They look like bodyguards, but they are not guarding anyone.
In Egypt, fit young men roam the streets at night, selling their bodies for money. Online media company, Sputnik, reports that male prostitutes flood the streets of Giza, a town outside Cairo, in search of clients who will pay for a one-night stand or book them for an entire week. But that is not the alarming news.
What is shocking is that most of these men are university graduates, doctors and lawyers, who “have decided to become hookers instead of finding a decent job people would respect.” One of them is a man named Mamduh, who is a certified doctor, but opted to be a ‘night man’ once he learned that he could make more money by selling his body rather than treating people. Mamduh has been in the business for a decade and, according to him, there’s hardly any country whose female subjects haven’t asked him for sex. The graduate of medicine spends a good chunk of his earnings on his physical appearance, he works out a lot to keep fit, as this is great for business.
Another, is a young man, Muhaya, who failed to find a job after graduating from law school. He managed to find a job at a local hotel, but soon, he started getting request from female guests to sleep with them for money. “They paid well, more than I could earn in a month. That’s how I found myself another job,” he said. Sputnik reports that the young man recently celebrated a record of having serviced 300 women, most of whom are from Australia, North America and the Persian Gulf. According to him, some of them “pay enough money for a needy family to live on for a long time.”
From all indications, the state of the country’s economy plays an important role in forcing these young men into becoming sex workers. Currently, there is an unprecedented economic crisis in Egypt, under a terrible regime run by Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, with hundreds of disappearances, thousands of political prisoners, increased police brutality, unfair trials and death sentences. The country’s economic crisis has been aggravated by the fact that Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states have had to cut down on their financial support for the el-Sisi administration due to drop in oil prices.
Even the prostitutes are affected by the economic instability, forced to come out into the streets in search of clients. Mamduh explained that most of their jobs are gotten through contact calls from hotels, but now, “because the tour industry is experiencing hard times, we also have to work the streets.” But it’s not just that, the crisis has affected their service charge too, having to offer discounts for their services, charging $200 a night, and $1000 for a week’s service. As if these issues are not enough, these men have to deal with frequent harassment from policemen as well. They chase them off the streets causing them to lose clients and money, or simply collect bribes and look the other way.
In trying to re-stimulate the economy, el-Sisi is cutting down subsidies, public spending and has even threatened to cut down on public sector employment, saying Egypt only needs a million civil servants and public sector employees. These are severe measures that will probably only lead to more men roaming the streets, in addition to other vices like robbery.
