Famous Egyptian Talkshow Host or Hypocritical Televangelist?
DISCLAIMER: This article is referencing no one in particular.
CONTENT WARNING: This article discusses topics of violence against women including domestic abuse, sexual harassment and sexual assault.
Setting the Stage
Imagine, it’s the early 2010’s, the country just had two major political upheavals trying to determine which institution is fit to run the government and you’re a young broadcast journalist trying to climb an extremely narrow career ladder. Everyone at the top is heavily manicured, surgically enhanced, media trained to have voices like silk and virtually indistinguishable from one another. They don’t have to deal with the brunt of high inflation thanks to generous foreign investment and all they have to do is stay on the right side of the law. They have opinions, to be sure, but nothing that gets anyone’s undivided attention. Ratings are steady but the subject matter is stale. That’s when you come in. You take everything they teach you, especially the beauty treatments, and turn it on its head. Pull a reverse Elizabeth Holmes and fashion yourself a new voice that can only be described as a cat being put through a heavy drying cycle so you can cut through all of the noise. It doesn’t matter that you’re not being truthful about anything when on camera. It only matters that everyone is watching you and more importantly that they’re talking about you. Now you’re huge and viewers are hanging on your every word. How intoxicating.
So what was your big break? Last year, a video goes viral of a couple getting married and the groom brutally strikes his new wife mid celebration. The uproar against blatant, unapologetic domestic abuse is palpable. The fury is present in every conversation on every social media platform and broadcast channel. You, however, add gas to the fire in a Not Like Those Other Girls™ way. Broadly there is a call to return to tradition online. Everyone wants more money than they know what to do with and to be right all of the time. They’re listening to Fox News pundits and Andrew Tate. Never mind one got sued for nearly putting a voting machine company out of business and the other is on house arrest in Romania pending human trafficking charges, respectively. They want an idyllic Phyllis Schlafly inspired home life and society. Cate Blanchett played her in Mrs. America because there are redeeming qualities to her, right? Why shouldn’t you answer the call, too? And the people against that are also lucrative because hate watchers are a slam dunk for engagement. It’s Facebook’s entire business model for a reason.
Then you hear that said battered bride forgave her husband/first cousin (read: cousband) and your eyes glitter with a new opportunity. Most of us would be flagging down the ma’zoun (officiator) for an immediate divorce but you have a different idea. Let’s keep the freak show going and humiliate this poor woman even more. You pay her husband to double down on what he did and downplay the severity domestic abuse as a whole framing beating a woman into submission as any other component of a normal, healthy marriage. Now that he spoke all you have to do is agree with him and no one will know that you might be slightly horrified because your obvious color contacts won’t show your pupils dilating in nervousness anyway. The show must go on. Lay in the bed you made and reap the financial benefits of this ratings winner. Trad-culture is your brand now and you’re well aware molly-coddled boys on Reddit are zooming in on your unnatural, vitamin D-deficient, paper-white legs, cleavage, and leather pants on r/ArabCelebs. Use it. So long as you have an iron-clad grip on their attention you can keep giving tired, harmful advice to young boys and girls who don’t know anything about the world yet.
As you keep slathering yourself with enough Fair & Lovely to almost cause a shortage in the Indian factory where the stuff is made and watching your numbers go wild, people are starting to complain to the Supreme Council of Media calling you dangerous and accusing you of inciting violence. What’s more is that you have a hashtag with celebrities weighing in and news outlets in other languages picking it up and they all want you to go away. You’ve gone global and your mantra is, “all press is good press.” But now you have tempers to manage so your show stays on air and you need to cull the general dismay at you still somehow having a career. Give a half hearted apology, state your vague intention to strengthen families and go on an insipid, repetitive and clearly scripted prank show so you can pretend to get tortured. Is everyone happy now?
Can We Stop the Second Person Narration, Please?
These slippery types of personalities go back at least to the 1960’s back when clutching branded cue cards was the height of technology. Why Egypt hasn’t made use of teleprompters yet, I have no idea. It’s how Phil Donahue made a living and it’s how Jerry Springer lasted so long. The celebrities getting interviewed didn’t satisfy a viewer’s morbid curiosity quite like the host and the subject matter they covered could. The two ends of the spectrum of those two respectively being, “this is interesting,” to, “what is happening?!” In trying to get everything right, to capture sensation, it’s not difficult to get swept in with the drama. To keep saying more and more outrageous things to keep capitalizing on attention. The things said on air do not exist in a vacuum. The argument could, and is, made that we don’t know what these people’s actual opinions are; that they morphed themselves Build-A-Bear-style into a sentient megaphone for a massive media conglomerate to generate buzz therefore to maximize advertising revenue and, in lieu of that, they’re very good at it.
