Men Make Fire.

I went to the beach this weekend with a group of friends to celebrate one of our friends’ birthday. I found that the perfect opportunity to analyze the men and woman’s behaviors in such an environment. The men were particularly interesting to observe. Arab men find going to the beach, a chance to practice their “machismo”, like it was an activity.



The western world is a more free world than the Arab world. I don’t like to generalize but that’s my personal opinion. In the west I guess it has become okay to embrace the different types of men’s behaviors. Like Sutherland discusses in her book, there are many different ways a man can be a man. There’s the heartless tough man figure, referred to in his book as the terminator, after Arnold Schwarzenegger in the movie terminator. And there’s the emotional sensitive understanding man figure, referred to in his book as the kindergarten commando. Of course those two are the extremes, there are gray areas in between where other people lie.



In the Arab world, the kindergarten commando is not an accepted way of life, and if a man were anything but a “terminator” they would start to question his sexual orientation. This was reflected in my friends’ behaviors on the beach. I noted “macho” behaviors, or what they considered as expression of their masculinity, like logging heavy rocks and wood around to make a bonfire, cooking the meat (meat is a very manly type of food for Arabs, so cooking it on the beach with the fire they made represents their masculinity), and finally, ordering the girls around to clean, set the place where we’re going to eat and organize the seating area. When the girls offered to help with the fire making or meat cooking however, the men replied with “of course not! What kind of man do you think I am”?



I found it extremely interesting to take theories based on the behaviors in west and apply them to the Middle East. It has proven that what people consider appropriate or acceptable differs drastically between different parts of the world.

Representation of Gender in Egyptian Cinema

If we look at films as the reflection of society, then one of the main themes that should be looked at in a nation’s cinema is the representation of gender roles. In the book Cinematic Sociology, Jean-Anne Sutherland tries to define power in regards to women’s empowerment. She divides the notion of power into different types of power. The first type is ‘Power-Over’, which is the classic Weber-ian definition of power. Power-over simply divides power between the powered (master) and the non-powered (subject). The master controls the subject, and in the case of Gender, the man controls the woman as masculinity and manhood are equated to power. There’s also ‘Power-To’ which is the case when one has control over the circumstances of their own life. These power-over and power-to notions that we experience in reality is both portrayed and challenged in films. If we look at Egyptian films specifically, we find that the representation of gender roles has not really changed since the 1960s. Starring Fatin Hamama, Al Bab Al Maftuh (1963) is a melodrama based on a novel with the same title written by Latifa El Zayyat.

 

The film tells us the story of Laila, a smart and enthusiastic young woman who struggles with the patriarchal society she lives in where the traditions are imposed on women in order to please men. In the first scene of the film, Laila challenges the headmistress of her school. When the headmistress says that women’s job is motherhood, while war and struggle is for men only, Laila preaches to the students of her school and says that war doesn’t differentiate between men and women and asks the school to ‘open the doors’. After she leads a demonstration against occupation, Laila returns home and gets beaten up by her father who sees what she did as a scandalous act. Laila’s father has power over her. Throughout the film, Laila is forced to act within the gender roles imposed on her as she gets engaged through an arranged marriage. However, at the end, Laila finally decides to leave her fiancé, run away and jump on the train to Port Said with her lover to join the resistance of the people against the Triple Aggression instead of going to Fayoum with her family.

 

Finally we see Laila getting the power to control her life, however, this ending shows that Laila’s freedom was still dependent on her lover, Hussein, who’s a male figure and that she could not achieve it on her own. If we look at a more recent example, Taymour w Shafika (2007), we find a lot of the similar notions, empowering women throughout the film and dis-empowering them at the end. Taymour w Shafika is a typical romantic-comedy starring Ahmed El-Sakka and Mona Zaki.

 

Taymour and Shafika are lovers and best friends who have been neigbors since their childhood. Since the beginning of the film, we see that Taymour has power over Shafika due to his masculinity. His masculinity is enhanced by his buffed up muscles and his job as a security officer.

 

Shafika gains more and more power as she gets her PhD and becomes the Minister of Environment. Shafika’s power is seen as the problem throughout the film, as Taymour is a conservative, traditional man, who makes Shafika choose between him and her career. After choosing her career, Taymour breaks up with Shafika. By the end of the film, Shafika gets kidnapped after she goes on a business trip to Ukraine, but “luckily” Taymour was on her security team and he rescues her. Shafika realizes that her love for Taymour is worth sacrificing her career and they get married, giving up her power-to as she gives Taymour the power over her.