Talking about sex and sexuality in Palestine (in Arabic)

Generally speaking, the 1950s nationalist revolutions were much more radical then the 2011 "revolutions".* Similarly, the current writings about religion and sexuality in the Middle East are much less radical than the 1960 and 1970s writings by the Syrians Abou Ali Yassin and Sadiq Jala Al-Azm, for example. 

Although different sexual practices, albeit discreet, are very common, Wilhelm Reich's Sexual Revolution is still relevant for the region. Contemporary writings do not step outside the dominant bourgeois discourse, and they tend to anchor their analyses in a Western-centric persepctive of sexuality, ignoring commodification and sexualisation of the body by capitalism. 

Even from a bourgeois perspective, the tendency is to disassociate the dominance of capitalist relations, i.e. bourgoeis norms and morality, from changes in people's sexual practices and gender relations. After all, that was the context in which modern day sexual relations in the West were shaped.

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* "If by revolution we mean a radical change in the social system," argues Isam Al-Khafaji, "then these changes [resulting from the nationalist revolutions of the 1950s] qualify for the terminology par excellence. As for the form... these revolutions always came following a period of rising social tensions and, in Iraq and Egypt, mass movements 'from below'."