Sex and Lies by Leïla Slimani

Author:Leïla Slimani [Leïla Slimani]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571355051
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2019-02-20T16:00:00+00:00

MALIKA*

MAKING LOVE: THE ORIGINAL SIN

Malika is forty. She’s single and has never been married. A doctor, she has been posted to a rural practice, in a deeply conservative region, far from the big urban centres. She lives alone, a long way from her family. Her parents are laid-back. Her religious education was not particularly strict.

We had quite a classic education: it was all about good and evil and respect for your elders. We were never separated from the boys, we threw parties at home, we all travelled together. It was very free. Of course, we never went to nightclubs and, generally speaking, our outings were among a very limited circle of people. But I never found that particularly frustrating.

Like most of the women I have spoken to, Malika cannot recall ever receiving any sex education. There were no taboos, we didn’t live in shame. That said, we never talked about contraception or protection. In any case, if you lose your virginity, you must be married, so problem solved!

Malika came late to sex. She only met her first boyfriend towards the end of her first year at uni, and her relationship with him was a chaste one. She was twenty-four when, for the first time, one of her friends announced she had slept with a boy one night, just like that.

I was terribly shocked. I started to lecture her, to tell her that now she absolutely had to marry him. Afterwards, I kept thinking about it for days and days. I went back to see her and apologised. That moment stayed with me. I realised that, like everyone else, I’d been conditioned. No one had ever specifically talked to me about virginity, I hadn’t given it a thought – and yet I had this very hard-line attitude.

Malika lost her virginity quite late, with a foreigner, an older man, whom she never considered marrying. By that age, I had left those constraints behind somewhat. While all around me my friends and sisters were marrying as virgins, I concentrated on my studies and won greater personal freedom and financial independence.

As a doctor, Malika has witnessed extremely difficult situations, scenes she is unlikely to have experienced had she gone on living in her middle-class family cocoon. Before I became a doctor, I had no idea how common virginity certificates are. That really shocked me. One morning at 8 a.m., back when I was doing my internship in gynaecology, a girl was brought in straight after her wedding night, for me to determine whether she’d been freshly or previously deflowered. I said, categorically, that it was fresh. I’d have covered up for her anyway. That incident left a bitter taste.

Another time, I fell out with a colleague who wanted to report a single woman in whom we had diagnosed an ectopic pregnancy. She’d begged us to keep her secret. But my colleague was furious. For him, it was more important to betray her to her family than to care for her.

In many ways, Malika’s life stands out as different in Moroccan society.

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