We must have read different wiki entries, maybe for different key words.
--- On Thu, 6/25/09, Michael Pollak <mpollak at panix.com> wrote:
> From: Michael Pollak <mpollak at panix.com>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Middle eastern dance
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Thursday, June 25, 2009, 7:54 PM
>
> On Thu, 25, Chris Doss wrote:
>
> > It's not specifically for women though, is it? I'm
> pretty sure the dance is done by both genders. It's
> non-Middle Easterners who made it into a woman thing. (?)
>
> > According to that infallible scholarly source
> wikipedia, belly
> > dancing has nothing to do with femininity or gays or
> whatever at
> > all. It's just a gender-neutral folk dance form, like
> line-dancing.
>
> I think you're reading that entry wrong. It says that
> what most people call belly dancing today was codified by
> Egyptians in the 1930s as a female form.
>
> According to wiki, the male form that preceded this
> Egyptian codification existed during the Ottoman empire,
> when boys were sex objects; it was changed when that fashion
> changed when the Ottoman empire fell. There was no
> male form for decades. The current male form is not an
> old folk hold-over, but rather something that started in the
> 1960s as a conscious extension of the Egyptian form for
> women.
>
> So it wasn't westerners who made it into an erotic dance,
> or who made it woman-centered. Rather it was in the
> west -- in the US -- that the current male version
> started. It is only now beginning to get to the Middle
> East. Again pace the same wiki entry.
>
> IIUC, belly dancing in the middle east is much more
> sex-coded than in the West -- it's like their version of a
> titty bar. Not only do men not do it, but women don't
> enter these places to watch. Whereas in the West, it's
> much lower key and audiences are mixed.
>
> While we're on the video front, there's a wonderful
> climactic belly-dancing scene at the end of the recent
> French-Algerian movie _Secret of the Grain_ (La grain and le
> mulet)
>
> Michael
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