Now after Alia El Mahdy showed some serious skin in Fall 2011, she strikes again this winter accessorized with Egypt’s flag. It seems that some people are ok to get naked fighting for a cause, but this time, we aren’t talking about Alia El Mahdy’s cause, or nude art or whatever artistic or political terminology that I’m proudly ignorant of, but we’re talking about deliberately exposing your most intimate, cherished, private life to the masses.
Exposing private parts came hand in hand with exposing private lives. Last month, a new form of divorce was on everyone’s lips. A well-known businessman, who comes from a very reputable aristocratic family, divorced his wife in a TV advertisement aired on the channels he owns. Most people were shocked. Women were traumatized and men were disgusted by this shameful act. A psychologist commented on this act in an online newspaper saying that this man suffers from psychological illness that can lead him to walk down the streets naked without even regretting it! However, a couple of weeks later, the man said publicly that he respects his wife and the way he divorced her had nothing to do with respect and it’s a thing they both understand.
Before the TV divorce, another shameful kind of divorce took place in the social scene. That one was only online. A couple got divorced and the man created a fake Facebook profile of his wife and invited strangers to sex orgies at his wife’s house, mind you the same house where his daughter lives as well. Everyone was shocked! How do you sleep for years next to the father of your children and one day he emasculates himself tainting his manhood and your relationship without even putting the kids into consideration? We should salute all the women who came out of these experiences and managed to move on.
Trendy this year is regular people who aren’t pop stars zooming a public eye on sexually explicit things they say just to shake their name a little bit. A few weeks ago an international public speaker who calls herself a “columnist and international public speaker on Arab and Muslim issues” wrote her first poem that was a mix between erotica and meaningless sexist lines. She talked about Sekhmet the well-known Warrior Goddess and the Goddess of Healing for Ancient Upper Egypt who was also the fiercest hunter known to the Egyptians. She talked about Sekhmet’s tits saying that these tits are “My revolution” and “Pink is the color of my p**sy, you want to f**k me in my pink coat”. Explicit words were used without any poetic structure. A Palestinian female activist who resists sexism commented on this poem by writing a blog post saying that reading anymore writings from this writer is considered ‘brain death’! The Palestinian activist also commented on some parts of the poem like that when the writer asked in her poem “Does Sekhmet cry when she cums?” saying, that Sekhmet, may be crying, but not due to her experiencing any sort of sexual euphoria, instead her tears may be due to the use of her name “in this haggard, bumbling collision of words marketed not as a comical train wreck but as a poem”.
Using and abusing revolutions to get naked and grab attention is a trend that should be so out by now. Everyone knows who wants to jump on the bandwagon and who wants to fight for a real cause by creating useful solutions for the public. Raising awareness by explicit material never made a change throughout history. Exposing your private life and dirty laundry for the public was never in the benefit of anyone.
Dirty media, notorious people, beautified lies will remain coming to life if we keep on giving an eye and ear to them. We are in a very critical time of our lives politically, economically and stripping naked isn’t the solution.
