Women’s coffee shops are no longer just meeting places for friends or refuges for a moment’s escape from the daily routine. Instead, according to some, they have become the haunts of university students and schoolgirls playing truant to indulge themselves in smoking shisha pipes and cigarettes, with women using the locations as impromptu job agencies, and matchmakers seeking willing bribes. Behind the walls of women’s coffee shops, some say, all sorts of things go on.Smoking? Dancing? Make-up? Jeans? Acting like boys?
Salwan Abdullah, a 24-year-old university student, recalls the first time she was invited by a student friend to go to an all-female coffee shop. “I had no idea of what went on in these places, and when we entered the room was crowded with university students and girls from secondary and intermediate school. The air was full of smoke from shisha pipes and cigarettes. There were married and single girls, and women matchmakers going round asking girls if they were looking for husbands and if so what sort of features they were looking for.”
“I saw the same thing in another café during school exam time,” Salwan continued. “I saw girls in school uniform, no more than 14 years old, going into the bathrooms to change into jeans and T-shirts and putting on make-up they’d hidden in their school bags along with their cigarettes.”
“Girls have become more and more daring in coffee shops,” said university student Khuloud. “I once saw two girls among a group smoking shisha and laughing out loud as if it were the most normal thing in the world, and I could tell from their eyes that they were proud of it.”
Sara, a science student at King Abdulaziz University, described some of the behavior she saw in coffee shops as “incredible.”
“It goes completely against our ethics,” she said. “In one of the larger coffee shops I saw girls dressed very immodestly, acting as if they were young male teenagers, drinking coffee and tea, and there was a special place for listening to music which had been turned into some sort of place for dancing and showing off their bodies. Families need to keep an eye on this and prevent this sort of behavior in our conservative society.”
What could make Saudi girls want to act like this?
It couldn't possibly be living in a society where they are forced, 24 hours a a day, to avoid accidentally being seen by any man, could it?
No...it must be that they are simply immoral.