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.