DUBAI: A Kuwaiti woman and former candidate for Parliament Salwa al-Mutairi has argued that men should be allowed to purchase women in order to meet their sexual desires. She argued that it would be a way of ensuring adultery doesn't happen and said in comments published by British media that female prisoners of war should be sold on an open market. She argued the women would be used by “virile” Kuwaiti men to protect them from being “seduced or tempted into immoral behavior by the beauty of their female servants.” She went as far as saying that female Russian captives should be the ones being sold. “For example, in the Chechnyan war, surely there are female Russian captives. So go and buy those and sell them here in Kuwait,” she continued. “Better than to have our men engage in forbidden sexual relations,” she argued. But her comments are unlikely to gain any traction, in fact, quite the opposite, as women's activists and advocates in the Middle East have lashed out against her, saying what she is promoting is “sex slavery” and should be put on trial for her statements. “This is absolutely horrible and degrading to any woman anywhere in the world, and especially here in the Middle East,” blogger and activist Mona el-Jamal told Bikyamasr.com in Dubai. For Jamal, the issue of sex workers is a tenuous discussion in the region, where “men have already helped push this industry into new directions while the governments in the region continue to push women's rights aside. “This is the societies we live in right now and for a female politician to speak out like this is wrong and disgraceful for all Arab women,” she added.
