SIX or seven years ago, a Japanese adult entertainment company developed what it believed was a novel sex toy – a synthetic hymen. Basically a small bag filled with a non-toxic red fluid that simulated the resistance and bleeding of defloration, it was a cheap and simple way “to give women back their first time”, as one report put it. A Chinese company began churning them out and, in 2009, launched an aggressive international marketing campaign for the “Artificial Virginity Hymen Gigimo”.

In the Arab world it was peddled as a cheap alternative to hymen repair surgery, a procedure carried out in secret by some clinics in the Middle East. In the controversy that followed, a leading Egyptian scholar, Abdul Mouti Bayoumi, demanded that those who imported the product should be put to death and, in parliament, angry Egyptian opposition MPs used the issue to attack the administration of then-President Hosni Mubarak. As a member of the Muslim Brotherhood put it, “It will be a blot on the conscience of the NDP [the now-disbanded National Democratic Party] if it allows these membranes to enter [Egypt].” He added they were dire threats to womanhood, tempting “vulnerable souls into committing vice”.

The “vice” in question – premarital sex – is, according to the writer, broadcaster and academic Shereen El Feki, of enormous concern in the Middle East. As she puts it in her acclaimed 2013 book, Sex and the Citadel: Intimate Life in a Changing Arab World (Vintage), “Across the Arab world, female virginity – defined as an intact hymen – remains what could best be described as a big fucking deal.”

These are not words chosen lightly. There are graphic details in El Feki’s book of age-old customs and the more recent practices that have taken their place that may strike the Westerner as backward and violent – “a sort of family-sanctioned rape” – but in Egypt, where much of her research was carried out, the lack of an intact hymen is often literally a deal breaker when couples decide to marry.

Virginity, El Feki reveals, is very much a family affair thanks to what is known as dukhla. It means “entry” and refers to the defloration of the bride on her wedding night. Parents often demand to see the evidence the next morning. 

“That dukhla of any description persists in Egypt,” she writes, “is because family honour (and in particular, the honour and reputation of its men) is still bound up with female virginity; it’s possible that as family ties unwind, or as personal freedoms come to be recognised in an emerging democratic order, this tight association might weaken, and that virginity will become a private affair, between husband and wife only, as it is between some couples I know. Meanwhile, mothers still invest enormous mental energy in putting the fear of a ruptured hymen into their daughters, warning them off anything that might breach that all-important membrane, be it masturbation or the ubiquitous water hose, found in bathrooms across the Arab world for washing ‘down there,’ according to Islamic custom.”

Virginity testing remains widespread. These days it is the doctors who issue “virginity certificates” – such premarital examinations are legally mandated in several Gulf states – but traditionally such duties fell to a daya, or a midwife, who would examine a bride on her wedding night before a marriage was consummated, with the groom and family members in attendance.

Disturbingly, virginity testing is also an instrument of political control. “In the wake of the 2011 uprising,” El Feki writes, “several female protesters were forcibly subjected to virginity tests authorised by the Egyptian military. Officials argued that the tests were to prove that these unmarried women, who had been camping out in Tahrir Square, were not virgins, just in case they later brought charges against the army for sexual assault. The reality is that such tests are just another instrument in the torturer’s toolkit. Sex is a source of shame – be it the humiliation of male prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison, or violence against female protesters in uprisings across the Arab region, or rape in the Syrian and Libyan civil wars – packing a one-two punch of disgracing women and, by extension, their women as well.”

It was this aspect of Sex and the Citadel that intrigued me, particularly as the issue of virginity testing, while perhaps not as overt a tool of political control in South Africa, remains very much on the political agenda. The Children’s Act has banned the practice for those under the age of 16 – and yet the testing of girls, some reportedly as young as 13, takes place every year across KwaZulu-Natal in preparation for the reed dance at King Goodwill Zwelithini’s eNyokeni Royal Palace in Nongoma. 

The act does allow virginity testing for consenting girls older than 16, but commentators have suggested this provision is bad law as it allows “cultural” traditions to trump individual rights to “bodily and psychological integrity” as outlined in the Bill of Rights. Despite continued calls for its outright abolishment, the practice remains very much with us. 

