Sex and Abu Dhabi
[after her condoms fall out of her purse in the market in front of a bunch of angry men]
***
A false movie portrait of United Arabic Emirates- women and feminist thinking.
Ever since in 1998 the first episode of Sex and the City aired on HBO in the United States – and on the Internet for those of us who did not want to wait for our own countries to pick up on the hype – women had four new feminist examples (Imdb).
Carrie, Miranda, Charlot and Samantha talk about life as a career woman and all that that includes. Which from 1998, the series, till 2010 the last of the two movie, was mainly a how to on juggling relationships, fashion, sex, careers, children and marriage in contemporary west society. Each one of the characters had their own role in this portrait of free female live. Carrie was the girl next door that everyone could relate to, a writer that loved to shop and had an on and of again relationship with the love of her live. Miranda was the career women who had to juggle dating live, Charlot was always looking for the one, and Samantha was the provocateur who portrayed career and free sexuality. Because the series were such a success they were turned into two movies (Imdb; Imdb/awards). Sex and the City the movie and Sex and the City The Movie 2. My specific interest for this research lies in the second movie and even more specific the character Samantha Jones, played by Kim Catrall, in this movie (Imdb/Samantha Jones).
While it is not the best movie ever made to me, the concept that the film takes place in Abu Dhabi is interesting for a Internet research, because this concept is not true. Sex and the City The Movie 2 was originally planning to shoot in Abu Dhabi but it was banned because of regulation by the United Arab Emirates Telecom Regulatory Authority, so it had to be filmed in Morocco. The Telecom Regulatory entails that:
This quote shows reasons why Sex and The City The Movie 2 could not be filmed nor be in the cinemas or on the Internet of Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates. So why pretend that you are in Abu Dhabi is a question that is much asked on the Internet when you search for ‘Sex and the City filmed Abu Dhabi’. Michael Patrick King, the maker of Sex and the City, says in an interview that his main reason was:
Image 1:
Screenshot SATC The Movie 2
And that is exactly my point of interest as well. The movie SATC2 creates an image in which women in Abu Dhabi are not allowed to express themselves in such extreme ways as for instance the character Samantha does in the film. In the movie the characters experience Internet censorship in the pretend UAE and show women always wearing Burqas. The film even has a shot in which Carrie expresses her worries about the women in the pretend UAE, she says about their Nikaab (that covers a woman face but not the eyes): “It is as if they don’t want them to have a voice” (Sex and the City The Movie 2 2010). But is this image that SATC2 creates a true image? Are the women in UAE “voiceless” and kept from more feminist ideas? There are no direct answers why critics of the movie have not yet tried to proof the false portrayal by mere Internet fact checking trough UAE proxies.
Further research into the United Arab Emirates (from now on UAE) leads me to findings that are much the same as findings from 2009 by the Open Net Initiative about the UAE:
The exile of SATC2 to Morocco, the list of regulations from Telecom Regulatory Authority and the findings of ONI from 2009 let me to believe that women from the UAE are indeed not exposed to feminist ideas and further more not to the concept of Sex and The City the movie (2010; Opennet; Collider). Even though this movie pretends to have been filmed in UAE, online research let me to believe that Samantha and her choice for free sex and naked clothing could never be accepted in UAE.
To see if this was true I searched for woman’s voices on the subject of free sexuality as, it is discussed in SATC2, that actually came from the UAE. And these women claim that the image that is portrait of women not being feminists or freethinking is not true. For instance Safiyyah (response name) says in an interview with Muslimah Media Watch blog:
To research this query, of the false portrayal of women in the UAE in 2012, I found multiple SATC2, Samantha Jones, Kim Catrall, fashion and feminist related websites. These I tested with the censorship explorer to see if any of the website’s were blocked, or gave me the idea that they could be blocked. This small research shows if the women of UAE were actually kept from feminist ideas and more concrete from SATC2 related sites and ideas on freethinking and sexuality. I found two reliable proxies in the UAE that were both situated in Abu Dhabi that showed results – against created expectation as you can see in the image below – that women are able to gain SATC and feminist related information.
Source: govcom.org/maps/censorship
Method
To find out more about Sex and the City the movie 2 (2010) related websites I changed the Google search settings to get hundred results on one page that were related to my query. First I searched for websites related to “Sex and the City the movie 2”, “Samantha Jones”, “Kim Catrall”, “Feminist” and related websites. These finding were then put in the Harvester to gain the main URL’s that were related to my research.
The URL’s gained from the Harvester were the basis information for my research. This way I sampled websites that were related to SATC2 and free sexual and feminist thinking. Here I must amplify that I did not research images or information that could be interpreted as pornographic material in the Netherlands or the US. I focused on the notion of some nudity and ideas about- and from the UAE women that could be different then what the Telecom Regulatory Authority would want citizens of the UAE to be exposed to.
Image 2:
Location of Proxies in UAE
To investigate how the Unites Arabic Emirates respond to my found websites I needed UAE proxies. From the many Proxies lists I found online and tested only two gave me reliable response with the Censorship Explorer in comparison to Dutch outcome codes. To see if these Proxies were actually located in the UAE I have put them trough whatismyipaddress.com testing. A website that traces location of IP addresses. Image 2 show’s that the server linked to the proxies is located in the UAE.
