Narrating Sexual Blackmail in Lebanon: A Present-Day Pathography

Abstract

ABSTRACT An ongoing economic and financial meltdown, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the August 4, 2020 explosion of Beirut Port—since 2019, Lebanon has been assailed by a spiralling confluence of mutually exacerbating crises. The present-day poverty, hunger, and unemployment levels are coeval with an extraordinary rise of similarly hyper-endemic sextortion cases. While drawing on its author’s experience of sexual blackmail in Lebanon, this article narrates the various parameters of this pathology and its trauma—its perpetrators, progression, and victims—in relation to several documented instances of this illness, including three excerpts from my students’ memoirs (2020–2023). The resulting ‘pathography’ reveals sexual blackmail in Lebanon as a nuanced corollary of not only socioeconomic tensions, but also sex stigma. In a context where societal attitudes to sexuality remain, to a significant extent, regressive, being sexually active, regardless of sexual orientation, incurs a status quo of shaming and silencing that most affects the sexual and mental health of the country’s vulnerable groups: youth, particularly women, and queer individuals more generally.