Boreal

LOVE, SEX & ISLAM

Sex in the Here-And-Now

Josée and Roberta

Allowing young women to seduce me into paying for sex when I had a wife at home whom I loved and who loved me back was not right, as my time with an angel reminded me. I had to do something. I would need some help, and one of the men behind the bar was more than happy to provide it.

My regular bartender had been at his job for more than ten years. He knew these mostly young women who walked in alone and left with the proverbial john. We agreed on a signal. If the girl who cozied up to me was a working girl, he would discreetly nod his head and, before she had a chance to even introduce herself, I would turn to tell her: “No, thank you.”

Most just smiled, got up and walked out the door, their cover blown. As mentioned in the story of Mary, Thursdays tolerated prostitutes who could pass themselves off as regular girls, trolling for customers as a sort of service for their out-of-town and foreign visitors mostly. They were, in effect, part of Thursdays’ business model. This is one reason why my bartender could not overtly intervene and tell them I was not interested. With his surreptitious assistance I became a trolling working girl’s kryptonite, and that suited me just fine.

Pretty soon, the stools next to me were taken up by women—and occasionally men—who showed no interest in me. I returned the indifference until, one day, a voice to my left called out, “What are you, some kind of snob that you won’t talk to us?” That voice belonged to a tall blonde named Josée sitting next to a petite brunette whom I will refer to as Roberta.

Josée and Roberta did not normally sit at the bar but at a table close by, usually accompanied by people I took for friends when they made their grand entrance between 5 and 6pm. Josée and Roberta, I would soon discover, were a two-person marketing firm specializing in promoting new drugs to the medical profession. When I met them, that new drug was Viagra.

After a short conversation, Josée asked if I wanted to join them for dinner at Thursdays’ restaurant on the second floor. When we got upstairs, the maître d’ rushed to welcome them as if they were royalty. We never had to wait for a table, and it was a good one at that.

They began inviting me to dinner at least once a week, whenever they were on their own or needed a fill-in. One such evening, with a doctor whom Roberta hoped would offer Viagra to his patients when it hit the market, was especially memorable. During these types of dinners, Roberta, the brains of the operation, needed me to keep Josée amused while she attempted to persuade a sceptical member of the medical profession to prescribe this impotence-busting wonder drug.

That night’s hard sell was a urologist, I believe. He was adamant; you could not cure impotence with a pill! Impotence, he argued, was another symptom of getting old and men had to get used to it. In fact, he had said just that to a fifty-year-old patient who had recently developed the condition. He told him there was no cure, that his sex life, as he knew it, was over, and to learn to live with it.

While Roberta was trying to convince her doctor that his patient’s sex life was not over, thanks to Viagra, Josée was, I think, trying to convince me that my sex life could only improve if I got to know her better—starting with her left knee, which she glued to my right. In Iran I could have had her flogged for committing khalwat, the sin of "close proximity.” Under Sharia Law, you are guilty of khalwat if you are too close to or touching a person of the opposite sex for no good reason. Khalwat is not a trivial sin. In Iran, the punishment for committing some forms of khalwat is 99 lashes.

The Islamic prohibition against what most non-Muslims would consider innocent flirting, a normal process of getting to know a potential romantic partner, can have extremely violent consequences for young women and girls, such as the repeated rape of mostly young Muslim girls in such a civilized city as Paris. Samira Bellil wrote about the phenomenon in Dans l’enfer des tournantes, or In the Hell of the Gang Rapes, my not-entirely-accurate translation. This novel depicts the practice of men befriending girls as young as thirteen in order to have sex with them, then inviting their friends to do the same.

The young Muslim men featured therein, whose religion has denied them the opportunity to know the opposite sex as human beings, think of these "tournantes" as no big deal. They indulge in this vicious and reprehensible behaviour believing it to be sanctioned by the Koran since they target women and girls not conforming to Allah’s ideal of the perfect woman. It is an ideal that even Mother Theresa, if she had chosen to become Muslim, to marry and stay at home, would have had difficulty living up to.

Samira Bellil fell into these "tournantes" when she tried to escape a home where she was brutalized by both her father and mother. Her story illustrates the cycle that happens when women are beaten by their husbands. Mothers, following their husbands’ examples, beat their daughters. The daughters grow up expecting to be brutalized by their husbands and see nothing wrong in brutalizing their daughters in return. It is as if an entire community has been infected with battered woman syndrome on steroids.

Rather than come to the aid of their daughters who have been raped, the mothers in Bellil's book defend the rapists. The girls must have deserved it, just like when they are raped and brutalized by their husbands.

In much of Islam, a woman who is raped dishonours her family and therefore, the least she can expect is to be cast out of her former home with nothing but the clothes on her back. There is a reason why a large number of young Muslim women in France choose to make their homes their prisons. Outside the walls, waiting, are dangerous young Muslim men with the Koran on their minds.

Josée Stoquart of Gallimard Editions, the publishers of Dans l'enfer des tournantes, doesn’t place the blame for the rapes entirely on the young men in her introduction to the book. She blames the khalwat, which does not permit even innocent flirtation and fraternization between adolescent Muslim boys and girls in a society where young men are bombarded everyday by sexual and pornographic images. This leads to a skewed view of what it is to have a romantic relationship.

Here is how Stoquart explains it (my translation):

[Young Muslim men] are caught in a contradiction between the inflexible demands of their cultural origins (religious fundamentalism, seclusion of women, polygamy…) and a cultural environment filled with erotic images. Flirting is not allowed, nor is friendship between boys and girls thereby heightening the sexual tension. The only sexual education available to these young people is from pornographic films; they have no other representation of what constitutes a romantic relationship.

These young people have no barometer and no appreciation of the gravity of their actions. For them "la tournante" is just a game and the girls, the objects [of that game].

The girls who are raped become, in the eyes of boys and the community, "des filles a cave" [basement girls, since most of the rapes occur in basements] to whom you can do anything. The violence for these girls is not only physical; … they also have to confront the moral violence of a loss of reputation, the shame, the humiliation and the fear of reprisals should they complain [to the authorities].

***

When the girls were entertaining a client, Josée kept it to knocking knees. On other occasions when it was just her, Roberta and me, she would put the leg closest to me on top of my lap, the floor-length table cloth obscuring her maneuver, and invite me to stroke her thigh.

Did I tell you that Roberta usually wore a pant suit and Josée, a dress that ended about six inches above the knee? The first time she put a leg over on me, I looked at Roberta, who just shrugged her shoulders and gave me a look that suggested I just play along. And I did; I didn’t want to lose my dinner invitation. It did not progress further than my placing a hand on her thigh and stroking, sometimes squeezing it a little.

Josée was a confident, exuberant woman who expected me to come around eventually. I remember one time it was just Roberta and I on the outside balcony on a nice summer’s eve waiting for Josée to show up. She drove up Crescent Street in her white BMW convertible waving to the crowd, who waved back. Josée drank too much while Roberta drank very little.

They suggested that, if I was in town on a weekend, they could invite me for supper at their house in Westmount, the most exclusive and expensive part of town. There might have been more to this invitation than meets the eye. Josée, who was already outspoken about her desires when she was not drunk, added, “But you can’t spend the entire night; I can’t hold a fart that long.” I kid you not.

That visit never materialized but those invitations didn’t stop until I left Montréal, and I am grateful for that. All it took was squeezing Josée’s thigh every now and then to avoid dashing her expectations.