Sex and the Lebanese pop singers

I used to know this muslim convertite woman who loved middle eastern pop, but complained about the immoral nature of the way the female singers would dress. "But at least," she'd say, "they don't dress up like Britney Spears or Shakira. Look at these album covers - this which is considered a normal top in the west is considered highly sexualised in Egypt!" She showed me a picture of a woman in a fairly modest top, covering the top of the arms.

In retrospect I shouldn't have believed her. Another friend (lebanese-finnish-american) showed me some lebanese pop videos a couple of months ago and I was fairly surprised to see just how sexualised lebanese pop is right now. Certainly more so than a lot of western pop (!) and totally against stereotype for a majority-muslim country. In that respect it's much like Indonesian dangdut seksi.

In this video, the singer plays footsie with a man's inner thigh while chocolate sauce suggestively runs down icecream, catches a flying champagne cork between her teeth, strips off her dress and the man's t-shirt, all while displaying her cleavage:



Name one recent western music video so explicitly about sex! Meanwhile, in the scantily-clad department, there's the first sequence on the boat in this video:



And so on. Plenty more on Melody TV's channel, where there's a lot more female pop in this vein. Honestly don't know what to think about it, but at least the prudish Arab stereotype should be well smashed, if anyone still believes in it.