Researching if some of the websites that I harvested were also originally situated in UAE, the first list of results were put trough the Geo Extraction tool (Appendix A, Appendix B). Because my first results were that most of the websites were based in the US I decided to use Google Translate to find the Arabic words for “Sex and the City the movie 2” and “feminist”. These were translated to: “الجنس والمدينة الفيلم 2″ and “النسوية”. With these Arabic words I search Google again for websites and harvested the URL results. So now my combined results were Arabic and English in language and still on the subject of SATC2 and free sexual and feminist thinking online in UAE. The URL results that I harvested were then put trough the Censorship Explorer using the 213.42.124.107 and 213.42.124.114 Internet addresses from the UAE and put trough the Geo Extraction Tool. These results are shown in Appendix A and Appendix B.
Results
The Results from the CE-Tool are in Appendix A. This information are the response codes from the websites that I harvested from my search query on “Sex and the City the movie 2”, “Samantha Jones”, “Kim Catrall”, “Feminist”, “الجنس والمدينة الفيلم 2″, “النسوية” and related websites by Censorship Explorer tool. These results from the CE-tool are divided in subjects: URL retrieved, Country of proxy, Type of proxy, Proxy, Time of access, 20s time out, Response code through proxy, Response code in NL, Response differs, HTML differs. I put an extra differential subject on the sheet: Reason Forbidden, expecting that quite a lot of websites were going to give the 403 forbidden code, which means the site is blocked, and not the 200 OK code which means you can access the site. On these differentials I put an automatic filter in Excel, which give the user of the sheet the possibility to filter the sheet by query.
First I deleted al the sites that gave an error in the UAE that was the same as the error in the Netherlands, which resulted in 144 reliable websites that I could interpreted. What I found, when you look at Appendix A filtered by error and forbidden codes, was that most of the codes came back 200 OK from the UAE. Which would mean that women are able to look at sites related to “Sex and the City the movie 2”, “Samantha Jones”, “Kim Catrall”, “Feminist”, “الجنس والمدينة الفيلم 2″ and “النسوية”. The picture SATC2 paints of women in UAE would therefore be untrue; these are not “voiceless” women.
There were however three websites that gave an error code: nashess.com, il7ad.com and cosmopolitan.com. These websites I research further by looking them up online and try to see what could be the issue. Nashess.com looked like a news site, as far as Google translate could give me information. Cosmopolitan.com could be blocked because a cosmopolitan is an alcoholic drink (and Muslims do not drink alcohol) seeing as there was no explicit nudity on the website, ONI supports this claim as they show that UAE filters keywords. Il7ad.com was, to my knowledge using Google translate, an Arab Atheist website. What this tells me, limited to my two Proxies addresses from UAE and having a language barrier, is that women in the UAE are able to gain information on Sex and the City the Movie 2 and related feminist and free sexual thinking ideas.
But who then portrays this image of “voiceless” women and where does this information come from? To find this out I put my harvested URL’s in to the Geo Extraction Tool. The results from the GE-Tool are shown in Appendix B. The GE-Tool divides the results into: url, host, ip, city, country, c. code, lat, lon. These results I filtered by country. What you can see is that most of the websites originate from the US. Appendix B shows the websites that originate in the US in the colour Green. A view were from Arabic countries, these are yellow in Appendix B.
Combining my findings, as are shown in Appendix A and Appendix B, and including my limitations of language and small amount of proxies but also the notion that the servers that send back the proxies code information are indeed in the UAE, one could say that women are able to look at a variable of SATC2 (2010) subject related, feminist idea related websites in the UAE which would make the portrait that SATC2 (2010) and The West, mainly the US (Appendix B), false.
Discussion
What is now known by doing this research is that women in the UAE are able to look at SATC2 related ideas of free sexuality, fashion and feminism. This research is limited to non-pornographic images, language barriers and a low amount of proxies in the UAE. It would be interesting to do this research on feminist and free sexuality in the UAE on a larger scale to see if the results of this research and the research from 2009 by ONI could be combined. Looking at what is claimed when first entering this query online is contradictory to my findings. Sites like the Open Net Initiative (2009) and Dubaifaqs claim that censorship is happening in the UAE.
Taking the results of this censorship research, as are shown in Appendix A and Appendix B, and actual online discussions on how feminism is perceived by the ideas of SATC2 (2010) in Abu Dhabi in UAE, I have to agree with critics of the movie, and the female portrayal in the UAE. This image is out dated. Yes these women might wear different clothing than women who live in “the west” but online they share information on their view of how the west, in my findings mainly the US (Appendix A and Appendix B), portrays UAE women in movies like SATC2 and are speaking out to gain respect for their believes and way of live.
A Masters of Media Censorship Research assignment by:
Other sources
Sex and the City The Movie 2. Dir. Michael Patrick King. New Line Cinema, 2010.
Imdb. 06-11-2012 <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0159206/>
Imdb/awards. 06-11-2012 <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0159206/awards>
Imdb/Samantha Jones. 06-11-1986 <http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0018418/>
Digital Methods Tools
Censorship Explorer. <https://tools.digitalmethods.net/beta/proxies/>
Geo Extraction. <https://tools.digitalmethods.net/beta/geoExtraction/>
Harvester. <https://tools.digitalmethods.net/beta/harvestUrls/>
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