Sexual emancipation?

Sahar El Mougy's new novel "Noun" (which I admittedly have yet to pull off my bookshelf) is getting attention as the new feminist novel dealing with the challenges and tribulations of being female, single and liberal in contemporary urban Egypt. That's nice, and if I were to ever write a book (ha!) I'm sure it would cover similar topics since being in that class/gender/lifestyle position is an extremely definitive experience, for me as well. There's something though about all the talk about sexual emancipation that bothers me. It's as if all our problems as single, secular (what the hell does that mean?) females revolve around how to get it on. That is simply not true.

More important, and more relevant to a wider class of women, are the societal structures which limit the spaces in which women can exist and function in society. Such spaces are both physical and symbolic, and while this is related to the image of women as inferior sex objects to be preserved in the private sphere, the resulting problems have less to do with sexual emancipation , I think, than with recreating the meaning and value attatched to being a woman in Egypt today. Most Egyptian women could care less about sexual emancipation, but I imagine that issues such as economic discrimination and norms on public visibility and interaction affect all women in Egypt. I don't even really care about how many girls wear the veil or not, because I simply don't think that that is the issue. Focusing on themes like veiling and sexual emancipation (while sometimes relevant) shifts the spotlight away from what really matters: a ridiculously uneven distribution of power reinforced by and employing a mostly Islamicized discourse which leaves women of all classes and walks of life in a vulnerable position socially, economically and sexually.