He leans in close and says, "Wahid." His dark-brown eyes are beautiful, too beautiful not to stare into, but he wants me to look at his mouth. His name is Hanny, he's only twenty-one, and he won't let me have what I need until I repeat after him.
    "Wahid," I say.

     It's not good enough, so he doesn't give me what's in his hand: the eggplant. He makes me repeat the word again. To say wahid correctly — the word means "one" in Arabic — the "h" must be breathy, like you're fogging up a mirror. When Hanny says it, it's like he's exhaling sex.
     Hanny works at my local produce market in Cairo. Ever since I arrived a few months ago, he's been teaching me Arabic. He makes me say the numbers and names right — khamsa tamahtiim, talata basal — before he'll charge me for my purchase. His sly, sexy eyes fluster me, as does the fact that he's twenty-one. (I'm thirty-six.) I had wanted to seduce him for a long time, before I finally realized I couldn't figure out how. So I gave up. It's precisely what Egypt wanted me to do.
     Having grown up in Pennsylvania as a product of Catholic grade school, Catholic high school, Catholic mass every Sunday and still-persistent Catholic guilt, I thought I knew something about being suffused with religion. As a girl, I was a prude; I lost my virginity late. For a while afterward, I mostly had sex just to see what it was like — it had been such an unknown quantity. But once I moved to Egypt for a journalism job I found on the Internet, I realized how mild my bout with religion had been.

     Egypt isn't just a country of Muslims but a Muslim country, and the distinction looms large. Church and state overlap; morality — namely drinking, gambling, and sex — is legislated. If your passport says you're Egyptian, you can't set foot in one of Cairo's cheerless casinos. If you're an Egyptian couple and can't prove you're married, you can't rent a hotel room. And where laws don't apply, society steps in. It's right there between Hanny and me, between every anxious, horny teenage boy and girl in Egypt who can't be seen in public holding hands, between every horny adult male and female, each of whom is likely still stuck with the sweaty-palmed anxiety they never got over in their teens.
     Islam forbids sex outside of marriage, but unlike in Christianity, the faithful still do something about it. Just as in an Edith Wharton novel — think Lily Bart's omnipresent tormentors in The House of Mirth — society is a pervasive, relentless enforcer of sexual mores. A kiss here is enough to merit gasps. When an American friend of mine walks down her street in jeans and a long-sleeve blouse, a neighborhood man regularly hisses at her, "Cover yourself!" Sex scenes are clipped out of American movies by state censors, and subtitles are manipulated to reinforce dominant values. In the recent Hannibal Lecter flick Red Dragon, Emily Watson's blind, naïve character asks serial murderer Ralph Fiennes if he wants to join her for a cup of coffee. "Would you like to come up for an alcoholic drink?" is what flashes across the bottom of the screen in Arabic. The logic is that she clearly wants sex, and one bad thing naturally goes hand in hand with another.
     Society conspires to make it difficult for a man and a woman even to be alone together. Single adults live with their parents. "You stay with your family until you get married," one Egyptian co-worker in her late twenties told me. "Egypt will never, ever accept anything different. Ever." If you're a foreigner living alone, or a married person whose spouse isn't at home, it's scandalous to let someone of the opposite sex come into your apartment. When I first signed a lease in an upscale Cairo neighborhood that's popular with Westerners, my sweet older landlady instructed me not to open the door if a man from the gas or electric company came by with a bill. Then, to make sure I understood, she repeated it in Arabic to my bilingual real estate agent, who said it again to me in English.

When the electric-company man does come around with my bill, he is escorted to my door by the public representative of the Egyptian sexual surveillance system: my bawab.
     Every residential building in Cairo has a bawab, or doorman. For $10 a month, he takes out your trash, washes your car, greets you as you come and go. As a bonus, he monitors your every move. Right inside my building's front door, there's a room the size of a broom closet. There I can find my bawab, Mahmoud, or one of his young sons, Sammy and Akhmed, at any hour of the day. Around midnight, they lock the front door and put a brick on the floor behind it. When I come home late at night, even if I manage to unlock and open the door quietly, the brick scrapes along the floor, and I wake the bawab. He emerges from his post to solemnly, pointedly wish me a good evening. As a result, if anybody — a family member, a landlord — wanted to know about my habits and improprieties, a few bills in the bawab's hand would produce any information they wanted.
     Marie, an American friend working in Egypt, told me how, one night her boyfriend phoned around 12. He wanted to see her; he was in the neighborhood. Knowing that she couldn't invite him up to her apartment, she snuck out past her sleeping bawab. Her boyfriend pulled up to the curb a short distance away, and they leaned against the car, talking. A few minutes later, my friend looked over and saw her bawab sweeping the sidewalk in front of the building's entranceway. He didn't say anything. He was just there.
     The bawab is the most tangible sign of sexual surveillance in Egypt, a system that begins at home. Because improper behavior has the ability to "reflect badly" on the family, dates are held at home, under parental supervision. Parents have the power to call off their children's weddings. Because the system is such an accepted way of life, it took me a while to register the reality of it — to understand that, even during my first couple of months in Cairo — those months of resigned celibacy! — my neighbors and bawab viewed me as a slut.
     I know an Egyptian woman raised in London who hasn't spoken to her Egyptian relatives ever since they started calling her a whore — a British whore, to be precise — for going out to public events such as art openings and movies with her boyfriend. "We got married because we just couldn't deal with it anymore," she told me. One Western-raised Egyptian woman won't go to restaurants with a man because her family is well known. A date isn't worth the trouble it would cause, she explains. She tells me of other things that remain deeply hidden to me as a foreigner: stories of women subjected to prenuptial hymen tests, of female genital mutilation.

