Befriending a group of Cairo housewives, Shereen El Feki offered to buy them some "marital aids" on her next trip abroad. Checking out an instructional DVD for them, she heard the earnest voiceover extol the "special appeal" of al fresco sex. As El Feki deadpans, "the only appeal this was going to have for Azza and her friends was the kind you make to overturn a conviction for public indecency". In this brave book, the former vice-chair of the UN's Global Commission on HIV and the Law acknowledges that while western licentiousness might not be a good match for the Arab world, 2011's uprisings have provided an opportunity to rethink sexual rights. Focusing on Cairo, she speaks to the married and the single, gay men and lesbians, health workers and sex workers, revealing how socially sanctioned marriage is not the only story. She uncovers much that is upsetting – domestic violence, persecution, female genital mutilation – but El Feki allows herself a cautious optimism that change is slowly coming: "not a sexual revolution, I think, but a sexual re-evaluation."