In 2013, for example, and much to the indignation of the Zulu royals and other traditional groups, the then-ANC Women’s League president Angie Motshekga likened it to ukuthwala, the abduction of a woman for forced marriage, and ukungena, forcing a widow to marry her late husband’s brother. Nomagugu Ngobese, president of the Nomkhubulwane Cultural Institution and the province’s chief virginity tester, accused the league of being “worse than the apartheid government” and being disrespectful to the king. She added that the virginity testing was meant to encourage young women to abstain from sex.

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EL Feki was in South Africa recently, one of the authors who appeared at last month’s Cape Town Open Book Festival. I managed to buttonhole her for a frank chat about her book and other matters. In her talks, as well as in our interview, she made the point that if you wish to understand a people, start by looking in the bedroom. Sexual attitudes and behaviours, she believes, are intimately tied up in religious, traditional, economic, cultural, gender and political practices; sex, thus, is an ideal prism through which to examine a social landscape. 

Her interest here was piqued when she worked at The Economist, where part of her job was to write about Aids. Each year’s UNAIDS statistics revealed vast numbers of those living with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern Europe and Asia – but almost no-one in the Arab region. With a little digging, however, a wholly different picture emerged. Officials, on one hand, were loudly proclaiming that HIV was not, and could never be, the problem in the Arab world that it was elsewhere, but on the other she was meeting whole families who were infected and being overwhelmed with the stories of those who were quietly working to stop the epidemic. The main wedge between appearance and reality concerned sex and a “collective unwillingness”, she says, “to face up to any behaviour that fell short of a marital ideal, a resistance buttressed by religious interpretation and social convention”. 

More than that, however, there seemed to be an utter inability to talk about sex – because they just don’t have the words for it.

“This makes it difficult for women who are embarrassed about the subject and are ashamed at the vocabulary,” El Feki says. “But because we don’t have sexual education it’s problematic. But, a thousand years ago, we used to have who dictionaries full of synonyms for sex in Arabic. And in one 11th century dictionary there are precisely 1 083 words for to have sexual intercourse.”

Generation after generation of Arabs, she says, were able to discuss sexual culture in a frank and open manner – but no more. “This closing down, as I talk about it in the book, is just part and parcel of the closing down on everything in the Arab world, in the politics, in the economics, and the cultural leadership. That is why, I argue, let’s look at what’s going on in the bedroom. Because, ultimately, if we don’t open up in the bedroom, opening up everywhere else doesn’t make a difference.”

This hard-core sexual repression is not unique to the Arab world, and it comes as no surprise that Sex and the Citadel is extremely popular in India. “It’s not just the Moslem population that’s coming to my talks [there], it’s the Hindu population. In India, they have all the trappings we aspired to in the Arab Spring – a relatively free press, a relatively independent judiciary, relatively free elections. 

“Nonetheless, it’s very interesting, with all these structures of democracy and yet there’s no democracy at the level of the family. And as a consequence of that, we have honour killings galore, all the issues of virginity, the condemnations of homosexuality, This is why, if we’re starting, in the basement here, thinking in terms of what our Arab society is going to look like going to look like in the future, seriously, look at what it looks like in the bedroom. 

“Because if you go India, where they looked at the superstructure but didn’t bother to look at what’s happening in family life, in intimate life, they didn’t make the connection, then what does democracy mean if it doesn’t translate into your intimate life?”

Which brings us, if I may, to our own demon-haunted bedrooms. 

“South Africa,” El Feki says, “is also an interesting example of the limits of the law. Again, you have this amazing constitution, great laws, these fantastic structures, and yet, you look at all the sexual problems that exist in your society. It does show the limits of legal change.”

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THE Children’s Act also prohibits female genital mutilation but – and notwithstanding grisly reports of the Danish national with body parts in the freezer of his Bloemfontein home – it is regularly performed on girls in the Sudanese, Somali and other immigrant communities in South Africa. It is, however, not as widespread as it is in Egypt, where Type 1 FGM, as defined by the World Health Organisation, is commonplace.

