Obtaining condoms should be a simple errand, but if you start thinking about it too much, it can become a treacherous endeavor fraught with peril. Paranoid scenarios start running through your mind: Your hitherto out-of-the-loop ex might catch you in line with a packet of Trojans, the cashier will you give you a horrifying little smile as he hands you change or your fundamentalist RA will have poked a hole in all the free condoms she distributes.
If your paranoia barometer is near its breaking point, take a moment to thank your maker you don't live in an Islamic theocracy. In Iran, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria and other states that enforce sharia (Islamic law), a condom found with (or on) an unmarried person is not just embarrassing but can be grounds for corporal punishment.
But junior Jasmine Ainetchian knows no fear. In a visit to Iran in the summer of 2005, Jasmine tried to buy condoms in Tehran in a small sex-political experiment.
"I put a ring on my wedding finger just in case I got caught," she told me.
A master of disguise, Jasmine walked out of the store with a box of illicit contraceptives.
It's difficult to find a sufficiently depressing adjective to describe Iranian sex laws. Premarital sex can be a capital, crime. Iranian law enforces a hadith, or oral tradition, that orders 100 lashes for the crime, certainly enough to kill some people. There's no ambiguity in case of adultery: They throw rocks at you until you die. Luckily, the law is not always enforced to its fullest extent. Premarital couplers are often fined, and punishment is sometimes sidestepped altogether by setting up a sigheh, or temporary marriage.
So for unmarried Iranians, the usual routes to getting some ass are blocked. Pulling over to the side of the road and getting frisky is a distinct no-no. Even holding hands in public with a member of the opposite sex will get you attention from the police. Intriguingly, a same-sex couple holding hands with one another will probably be read as just friends, which is just as well because being gay in Iran will also get you killed with rocks.
What's astonishing is how, despite the sexually miserable legal system, the Iranians themselves can be incredibly liberal and unrepressed. There is a thriving underground sex culture, including a gay scene and gay rights movement.
Another obstacle to getting laid is Iran's strict legal code concerning fashion. Muslim women must cover their heads and bodies. The Qur'an says that "women ... should guard their modesty ... They should not display their beauty ... they should draw veils over their bosoms" (24:31).
Many young Iranian women manage to express themselves sexually while working around the constraints. They wear their head scarves far back on the head, revealing the face. Instead of showing skin, they wear bright, gaudy colors and high-ankled pants.
Dressing provocatively is bound to provoke more attention than you want, especially from the "fashion police" who reprimand and sometimes arrest people in immodest clothing.
So is a progressive, egalitarian, feminist culture possible under Islam? The growing Islamic feminist movement believes it is.
Senior Maryam Jelvani feels that Islam is fully compatible with feminism and egalitarianism. The problem is not the religion itself, she told me, but the way it is interpreted by governments and societies in the Middle East.
For example, Jelvani says that the veil - which she proudly wears - is not oppressive but pro-woman. For her it means that "God ... is telling men not to think of women only in terms of their physical beauty or their sexual attractiveness. By making the physical irrelevant, the focus shifts to the spiritual and intellectual aspects of the person."
Many scholars agree with Jelvani: "One would seek in vain for the slightest trace of misogyny in the whole of the Quran. ... [A true] Islamic civilization is essentially feminist," Abdelwahab Bouhdiba wrote in his 1975 sociological study, Sexuality in Islam.
Not everyone agrees. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an apostate from Islam who received international attention for calling Islam "the new fascism," wrote in a London newspaper earlier this year that "violence is inherent is Islam - it's a destructive, nihilistic cult of death." Hirsi Ali received international attention as the screenwriter of Submission, a 10-minute film about the abuse of women in Islam.
Jelvani would agree that most Muslim countries mistreat women, but strongly believes the religion itself is feminist, even if the actions of its followers do not reflect this. "Do a lot of Muslim countries treat women terribly? Yes. But to attribute that to Islam shows an ignorance of history."
Misogyny and political oppression of women is a Middle Eastern tradition that predates Islam, Jelvani says. "A lot of these cultures have always mistreated and demeaned women."
Jelvani cites misogyny as the original motivator for the spread of Islam. "Part of the reason Muslims believe Islam was revelated in Arabia was because the culture was so corrupt. The people were so ignorant that they needed a prophet to guide them, to bring them out of the jaheliya, or darkness."
The prophet was, at least compared to these benighted Arabs, a feminist. "When the prophet Muhammad began preaching Islam, he was preaching women's rights and their value." By contrast, 7th-century Arabs were so male-centered they were practicing female infanticide, Jelvani explains. "Islam gave women rights to property, to vote, to be valued as much as men, not to be judged on the basis of their femininity but on the basis of their virtues. This was all very elevating for women."
Islam was not always a prudish faith. From the 9th century to the 16th, sexual taboos in Islam were few. One of the world's earliest and best sex manuals, a 15th-century classic called The Perfumed Garden, was written by an Islamic scholar, Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Nafzawi. The book contains no images, because Islam forbids, for fear of idolatry, all depictions of humans. The manual's section entitled "The Sundry Names Given to the Sexual Parts of Man" uses numerous expressions to describe the penis - including "the discoverer," "the trickster" and "the liberator." The book documents the various kinds of vaginas, including "the hedgehog," "the hot one," "the humpbacked" and "the one with a long nose."
