Interesting old article in The New Republic. I wonder if it is an accurate description of what is going on between “young Kuwaitis” – although the story is about Sultan Juan, a Syrian man living in Kuwait.

After some searching, I found that this article was discussed by White Wings last December on her blog in the post Mumbo Jumbo

The subject of the use and misuse of Bluetooth in Gulf countries is wide. Here is also a link to an old story/ account by Temetwir on the use of Bluetooth technology by young men: The Game

Jewaira

How Bluetooth helps young Kuwaitis get it on.

Phone Sex

by Joseph Braude
The New Republic Online | Post date 09.14.06

The clock is ticking for Sultan Juan–that’s an alias–a 27-year-old Syrian-born wage earner betrothed to a virgin from his home country. They’ve been out on a date only once, chaperoned by half the village, but he says she’s beautiful, and he faithfully calls her in Syria three times a week from his flat in Kuwait City. Next summer, the two will marry, at which time Sultan promises that he will say goodbye forever to his 14 female sex partners here in the Gulf.

I watch him sweat to add a fifteenth at Grand Café–a hipster hookah bar in this seaside suburb of Kuwait City–and wonder whether he’ll really be able to turn off his mojo once and for all in less than a year. In the meantime, though, the only thing standing between him and a promising fling is his mobile phone. He is hurling obscenities at it. “Damn this thing! It won’t let me text!” he says in Arabic to his PPC-6700, a Bluetooth-enabled device with a large, full-color screen.

That’s because the mating call of choice in Muslim countries today is the wireless digital telegram–a discrete medium for surreptitious flirting and hooking up that circumvents authoritarian strategies for repressing casual sex. In patriarchal societies like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait or hard-line regimes like Iran, methods for preventing unchaperoned dating range from legal restrictions on non-familial mixing between the sexes to tough social taboos, reinforced at home and at school, that render frontal flirtation all but impossible. Mobile phones, now widely in use by teens and twentysomethings throughout the Middle East, enable swinging singles to tiptoe around these roadblocks: A group of boys can appear to be hanging with each other when they’re really chatting it up with girls across the hall. And, thanks to Bluetooth technology, which renders phone numbers unnecessary by enabling short-range, anonymous signaling, it’s even possible for a boy and a girl to meet and mingle without any prior arrangement. Small wonder some Muslim clerics in the Gulf and elsewhere have called for a Bluetooth ban. So far, their plea has fallen on deaf ears–which is less than I can say about one young woman’s audible overture to Sultan Juan tonight at the Grand Café.

Somewhere nearby, a girl has just sent Sultan an indication that she may want to sleep with him. Two lines from a song by the sultry Egyptian pop star Angham–in which the singer instructs her beloved to stop being coy and bed down with her–warble through the tiny speaker in Sultan’s hand. Unfortunately, since yesterday–when his phone caught some sort of virus–he has been unable to send text messages.

“I have two options,” Sultan explains in tell-it-straight Damascus slang. “I can send her my phone number and hope she calls–that’s an automatic feature on this phone–or I can transmit entire files off of Windows, like a graphic image or one of the poems I wrote.” Either way, he’d better do something fast. The handset now emits a chirping sound, which signals that the girl nearby has followed up her singing telegram with a text message. Sultan reads the one-liner then hands me the device for a look-see.

“R U Syrian???”

Oil-rich Kuwait, like many Arabian Gulf sheikhdoms, is mainly staffed by expatriate workers–from Asia, the Indian subcontinent, poor Arab countries like Syria, and the West–who collectively outnumber the indigenous population. “Either she knows me,” Sultan whispers, “or she’s close enough to our table that she can hear my accent.” He takes a puff from his waterpipe, briefly shrouding his face in smoke.

Since most customers at the Grand Café tonight are bearded men in sandals and headgear, it’s not hard to guess where the messages are coming from. Four tables past ours, three young women sit giggling over a hand-held device. The girl facing us is a little heavyset, I would guess, for Sultan’s discriminating appetite; and the two with their backs to us are veiled. Sultan says he’s banking on his love interest being among the latter, and, though I can’t see their faces, I can understand why: Their tight-fitting silky black head coverings extend below their shoulders, clinging tightly to their willowy frames. One of the two has already played the bathroom card–the closest Kuwaiti love culture ever gets to a catwalk–strutting past our table en route to the lady’s room. And she’s a looker.

“I know!” Sultan says as he scrolls through his tiny hard drive to retrieve a digital image for use in response to the text message. It’s a picture of the Syrian flag with sculpted busts of the late dictator Hafez Al Assad and his reigning heir Bashar peering regally into the distance. The tacky propaganda was surely intended for loftier purposes, but it’ll do the trick. Sultan hits “Send.”

All three girls instantly chortle across the room.

Within a half hour, their steamy back-and-forth has reached a boiling point. At last, the veiled hottie sends Sultan a fateful, blessed text message that promises to seal the deal. In just four words, she conveys to her paramour that it’s time for him to come over to her table so they can meet face to face for a fleeting moment and make absolutely sure they want to have sex with each other.

“I WANT A CIGARETTE.”

Go get ‘em, tiger.

Sultan does not invite me to see where this flirtation takes him, but he tells me that it follows the same pattern of his other escapades three or four times each week: It ends behind closed doors in the bedroom of an apartment he shares with his father. He says he buzzes the woman in after midnight, makes her a cup of Turkish coffee or sweet tea, and, after a brief conversation, goes at it.

“Sometimes an hour, sometimes a few hours,” he explains. “The one rule is they always go home. It’s no problem for me if they stay, but they all live with their parents, so they have to go back.”

I have come to know the individual we’re calling Sultan over the past few days and found him to be a man of professional integrity–not prone to exaggerate–for whom reporting facts is a virtue. So when he says he has 14 love partners in Kuwait City and that his story isn’t particularly rare, I believe him. I ask him if his prolific cross-pollination has a historical precedent in this conservative Gulf society–or if Bluetooth technology is fueling an explosion of casual sex.

“In my case,” he says, referring to his father–whose exploits took place long before the advent of Bluetooth–”sex runs in the family.”

Joseph Braude is the author of The New Iraq: Rebuilding the Country for Its People, the Middle East, and the World.

Article above is from The New Republic.