Egypt: ‘Prostitutes’ are not whores, and vice-versa

Rudolph.A.Furtado
Nile Cruise: Photo Rudolph.A.Furtado

Do you know whether or not you are a prostitute? asks a sign in Shanghai I wrote about last year. Like that piece, the one below mulls over the slippery meanings ascribed to women’s behaviour in regard to sex, whether any money is involved or not. This time the setting is urban, middle-class Egypt. Excerpts highlight the anthropologist’s attempts to pin down what her companions mean when they call a woman a prostitute, in part revolving around her studies of Gulf tourists visiting Egypt. What’s being discussed is sometimes known as whore stigma, according to which certain behaviours signify dirty status for women who are certainly not sex professionals.

What is a Prostitute? 

L.L. Wynn,  24 June 2008, American Sexuality

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.. . . 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.”

. . . It took me a long time to understand what Egyptians meant when they said “prostitute” . . .  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. . .

. . . they imagined that Saudis came to Egypt to drink, visit prostitutes, and do everything else that was forbidden back in Saudi Arabia. . . . 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.” . . .

. . . 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,” . . . Ayman just shrugged, but Lina made an attempt. “It’s a lot of things—they way they look, the way they dress, their makeup, their attitude, the expressions on their face, their body language . . .”

. . .  you don’t look like a prostitute. First of all, you’re always with the same people, in a mixed group of men and women. The worst they might think is that you’re the girlfriend of one of the guys in the group, but we don’t sit close together or touch, so they probably wouldn’t even think that. Second of all, your makeup isn’t like those women. They’re wearing thick black kohl all around their eyes, top and bottom. Third of all, your clothes are more decent—you cover up more than they do.” “Okay, maybe tonight I’m covered up, but sometimes I show more skin.”

. . .” Okay, look, I found one thing that I can point out about those women. You see that one that’s wearing the short sleeveless dress? Look, you can see her bra underneath the arm-holes. And the hem keeps turning up and showing her slip. Put the two things together and you can see that they aren’t used to dressing up and looking comfortable in elegant clothes.”

. . .  “You see that woman with the long wavy black hair sitting at the end of the bar?” The one wearing the skirt with the long slit up to her thigh?” “Right. This woman is well known for being very wealthy and loose. Her father died and she inherited a lot of money and she has her own apartment and she has sexual relationships with men just for pleasure. She’s a prostitute.. . . it’s obvious by the fact that she has her own apartment. A respectable woman does not live alone. . . ”

. . . Eventually I realized that the reason I was struggling to understand the concept of a prostitute had everything to do with my own preconceptions about sex and money. I thought of prostitutes as women who had sex for money. But as I reflected on my friends’ relationships and the role that money played in them, I remembered that all of my Egyptian female friends took money from the men they were dating or married to. It didn’t matter whether they were rich or poor, or even whether the men could afford it. No matter what, their boyfriends, fiancés, or husbands paid for evenings out, for doctor visits, and often for luxury items such as jewelry and designer sunglasses. When they married, men paid women a large bride price, a sum of money up to $10,000 that was hers to spend as she liked. Married men usually gave their wives stipends, even if the wives had their own jobs.

In short, it was not the injection of money into a sexual relationship that defined it as prostitution. . . . Nor was “prostitution” even necessarily about sex, since a woman could be labeled a prostitute when there was no proof that she was sexually active at all. For example, sometimes Zeid and Lina would have disputes over whether a particular friend of Lina’s was a “prostitute” or not. Zeid, for example, claimed that one of Lina’s childhood friends was a prostitute because she drove around alone after midnight. . .

Note: language issues are covered in the article, such as the use of the English word prostitute to distinguish certain meanings from those carried by Arabic words.

7 thoughts on “Egypt: ‘Prostitutes’ are not whores, and vice-versa

  1. Cecilie Luder

    Very interesting.

