Thursday, August 11, 2005

Rambling: Flirting, Saudi Style

I ran across an interesting (and unusual) article from the AP about the dating culture of Saudi Arabia. The full text of it can be found here. This strange story is proof that you can't make up stuff like this.
This story is about flirting in the gender-segregated Saudi society. Strick Islamic law forbids the interaction of women with men who are unknown to them. To get around these restrictions, the violation of which could result in arrest by the religious police, singles use Bluetooth-enabled phones and computers to communicate with the opposite sex. Bluetooth is a standard that allows cell phones and other electronic devices to communicate with each other directly, instead of having to connect to the Internet or a phone network first. Because of how segregated Saudi society is, using Bluetooth to interact with unknown members of the opposite sex is attractive to technology-savy Saudis. And I'm guessing that it's much more efficient than the older, lower-tech way of flirting (and I'm not making this up): "throwing phone numbers at women through car windows". Go figure. :-)

2 comments:

incurable optimist said...

see, you have it easy: you have yentes working for you.

Mr. Pi Thetahead said...

With yentes like that, who needs Bluetooth (?) :-)