CAIRO (Reuters) - Nearly two-thirds of Egyptian men admit to having sexually harassed women in the most populous Arab country, and a majority say women themselves are to blame for their maltreatment, a survey showed Thursday.

The forms of harassment reported by Egyptian men, whose country attracts millions of foreign tourists each year, include touching or ogling women, shouting sexually explicit remarks, and exposing their genitals to women. “Sexual harassment has become an overwhelming and very real problem experienced by all women in Egyptian society, often on a daily basis,” said the report by the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights.

Egyptian women and female visitors frequently complain of persistent sexual harassment on Egyptian streets, despite the socially conservative nature of this traditional Muslim society.

The behavior could have repercussions on Egypt’s tourism industry, a major foreign income earner, with 98 percent of foreign women saying they had experienced harassment in the country, the survey said.

The survey of more than 2,000 Egyptian men and women and 109 foreign women said the vast majority of Egyptians believed that sexual harassment in Egypt was on the rise, citing a worsening economic situation and a lack of awareness or religious values.

It said 62 percent of Egyptian men reported perpetrating harassment, while 83 percent of Egyptian women reported having been sexually harassed. Nearly half of women said the abuse occurred daily.

Only 2.4 percent of Egyptian women reported it to the police, with most saying they did not believe anyone would help. Some feared reporting harassment would hurt their reputations.

“The vast majority of women did nothing when confronted with sexual harassment,” the survey said, adding that most Egyptian women believed the victim should “remain silent.”

Some 53 percent of men blamed women for bringing on sexual harassment, saying they enjoyed it or were dressed in a way deemed indecent. Some women agreed.

“Out of Egyptian women and men interviewed, most believe that women who wear tight clothes deserve to be harassed,” the survey said. It added most agreed women should be home by 8 p.m.

The survey said most of the Egyptian women who told of being harassed said they were dressed conservatively, with the majority wearing the Islamic headscarf. The harassment took place on the streets or on public transport, as well as in tourist destinations and foreign educational institutions.

PARIS (AFP) - A speech-writer for France’s foreign minister has penned a literary, lustful and possibly lecherous “Guide to the Pretty Women of Paris” which blows a loud raspberry at political correctness.

“Just as every region has its gastronomy, every quartier has its feminine specialty,” writes Pierre-Louis Colin, a dapper 34-year-old who co-authored Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner’s most recent book.

“You do not find in Menilmontant the sublime legs you see at the Madeleine. But you do find perfectly shameless cleavages, radiant breasts often uncluttered by a bra,” he said in his own book, which was published last month.

Paris is the most visited capital in the world and people come here to see city’s magnificent women as much as they come to admire the Mona Lisa and the Eiffel Tower, Colin told AFP.

He could find no guidebooks to the human wonders of Paris so he decided to produce his own. The result is the 190-page “Guide des jolies femmes de Paris,” which is more of a literary essay than a fact-packed guidebook.

Area by area, Colin notes the best observation posts — bars, supermarkets, parks, museums, metro trains — and the best times of day for the connoisseur to contemplate various Parisienne archetypes.

“Trendy youth,” characterized by the “generalization of the G-string and the near disappearance of the bra” is to be seen on rue Montorgueil, a pedestrian strip of cafes and upmarket food shops which the author hails as the “epicenter of the city’s erotic radiations.”

Luxury boutiques and elegant cafes terraces are the natural habitat of the leisured bourgeois, who is described as “the mother of all fantasies since the origins of literature”.

Women in the “saucy maturity” category, those aged between 40 and 60 whose appearance “bears witness to the meanders of an agitated or ambitious sex life which refuses to lay down its weapons,” are best observed in lingerie stores.

The author, a graduate of the elite Ecole Normale Superieure which has honed writers like Jean-Paul Sartre, sees his work as a “high mission” to counter the mood of a righteous America, but some extracts may raise eyebrows.

