Revealing underwear
By Siona Jenkins
Published: November 1 2008 02:00 | Last updated: November 1 2008 02:00
The Secret Life
of Syrian Lingerie:
Intimacy and Design
by Malu Halasa
and Rana Salam
Chronicle Books $24.95
175 pages
During a recent visit to the ancient Souq al-Hamadiyyeh in Damascus, I stood beside a fully veiled woman bargaining hard with a salesman over a feather-trimmed bra and thong ensemble with peepholes at the crotch and nipples. Other women - someshrouded tourists from Iran and the Gulf - were being shown underwear that in most European capitals would have been sold in a sex shop. As they discussed colour and design, their children played or waited patiently with a relative; that veiled women were being shown explicitly sexual attire by strange men seemed unworthy of comment.
The contradiction of a prim public face and behind-closed-doors bawdiness is not unique to Syria. From lewd wedding songs in Casablanca to dirty jokes at women-only get-togethers in Cairo, in private the Arab world is anything but prudish. Across the region, public and private behaviour are caught up in a tangled web of tradition, religious conservatism and social change.
Lingerie may not be an obvious vehicle for deconstructing such complexity, but The Secret Life of Syrian Lingerie is sociology by stealth. Through photographs, essays and interviews from Syrian men and women, edited by journalist Malu Halasa and designer Rana Salam, the volume is surprisingly revealing about a country usually seen through the lens of political polemic.
The lingerie itself is an outrageous mixture of kitsch and creativity: thongs are adorned with fake birds - "bird's nest" ( ish al-asfour ) is the slang for women's pubic hair - or even the red rose of martyrdom, symbol of Hizbollah; bras are emblazoned with "I love you" in Arabic and play tunes when squeezed.
This ribald humour banishes sleaze, imbuing the underwear with an improbable sense of fun. "There has to be humour in bed," says Muhammed Emad Haliby, owner of a women's clothing shop in Damascus. "If a man doesn't make the woman laugh, the sex is dead."
Paradoxically, the authors argue that Syria's lingerie market is supported by "traditional" women, mostly veiled Muslims from modest backgrounds. "The more religious an area is, the more risqué the underwear," says one Christian woman. "Muslim women have less freedom on the outside, so to compensate they have more freedom on the inside. It is the opposite for Christians."
And yet, as political commentator and self-styled "former fundamentalist" Ammar Abdulhamid says in an interview with editor Halasa, women's sexuality is still controlled by men. "[Women] are not supposed to be sexually stimulating to other people, but to the husband, they're supposed to provoke his sexuality and do whatever he says." Any power women have in this relationship is limited to manipulation through sex; fear of men leaving or taking on a second wife is a constant sub-theme.
But these are the ambiguities of a society in transition. As Abdulhamid says: "The modernisation of Syria is a constant challenge to the layer of homogeneity traditionalists want to hold on to. Modernity is the process of removing the fig leaf from our contradictions." Or donning a thong.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
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