the public toilet, because there’s a risk that there was a man there before and he did, I don’t know what, ejaculate. In the family, they say, you could become pregnant, be careful.” Her colleague chimed in: “Yes, we do the [condom] contest with the girls, but the girls alone. Obviously, they need to know as well. But the problem is that they don’t dare to ask a boy to put on a condom. So we have to make her learn that this is her right to protect herself.”

That need is all the more pressing, said the angels, because there is a lot of premarital sex going down. “Ah, the men, yes, all of them,” one angel answered when I asked if relations before marriage were common. “No, not all of them,” her colleague piped up. “Some have entered into religion—you can’t forget them.” “But eighty percent or more,” the friend replied. There were no disagreements, however, when it came to women’s premarital activity. “The men, they brag; they are proud when they have sexual relations.
But the woman can’t say it,” they said. “Young women, there are some who dare, but we never know because there is always the way society looks at you. You can’t just say, ‘I had relations.’ Even if she did, she wouldn’t say.”

This is at odds with Tunisia’s long-standing reputation as light on religion and loose on sexual morality. This stereotype has a history. After Tunisia gained independence from France in 1956, its president, Habib Bourguiba, was bent on developing the country—and that included women. Tunisia was an early mover in outlawing polygamy and wife repudiation, giving women access to divorce, among other rights. In the 1980s, the country banned hijabs in public offices and educational establishments, as President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali consolidated power in what would be his two decades plus rule by circumscribing the scope of political Islam. Hence Tunisia’s free-and-easy reputation in the Arab region.

The reality is rather different. Even before the rise to political power of Ennahda, its “moderate” Islamic party, and the more visible presence of their Salafi cousins, Tunisia is still, by and large, a patriarchal society where women grapple with legal, economic, and social obstacles precisely because they are women—a persistent challenge as the country struggles to reshape itself. Tunisia’s open approach to reproductive health, for example, had more to do with a postindependence strategy of controlling fertility on the road to economic development than with sexual liberation: premarital sex, extramarital relations, and homosexuality were all illegal in Tunisia under Ben Ali, just as they are in its more ostensibly conservative Arab neighbors.

And so, in Tunisia, the region’s rules on female sexuality still apply. “The men don’t easily accept that women are not virgin. A minority is different, not very educated but open-minded. It’s not a question of education. The man, he has all the right to a sexual life, but the woman, she has to be a virgin. That’s why a lot of them resort to the [hymen repair] operation,” one angel remarked. There are alternative strategies too. “There is a lot, a lot of anal sex. Frankly, because the girls say it is another way to control virginity. The men want her to be a virgin, so she finds another solution. That’s why we
raise awareness; when we talk about sexual relations, it includes anal as well,” her colleague observed.

I asked the angels if they thought exposure to Europe, and its sexual culture, accounted for Tunisia’s substantial rate of premarital sexual activity. “That’s the song of the religious people,” Guedouar scoffed. “They always say the same thing. Me, I think it’s more because the age of marriage has grown. Women, they are more educated than before. She goes to university, she finishes her studies at twenty-four years old. She has to work. So she’s marrying at thirty years old. She has the right to a sexual life [before marriage].”

For all their feistiness, the angels were skeptical of a wholesale change in the current sexual landscape. “The generation that is liberated, that’s the minority, not the majority. It’s not the same in the north or the south; it’s not the mentality. It’s not going to change everywhere. It will change in certain families, in certain types of people,” one of the angels observed. “The women are becoming more and more open, but the men are not changing.” Guedouar nodded her head in agreement. “He’s still at the prehistoric stage.”

THREE MONTHS’ NOTICE

If male evolution is taking too long, women in Tunisia have alternatives. Theirs is the only country in the Arab region to provide abortion (
ighad
) on request, meaning that a woman eighteen years or older, married or single, can have her pregnancy terminated, up to the end of the first trimester, on a variety of grounds, spousal consent not required. Tunisia started down this road more than four decades ago, when it first legalized abortion under limited conditions as part of Bourguiba’s wide-ranging plans for national development.
³⁴

Two generations later, the fruits of this approach were clear during my tour of a youth clinic in Bardo, a suburb of Tunis. As the condom angels attest, Tunisian authorities have taken a comparatively bold approach to the delicate matter of providing sexual and reproductive health services to young, mainly single people—an
approach many hope will survive any attempts by Islamic conservatives to retrench. Since 2000, the National Office of Family and Population (ONFP), the government’s department on reproductive matters, has set up centers across the country to help young people steer a smoother course through the early years of their sexual life.