Colin regrets, for instance, it is no longer possible to loiter contemplatively outside high schools because “current legislation and a certain form of collective psychosis have created a climate of suspicion that makes every admirer of young girls a rapist of children”.

He also gives many tips such as where to position oneself so as to get an “unbeatable view” up women’s skirts as they climb a spiral staircase — singling out the Cafes Louis-Philippe in the fourth arrondissement, or district.

But it’s all in the best possible taste, insists Colin.

He rejected suggestions that an alternative title for his oeuvre might have been the “Voyeur’s Guide to the Pretty Women of Paris” — though concedes his girlfriend was at first perturbed by the idea of his book, but later came to like it.

The author points out that he has not included any suggestions on how to pick up women, nor provided the addresses of any of Paris’ numerous dens of iniquity.

“To contemplate is not to encounter,” he writes in his introduction. “Therein lies without doubt, the profound originality of the contemplator in these consumerist times: his aim is not possession.

“He is similar to those rare lovers of art who visit museums without feeling obliged to walk out loaded down with guidebooks or postcards,” wrote Colin.

During an interview in the Cafes de L’Esplanade — which the author said was of note more for its busty waitresses than for its sober clientele — Colin insisted his book was a celebration of women’s freedom.

“I oppose all those who want to restrict women — the priest, the man who pesters women, the censor,” he said.

He dismisses Anglo-Saxon political correctness and boldly states that the freedom to contemplate the beauty of women is a key part of French culture.

“In this troubled century, while from America come the echoes of another moral order, the responsibility of the contemplator is immense: in his respectful courtesy depends a part of the survival of our civilization of liberty, of gentleness, and of grace.

“May this guide contribute to the success of this high mission,” Colin wrote.

ROME (Reuters) - Silvio Berlusconi, who has been biting his tongue for most of the April 13-14 election campaign, said on Tuesday his opponents on the left had no taste in women.

“The left has no taste, not even when it comes to women,” he said. “As for our (women candidates) being more beautiful, I say that because in parliament they have no competition.”

The favorite to win the parliamentary election also promised women would occupy a third of cabinet posts if he won, but his sexist comments provoked an angry response.

“Running for parliament is not the same as competing in the Miss Italy beauty contest,” said parliamentarian Paola Balducci from the red/green Rainbow Alliance.

Berlusconi, the conservative People of Freedom party leader, cultivates a jocular image and told a television interviewer his background as a salesman had taught him that “you have to make a joke every 10-15 minutes. It’s a way of keeping up morale.”

In an unusually staid campaign that began when Romano Prodi resigned as premier in January after his coalition collapsed, Berlusconi has kept a poll lead of between 5-9 percent over his centre-left rival Walter Veltroni.

Berlusconi is Italy’s third richest man and its first prime minister in 50 years to last the full term, from 2001-2006.

The 71-year-old delights in the company of glamorous women and has fielded some of the dancers who populate television shows on his Mediaset channels as candidates for parliament.

His long-suffering wife Veronica, 20 years his junior, got her revenge last year by reprimanding him for lechery in an open letter to a left-leaning newspaper. He publicly apologized.

His women supporters laughed when he called them the “menopause section” at a recent rally and urged them to bake cakes for campaigners, but Berlusconi infuriates others.

“Berlusconi continues to judge women only by their looks, the sign of a very backward, sexist mentality,” said Silvana Mura, member of parliament for the centrist Italy of Values, the main ally of Veltroni’s Democratic Party in the vote.

“In any other modern, democratic state one single comment like this would be enough to condemn a candidate for prime minister to certain defeat,” she said. “I hope Italian women — but not just women — give Berlusconi the answer he deserves.”

However, chauvinist behavior is unlikely to provoke widespread outrage in a country where elderly men dominate public life and women occupy only 2 percent of boardroom seats in state-owned firms.

Talk persists of Berlusconi and Veltroni forming a “Grand Coalition” if the vote is too close in the Senate, as expected.

They would share power long enough to reform electoral rules to change the system of broad alliances to a two-party system and then compete head-to-head in yet another vote.