This book is precisely what the front cover announces - a personal recount of women's experiences in Morocco in regard to sexuality.

There were no surprises here. The stories we read about are hard to comprehend from a "western" perspective. Sadly, they got repetitive rather quickly with a narrative that seemed to have been pushed onto this to prove a point. I expected more variety in this book, maybe even some positive tales. However, this is not that type of book.

Slimani rightly calls out the hypocrisy of a society oscillating between sexual fantasies and disgust when it comes to sexuality, where religion always has the final word. The obsession with virginity is the norm, while men are among the highest consumers of pornography in the world.

But, more interestingly Slimani says that as long as you are rich you are free, above these laws and mores. Sadly, that seems true for women wherever they are in this world. ( )

The full title Sex and Lies: True Stories of Women's Intimate Lives in the Arab World just about sums it up, but there’s more to this book than the stories. Over twelve minutes of this short book is taken up with informative and incisive commentary.

The accounts of women’s private lives are moving, though most of us will know something of the restrictions on women who live under Islam. Much of the restrictions in Morocco are driven by society, though backed by the current government.

Apart from her own views, again to be expected, Slimani quotes from a number of Arab journalists and writers.

Abdellah Tourabi, a Moroccan journalist, describes the Moroccan men known for their post football brawls, as taking out their anger on the two things that they want and cannot not posses- cars and women.

Kamel Daoud, Algerian journalist and novelist was accused of feeding Islamophobia for seeing sex behind the Cologne 2017 New New Year’s Eve riots. But by far the greater part of Daoud’s anger was directed at the "naive" political left, who in his view deliberately ignore the cultural gulf separating the Arab-Muslim world from Europe.

Slimani comments, What Cologne showed is how sex is "the greatest misery in the world of Allah”.

Many of us have read Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation, a favorite of mine. Daoud gave up journalism because of the attacks made against him by the Algerian political left. He’s now concentrating on writing.

Sex and Lies is a good read. The stories are important as we hear first-hand, the effects of the restrictions so many women are forced both by government and society to live under

You can read more of Leila Slimani at the Observer article Leïla Slimani: ‘This book is a mirror to make the elite look reality in the face’. ( )

Dans ce livre d’entretien sans tabous, Leïla Slimani donne la parole à des femmes qui ont eu (et ont parfois encore) bien des difficultés à s’épanouir sexuellement dans la société marocaine.

Ces portraits dépeignent une société machiste, conservatrice, islamique et patriarcale, où l’hypocrisie, l’argent et la discrétion sont les seules alternatives à l’abstinence hors mariage. Où l’hymen reste témoin de la virginité des femmes, condition quasi-requise pour un mariage.

Un livre qui peut donner à réfléchir bien au delà des frontières marocaines, à la vue des extrémismes politiques et religieux qui tentent de partout de régir le plaisir et de contrôler le corps des femmes, des homosexuels ou de toutes autres minorités ( )

Leïla Slimani's first novel, Adèle, caused a bit of a stir when it came out. With its libidinous protagonist, who neglects her child and lurches through a series of destructive affairs, it was especially indecorous (some critics implied) for a North African novelist. And yet it is precisely those in the Maghreb, Slimani argues in this unacademic but fascinating study, who are ideally placed to tackle themes of sexual dysfunction. ‘Living or growing up in societies where sexual freedom does not exist turns sex into a permanent obsession.’

Adèle's background was never mentioned in the novel, but her father was called Kemal and there were intriguing references to the Arab Spring going on in the background. Now Slimani confesses that the character is to be read, at least in part, as ‘a somewhat extreme metaphor for the sexuality of young Moroccan women’. These are the people to whom Slimani now turns directly: the bulk of this book is extended interviews with women about sex, many of whom reached out to Slimani after reading her novel.

The picture of Morocco that emerges is one of near-total moral hypocrisy – a culture with a complete disconnect between public ethics and private behaviour. It is against the law to have sex before marriage, or outside of marriage, or with someone of the same sex as you. Of course, this does not stop people doing these things; it just means they have to be done in secret, which makes them potentially physically unsafe, legally dangerous, and psychologically damaging.

If you are comfortably off, you might be able to afford an apartment, or a French-run hotel to meet your boyfriend – or, if you're meeting in an empty lot or a car park, you might be able to afford to pay off any police that come round. Otherwise even these options are closed to you. Sexuality is therefore filtered, like everything, through economic or class-based structures.

