The S-Word

Like a sword the s-word cuts through our lives; starting and ending relationships; labeling and tagging people; torturing some and relieving others. I grew up watching our Egyptian cinema turning sex into a shameful repulsive act where the woman is defeated and the man is delighted. The message was very clear: women who “give in” to men without a legally binding document end up suffering one way or the other. The s-word turns them into social outcasts, black sheep, or infamous notorious creatures of the night. The man usually vanishes leaving behind a bereaved creature pulling her hair and tearing apart what’s left of her clothes as a sign of intense remorse. Some of those women were portrayed to show further suffering when the seed of the affair blossoms into a child. With nothing but disdain and a curled lip, the voice of our intact society would echo in our ears saying “I told you so!”

In our modern cinema, girls can flirt and tease as much as they pleased but the s-word is still frowned upon. Those engaging in premarital sex strive throughout the movie to set two wrongs right – and of course it is the girl who is always doing her very best to get a ring on the damn finger. Other tragic heroines, whose character flaw is their lustful nature, have to go through a painful catharsis whereby they are humiliated, rejected, mortified, and eventually forgiven, or killed in an accident. In the first dénouement, being forgiven in this sense means that they have learnt their lesson and that they will lead a life of penance and “virtue” until a fine gentleman sees how far they have changed and kindly accepts to give them a ring. In the second scenario - where they die - they have paid in full for their mortal sin and now they can just die to set an example for the living.

Today a fellow writer, in a casual chat, asked me why girls refuse and adamantly resist getting intimate with their beau. He complained of the fact that girls feel that the s-word impacts the interest, or the lack of interest, of a guy in a girl. He bluntly asked me why girls fear losing the guy once they have sex with him. I was not the only one watching those movies; I could even consider myself lucky because I was a late bloomer in my relationship with the silver screen. Decade after another, such movies spread the guilt culture in our shame society. As if FGM (female genital mutilation) was not enough to create lifetime barriers between our girls and their sexuality, we have a whole culture preaching the virtue of a hymen.

Arabic movies, books, and anecdotes planted a deeply rooted conviction that girls who are “dishonorable” are not fit for being wives or mothers. The same influences caused men to believe that a girl who expresses her love physically is loose; hence the famous analogies between a girl’s honor and a match stick, a brand new car and a second hand car, and the famous piece of meat covered in sticky flies. My maid once noticed that my cats were not playing together and threw me a casual comment saying “why would he want to even see her face … he already took what he wanted … he is just a man!”

I have many male friends who, in my presence, share their success stories and conquests in the female world. Their verbiage and jargon are of the most offensive type; verbs like jumped, humped, and scored are very popular. So even if a guy is sitting there all polished and cleaned up for his girl, she could still sense the jump-hump-score sequel. Our men are known to be sweet-talkers and to be very expressive in the beginning of the relationship; an American friend of mine, who laments ever getting married to her educated Egyptian hubby, told me that he swept her off her feet with his words, attention, and passion – this is what our men do.

But once the girl loses touch with the ground, she falls … she falls hard and is most likely to break her neck, smash her head, or crack her back. She survives the fall only to live with a permanent disability. Experience taught girls to hold back; they learnt to disguise their feelings in a cloak of callousness for self preservation purposes. Our generation of men and women are confused; everything that they were taught as kids is being questioned as adults. Our very same inhibited women and our very own conservative men, once in the presence of a foreigner are transformed. The women no longer feel judged and the men no longer feel pressured and questioned – what a mess!

I am not for or anti premarital sex. There are so many variables in the equation and our society is not ready for a generalization of any sort at this point of time; if I tell girls to go ahead and to release their inhibitions, I will be damned. If I tell them to resist and to fight the natural urge for intimacy, I am a lying hypocrite. I will just leave it at the point where it is a case by case scenario and I will conclude on a final note to the guys: mental shackles are way worse than metal shackles. We will get out of our dungeons, when we no longer fear your dragons.

Look ... but don't you dare touch!

“Let me give you a little inside information about our society; our society likes to watch. It’s a prankster. Think about it. It plays on mans’ instincts. It gives you extraordinary gifts, and then what does it do? I swear for its own amusement, society sets the rules in opposition. Look but don't touch. Touch, but don't taste. Taste, don't swallow. Ahaha. And while you're jumpin' from one foot to the next, what is it doing? It’s laughing its sick head off! It’s a sadist society!” – That was me, Marwa Rakha, playing John Milton in Devil’s Advocate!

What is it this time that offset my safety valve? Was it a guy who started the lame nauseating right and wrong argument with me? Was it a girl who hid her actions in a cloak of virtue and self-righteousness? Was it a married couple who preach what they never practiced when they were single? Regardless of what irritated my hyper allergic brains, the fact remains that we are a shame society nurturing a guilt culture.

“Shame” – what a word! It has the power to clog your mouth and seal your lips just by pronouncing it. Have you ever noticed how such a tiny word can lock your mind, inhibit your feelings, and imprison you in a world of rules that are not supposed to be broken just because it is a “shame”? We were born free and uninhibited, and then we were given “the rules of shame and its derivatives”; cover your body, hide your feelings, withhold from expressing your opinion, and filter your words before you get yourself in trouble, were all tips to treasure from childhood onwards.

