There's a point when the parents of a country get so desperate they sell whatever they can to make ends meet, including their daughters.
This topic came up with some guys at my hotel when Ahmed stood looking at his Facebook account on the small netbook atop the check-in desk and said, "She's in Africa."
A flurry of Arabic went back and forth between the three other men before the story was eventually explained to me. Ahmed had been dating a girl from the country who came to Cairo after the revolution to earn money to send her family.
She fell into prostitution, Ahmed said, quickly making it clear she floundered at the job; being unable to demand payment and allowing men to do whatever they liked, it was an ugly tale.
Even worse, she'd disappeared and Ahmed hadn't heard from her in months, until that morning on Facebook. That started a conversation about Cairo prostitution, which they all said blossomed following the revolution.
From what they patched together it occurred to me that prostitution was a good indicator of wealth inequality. I poked around, asked some questions and found not only has prostitution seemed to expand following the revolution, it seems to have settled into stark social and economic layers.
When young men don't earn enough to marry, any type of physical intimacy is out of reach among their network of friends. If a young man wants to have sex he can go to a prostitute, and these days the least expensive girls are Egyptians, who frequent certain coffee shops and apartments dedicated to their field.
At about 100 EGP ($13) it's an encounter most employed Cairo men can afford, but it's still half what many bring home each week.
My friends at the hotel explain their selection is far beneath the Marriott's, where foreigners stay and have their pick of countless beauties within the hotel's casino.
That is indeed what I saw when I went to the Marriott. After about an hour of nickel slots I managed to cash out the twenty bucks I'd put in the machine and leave with a pretty good idea of the setup. Running the spectrum of hair color and body-types, a floating array of available females mingled about and seemed available to whoever might be interested.
They'd saunter slowly past a man, stop, turn their back to him and look around their should for eye contact before moving on. Another handful sat at the bar, mostly in pairs before one drifted off to be replaced by another.
In a set of chairs off to the side, by the casino entrance, sat a younger, better-dressed pool of girls. Either they came with men on the casino floor or they simply formed a different price range.
I left and went to the restaurant down the hall to wait on my ride. Inside the Billiard Bar, I thought, was the wife of a gambler or a guest of the hotel. She was the only one in the place aside from the bartender, and it didn't occur to me anyone would be working the empty room, but I was wrong. After a few minutes she was at my table saying yes, she worked for the hotel. "American's always figure that out so fast," she told me.
Over her most recent bottle of Stella, "Megan" asked me how much I'd pay for a night out with an American girl at a nightclub. Looking at my watch and wondering where my driver was I replied one-hundred dollars.
She threw her arms in the air, brushed black hair from her face and leveled her green eyes at me.
"I don't believe you," she said, in a slurry of Arabic flavored English.
I told her it was true, that I was a poor American who wasn't even staying in the hotel. "All Americans are rich," she said. Unsure if I were serious, or simply negotiating, she ordered a shot of tequila and I filled in some blanks.
Megan said her mom left her father when she was 14 and the man wanted nothing to do with her. Alone on the street, she fell in with a man of her own, had a baby, and got married before her man left as well.
A common enough story in that part of the world, it was impossible to say if it was true, but she teared up. "My mother cared nothing about me," she said softly.
But then she threw her head back and said she didn't care, didn't want to talk about her life, and only wanted to have fun. She normally received $400 per client, though more was not uncommon.
Only once had she not gotten paid. That night she gave her last hundred-bucks to hotel security, had the man beaten and walked home. No money for a cab, she said it was the finest stroll she'd ever taken.
She was sitting in the velvet wallpapered bar, empty but for Frank Sinatra's voice, because as a local she couldn't enter the casino. The girls by the entrance were in fact for high-rollers, she explained with a mix of bitterness and envy. There for sheiks who'd think nothing of dropping ten-grand on a good time.
My borrowed phone lit up. I looked down and explained my ride was waiting out front. After an awkward farewell, she settled back in the booth to finish her drink
I went back to my far more modest hotel and explained to the guys that the women of the Marriott were nothing special.
I'd promised a Business Insider editor I'd stop by the Four Seasons Giza regardless, so the following day I stopped by and talked with the poolside barkeep about my Marriott experience. Not to be outdone, he told me how it was handled at the Four Seasons.
He told me to use my Bluetooth to scan other users and see what names came up. The words leave little doubt of the owners intent. We found Sensual, who we watched ride down an elevator, sit with two men and leave. As well as another Arabic phrase indicating lonesomeness and availability, other less conspicuous handles lit up and dropped off over the course of 10 minutes or so.
With hotel occupancy down from 101 percent to 15 percent since the revolution, bartenders will tell guests they don't even know their hotel's darker secrets. The rooms at the Four Season's start at a couple hundred bucks and I assumed the girls likely charged about the same as Megan. The bartender then gave me directions to another two locations where I'd find different selections at different times.
Prostitution charges against women are no joke in Egypt, while the men involved basically walk away scot-free. We skipped the rest of the bartender's instructions after watching the Bluetooth process in action.
Back at the hotel a quick web stats search showed a long list of websites devoted to the selling of sex in the city of Cairo. From about €350 per hour to multiples of thousands for overnight stays or two girl evenings, the demand seems clear.
As unseemly as all of this may be, it's still better than the bogus wedding certificates the country now issues to wealthy Gulf men who "marry" girls as young as 13 straight from their parents homes, and whisk them off for a brief honeymoon before dropping back with a handful of cash.
Called "Summer marriages" those arrangements are merely another way desperate Egyptians are forced into the unthinkable just to get by, since the heady days of the revolution.
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