    I’m wondering whether some of the confusion is due to the Egyptians using the same word for prostitute and slut? We do in Danish (‘luder’), and the muddy way the word is used can make it very difficult to tell which kind of ‘luder’ is being referred to: Someone taking money for sex, or someone engaging in frequent sex with a lot of different people without trying to form a relationship with any of them. I think especially the last part, not wanting a relationship, is crucial to a lot of people’s understanding of what makes a woman a whore. That must be why they are calling a woman who inherited her money, lives alone and has sex with men simply for pleasure a prostitute, no?

    Reply
  2. Laura Agustin

    hello cecilie

    most languages have several terms, as you suggest. it’s interesting here that these arabic-speakers choose to use the english word prostitute to signify something different from what the word actually means in english.

    the concept of whore stigma refers to the possibility of any women becoming a slut at any moment. yes, in this case, living alone and outside marriage yet having a sex life causes the stigma.

    there’s no way to make the topic perfectly clear, but there’s a lot of suggestive material from different countries about how the whore or prostitute label confuses and overlaps with non-family-values behaviour.

    Reply
  3. Kris

    That’s interesting. I think that you can separate prostitutes from non-prostitutes by their availability. Non-prostitutes are very picky about which men they sleep with. Typically the average guy is turned down dozens of time by women before they hit the jackpot. It is like this: court 100 women, 25 give their phonenumber, 13 make up their minds when you call them. Then 12 are left over. 6 you can lure to your home, and with 3 you eventually have sex. You probably have faced 97 rejections in a very nasty ways, like complaining you don’t have a car or only work 3 days a week.

    This is no kidding, I’m also studying pick-up artists and then you find out that even they have tremendous difficulties courting women. They raise the numbers by just making a pass at 10 women a day.

    A prostitute is available to just ANY guy, except for a few exceptions like direct friends, family members or extremely dirty or violent men. That’s the difference.

    Reply
  4. red light district

    These types of societies are stuck behind the times. Labeling women as “prostitutes” — a clear attempt at stigmatization — simply because they do not conform to overly prudish cultural norms should not be acceptable. Perhaps there is an element of envy in these slanders?

    Reply
  5. Tarek Taha

    In Arab countries sex relationship outside marriage is forbidden this is because of the religion as a lot of people are religious so whether you called it whore or prostitute it has the same meaning to us because in our culture it does not matter whether the girl doing sex for money or not as it’s all about Chaste
    The girl should stay version until she get married
    I believe that no one has to blame each other actually I did not like “These types of societies are stuck behind the times” and I believe that the women should not use their bodies to earn money
    A woman should be a queen in her house she might get out of her house any times she likes without any restriction. As you can feel safe in Egypt
    I our society in Egypt the husband should buy everything to his wife cloths, food and everything she or his children need. a woman in Egypt might work only if her husband need her assistant to share their house needs and she has the option whither
    We respect all cultures and all religions so please do not Scorn our culture or religion
    Finally please excuse my poor language as I am not native

    Reply
  6. Pingback: Whore stigma makes no sense « Clarisse Thorn

  7. Maria

    In Spain, in the sixties, a friend of my boss’ was absolutely livid at having been turned down by a beautiful, scandinavian acquaintance: “I know she has slept with so and so without even being his girlfriend, therefore she is a prostitute, how can she turn me down?” The stigma was in availability.

    In the same country, in the late 80’s-early 90’s, my mother was saying she wouldn´t speak to a relative who had become a prostitute, because she was living with a man without getting married. Indignant, I told her she was calling a close friend of mine she spoke to, a prostitute too, since she also lived with her boyfriend. She said she didn´t like what my friend did, but since she was working and supporting herself, she was not a prostitute. The stigma was moving to sex for money, where it(pretty much) rests now. Now it´s mainly a class thing.

    Attitudes change. In old fashioned, patriarchal societies women can only be supported by men, and and putting an stigma on sex for money wouldn´t help men like the previous commenter get the wife they want and sex from her on demand.

    Reply

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