In Egypt, "Prostitute" Is a Slippery Term

By L.L. Wynn, American Sexuality Magazine. Posted June 26, 2008.

It was 2000 and I was at a dinner party in Cairo. I was sitting with *Malak, a belly dancer, and we were eyeing up a young woman who had large oval eyes thickly lined with black kohl and a wide mouth painted salmon. It was the first time Malak and I had seen her at Haroun's house. After she'd been introduced around to the group of friends -- dancers, actresses, businessmen, and me, an American anthropologist -- that met every Thursday night for drinks and dinner, Malak looked her up and down skeptically, and then she said to me in a low voice, "She's a prostitute. Look, obviously that vulgar man thinks so too, because he wouldn't dare put his hands all over her like that unless he was sure she was a prostitute."

I shrugged. "You know, Malak, my dear, under the broad definition of 'prostitute' used in Egypt, all of the women here are prostitutes, including you and me." Malak smiled wryly.

It took me a long time to understand what Egyptians meant when they said "prostitute," and during the first year of my anthropological fieldwork, I was plenty confused. Every time the word "prostitute" came up in conversation, I listened carefully to try to understand the context and how it was being used. It seemed to have to do with behavior, dress, social class, and sexual experience. But it wasn't until I could finally shed my own cultural preconceptions about prostitution fundamentally being tied up with money and sex that I finally understood what my Egyptian friends meant.

When 'Sex' Tourism Doesn't Necessarily Involve Sex

I didn't come to Egypt intending to study prostitution. I was studying tourism and the way people interact across cultures. To that end, I had decided to compare Western tourism and Gulf Arab tourism in Egypt (the countries considered part of the Arab Gulf include Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates).

Gulf Arab tourists mostly come to Cairo in the summer months to escape the heat in their own countries, and I documented lots of family vacations and dating between Gulf men and women. I had good access to Gulf tourists: I had previously lived in Saudi Arabia, and I met up with my Saudi friends when they came to Egypt on vacation. We would go to restaurants and movies and nightclubs. Some of my Saudi friends dated each other, while others were already married. One couple got engaged while they were on vacation in Cairo. Their vacation was one long party, and in many ways they transgressed Saudi cultural norms about male-female socializing, but it was all pretty chaste.

But that's not what my Egyptian friends thought. Instead of youthful dating, they imagined that Saudis came to Egypt to drink, visit prostitutes, and do everything else that was forbidden back in Saudi Arabia. It was in the context of talking with Egyptian friends about my research on Gulf tourism that the issue of prostitution first came up. If I said that I was going to such-and-such a nightclub to observe, and that nightclub was known to be a hangout for Gulf Arabs in the summer, my friends would all try to dissuade me: "Don't go there, men will harass you. They'll think you're a prostitute." Knowing, as I did, that my Saudi friends came to Egypt for fairly wholesome vacation fun, I thought this was an interesting allegation. I wondered: Why were these Egyptians (who never had any personal contact with Saudi tourists) convinced that Saudis were coming to Egypt to find prostitutes?

So I started paying close attention to Egyptian assertions about the link between Gulf tourism and prostitution as part of my research.

'Prostitution' and Social Class

But soon I noticed people talking about "prostitution" in contexts that had nothing to do with tourism. One night I was at a restaurant with a group of upper-middle class Egyptian friends. One of them, Ayman, was twirling his fork on the table when suddenly he said to me, "Look, Lisa, a case study." With the fork he pointed in the direction of two women with short hair who were sitting at a table in the corner.

"You really think they're prostitutes?" Case study had become our code word for a prostitute because of my academic interest in the subject.

Lina looked over and agreed with Ayman. "Definitely case studies."

"I just don't see it," I said with some frustration. "What is it about them that makes you identify them as prostitutes?"

The others couldn't point out anything specific. But they were positive that these women were indeed "prostitutes."

"Look, there must be something that makes you say 'that's a prostitute.' There must be something that you all see with your cultural knowledge that I don't see. Try to analyze it. Try to explain it to me so I can see through your eyes."

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Lisa L. Wynn is a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. She spent over three years living in Egypt doing research for her 2007 book, Pyramids and Nightclubs: A Travel Ethnography of Arab and Western Imaginations of Egypt, from King Tut and a Colony of Atlantis to Rumors of Sex Orgies, Urban Legends about a Marauding Prince, and Blonde Belly Dancers.

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