I talked to dear friend, avid reader of Fingan Qahwa and talented practicing lawyer, Amir Ebrahim and he had a lot to say. Firstly, he explained to me how an individual or organization would go about getting a show investigated for inciting violence like the American 5-year old I am with the patience of a saint. It’s like going to the FCC in the US. Second, he ran through how said shows are not quite as pervasive as media starring Tamer Hosny and/or Adel Imam, for example. Those stories will trivialize heavy topics such as street harassment and the varying forms of sexual assault (from inappropriate touching to rape) and try to make them apart of the comedy. The indication that a woman is actually lying about disliking catcalling and nonconsensual touching in these movies and television shows makes men imitate the behavior exactly as they see it acted out in real life with real women and girls.
He went on to explain his observations of the real world consequences such popular programs has on young, impressionable Egyptian women in his practice. Thereby thwarting real progress feminists have been working towards in informing women and girls what rights they are entitled to, as guaranteed by religion and the state, and how much power they really have. The interview was a little longer than everything I could include but here’s the part that’s really disheartening.
“I would say less than 10% of the women that contact me regarding sexual harassment, who are victims, those victims less than 10% of them who talk to me follow through with their cases. And when you talk to them, sometimes you can even quote things from […] people like [them]. The stupid, very toxic concepts that [they talk] about how a man is suffering. Sometimes I hear this from victims. Sometimes I hear it from rape victims. I swear to God. And they ask me, ‘what’s going to happen to him?’ And I say, ‘Well, if everything goes well, at the end this guy could take, I don’t know, [maximum] 15 years for what he did to you. No less than 7 years for what he did to you.’ She says, ‘no, he does not deserve that. He raped me but he does not deserve that. He’s actually kind and he’s actually suffering. He’s going through a lot.’ They’re the same exact excuses that [they say on their shows.]”
The glaring problem here is that broadcast journalists are not licensed mental health professionals. They don’t know each and every one of us individually and the details of what we deal with in order to give us good, pertinent advice. And so giving it so willingly anyway is deeply irresponsible if not deeply dangerous. No good can come from encouraging willing ignorance of one’s own rights or an extremely repressed sense of self, especially not a loving relationship. Being married themselves is about as close as they can possibly get to being qualified to give advice to other married people en masse. You’re not a professional chef when all you have is a kitchen. I’ve seen the 2019 film Bombshell about these types of figures before and I know how it ends.
The only other arena in which I see people with no qualifications giving horrible but predictable marriage advice is in the Evangelical Fundamentalist Christian and Mormon spheres. Think of, or watch, the new Amazon Prime docu-series on the Duggar family, Shiny Happy People, or the Netflix docu-series released last year on the FLDS, Keep Sweet Pray and Obey.
What I noticed was that the same things being told to girls and women in these high control groups is more or less the same kind of rhetoric getting espoused on these television shows but haphazardly jammed through Google Translate. That it is the duty of women to be completely self-sacrificing, slap a smile on that obviously sad face, and manage a man’s emotions and wellbeing for him because they just can’t get it together for themselves like an adult who decided they were mature enough to get married. And if a man gets mad then obviously you weren’t doing it properly. Work harder to make him happy so you earn your basic human dignity because you are only here to please.
Enforcement of these principles also come from other women who give off extremely familiar self-righteous mean girl energy to get everyone else to fall in line or else. This type of conservatism is not at all new and it’s not at all native to Egypt. It harkens back to the 80’s-era American Prosperity Gospel and the more I learn about it, the more I find how this ideology has so seamlessly infiltrated all of our spiritual lives, even the Muslims. Case in point, that stubborn umbrella analogy that keeps getting spread around. Now, I am not saying some Egyptian talkshow hosts are a bunch of destructive cult leaders or explicitly encouraging various forms of violence against women; they just sound an awful lot like the ones in those scary documentaries.
So What Now?
Whether or not you think on camera media professionals are serious or cheaply cultivating eyeballs is completely up to you. However you decide to structure a relationship is your business so long as no one is hurting the other. There is no shame in wanting a more traditional set up for your home life it just doesn’t have to be the same thing as the perfect pretext for abuse. Having a vocal, independent spirit and critical thinking are not mutually exclusive with being a good wife. But before I wrap this up I want to offer a little food for thought. It costs nothing to be honest but it also pays nothing; People are honest for the sake of it being such a high virtue.