Girls and Boys

Male teenagers are a common evening sight on a typical Libyan thoroughfare pavement. Not gangs, just clusters, gaggles, giggles of friends. They stand there and chat and smoke and laugh and they sometimes throw a rock, a hubcap or a lump of wood at each other. But that is not their main purpose. These are mere interludes from their main business. The main item on their agenda is that of harrassing, or as a Libyan apologist put it "teasing" young females.
Of course, it would be unreasonable to be too po-faced and comdemnatory about such behaviour. Young and not so young men the world over have been known to vocalise their appreciation for the female form in all its splendour since time immemorial. Construction site humour seems to be one of the occupational hazards of womanhood and, however unacceptable some of us may judge it to be, it isn't going anywhere fast.
Indeed, there seem to be at least three behavioural traits that are universal to male teenagers in every known society in the modern world. One is a desire to routinely kick each other in the head. The other is to bleat "There is nothing to do here", often contrived as a valid pretext for the consumption of drugs and alcohol. In fact, to give the sentence its full lustre: "There is nothing to do here except drink and/or take drugs." The third is to make lewd suggestions to women in public places. Thus, when you hear the older Libyan generation bemoan the ways their youths are heading, it is invariably their fighting, drug-taking and "teasing girls" that are carted out as examples of their delinquency.
However, in Libya this sort of female-baiting takes on a bizzare hue. Things are happening in a way they should not happen. Here, the easiest bait of all is girls who choose to eschew the traditional Muslim headscarf, although of course the headscarf, or hijab, has a cultural signifiance that predates Islam. I think that the sight of female hair is not actually the main erotic stimulant, and rarely the part of the female anatomy which the teenage haranguers focus on. Instead, the absence of a headscarf is more of a perceived indication that a girl may be thought to be more liberal and possibly more permissive, more attuned to the proclivites of the Western World, presumably via the emerging channels of the internet and Friends and Oprah on MBC. A Western world where, as all us men from there know, women invariably respond favourably to a cry of "Come over here, you sexy bitch!" when shouted across a busy street.
And here we come to the creation of a devilishly twisted paradox. The young men on the street corners don't want young women to dress conservatively or wear headscarves. But through their behaviour, they often force women into wearing them. Fatma, a Morroccan girl, detests having to wear one and never would back home, but says that she just doesn't want to put up with the hassle over here. Consesequently, the boys act as agents for conservative values they most evidently do not share wholeheartedly. Why would the Koran-bashing fundamentalist mentals need to patrol the streets to enforce the dress code when they have an army of thousands who are unwittingly doing it for them?
Their own worst enemies, it would be easy to be harsh on the young men of Libya and if I was a young woman, I might feel very bitter indeed. What is normally relatively harmless harrassment can sometimes be what would appear to be a flustering and even disturbing experience. I once witnessed a blonde girl walking on the pavement being kerb-crawled by no less than three cars. The combined six or seven drivers and passengers were all shouting suggestive obscenities and wolf-whistling and she just continued to walk on, with her head bowed, lowering her gaze to the ground. Supposedly amusing male humour directed at women can sometimes teeter close to lynch-mob humour. Well, she wasn't wearing a hijab! And she was blonde! She was asking for it!
Having said that, I think, as my Libyan friend said, the general motive, if not effect, is more of a wind-up than an act of harrassment, though there must be some level of real misogyny at play. I am sure that the vast majority of men who whistle at women in the street do not expect it to elicit enthusiastic responses. So what response do they expect? Discomfort and embarrassment, presumably. I really don't know exactly what the expression they hope to see on girls' faces is. Maybe there isn't actually a word for it. There has to be something more than a little bit cowardly in targeting teenage girls of your sneering and bullying, even if you are a brainless teenager yourself.
On the other hand, it is hardly surprising that many young Arab men are not conditioned to deal with women in any meaningful manner. The only thing that they are really taught about women is that you should not go anywhere near them (and are literally policed - you can be pulled over and asked to prove the woman in your passenger seat is a relation) until you marry them, and then the rest will sort itself out. As Najib piously told me: "In front of a woman, we should just be polite and put our heads down to the floor and not even look at them in the face." It is not a code of behaviour I have seen heeded very much and indeed, Najib himself could not have been looking at the floor when he pointed out about a female colleague, "The way she dresses it is like she is saying she wants to have sex." The lady in question does not exactly dress like Cher on Oscar night and always wears a headscarf and has her knees and arms covered. It is useless to point out that the Koran proscribes modesty of dress for both women and men and after all, this admonishing did come a day after Najib had given me an unwelcome, conspiritorially laddish description of a girlfriend he says he has holed away in Tunisia. There is a hypocrisy towards women which is so deeply concealed in the male Arab psyche that I think it would be hard to even get one to acknowlege that it exists. It would not surprise me in the least if most of the female taunters that I see in the street are the first to unfurl their prayer mats once they are behind closed doors. Not that Libyan men are the only people guilty of pious hypocrisy or able to carry around totally contradictory ideas around in their heads.
It is amazing the extent to which women will go in order to preserve their modesty. Although women and families are normally segregated from the single male population on Libyan beaches, you do sometimes see women swimming, fully clothed in their abayas and headscarves.
I was walking in the corridor the other day when some locks of very long, flowing raven hair poked out of the side of an office girl's headscarf. Her female colleague realised and rushed to shield her as if her breast had been exposed.
Not that all Libyan girls are shrinking violets. A Polish-Libyan University student told me that a lot of her fellow students change their clothes and make-up in the toilets as soon as they get to the campus. I think we are talking jeans, rather than miniskirts and hotpants here though.
There is a feisty Libyan girl, Samira, at the company where I work who refuses to a headscarf, and openly discusses her favourite episodes of Sex and the City in the office. Her father died when she was younger, which leaves her with just her brothers to contend with. If a woman is seen to be too independent, her brother is likely to receive flak from his friends, on the grounds that he is not able to "control" his own sister, as it was put to me. I think that Samira's brothers must tear their hair out in trying to deal with her and, even though I have heard some men in the company say that she "must be a whore", another girl in the office confessed to me that she wished she could be a bit more like her.