Hammer and Tongs
ALOKE THAKORE
"Sun, sea and sexual harassment," screamed the headlines in the free morning Dubai tabloid called "7DAYS" (October 25, 2006). The photograph showed a Caucasian-looking woman lying down on the beach in a bikini, her face comfortably covered by a shopping bag, her buttocks covered with a black strip that read "CENSORED", and two men, patently from the Indian subcontinent, wearing Pathan suits, their neck appearing to be turned towards her, apparently ogling her, apparently because their eyes were covered with a black strip. So far, so good, one would think.
The sub heads explained that the female reporter had spent a morning on Dubai`s public beaches, and in the space of three hours had "witnessed women being photographed without their knowledge, saw men deliberately brush against women as they swam, was ogled by so many men that she lost count…and she was even propositioned by a stranger." None of these above actions can be condoned in any part of the world. And yet, most of these actions are a part of the global beach experience since expectations of privacy are not there in public places, and least of all in a place like a beach. Such behaviour on the part of men ought to be criticized everywhere and one should ask for more vigilant patrolling from the police to deter people from violating the inherent privacy that surrounds the body of each individual. At the same time, taking photographs even if the intention is to get a picture of another person at a public place, or watching other people, ogling if you so prefer, and being propositioned cannot be stopped as long as one holds certain fundamental rights to be inviolate in a public place where all visitors come with the same rights.
What makes this piece of first person experience and reportage galling is the racism and colonial suppuration that oozes out of the piece.
All those doing the ogling are brown, and specifically from the Indian subcontinent, and all being ogled are white-skinned Europeans. The colonial fear of the virginal white woman against the rapacious eyes of the brown and black-skinned being played out in the beaches of Dubai. A photograph that shows two subcontinentals in the foreground and two white-skinned women at a distance is captioned, "Perverts: These fully-clothed men are clearly not working on their tans." It might not have occurred to the reporter that having little melanin deficiency, there was no desire to acquire tans, and taking clothes off at public places is not necessarily a culturally acceptable practice for these men. And this would hold true of Arabs too. Some of the torture techniques in Iraq perpetrated by the US military preyed upon cultural notions of privacy and nakedness. The story carried side bars, which were first person accounts of why men do these actions. Both the people asked were from the subcontinent. One is an electrician who is reported to have said, "We hardly find women in such attires in India. Even when some of them come to the beach in Chennai, they are more than half covered. It really feels good to watch these women." Another person`s pull quote reads, "Some women like the attention to feel good about themselves". None of these are any more different than what men or women would say in any other part of the world. Baywatch, its country of origin, and its global popularity speaks to this.
Read this introduction to beaches in the Conde Nast website, concierge.com, "Is there anyplace on earth more obviously an adult playground than the beach? You can get away with wearing almost nothing; it`s acceptable to quaff fruity alcohol drinks during daylight hours; and ogling the gorgeous thing on the towel next to you is expected. (She—or he—isn`t wearing that skimpy suit for the heck of it.) But not all beaches are created equal. You want the rocks in your cocktail, not under your feet, and the swimwear should be overflowing with flesh in the right places…"
One cannot understand this reportage without putting it in the context of its reception. Dubai is a deeply racial society. The subcontinentals are the labouring classes including the business classes whose cravenness is a sight to be seen, the locals the master classes, and the white expatriates the plenipotentiaries. This holds true of the hiring practices where appointment ads regularly discriminate between those with a fair skin and those without albeit under alibis like an American degree, in social practices where pubs do not allow Asians to enter, in immigration practices where visa, labour cards and other paraphernalia are discriminatory, and most crucially in a discriminating pay structure.
This report with all the so-called perpetrators being non-white and all the named victims being white, except possibly the reporter who is called Zainad Fattah, maps what possibly, and most charitably, may be called masculine predatory behaviour on to ethnicity, nationality, and race. When the race riots broke out in Australia one of the reports carried this piece of similar prejudice, "Barely a moment later, another of the young men, Brad, tells angrily how the Lebanese frequenting the beach are ogling and mistreating local women, making them feel unsafe." Joining Brad from far-off antipodes is this Dubai-based reporter who betrays the ignorance and prejudices that is the stock-in-trade of such publications in neo-colonial societies like Dubai.
Aloke Thakore is a media consultant, journalist, and teacher. He can be reached at hammerntongs@fastmail.in