GOING DOWN

A friend has just bought a pair of these cute panties to taunt her boyfriend - an ardent activist who flinches every time  el-Sissi is mentioned - two of his mates  are somewhere in a Cairo prison, no one knows where, and are about to be charged with assisting 'terrorists' - ie looking at a person with a beard. And if that's not enough, his girlfriend's walking around with another man's face on her fun-zone.

I warned her that the el-Sissi knickers  would not go down well in the bedroom, and she replied that they would go down faster  than a protester hit by a police sniper, and this was why she was wearing them. It struck me as an inappropriate simile but this is how it is in Egypt these days. Humour is the antidote to reality. There's a limit to the number of stories of young people being  tear gased and roasted alive in police vans, torture, cooked up charges, beaten, kicked, shot that can be listened to without either bursting into tears, overdosing, or laughing.

The knickers are Ecstasisi gone mad. They are selling well. El-Sissi is reaching the parts he never thought he would. Knowing how jealous and possessive Egyptian men can be, I'm hoping this will turn the tide of el-Sissi mania. The  Lion King may have saved the country from gathering Islamist hoards,  but does he have the right to have his face in the  crotch of Egyptian womanhood? If this continues, votes are more likely to go to some secular wimp than to the guy who's  on, and by implication, in your wife's panties.

It's a turn off in more ways than one. This is the man who sanctioned the humiliating removal of the panties of jailed women protesters to enable a search  for intact hymens. If  it's broken, eureka!, you are a bad woman, and deserve the charges.   This alone, should be a no vote, let alone everything else.