Ghalia, who asked me not to use her last name, was giving me the "Bridal Works" packageโpeeling me, leaving not even a single flake of dead skin or body hair behind. We Egyptian women are a hirsute group, so for me this process involves a lot of breaks, a lot of deep breaths, a lot of going to my "happy place.
I'd come to Egypt with one question: How do peopleโespecially womenโlearn about sex in a country where sex is taboo? When I bought birth-control pills in Zamalek, an affluent part of Cairo, an Egyptian man next to me muttered, "Disgusting. In the government dropped all sex education, the bare minimum requirement for reproductive health, because teachers were shyly skimming the curriculum anyway.
Naturally, people turned to the internet: Egyptians are the second-most-likely people in the world to google "sex," but as of , only 44 percent of the population had access to the web.
Egyptian mothers are notorious for avoiding the subjectโprepping their daughters only for the customary wax that must take place before their wedding.
They grab their daughters by the hand and take them to beauty centers. It's often only there that they can have real and honest conversations about sex, usually with women like Ghalia. She laughed at the faces I made every time she flattened a cold ball of halawa โalso called "sweet," a popular homemade waxโonto my leg, stripped it, and repeated the process.
