Misadventures in Mating-Part 2

Or a few observations on sex and prostitution in the Arabian Gulf

I knew an American woman who was teaching at the University of Bahrain who conceived an attraction for one of the students in her class and propositioned him. Interestingly, he would not sleep with her unless they entered into a formal mut’a (temporary marriage) contract. His reaction was quite unlike most of the locals who would jump at the chance of sleeping with a western woman. In this case they actually went to the mullah and entered into a preliminary contract for three months. I don’t know what the consideration was. Apparently, they were both happy with the arrangement as I heard that they extended it for another three months until her teaching contract was up, and she went back to the United States.

Not all cross-cultural relationships went as smoothly. My best friend’s little sister got a job as an administrative assistant at a hospital in Riyadh. Initially, she was having a great time as this was in the early 90s and as everyone working in Saudi had to be tested for AIDS the degree of anxiety in the compound was very low and casual fornication among the expats was the order of the day. She resolved to sample a variety of the local men as well which ended one night with a dispute when her paramour demanded, “get yourself wet woman”, and she jokingly pressed her finger against her leg and said “pssshh”. This angered him and led to him throwing her on her stomach, tying her hands together with his igal (the ropes that holds the Arab headdress in place), her legs together with a towel and taking her from behind. He then left her trussed up, in which condition she remained until her roommate got back.

Her career in Sa’udi Arabia ended in a most extraordinary way. She transferred to ARAMCO and was coming back from a party at Half Moon Bay one evening when the man she was riding with, also an English expat had a heart attack and crashed the car. She was knocked unconscious and came to in the hospital to find that she had been charged with three crimes: public indecency because of the way she was dressed, public intoxication as they had taken a blood sample and found alcohol in her bloodstream and attempted prostitution. The reason that the charge was attempted prostitution was because she was in the company of a man to whom she was not muhrim (a degree of permitted relation) but as they had swabbed her vagina and found no semen the charge was only attempted prostitution and not prostitution. A friend of mine at the embassy remarked that the charge made it sound like she was incompetent and was actually rather insulting inasmuch as it implied that an attractive young woman couldn’t pull off the real deal.

Normally she would have been subject to 40 lashes, but I assume the Saudis wanted to avoid the adverse publicity that would arise as a result of flogging a British woman so in the end she was placed under house arrest for a while and then deported.

The Emiratis on the other hand are less particular and although they haven’t flogged any westerners, they have bunged a few up in jail for fornication. This seems to have happened mainly to British tourists who were under the delusion that if one could freely copulate on a beach in Greece or Spain one might just as happily copulate on a beach in Dubai.

It’s a bit rich of the government of Dubai to prosecute crimes of moral turpitude given the moral laxity of Dubai which has got to have one of the highest numbers of prostitutes per capita in the world. After the collapse of the Soviet Empire the country was flooded with enterprising Russian girls who using soft currency and carrying a soft asset came down on Aeroflot and converted their soft assets to hard currency-cash. They then bought electronic goods with the hard currency which they took back to Russia to sell and after disposing of the goods came back to Dubai to repeat the cycle again.

The arrival of cheap Eastern European whores distorted the entire market in the Gulf. In the 80s the going rate for an English girl was $1,000 and for a Filipino $200. There were English prostitutes who used to come out for a three-week cycle and do a week in Bahrain, a week in Abu Dhabi and a week in Dubai then go back to London. There was one that was doing so well that at the end of each trip she would stop off in the offices of the British Merchant Bank, Robert Flemings to buy mutual funds with her earnings.

When the Russians, not to mention Poles, Lithuanians and Ukrainians first showed up they started off by charging ridiculously low sums of money such as $50 thus undercutting the Filipinos and driving the English girls out of the market entirely. They soon realized that they were underpricing themselves and soon the prices reached a better supply-demand equilibrium. The Arabs, as is well known, preferred lighter skinned European girls and blondes whenever they could get them and were indifferent to any cultural differences between the Russians and the English so that was the end of the glory days for the girls of old Albion.

I once saw an internet add for two sets of identical twins, all Russian working out of Dubai offering themselves as a group for 2000 dirhams (about $700) which if you ask me was quite a tempting bargain. The prostitution situation in Dubai became quite ludicrous over time. There was one hotel called the Aref Castle that had three bars in it known popularly as the brown bar, the white bar and the yellow bar. This because the one contained Eritrean prostitutes, the second Russian and the third Chinese. Eventually with the relaxing of travel restrictions in China the Gulf was flooded with Chinese prostitutes. If one went into a nightclub such as The Garage or The Cyclone in the early 90s there were mainly Russian girls and the occasional Kazakh. By the early 2000s they were entirely Chinese. One evening a Chinese girl asked me what I did and I replied, “I work in finance.” I then asked her what she did. She said, “I work for you!”