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.

Libido, for Egyptian men! Women have it to, despite what Freud said about us. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lb_KHj2cjBo

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.