It's a Man's World (cont'd)

A few hours after deplaning and my first awestruck encounter with a fully Muslimized woman, I was whizzing through the dizzy traffic of Cairo on a Friday night after prayers, when everyone is out and everyone is at their best (no accident the revolution had its highest moments on Fridays after prayers...the whole population, er, 90 percent of the population to be exact, is holy and ready for miracles on Friday evenings), while my driver had his head stuck out of the car window to conduct one of the 38 conversations he would have with his fellow Cairean drivers that night, I noticed the following. It will rest forever in my mind snuggled right next to the image of the woman in head to toe black waiting outside customs.

Two boys, not yet truly young men, but aiming diligently at that noble goal, walking together down the crowded street. They were probably thirteen years old, by most Arab standards, men, meaning they were mature enough to be considered threats to unveiled women, would not, hence, be allowed easy access to classrooms of girls, share food at weddings with girls, see the skin of no females until marriage if they were devout, except their mothers and their sisters. You know the age: When puberty has gained the upper hand, no longer takes the boy by surprise. Whiskers are sprouting on upper lips, if irregularly; perspiration has taken on a new pungency. And somehow, in any culture I have ever witnessed, the stride of the boy has changed, a little longer, a little more from the hip. So we have two boys, on the cusp of sexual maturity, where they will balance with more or less  ease, depending on their religious values, their family ties, their imaginations for another few years or so. And these two boys, in Cairo in June of 2011, post revolutionary Cairo, are wearing completely matching ensembles that remind me immediately and uncannily of the beautiful boy in the filmed version of "Death in Venice," the blonde boy with the striped shirt. They are holding hands and walking with their new man-stride down the crowded street, dressed for the night, dressed to impress, holding hands and walking on a Friday evening after prayers. I am the only one who notices, except my daughter. The Egyptian who is driving, a deep and dear friend of ours, doesn't seem to understand why we even remark upon the boys.

You see, this is so much a man's world, a world where homosexuality has for so long been so denied, hidden, subversive no one can readily understand how standards of affection and affiliation between men are different here than elsewhere in the industrialized world. Men spend their deepest lives with men here. The division between the sexes is so deep and wide they don't even often see the other side. And before Mubarak, there was a long period of time when it wasn't like this, when men and women mixed, when women didn't have to hide themselves from view. Mubarak was smart enough to know that increasing Islamic fundamentalism would serve his reign well. Over the course of his cruel dominion, women lost a lot of freedom and men returned to the ways of their great grandfathers. Our friend the native Cairean told us about how his mom used to wear miniskirts. Now, both she and his sisters are veiled.

In the USA, we call this kind of sexual separation a fact of life only in the Board Room, where life is still a man's world.