Dr. Thomas J. Scheff, author of Shame and the Social Bond: A Sociological Theory names shame as the premier social emotion. “The thing that moves us to pride or shame is not the mere mechanical reflection of ourselves, but an imputed sentiment, the imagined effect of this reflection upon another's mind. We are ashamed to seem evasive in the presence of a straightforward man or cowardly in the presence of a brave one. A man will boast to one person of an action—say some sharp transaction in trade—which he would be ashamed to own to another.”

Likewise, in the presence of her family, Maha would curl her lips and condemn girls who “shamelessly” hold hands with their boyfriends. In the company of his friends, Ahmed would brag of dumping a girl for “shamefully” offering herself to him. On a shopping spree with her mom, Ola would show her resentment towards a couple kissing inside the elevator. They all want to belong; they all want to be accepted. This is why we lie, fear judgment, and wear masks and faces to hide our own. The question is: who do we see when we look in the mirror?

She woke me up crying in the middle of the night. I asked her what happened and she said that she was so ashamed. “I want to die” screamed R. “I kissed him. I let him touch me. I kissed him back. I wanted him.” I was silent. I knew that my “guilt-shame” argument will not be understood. I tried to be as unbiased as possible. That night I could not sleep; a questionnaire was formulating in my head, and the morning after I was café-hopping picking people’s brains. My “research sample” included single men and women of different ages, families who were having lunch, and couples. The findings of my quick survey revealed that we are sucked in a black hole of contradictions where human termites are eating away our uninhibited essence and our basic human rights are vacuumed by the hands of society and its code of ethics.

The sad truth was that so many responses sounded identical; I asked them on a scale of shame from one to five, one being the least shameful and five being the most shameful to rate the following physical actions between a girl and a guy who were not married. Kisses scored the lowest and full intercourse scored the highest. Touching with clothes on was more acceptable than making out naked. External sex is less grave than penetration. Why? Because what the eyes do not see the mind does not judge and what you don’t know will not hurt you – Hail thee ostrich land I said in the back of my head.

I asked four families who have no relation whatsoever if they would let their daughter date. They unanimously said no; but, one mother said that if her daughter was seeing someone, she did not want to know about it. One of the fathers said, with a stern knowing face “She is not a boy.” Another mother said she knows that her daughter has a boyfriend but “thinking that I do not know, will make her feel guilty. When she feels guilty she will not make mistakes.”

Couples and singles were asked to explain their boundaries; what will they do and what will they not do? Nahla & Amr said that they would do whatever pleased them because they were in love. Their families did not know and if they broke up no one would know. Samar and her boyfriend said they moved in together but told the doorman that they were married. Rehab said that she always kept him wanting her but she denied him anything that went beyond holding hands. Her significant other had a smile on his face and as he told me that this was why he trusted her. He knew for sure that he would be her first and last. Mona does not let her boyfriend touch her at all but she “has a few guys stashed for “touchy-feely” purposes.”

Omar will never take a girl’s virginity, even if she asked for it. Tamer promises that the girl will walk out of his house just as she walked in; “if she walks in a virgin, she walks out one, and if she walks in not a virgin, she never walks out pregnant”. Hisham told me that there were wives and there were whores; a whore would never be marriage material. I had to ask him to define a whore; he said he was referring to loose girls who wore bikinis on the pool. “If I am with her, she would let me rub oil on her body and touch her allover. How could I get married to one of those?” Khaled said that he would never get married to a girl who was known to have lost her virginity. I naturally assumed that he wanted to get married to a virgin until he said “but if it is a secret and no one knew, I can forgive her and marry her.” I was perplexed; “I would be ashamed if everyone knew that I was married to a girl who had experience; but deep down, I do not care less.”

Mayar caught my attention with her long blond hair, made up face, and perfect figure that showed clearly through her tight fitting low waist jeans and body hugging shirt. She was sitting alone when I approached her, introduced myself, and asked her permission to join her. I did not need to ask many questions; she did all the talking on her own. “I am 27 and, as you can see, I am very pretty. I date a lot and my rules change depending on the person I am going out with; if he is “efl” – narrow-minded – I will dress up less provocatively and will just let him pick up the checks. If he is one of those fake modern guys who wear cargo pants to hide their “galabeyas”, I beat him at his game too by showing everything that he cannot touch. I am never myself with Egyptian men; I feel that I am always seen through a microscope and my slightest expression of my feelings will be used against me. When I am with a foreigner, I am more expressive. I am not a slut as people call me.”

Surprisingly enough, none of the people I talked to said that they did something or withheld from doing another because they wanted to; it was never their innate choice, it was always a reaction to “people” - those who make up the double-faced fabric of society. Those "people", along with ghosts, demons, and spirits, are in the same category in my head - they are there but we have our separate lives and our paths don't cross. I don't fetch them and they don't come after me - end of story. “Our intense hatred, resentment, and envy towards anything or anyone, are all products of unacknowledged shame. We fall in the feeling traps of shame/anger. Acknowledged shame is the glue that holds relationships and societies together; it is the cause or the result of social solidarity and alienation.” concluded Dr. Scheff in his study.