Behind a lot of it is the fetish of female virginity. Men are not supposed to have extramarital sex, but everyone forgives it when they do; this was brought home to me in vivid terms when I lived in Rabat in the late 90s, and regularly had to help the guy I was staying with sneak prostitutes out of his parents' house unseen. This depressing process, which I did my best to avoid by determined sleeping or feigned misunderstanding, was seen as, at worst, a kind of manly peccadillo.

Women, on the other hand, are ruthlessly punished for similar activity, and their sex lives must therefore be lived in utter secrecy. Almost everyone interviewed here has numerous stories of how all their most conservative, veiled friends have the most debauched private lives: but when they get married, as far as the world is concerned, they are virginally ‘pure’ (and may have a certificate from their father to prove it). Even sex itself is carried out with this in mind:

‘Girls act like frightened virgins. The first time they make love with a man, for example, they won't move. Because a lot of us have heard these terrible stories where men start hitting their partners [if they're too active], saying, “Where did you learn that?”’

« Les filles jouent les vierges effarouchées. La première fois qu'elles font l'amour avec un homme, elles ne bougent pas, par exemple. Beaucoup ont entendu des histoires horribles où des hommes ont attaqué leurs partenaires en leur disant : “Où est-ce que tu as appris ça ? ” »

Culture is held ‘hostage to patriarchy and the religious,’ Slimani concludes. Western commentators tend to stress the ‘religious’ bit of that, but the situation is complex. The Moroccan law forbidding homosexual relations, for instance, has nothing to do with Islam – it was lifted wholesale from article 331 of the French penal code (since repealed). Colonialism, not sharia, is behind a lot of the repressive legal framework here.

The Moroccan director Nabil Ayouch has an interesting take:

‘Nowadays, we set identities up in opposition to each other: sex is the Other, the decadent West, while Moroccan and Muslim identity is aligned with virtue and modesty. But we forget everything. We forget that it was we, the Arabs and Muslims, who shocked the West in the 15th century with our erotic writing. We invented erotology. We've become amnesiacs.’

« Aujourd'hui, on fait face à une opposition en termes identitaires : le sexe, c'est l'autre, l'Occident décadent, alors que l'identité marocaine et musulmane s'apparenterait à la vertu et à la pudeur. Mais on oublie tout. On oublie que c'est nous, les Arabes et les musulmans, qui avons au XVe siècle choqué l'Occident par nos écrits érotiques. On a inventé l'érotologie. Nous sommes devenus amnésiques. »

Islamism has certainly increased in Morocco since I lived there in 1996–97, when face veils, for instance, were not ever so common; a lot more rightwing religious politicians are in power there now. Of course, the same can be said of the United States. It's debatable to what extent the religions involved are really to blame. ‘These things don't serve the cause of Islam,’ as one of Slimani's interviewees puts it. ‘They serve only one cause: men's.’

But then patriarchal social structures (as sometimes needs reminding) are maintained by all members of society. Otherwise, they would not be social structures. In Moroccan surveys, even more women than men say that they are opposed to sexual freedom (90 percent versus 78 percent), and even feminist groups in Morocco will usually not touch it, preferring not to devalue their cause by associating it with sex. Yet as Slimani argues, ‘To defend sexual rights is directly to defend women's rights.’ Among the consequences is the fact that between 600 and 800 illegal abortions are carried out every day in Morocco, a figure that I find incredible given that the UK only carries out five-hundred-and-something (legal) abortions a day with double the population.

Though many things in this book are depressing and will lead to frequent accesses of rage, in fact overall there is a lot of positivity. Morocco has always been at the liberal end of the Muslim world, and it has a long tradition of that to call on; the current king, who's relatively progressive, also helps. Mass media and the internet make comparisons with other cultures unavoidable. Since divorce was legalised in 2004, a great many women have availed themselves of it, and there seems to be a growing feeling that very early marriages and abusive husbands are not the life sentences that they once were. If things were not changing, there would be no conflict around this issue – and on the evidence of this book, there is, a lot.

This is not a work of academic sociology, but if you can accept that, Slimani has compiled a fascinating revelation of a society that is ‘very prudish and conservative…but at the same time completely obsessed with sex and performance’. ( )