I work with a thirty-year-old Egyptian woman who's clever and funny. She reads Milan Kundera and Gabriel Garcia Marquez in English translation and happens to wear a head scarf. Once when someone suggested that she get a ride home with a male co-worker, she said flatly, "I couldn't do that. Alone in a car with a man? No."

     The effect of all these rules isn't exactly surprising. There's a ton of illicit stuff going on. Although they're expected to stick to public spaces like sidewalks and parks, couples find places to go for sex. Adults resort to teenage tactics, making out in dark, parked cars and lying to their parents about where they were. With few, if any, outlets to meet men, some women will linger on the streets at night and slip into the front seat of a random man who pulls up in a nice car. Some women will give a taxi driver a little thrill by letting him peek behind the veils that cover their faces.
     My Catholic upbringing taught me the particularly sweet pleasure of transgression. But transgressing is no fun here, because just about everything I do is forbidden. I break rules I don't even know about. I never thought about how many times I made eye contact with a guy — a friendly "good morning" or a simple acknowledgement that he's sharing the sidewalk with me — until I stopped doing so in Cairo, where it invites anything from blatant stares to unwelcome touches. At the same time, I've become an embarrassingly drop-jawed ogler at any glimpse of sex, whether it be a ludicrous Christina Aguilera video on a bar's satellite feed or Western tourists kissing in front of a medieval Islamic fortress, or a sultry, sweaty ad in a French magazine, like the one I saw the other day which made me literally lightheaded for the rest of the afternoon. I never used to be like this.
   But I've never before lived in such a restrictive culture. If you're a liberal in any arena — sexual, political — there's really no movement in Egypt that you can latch onto and support. The reasons are many. For one, Islam spells out very specific rules for women's conduct and rights regarding such things as marriage, divorce and employment. They're widely followed. In addition, most Arab countries see it as a matter of pride not to adopt what they see as loose Western standards. There are academics in Egypt who are feminists, but their main call is for political change. After all, when the country's first female judge was appointed in early 2003, many TV and radio commentators were vocally unhappy about it. That's what feminists are up against.
     It's true that Egypt isn't Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan under the Taliban, but there are still men and women here who believe, as a thirteenth-century Muslim scholar put it, that "the whole of the [woman's] body is to be regarded as pudental and no part of her may lawfully be seen." Even when this line of thought is diluted a hundredfold, the effect is that a woman's mere solitude can be interpreted as an advertisement for sex. It's exasperating, because it cuts off access to all the fun stuff we get to do that truly is sexy.

Case in point: one day a friend was riding the subway, and as the train pulled into a station, a man brushed against her. She looked up to find him standing outside the open doors. "I'm waiting," he intoned — actually believing, on some level, that she might get up and join him. A few weeks after I arrived in Cairo, a soldier was listlessly guarding a nearly empty subway station when he walked toward me and stared. All I was doing was sitting and reading. After hovering for a bit, he hissed and said something I couldn't understand. "What?" I naively asked in Arabic. He kept his distance and stared, and finally spoke a few more words, one of which was "sex," but he waited until a train on the opposite track pulled up, effectively drowning out most of what he was saying, which is the perfectly telling anecdote for sex in Egypt: If I say it and she can't quite hear me, maybe I haven't said it at all, or maybe I'll get laid.
     In a certain respect, I'm sympathetic to that soldier. I've fantasized about saying something to Hanny, something that could be interpreted as either dirty or innocent. I'd take my cue from the way his eyes did or didn't hold mine after I said it. If I say it and he can't quite understand me, maybe I haven't said it at all, or maybe I'll get laid.
     I haven't said anything, though. Instead, Hanny and I have begun an innocent form of intercourse: we're tutoring each other. I'm teaching him to read English, and he's teaching me more Arabic. When we were deciding where to meet for our lessons, we couldn't come up with a good option. He kept being coy, saying "I don't know, I don't know," shaking his head. Finally I said that I wished we could just go to my apartment, but it would look bad. He said not to worry. As he explained, "Everyone around here knows me." They do; his store is popular. But what was his point? That everyone knows that he's a respectable guy? When he walks into my place to learn the English alphabet, is every bawab up and down the street saying to the next bawab, "You know Hanny, what a nice guy"? Or are they nodding to each other saying, "Lucky guy — alone with the slut"?
    I may not be sleeping with Hanny. But at least all the people watching me in my neighborhood — and that's probably everyone — think I am. What's dismaying, though, is that considering their limited exposure to it, the sex I'm having in their minds probably isn't that good.  n°

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
	Theresa Everline has worked as an arts editor, a managing editor, and a freelance writer in St. Louis, New Orleans, Orlando, New York City, and Cairo.