Egypt touched me

May 11, 2005 - 10:58 a.m.

Ok, before I tell you how I was molested by an Egyptian masseuse, first let me say just how much I love the country of Egypt and it’s many beautiful inhabitants. I had an amazing time there, but for some reason I keep mentioning the negative parts. I don’t know why - I guess all of the positive things sound pretentious and then you’ll hate me. Sex! Bikinis! Liquor! Cruise ships! Monkey towels! Polaroid Muslim porn! Camel Jockeying! Carriage rides! Suicide bombs!

I LOVE EGYPT, I really do. I want to marry it. I was seriously contemplating moving to Cairo and getting a cheap apartment and just LIVING there. But sadly, I am far too much of a whore in both appearance and practice, to ever survive in a Muslim country. Egypt is not ready for my jelly, and they would now doubt bury me up to my neck and let wild dogs eat my head to death.

Egypt is extremely safe and the people are very nice and chillin’ and illin’ all up in that piece.

However.

I was molested by an Egyptian masseuse.

I was tired of this story AS IT WAS HAPPENING, do you understand? DURING. The molestation. I was like: God. I’m so sick of this stupid story already. LAME!

Dear Ra, God of the Sun and All Creator,

Molestation is a serious issue. Please do not waste serious issues on me. I will only mock them here on this website and send out a virtual face-slap-with-a-leather-glove to all of the molestation victims out there who are still sensitive about having been molested.

“Hello my name is Shawna Mooney and I am a molestation victim.”

No. Give it to someone else. Give it to a girl who likes to write poetry and listen to Sarah McLachlan.

Thanks, but I am incapable of taking anything seriously,

Shawna Mooney

Yeah, so picture it. Cruise ship floating down the river Nile. Fancy, rooftop pool and all the other shit you associate with Kathie Lee Gifford and her Carnival!

We have an awesome cabin with a balcony and two beds that we pushed together for rounds 3-8 of our knock-down drag-out love making. They are stuffing us full of good food three meals a day. They make butter sculptures: Swan. Horse. Unidentifiable. Reclining nude woman with caper nipples.

One morning I woke up as my boyfriend was returning to the room after sneaking around and doing nice things behind my back. He said, “I made an appointment for you to get a Thai massage. Yours is at 11 and I’m getting one right after you.”

“Thai massage? What is that, like, sex? Ha ha.”

“No, it’s deep tissue and it hurts, but you’ll feel great the next day.”

I was wondering what the massage would be like, coming from a conservative Egyptian man, who is most likely Muslim. Would I be fully clothed? Would he be able to look directly at me? Maybe it would be just like a Western massage, since every single person on the cruise was a frog, Brit, or American.

“Remember, if he gets out of line, you tell me and I’ll kick his ass.”

And I said, “There’s no way in hell he would risk his job and cross the line. He has an awesome job in a country full of poverty, he’s rich here, and he gets to look at beautiful women all day, in various stages of undress. This is a five-star boat, and I guarantee that he will be completely professional.”

I went and met with the masseuse and he was “good looking” – I guess you could say, though I am not particularly attracted to swarthy Mediterranean types. But he was young, handsome, with black curly hair, and would be any housewife’s fantasy. He pantomimed to me that he didn’t speak English and I looked into his face and he had wolf eyes. I’d heard from several sources that it is bad to make lingering eye contact with Egyptian men, because they might think you are soliciting yourself. I didn’t linger.

I was still confident that I would receive a legitimate massage, though at that point, I was also convinced that while he was massaging me legitimately, his wolf eyes would be taking it all in and storing it in his dirty wolf mind.

Ok, so basically I received a sensual, non-therapeutic, oily rubdown, with emphasis mainly on my butt cheeks/crack, inner-inner-inner thighs, and yes, he honked my hooters. I know you are going to ask, as everyone else already has, “Why did you let it happen?” Well shut up, seriously, because remember – you’re never supposed to blame the victim.

All I know is that I was very confused, overly tired and jet-lagged, and more confused.

Is this a Thai massage?

Why isn’t it deep-tissue?

Why isn’t he draping me with a sheet?

Wait. Boobs. Boobs? Wait, nipples. Is that? Ok, no, they’re not supposed to touch boobs. Right? But, he’s acting like it’s business as usual…

Maybe it is a cultural difference? Maybe I am mistaken?

Surely. Surely. No way. No fucking way? He wouldn’t dare. Would he? Is he molesting me? Is he knowingly touching me inappropriately?

