Sex and the Saudis

IT’S been a day of disappointment. First, for a young Saudi, whose face grew as lugubrious as a camel’s after I patiently explained to him that there was no “magic bullet” – or pump, or cream, or pill – that would lengthen his 11cm penis to the 20cm he so desperately wanted.

Then disappointment came my way when I found that a tantalising internet headline – A Girl’s Guide to Saudia Arabia – would not take me to the actual feature in the latest issue of Vanity Fair, but to a summary of the piece, which sparked my curiosity even further.

Dowd on the shore of the Red Sea in a government-issue Abaya. Aaaargh! Photo: Ashley Parker

Ah well, the full article by New York Times columnist and Vanity Fair contributor Maureen Dowd may materialise later.

This much I learned from the summary:

Saudi Arabia is slowly cracking open its doors to embrace tourism, albeit only for small, ‘high level’, and ‘fully educated’ groups of visitors. (‘No backpacking stuff’, warns the Saudi tourism minister.) The Kingdom is likely to be a tough sell. It’s a fundamentalist-Islamic state—the Koran is the constitution—where alcohol is forbidden, and even Western women must cover themselves the way Saudi women do, and cannot move about without a male escort, much less drive a car. Sound like the perfect vacation spot?

Maureen Dowd found the allure irresistible, and was determined to see Saudi Arabia on her own terms – or as many of her own terms as she could negotiate. The resulting article in Vanity Fair is one part travel romp and one part history lesson—with a healthy dash of moxie [fortitude] thrown in.

Dowd explores Saudi Arabia’s historically “veiled,” closed-off nature. Big oil companies were allowed into the country in the first place, in the 1930s, only because the Great Depression had cut into revenues from the hajj. The Kingdom didn’t have widespread electricity until the 1950s; slavery wasn’t abolished until the 1960s; and ‘restrictions on mingling between unrelated members of the opposite sex remain severe’, and punishable in various unpleasant ways. The pace of modern transformation in Saudi Arabia is, in Dowd’s words, ‘akin to a snail on Ambien’.

When Dowd arrives at her hotel in Riyadh, she finds a gift-bag containing a government-issued abaya (which, she says, ‘makes you look like a mummy and feel like a pizza oven’).

She keeps her male enforcers on their toes at every turn—and manages to stay one step ahead of the feared religious police, known as the mutawa. Along the way she interviews eminent Arabians—mostly men, who proudly explain that Saudi society is inexorably changing. They may be right, Dowd admits. But one also wonders: How can they tell?

Wearing an abaya is not without its dangers, as this shopping mall sign indicates

At least one commenter on the site was outraged by Dowd’s piece. Said Faransa:

She trivializes the Saudi culture, belittles their traditions and customs with a Western supremacist attitude and has no respect for Islam … She complains about there being no alcohol available. She complains about wearing an abaya. She complains about being segregated in the mall. Personally, those are some of the quirks that I love about Saudi Arabia. You can’t get that anywhere else.

Note: My encounter with the Saudi gentleman took place in a (non-segregated, abaya-free) sex shop in Brighton, where I have a part-time job. I did not send him away completely empty handed. After delivering the standard “size doesn’t matter” spiel I flogged him some herbal potency tablets (which work a treat) and a spray to combat premature ejaculation.

Hat tip: Canada Dave, who actually sent me a link to a completely unrelated story about al Qaida’s Inspire magazine, which we originally reported on here. It contained the Saudi report in a sidebar.