Type 3 FGM, as practiced among certain African communities, is infibulation. “You cut off everything and then you sew up the vulva opening basically,” El Feki says. “So it’s an incredibly invasive procedure. In Egypt they practice a ‘lesser’ form of cutting – and I use that in quotation marks because it’s a bodily violation now matter how you cut it.”

The rates of FGM are declining in Egypt, she adds. “At the time I wrote the book, about 75% of all 15-to-17-year-old girls were cut. It’s not as high among the richer, more educated and more urban households. Today, it’s about two-thirds. That is a remarkable decline, but it’s still highly prevalent.”

There is, she says, something of a paradox about the practice. “[Researchers] are not allowed to ask questions about sexuality. You need government permission to do household surveys and the government won’t give you permission to ask questions about sex. It’s just off the table. And FGM is about controlling women’s sexuality. And yet it’s such an entrenched cultural practice that we don’t seem to have a problem asking about it.

“And of course the government is walking a very fine line. On one hand, there’s a lot of external pressure [against FGM], and internal pressure, and on the other hand, many people feel that FGM is the right thing to do, and that government interference is basically a Western conspiracy to undermine traditional Islamic and Egyptian and Arab values. But those rates are falling.

“At the heart of the decision to cut or not – which is made by women – is this question of women’s sexuality. The idea behind FGM, at the heart of it, is that if you cut a women’s clitoris then somehow she’s going to be less sexually demanding.”

El Feki is now working on a study of Arab men – not just in the bedroom, but in all realms of their lives. She sees them as conflicted and burdened by complexities and “unarticulated issues”. Again, what she says does have an uncomfortable local resonance.

“We don’t really have masculinity studies in the Arab region. It’s the elephant or the camel in the room. Men are the pillars of the patriarchy, but we know so little about them. We have very little insight into their inner lives.”

She adds that a women’s rights activist had summed up the situation perfectly. “She said, ‘Men in this part of the world, they’re like oil and water. You pour on the water of education on them, of travel, of modernisation, of gender rights, but sooner or later the oil pops to the surface, the oil of tradition, the oil of patriarchy.’

“No matter what you do, eventually it will come out. And very often it comes out around the issues of sexuality. There’s the classic story of the Arab man who goes to the West to study and seems to be leading this very Western lifestyle, with a girlfriend, and is living the life of a Western male student, and yet when he goes back home, he’s looking for a traditional wife like dear old mom and has completely different standards when it comes to sexuality, and what he would accept from a foreign partner, he wouldn’t tolerate in an Egyptian marriage.”

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INVARIABLY, our conversation turns to the Islamic State and the mass rape of Yazidi women and girls captured in northern Iraq and Syria. 

In August, the New York Times reported that extremists were claiming the Quran’s support in codifying sex slavery and using the practice as a recruiting tool. The lengthy report made for grim reading: “In the moments before he raped the 12-year-old girl,” it began, “the Islamic State fighter took the time to explain that what he was about to do was not a sin. Because the preteen girl practiced a religion other than Islam, the Quran not only gave him the right to rape her – it condoned and encouraged it, he insisted. He bound her hands and gagged her. Then he knelt beside the bed and prostrated himself in prayer before getting on top of her.”

El Feki, a practising Moslem, describes such behaviour as “maddening” and discrediting of the faith. 

“I don’t talk a lot about Isis in my book because, in part, they were not a phenomenon when I wrote it, but also because they’re extremists, they’re not the majority and, if anything, what they’re really doing is pushing the majority to ask some really hard questions about what is going on in our faith. Because the rapes, this veneer of concubinage, is just absurd, and it is completely contrary to the tenets of Islam, and the fact that these women are Christian is neither here nor there, these are people of the Book, you’re meant to respect them.

“People across the Arab world are alarmed by Isis. There’s only one other group in the world that posts videos of beheadings and those are the Mexican drug cartels. So here you have all the violence of a Mexican drug gang allied to the fervour of a religious cult.”

IS, she says, is basically Al-Qaeda 2.0, a reboot. “At least, for all the madness and destruction and the violence and the unacceptability of their actions, there was some method to their madness, they had an ideology, however distasteful I find it, at least there was some underpinning to it. But my concern is what what comes next, after Isis. I think this a time for other voices to rise now, to speak up.”