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Yesterday NPR's Fresh Air spoke with El Feki, the former vice chair of the U.N.'s Global Commission on HIV and Law, and a former health care correspondent for The Economist, whose book examines the previously unspoken sexual and social laws of young Arab couples, primarily women.
A number of her discoveries about the societal and sexual climate of these twenty-somethings are, admittedly, alarming... but let's not forget that America could use a primer in women's rights, too.
On the need for hymen repair surgery, which El Feki classifies as a "shadowy business:" "I know of young women who have been returned to their families by their husbands because, as you say, they did not bleed on defloweration."
As of 2008, 90 percent of Egyptian women under the age of 50 were circumcised, and about 80 percent of girls aged 15 to 17 had been circumcised, specifically, even though many Egyptian leaders have been vocal that the practice of female genital mutilation is against the teachings of Islam and Christianity. So who actually makes the decision in each individual case? Shockingly, it's not the men of the house.
According to El Feki: "[Women] are making the decisions about their daughters' well-being and FGM [female genital mutilation], to cut or not to cut. [...] They are making these decisions based on faulty information, but the fact is, they have agency; and the key to moving forward is to recognize that power and to shift it to a decision which is recognizing and respecting their child's physical and mental rights."
The primary reason behind the older women's choice to inflict this unimaginable pain on their daughters is because the clitoris is still seen as "an engine of female desire" that "needs to be tamed," lest the woman grow up to be unfaithful to her husband or make "unrealistic demands" of him.
That said, here's a fascinating thing, particularly when you consider our stateside feminist implications behind a mass-market lingerie retailer like, say, Victoria's Secret. Lingerie sales are skyrocketing in the Arab world as a way for women—whose sexuality, when vocalized, is perceived as a threat to their marriage, their husbands and themselves—to signal to their husbands that they're feeling sexual desire.
El Feki: "It was interesting because these women did not conceive of lingerie as being a tool of male oppression. For them it was a tool of empowerment because they could signal their sexual desire not by actually saying, 'I would like to have sex tonight,' but by putting on this lingerie and then sending out more subtle signals."
A 2008-2009 study shows that domestic abuse remains the norm, says El Feki:
"It was interesting that many of these young people — significant percentages, men and women — agreed that a man should beat his wife if she refuses to have sex with him unless she had a very, very good excuse, or that a man is justified in beating his wife if she is unfaithful."
And, while these women do cite sexual pleasure in their lives, that isn't necessarily defined as an orgasm:
"They saw sexual satisfaction, for example, in that their husbands were happy in bed or that their overall life was happy in marriage, in that the kids were fed and the bills were paid and they had a roof over their head."
Follow Anna on Twitter: @annabreslaw
Image: UN Women/Fatma El Zahraa Yassin
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