Tag / gender roles

by Fadi Zaghmout

Horror films make women less feminine! A jordanian newspaper claims!


While it is hard for a lot people to imagine a genderless human being – which exist -, it is as hard for Arabs to imagine a genderless objects due to the nature of the Arabic language that genderlizes objects. There is no “it” in Arabic, we only have a he and a she. Nearly everything can be defined as either to be masculine or feminine depending usually on the ending of the word: those with ‘ah’ at the end are defaulted to be feminine, and those without it tend to be masculine!

With such a language heritage, it comes to no surprise the strong emphasize on gender roles in the Arab societies, and while it is impossible to attach every single object to females or males based on its own gender, sometimes people subconsciously do the attachmenet and build on it. For instance a spoon in arabic (mel3akah) is feminine but it cannot be explicit for females usage only! In the other hand, a flower (wardah) which has other feminine attributes such as being delicate and soft is strongly attached to females.

The rigid apply of gender roles on both sexes where masculinity and femininity come as a based for classification usually triggers some awkward situations that limit the behaviour of both men and women in our society. The other day, and while reading the daily Al Ra’ee newspaper, an article about horror movies caught my attention.

The article highlights how Jordanian women are getting more interested in horror movies. It is written in a way that shows the issue as a strange phenomena in Jordan where women are behaving in a way that should be limited to men! The writer comes with a mentality that can’t see how *fragile delicate feminine* creatures like women can betray their own gender and watch films that are full of violence and horror. Ofcourse different absurd reasons came up in the article such as that Jordanian women are forced to watch these movies because it is usually their brothers who take control of the remote control and they are who decide upon what to watch and what not! and so helpless Jordanian girls just sit down and watch their brothers choices of violent horror films!

To make it worse, it follows the guidlines of researched articles we are used to from such a newspaer, it goes further into consulting a social professional in the matter whom with his so called expertise condemn the phenomena and warns Jordanian women of losing their femininity by watching such films! (bullshit!)

The article even shows statistics! It claims that 14% of women who watch horror films on a regular basis suffer from lack of femininity! I wonder who is the genious behind those numbers! Really? How do *science* people conduct their research in this country?

It is not uncommon to read such articles who claim a scientific credibility by caughting a so called professional in our newspapers. I wonder whether the problem lies in the writers of those articles or in the professionals in this country who seem to be detached from what real science has achieved around the globe.

Isn’t it time for people to come up and complain when they catch a lie in a newspaper? We have an arabic saying: El saket 3an el 7a2 shitan akhras (The one who doesn’t stand up for justice is a silent devil). Newspaper writers should start hold accountability for what they write and take responsiblity for it.

by Fadi Zaghmout

Cross-dressers


There is no red line in our society that matches the one drawn to highlight the seperation of gender roles. Men and women, simple binary entities that simplifies all the diversity of humans nature into two templates. Only two that are hard to fit by many. It is even worse when it comes to the classification of these simple two templates; one is superior than the other. Men enjoy the upper hand. They ought to emphasize on different superior attributes (strength, intelligence, education, …etc) in order to fill their gender role.

So what happens when someone’s nature fail to fit with those guidlines? What happens when someone blurs the lines between between gender roles and mess up with one of the major parts of which we define our gender identities – our clothes?

Hell break loose! no?

What really happens is that most people fail to realize the natural diverse aspect of human beings and lump it under mental disorder category.

It is worth noting that I am not talking here about homosexuals who blur gender roles in a different way. I am emphasizing on another group of people who blur the line of gender roles based on their choice of clothes rather than their sexual orientation.

I know that we tend to lump everything that we are unfamiliar with under the same category – queerness -. Many people – falsely – percieve homosexuals as cross-dressers and cross dressers as homosexuals. In reality: The great majority of cross-dressers are biological males, most of whom are sexually attracted to women. (this is taken from the american psychological association website – read further here)

Now that we no that most cross-dressers are straight men, does that help in making them fit our unique men template?

Ofcourse not, they fail in one of the prerequisites.

While the american psychological association tells us as well that cross-dressing is not a mental disorder, a lot of people tend to maintain their constructed inherited structure of false rigidity of gender roles and judge cross dressers as mentally ill people.

We tend to play experts. It is no uncommon for us to judge any unfamiliar behaviour to be a mental illness. “He is sick, or she is sick” may be one of the most used Jordanian terms. People are sick – this is also common – in our own definition of equating sickness to weirdness.

Would we ever realize the diverse nature of human beings? and would we ever learn that being weird doesn’t necessary being bad? I know that the internet opened the door for us, we may find a hard time at the beginning to capture unfamiliar things, but we all know that with time weird things become normal.