What's Underneath Your Burka?: (Saudi) Lingerie shops torn between genders

[JCMach1]

Before her wedding last year, Huda Batterjee went abroad to buy her bridal lingerie - she just couldn't bear the humiliation of discussing her most intimate apparel with a man.

She had little choice: there are almost no saleswomen in Saudi Arabia.

Now a group of Saudi women - sick of having to deal with male sales staff when buying bras or panties, not to mention frilly negligees or thongs - have launched a campaign to boycott lingerie stores until they employ women.

It's an irony of the kingdom's strict segregation of the sexes. Only men are employed as sales staff to keep women from having to deal with male customers or work around men.

But in lingerie stores, that means men are talking to women about bras or thongs, looking them up and down to determine their cup sizes, even rubbing the underwear to show how stains can be washed out...

Fitting rooms are banned in the kingdom. So a woman is never sure she has chosen the right size until she gets it home.

"I have bras with sizes ranging from 32 to 38 because I can't get to try them on," said Modie Batterjee, Huda's sister and one of the boycott organisers.

Even male relatives get dragged into the embarrassment. Women are allowed to shop without a male relative, but husbands or brothers sometimes insist on coming along - or the women want them there - to ensure salesmen stay respectful.

Modie Batterjee recalls how her husband fled a lingerie store because he could not bear to hear her explain to a salesman that she wanted high-waisted underwear to hold in her tummy after their daughter's birth...






ALL I CAN SAY IS... OH MY :ROFL: