JO Magazine

JO's article about female sex tourism in Jordan generated a fair bit of feedback—some good, some bad and some indifferent. Since you wondered, here's what we were thinking.

Words by Nicholas Seeley.

IT’S KIND OF EXCITING: Our June cover story, “On the Prowl,” by Hamza Jilani, which described the issue of female sex tourism in Jordan and its effect on local men’s perceptions of gender, has been the talk of the town—or at least a few lively corners of our local blogosphere. We’ve received lots of feedback on it—some folks were positive, some damning (and quite so!), others were just unsure what to make of it.

And then it was our turn to wonder what to make of the tempest. It was an invitation to debate, and our readers sure gave us a lot to mull over. (We thank you for that, and welcome you to get your comments straight to us here at www.jo.jo.)

So: mulling it over.

“Hamzeh’s cover piece is conflicting for me; in the discomfort of the truth of it, and in the cementing of stereotypes of Western women in Amman it will promote. It’s tough enough to fight being considered an American Cougar in Amman without articles like this,” writes blogger “Kinzi Jones,” (who is an American woman living in Amman) in an e-mail to us.

Fair enough, Kinzi: we’re uncomfortable with that relationship too. Certainly none of us at JO want to make matters worse on the sexual harassment front. And stereotypes, unfortunately, are pretty cemented by definition.

Of course, that’s when it becomes so important to find out what the objects of stereotypes are actually experiencing. And, also, what those who do the stereotyping are thinking, when they do it. For us, that means reporting, and that was our motivation with this and every other article. We didn’t set out to glorify the phenomenon of sex tourism—but we don’t think it makes much sense to pretend it doesn’t happen.

Still, in our conversations with readers, we found a lot of people who were uncomfortable with the article—often, they weren’t quite sure why.

On the Internet, of course, things were different. Kinzi blogged about the article as well—and online she described it as “cement[ing] the stereotype that American and European women in Jordan are wildly desirous of a piece of Bedouin behind.”

Yikes. That’s certainly not what we meant to do. And her post drew a flurry of pretty outraged comments from her readers, as well.

First, of course, we took a long look back at the text, to see if we’d made any big, stupid mistakes: had we said or implied that all Western women here are sex tourists? Had we quoted someone saying all Western women were easy? Actually, we hadn’t. So we took another look at the critiques, to try and see what the problem was.

A few of the sharpest barbs really got us thinking:

“I get hit on inappropriately by soldiers, men at the bank, shabab waiting in line, you name it,” wrote expat-female MommaBean. “What you did ... is give license to the disgusting behavior that Jordanian men already exhibit.”

“Come on now author dude, as a female you can barely conversate with a male hotel employee in Jordan without getting hit on. I’m not even going to get started on my nightmarish experience with Jordanian male hotel employees,” wrote Asoom.

“Any hopes I had of things in Amman changing from Neandrathal stage to modern 21st Century anytime soon are dashed with this kind of stuff going around,” wrote Daisy, who didn’t say if she was foreign or Jordanian, but who added that our article was “increasing the horror of the lives of us decent women living in Jordan.”

“Of course, the Jordanian man wooing the Western woman for a passport and whitey DNA is no longer news,” blogged Kinzi herself.

You won’t find any argument from us on the point that harassment is outrageous and upsetting. But these bits of comments got us thinking about the stereotypes that cut the other way. After all, folks are making some pretty lurid generalizations about Jordanian men—often at the same time that they’re expressing outrage and disbelief at the fact that some foreign women come to the Middle East to behave badly.

“Western women seducing male Jordanian hotel employees … this is so ridiculous it makes it one of the funniest thing I’ve ever heard all week,” says Asoom.

"The negative implications of such a fluff piece on we Western women does not indicate rewarding you with profit,” says MommaBean.

Hmmm.

We came into this discussion with the knowledge that sex tourism, like honor killing, sexual harassment, domestic violence, and all the other “gender issues” we’ve written about, was a minority phenomenon. Yet like those other minority phenomena, it can have a disproportionate impact on people’s beliefs and behavior. It’s an upsetting thing to discuss, but isn’t sex tourism just one more factor that we need to consider if we’re ever going to have a realistic view of all those complex gender politics?

At least, that’s our point of view—and we think it’s motivated by sound journalism, as well as our own experiences.

WHENEVER WE WRITE ABOUT gender issues, we get pretty similar complaints—sometimes from very different sides of the spectrum. Articles about honor killing or the sexual harassment of women usually generate a few comments along the lines of: You shouldn’t write about these things, you make all Jordanians look bad. (Come to think of it, we got a couple of those in response to “On the Prowl,” too.)

Now we are being accused of making Western women look bad, as well.

Our answer is always the same: we shouldn’t stop writing about issues worthy of discussion just because someone might find that discussion unpalatable. It’s true, there will always be some people out there who take discussion of a problem like honor killing, no matter how it’s written, and use it to reinforce their pre-existing stereotypes of Muslims or Arabs. Or Western women. Or whoever. Our job isn’t to condemn the acts—though we do that sometimes, too—but to investigate why they happen, what effect they have on their victims, and what on earth could be motivating the perpetrators.

We’ve discussed these reactions with critics, and we got responses like this one, from Mary Elizabeth Diab, another reader of Kinzi’s blog, who wrote a letter to us directly (thanks).

“When women make broad generalizations, it’s not because they’re anti-Arab, it’s because our experience here is beyond what I suspect most men can imagine.”

Women who suffer regularly from harassment certainly struggle to find ways of coping with the pigeonholing of their identity. But still, we can’t help worrying about the logic that says: The harassment is so bad, it justifies any response we make.

It feels familiar, somehow. Just replace the word “harassment” with the word “terrorism,” and most of us will recognize this story.

It’s the old colonialist narrative that’s been with us for centuries. The colonizer is pure and decent, trying to bring civilization to those who are brutish and bestial. Women and sexuality have always central to this narrative, of course: little is more important to the colonizer than “his” women (because the woman is the source of honor—we’ve seen that somewhere else, too) and she must be placed on an ivory pedestal as an exemplar of virtue and purity, and protected from the corrupting gaze of the lustful savage.

Above all, the colonialist must retain the power of narrative. It is unthinkable that the “Neandrathals,” might have their own version of the story—in this case, that Jordanian men could have their own experience of Western women, which is no less (and no more) true than our critics’ experience of Jordanian men.

Not to be glib, but this is the same colonialist narrative that prevailed in transforming the attacks of 9/11 into a no-holds-barred, global War on Terror: What they’ve done to us is so bad, it justifies any response. We don’t even need to talk about the Israel lobby’s use of this tactic, do we?

Is this too much of a leap, from sexual harassment to terrorism? Well, as one of the folks in this debate put it to us, in a wide-ranging e-mail critique of JO’s biases: “Muslims worldwide still have an annoying habit of killing first, thinking about reputation later, it hardly breeds respect and acceptence ... respect is something earned, not granted.”

No, we don’t think we’re leaping too far. Here is the colonialist narrative at it’s most stark: White Christians and Jews must be respected for who they are, regardless of crusades or occupations; Arabs and Muslims must strive and subdue themselves to “earn” respect.

Reading the kinds of comments we’ve gotten on this article just confirms our belief that it’s important to keep writing about social issues like sex tourism—if only to upset the narrow colonialist sterotype of universally virtuous and pure Western women who are harassed by universally backwards and sleazy Arab men.

OF COURSE, CULTURAL stereotypes go both ways. Western women do get stereotyped as sexually promiscuous by some Jordanian men—which may, in turn, lead some of those women to see all Arab men as predatory, and ’round we go.

But do those stereotypes really lead to harassment? It’s not clear. Actually, that’s one of the questions we’ve been trying to find experiential answers for, in articles like the one this June—but so far, we haven’t found strong evidence for a connection. The men we quoted and interviewed in “On the Prowl” are not, as a group, sexual harassers —though some readers seem to have made the assumption that they are. (Some of those men we know well enough to say it’s false; in other cases we just doubt it.)

Nor is sexual harassment something reserved to Western women. Jordanian women suffer harassment every day, in a variety of forms—not to mention the Filipino women, Sri Lankans, Somalis and Sudanese... Read the stories of the Egyptian anti-government protesters in 2006, * or watch Dalia Kury’s film Caution: Comment Ahead, for more elaboration.

And, of course, sexual harassment isn’t confined to the Middle East, either. Women get harassed on the streets of New York, and Delhi, and Rome and Rio and every other city that allows men. So while there may be a link between “stereotypes about Western women” and sexual harassment, it’s at best only part of the story, and we’re wary of privileging it too much. Western women in the Middle East are not only harassed because they are the object of a special stereotype. They are harassed because women are harassed everywhere.

In the end, we hope to learn more about why people do such things. And for that, we need to think about sympathy and understanding, which are crucial to any discussion of stereotypes. What groups is it OK to sympathize with? Who can we try to understand? Can we think about the motives of the 9/11 hijackers, or is that too close to sympathizing with them? Can we ponder the reasons for suicide bombing, or domestic abuse, or harassment, or does the discussion stop with the word “unacceptable”?

It’s interesting that critic after critic has taken us to task for being too sympathetic to the Jordanian men who get involved with sex tourists. But the way we see it, that’s our job. We publish articles all the time about people who are suffering, in ways big or small: harassed women, abused migrant workers, impoverished farmers, evicted slum dwellers, Iraqi refugees, artists who lack opportunities and so on.

Every single one of those articles makes the exact same demand on the reader that some found so objectionable in “On the Prowl.” They ask that we try to understand others’ points of view.

And as long as the group of people written about is considered acceptable, that understanding is potentially forthcoming. But asking for understanding of sexually frustrated Arab men seemed to cross a line for some of our readers. Those guys, we were told, deserve no sympathy, and can’t be understood—they’re just bad, and they’ll never ever be no good.

And now we’re left trying to understand how our readers could think that.

“Understand that what to you may seem racist, is in fact a reality borne of our unfortunately common experiences here,” writes Mrs. Diab. “I love the Arab people, they have a beautiful culture, but that culture has been changing and it is not always for the better. And, men here are being raised poorly on the whole. Somehow they are not able to make the translation that they should not do to women (in general and foreign in particular) what they wouldn’t want done to their mothers and sisters. It is a generalization, but is no less valid for that.”

Have the Western women who have written to us been so scarred by their encounters with harassment that their solace is this: Our stereotypes are true, while theirs are lies?

Even if there were no other argument for why all Jordanians, of all ages and genders, should come together to try to stamp out sexual harassment, we couldn’t really think of a better one than this. Because for a few of the Western women who get harassed, that violence reinforces and actualizes all the stereotypes they’ve ever learned about Arabs and Muslims. And those women and their families—yes, the minority—take their pain, and, indeed, their prejudices with them back home. They pass them to their friends in America and Europe and Israel; they post them on the Internet for everyone to read.

And then Arabs and Muslims wonder why the West doesn’t respect them. (And if you want statistics on that, try John Esposito and Dalia Mogahed’s fascinating book Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think.)

And at the same time, America and Europe export their explicit magazines, their advertising culture and, yes, some of their sexually frustrated women to the Middle East. And ’round we go.

Despite the criticism, we feel for the critics, who have had their identities and autonomy spun by sexual harassment. We will keep trying to see their point of view. But we also feel for the men who get their identities spun by sex tourists, and we’ll continue to try and understand what they are feeling as well. And that we will do without apology.

* Correction: The original text misstated the year of the Egyptian protests.