Walking along Avenue Mohammed V on a Tunis afternoon, a breathtakingly beautiful woman walked by me. She had long, dark flowing hair, perfect makeup, and the stony I-will-fucking-end-you look on her face I know from catching glimpses of my own reflection in public. She wore jeans and a tight t-shirt that stretched the words “Don’t Touch” across her breasts. Later I saw another woman chatting with a friend, her t-shirt said “Leave Me Alone.”

“We don’t talk about these things,” I am told, every time I ask about sex in Tunisia. Everyone pretends no one is having sex. An unmarried Tunisian couple in public kissing risks being harassed, though Europeans can mostly get away with it. The women are confronted everywhere by fashion, images of Western celebs caressing perfume bottles as if the bottles can feel it. The dresses in Tunisian shops sparkle. Tunisian women’s clothing is serious about having twinkly bits that cling to limbs and midriffs, sparkles that end in skin.

Not far from the dress shops, the streets of Tunis, its cafes and squares, shisha joints and little markets, are almost all men’s spaces. The sexual male gaze, the catcalls, even the occasional reach out towards your body as you pass are not really about sex, they are about punishing women for being in public.

The male gaze everywhere is about power, and here it was about the power to keep women out of public life.

Sex in Tunis is a universally taboo subject. When I asked my translator to ask the old women I was interviewing about how sex has changed over the years, she refused uncomfortably. Even my asking her in English was awkward. The women who talked to me about sex were mortified by the idea of me writing about it. The men didn’t talk to me about sex at all, other than occasionally offering it, offers I don’t believe were sincere.

Hypocrisy, women said quietly to me. They said it of Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt. And of course, Tunisia. I was given links to stories: Teens jailed for kissing in public in Morocco, the notorious virginity tests in Egypt.

The hypocrisy in question isn’t really an Tunisian or even Arab one, it is this: men are supposed to have all the sex they can get, women are meant to guard their virginity as if their whole worth was contained in their unbroken hymen.

It’s not even as if the men like this situation. Some must enough to perpetuate it, but when they talk to me, I usually find men are as frustrated with the taboos around sex as women. They are, however, rarely comfortable with the idea of women being as free as they are. It’s dangerous somehow, nothing anyone can put their finger on. My take on sex is only ok because I am foreign, I am the other. I’m Californian, and everyone knows we’re practically space aliens when it comes to sex. I let people think of me that way — it lets people talk, and few people in the Arab world can talk about sex freely. It helps to talk to an alien.

A student filmmaker in Egypt did a fantastic film called Libido about men’s confusion about sex in a society that won’t deal with the issues. It’s face forward about porn, masturbation, and the fact that people get their sexual education from internet videos.

The chase scene while the young couple are trying to get alone to have sex is a must-see.

What about women’s side of the story? “Bpppppt”, the film happily admits.

In the meantime, on every TV in every cafe I saw in Tunisia, women were hyper-sexualized, images as vivid and lithe as Lady Gaga videos but without the critique. I was sitting in a juice cafe on Avenue Habib Bourguiba, watching a woman vaguely clothed in a single windblown cloth, mimicking lovemaking with a man, also in a cloth. Below them is a young couple talking over their entirely pink and green drinks. She was in a T-shirt and jeans, I couldn’t read if her t-shirt said anything.

How does she measure up to the media woman? Or the idealized virgin? Is she sufficiently sexy? Sufficiently untouched to be worthy of love and support? Tunisia is learning to date. A married woman told me that her father would have killed her if he’d caught her dating. I don’t know if she was being metaphorical.

Watching the couple and the TV in the cafe, I told a friend over IM that if you want to see a women in reasonable clothes on Arabic TV you have to wait for American film trailers.

“Why do men want to marry virgins?” I keep asking men and women when we talk about this, “It’s like saying ‘What I really want in a partner is that they’re bad at sex and probably scared of the whole thing.’ Why is that attractive?” No one really answers me. The attractive quality of female virginity so goes without saying that no one seems to have anything to say about it.

I was told by several friends in Tunisia that if a man beds a women, he walks away from her and treats her like shit, because he has had her, and now she is worthless. I considered this and shared my affection for pegging with a few of my friends. “Once you’ve slept with a man like that,” I confided, “They don’t just walk away. Well, not if you’ve done it right.”

My friends mainly just giggle when I talk this way.

I said this to be shocking, but also because I was so annoyed. Why were we still talking about sex this way? Why are we still at this point, anywhere in the world? Why are we not over this?

Women in Tunisia have rights, access to reproductive health, birth control, and condoms are for sale at the pharmacies at the counter. Wearing the nicab and hijab, the Muslim headscarfs, is a personal choice. The fertility rate has declined from around seven births per woman to around two, just below replacement rate. That’s a decline that generally accompanies a rise in the rights and education of women, a liberalization project both of Tunisia’s dictators took seriously. Access to abortion has fallen since the revolution, but Tunisian women are unlikely to tolerate a reversal of rights, and not even Tunisian men want it. For one thing, with the economy tightening women often need to work to support the house. That age-old stalwart of women’s rights: inflation.

Tunisian women are unapologetically sexual creatures. For all the taboos they face, they are talking about sex, what they want, and what they care about, with the people who will listen. For the most part, this is other women, but not always. Their dress varies from conservative to sexy, but mostly, they dress as modern women do everywhere: sometimes conservative, sometimes business, sometimes sexy. They are having sex, at times with each other. They just don’t talk about it publicly.

And for all the quiet hustling along the streets, they are very, very angry. Mostly women on the street in Tunis just avert their gaze from the floating clouds of eyeballs in the their way, or find ways to be invisible. Some women choose a headscarf that is not a nicab or hijab, just to not be stared at. Every single one of them is pissed off.

There is no woman in the world who wants her clothing choices to be dictated by the male gaze. Miniskirt to nicab, shalwar kameez to pinstripe suit, there is not one woman who wants her clothing choices to be dictated by the cloud of aggressive male eyeballs she faces, instead of what she wants to look like. There is no uniform that invites the eyeballs, because no one wants the eyeballs. They’re awful and threatening. They punish you for the mere act of being.

The eyeballs that follow you around the streets of Tunis, just like they do in every corner of the world, sexualize and shame the act of female existence. And fuck that.