Life will find a way? Online Dating Insider notes (Saudi Singles Resort to BlueTooth Belts) that young Islamic people are coming up with ways to sneak their phone numbers to one another, to share texts and pictures. The NY Times has a feature (Love on Girls’ Side of the Saudi Divide) about what it’s like from the girl’s point of view — and how the young women are cross-dressing as men to enter male-only spaces and take pictures of themselves doing so, to show other girls. How young men are holding their phone numbers up toward cars they believe contain women, and broadcasting their numbres over Bluetooth. And what happens when a woman switches on her Bluetooth:

A woman can’t switch her phone’s Bluetooth feature on in a public place without receiving a barrage of the love poems and photos of flowers and small children which many Saudi men keep stored on their phones for purposes of flirtation. And last year, Al Arabiya television reported that some young Saudis have started buying special “electronic belts,” which use Bluetooth technology to discreetly beam the wearer’s cellphone number and e-mail address at passing members of the opposite sex

It has very, very recently become acceptable in some families for a woman to talk on the phone with her fiancee before the wedding. Young women are also debating whether it’s ok to have male friends on Facebook.

Naturally most of the young women won’t admit to doing any of these things, and claim they don’t know any other women who do. Wouldn’t want anyone to get in trouble, especially considering just how real that trouble would be for them. At the same time, this infiltration of technology and the ingenuity of young people is bound to crack the rigid structure. I catch my breath thinking about what these youth risk — but also at what they can change, one clandestine text message at a time.