Ok, back to the inner thigh again. Why does he keep retuning to that area, and not problem areas like my back and feet?

Boobs. Boobs are fat. There is no muscle there. That’s not my pectorals. Nipples. What?

Frozen. Thoughts racing, be logical, don’t jump the gun. Stiff as a board. I want to get the hell out of here.

The finale was that he took a towel and toweled off my whole body to get that nasty grease off of me. That’s when the aggressive molesting occurred, and I jumped up, threw my clothes on while he stared at me, and left. I found my boyfriend and kind of muttered “your turn” and then I went to our room and just sat there.

Why?

Here’s why.

I know that if I told my boyfriend, he would have confronted the guy, maybe punched him in the nose. I know this. There were already several incidences of men on the street harassing me when he would wander away from me momentarily, because he isn’t used to having to baby sit me and stand by my side constantly. I went into a store to buy some glassware and my pilot got bored and waited outside the store for me. The salesman said, “Is that your husband?” and I said yes, and even though he was within plain sight, the salesman replied incredulously, “Then why isn’t he here with you?” From that point on, my “husband” didn’t let me more than 3 feet away from him at any time. He said several times, “If anyone gropes you in a crowd, you tell me, because I’ll kick their ass.”

All I was thinking was that my boyfriend was going to assault a man in a third-world country, with a fucked up government and military presence everywhere. We were on a boat. What if the staff retaliated? What if it got out of hand, and we were trapped there, and they killed him and dumped him overboard? What if they put him in jail? He’ll starve, or get raped, beaten, become infected with hepatitis or HIV. Maybe this is one of those countries that cut your hands off for stealing, what would they do to him? What are the laws?

There are no civil rights there, and apparently no shortage of police and government corruption.

Maybe that sounds like I overreacted, but honestly, haven’t you ever heard of people being falsely imprisoned and held in foreign countries?

Weigh it:

Tell boyfriend of molestation vs. Possible jail time, death.

No way in hell. If I was on the trip with a female friend, I probably would have raised the roof and gotten the pervert fired.

I had to protect my boyfriend’s ass. A few days earlier, I had seen a police/military vehicle transporting prisoners, and I tell you it was straight out of a WWII film, like Jews being taken away in cattle cars. There were men piled on top of each other, and clawing their way to the only ventilated windows, at the top of the vehicle. I was stuck in a traffic jam next to them, and they stared at me with that creepy hopeless face. They were even wearing old-timey uniforms, black with stripes, and matching hats.

You have to think about the difference between American prison inmates, and these prisoners. American inmates on a prison bus would probably holler at you, or whistle, or give you the finger and curse at you. They’re angry, they’ve got something to say, and they’ve still got fire in their belly. These Egyptian prisoners...had nothing to express, even when a young, pale Western girl is staring at them from her taxicab. Something has happened to them that has caused them to become a hollow shell of a person. I can only imagine.

So I waited, until we got off the boat at Luxor and flew back to Cairo, and were in our new hotel and lying by the pool, and I told my boyfriend. He was angry, of course, but not particularly surprised either, and he understood why I didn’t tell him while we were on the boat.

I tried to downplay it a bit, and avoid graphic details, but that still didn’t change the fact that some stranger was massaging his girlfriend’s breasts. I joked about it and said, “It was a lot like being on a bad date with a guy who gets all grabby and aggressive. If you look at it that way, then I’ve been molested at least 30 times since I was 11 years old.”

Ha ha. But really, I was disturbed, and I felt like shit, mentally, for the remainder of the cruise. What made it twenty times worse was that I had to pass the masseuse and the spa each time I wanted to go up to the sun deck, and he would stare at me with his wolf eyes and the slimiest smile. Then I noticed that I was getting the same looks from other guys on the staff and I could only assume that he had told them that this American lady let him touch her teats. Did I mention that the entire staff on the boat was male? That women aren’t allowed to have these jobs? Maids, cooks, servers, hosts etc. were all men. Same thing with our flight on Egypt Air, all of the flight attendants were men, not a single woman.

But Belle made a good point, that if stupid shit like this didn’t happen to me, then I’d have nothing to write about and no good stories to tell while I’m drinking my way into oblivion. Good point, Belle. *click* holy shit, 1,800 words. I need to shut my mouth now. Or as Christina said the other day, “Shut your sand lovin’ hands.”

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