Love and candy

There was a rash of out-of-wedlock pregnancies in central Egypt a few years back (2005 or 2006, I believe). Many of the pregnant women were teenagers; most were deeply conservative Muslims.

The local branch of the Muslim Brotherhood blamed the pregnancies on an "aphrodisiac gum" -- distributed by the Mossad, of course -- that turned these demure young women into insatiable vixens. News of the "plot" spread quickly; I remember meeting one man in Cairo in 2006 who forbade his daughter from chewing gum lest she wind up pregnant.

So nice try, Hamas, but come up with something more original next time.

Update: Turns out this myth goes back even further than I thought. This is from a July 10, 1996 Washington Post article headlined "Sabotaging Egypt, by Gum" (unavailable online; I found it on Nexis):

The story begins in mid-April, when police in this bustling city in the Nile delta 70 miles north of Cairo launched an investigation into the sale of chewing gum allegedly laced with a powerful aphrodisiac. A local member of parliament then weighed in, claiming that he knew of 15 cases in which women and girls had sexually assaulted men after chewing the stuff.

The tale proved irresistible for several of Egypt's feisty, and often wildly inaccurate, opposition newspapers, which wasted no time in identifying the distributor of the gum as -- you guessed it -- Israel... never mind that the gum package is stamped "Made in Germany" and that police have substantiated neither an Israel connection nor the rape claims.

Egyptian police had the gum tested by a local lab, which found no evidence that it came from Israel or was spiked with aphrodisiacs.