The day I visited, the clinic was buzzing with clients, mostly young women in their twenties. One group was clustered around a television, watching a video on breast cancer; others were in and out of consulting rooms, meeting with gynecologists or midwives or psychologists for advice and care on everything from acne to diet to contraception, all free at the point of delivery. This diversification beyond straight reproductive and sexual health makes more than just good clinical sense, especially for centers in rural areas, where young women are under closer surveillance and need some cover to explain away a visit that might be noticed by friends or family. Even in the capital, the Bardo youth center is discreetly tucked behind the main clinic, which caters to married women, with a separate entrance.

Youth-focused clinics are springing up in Egypt and a number of other countries in the Arab region—often on rocky ground.
³⁵
Although they face many of the same social and cultural obstacles, Tunisia’s public clinics are unique in one key respect: the abortion wing. The facility I toured was spotless; a gynecologist and two nurses in surgical greens were finishing up a procedure in the small operating theater, and in a couple of darkened rooms to the side, I saw the blanketed forms of three or four women. The wing has a capacity for nine, but it’s rarely full, I was told; surgical abortions are rare these days, in part because women are turning up for terminations much earlier. And the procedure itself has become safer thanks to the introduction of “medical abortion,” which uses a combination of synthetic hormones rather than mechanical means. It’s not just that medical abortion has replaced surgical procedures in Tunisia; the overall abortion rate has fallen dramatically since the late 1970s, confounding fears that widespread availability would lead to an abortion free-for-all, particularly among unmarried women. The number of abortions in Tunisia’s public
health system has fallen from twenty thousand a year in the late 1970s to an estimated fifteen thousand today, although the eligible population has grown by almost a third in that time. Unmarried clients are thought to account for roughly 15 percent of procedures, according to some estimates.
³⁶

Despite Tunisia’s successful track record with legal abortion, there is trouble brewing, says Selma Hajri, a Tunis-based gynecologist and a leading researcher on abortion trends in her country. “There is not a big pushback against abortion, not yet, [but] there might be. We can’t stop [abortion]; it is in the practice and it’s a law. But you can make it more difficult,” she explained. “For example, in the hospitals and family planning clinics, all women have access to abortion. But only to eight weeks [of pregnancy]. After that, you have to go to the hospital. And at that point, there is a stricter control. If a woman is single, they ask for her papers. The welcome is more difficult; barriers go up.”

Hajri is typical of many educated women I met in Tunis—so stylishly dressed and perfectly accessorized and speaking such flawless French that I sometimes lost my bearings in conversation and forgot that I was in Tunis, not Paris. She’s clear on where these new objections are coming from. “This is linked to the impact of religion. Midwives, even doctors, no longer want to be implicated in abortion. They are fine on contraception, but not on abortion. They think it is haram.”

On the subject of abortion, Islam offers a certain degree of flexibility. While the Qur’an warns believers against infanticide—particularly the killing of baby girls, which was a custom in pre-Islamic Arabia—it doesn’t touch on abortion per se.
³⁷
The cornerstone of Muslim thinking on the issue comes from verses in the Qur’an on the origins of human life and the timing of “ensoulment” of the fetus.
³⁸
All schools of Islamic jurisprudence forbid abortion after 120 days of pregnancy, except if a mother’s life is in danger; before then, however, positions vary not only between schools but within them as well, from the strictest stance, which prohibits abortion altogether, to the most liberal of positions, which allows it on a wide range of grounds.
³⁹
Today, however, there is plenty of
fire and brimstone from local religious leaders, particularly with the rise in recent decades of Islamism, which condemns abortion outright. The upshot is that many women are firmly convinced that abortion is haram no matter what.

Hajri gets a lot of visitors from sub-Saharan Africa eager to learn from Tunisia, but delegations from other parts of the Arab region have been rare. “We tried to bring people from Arab countries,” she remarked. “They also say, ‘It is very good, it is very interesting, but we couldn’t bring this experience to our countries. We don’t have the law; we don’t have the structure.’ It’s like visiting something completely new. They always have this feeling, Tunisia, it’s not a real Arabic country, it’s not a real Muslim country.” While Tunisia has proved an inspiration to countries across the region on the political front in the “Arab Awakening,” its laws and policies on gender and reproductive rights, the product of a particular history, have been harder to emulate. But the ascendance of Tunisia’s Islamic conservatives has brought the country a little closer to its more religiously inclined neighbors, who now might be more willing to take a look at its experiences—good news if Tunisia’s progressive policies and practices continue. Hajri readily acknowledges the difficulty of taking her country’s show on the road. “One of the most important things is the will of the power, the government,” she said. “If there is no real will, if they didn’t want to bring to women the choice of abortion, it would be very difficult to make it happen.”