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A fun scandal from a few years ago
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/01/24/580228837...
Bad title on NYT's part. The west has dog "beauty contests".
That being said, there is something very cool about appreciating the grace and power of a traditionally ugly beast of burden.
What's bad about the title? It's just saying this exists and it's part of their culture. In no way does it imply it's strange.
It's not "Beauty contests for an animal? This unusual cultural event comes to us from.." or something
I was confused as well. Perhaps they're referring to the actual title of the article on nytimes.com which is "Meet the Beauty Queens of Al Dhafra". I like the HN title better too.
We call them Dog Shows, why would this not be a Camel Show?
Different languages have different colloquialisms.
So why not use ours, for an article in our language?
I assume it's a translation error back in 1420 AH (2000 AD which is kinda pre-internet) by the King. He misunderstood how it's done in the West when naming it in Arabic.
Arabic wiki and UAE media also call it beauty -
https://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D9%85%D9%87%D8%B1%D8%AC%D8%A7...
The fact these articles don't address the issue is the problem.
For instance, when we show our goats, which are pets to us, we won't cut back their hair, because the hair to use is what we want in a pet, but to a breeder you need to see muscular and udder definitions etc on show. The breeders think we are strange/not that serious.
When they botox the camels is it about the camel as a machine or the camel as a companion.
Perhaps it's a similar arguments about is it "Allah" or "God" in the Koran. But here there is a a bit of sniggering going on here, but perhaps the Arabs own it. Child beauty pageant are a thing in the US which is owned.
Makes sense, in America there are dog shows for their beloved dogs. Horse shows for horses. Why not have camel shows?
I'd go so far as to say characterizing camel sports and shows as beauty contests, a phrase that implies "women" to pretty much every english speaker, is probably the most farcically and unselfconciously racist thing I have read in an edited publication. Horse versions of events like these around the world are a huge part of rural culture and economies. The festivals (Golega, Portugal, Seville, Spain, Verden, Germany, Calgary, Canada, even Palm Beach, USA etc.) draw millions of dollars to local economies and provide livelihoods for generations of people.
For all their concern, exotic'izing Bedouin culture and implying racist tropes about their relationships to camels and women, I wouldn't be surprised if the Times pulled the article, as it's hard not to read it as risably offensive.
I suppose as someone interested in cancel culture I would wonder respectfully why there's anything wrong with celebrating beauty as a feminine attribute, or with comparing a beautiful camel to a beautiful woman, (if in fact that's what was done)?
True, males have been traditionally denied the status of "beauty" in more traditional cultural arenas, and yes, many unfair prejidices towards domesticated animals exist such that their comparison to a human is assumed to be derogatory. However why let a few bad apples spoil the bunch?
I don't think there's anything wrong with celebrating beauty in all its forms and comparisons and I thoroughly enjoyed this article.
the issue is that it implies that Bedouins have relations with their camels. It's a common slur towards desert nomads & arabs.
cf. Wales and sheep,
See also the age old proverb applied to anything is highly male:
"the men are men the women are men and the sheep are scared"
They falsely advertise such shows here too: bring your fancy custom matched lingerie to a "Horse Dressage" event and they'll kick you both out.
They didn't kick you out for the lingerie, they kicked you out for pronouncing it "dressage" instead of "dressahhhhjjjjj".
>I'd go so far as to say characterizing camel sports and shows as beauty contests, a phrase that implies "women" to pretty much every english speaker, is probably the most farcically and unselfconciously racist thing I have read in an edited publication.
Or they're just trying to distance it from dog shows and farm animal competitions like you see at state fairs because those are boring and well known and won't get western audiences to click.
Not everything is racist.
> Or they're just trying to distance it from dog shows and farm animal competitions like you see at state fairs because those are boring and well known and won't get western audiences to click.
One of the ways to be racist and put down other cultures is exoticism, make the culture feel more dissimilar than it is. They are increasing the sense of “otherness” and de-emphasizing commonality (the camel show has more in common with dog and horse shows than with beauty pageants)
The title definitely is doing that and as you said, doing it for clicks which makes it all the more risible.
Yep, doesn't seem particularly unusual to me; here in rural Scotland, farmers and their families show all kinds of animals, in what are essentially beauty contests, including sheep, goats, cows, horses and chickens.
Every state-fair in the US has something like this, usually massively tongue-in-cheek.
The ones here are very much _not_ tongue in cheek - folk take them very seriously!
Yeah I'm sure animal shows happen in rural communities the world over
"In (x place) there are (y bizarre events)" articles tend to overstate the popularity of the event. Yes, there is a Sauerkraut Festival in Ohio, but no, sauerkraut isn't a huge American cultural phenomenon. This especially happens with articles about Japan.
VOX is very guilty of this. This video (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VKWLC87Uzw&ab_channel=VICE
) had me convinced it was a mainstream normal thing. I spent several months in colombia and dated a colombiana. I never encountered anything of the sort being an actual thing. NOT accurate at all.
Australia supplies a lot into this market. We have a huge population of feral camels roaming the central desert regions. Brought in as pack animals during the great expansion of the Victorian era.
Hundreds of thousands of them, roaming semi-free.
Serious amounts of money bid at auction for OZ Camels to fly back to the M.E.
Camels are a big deal in Rajasthan, India too - _India’s famous Pushkar Camel Fair returns after COVID break_ (1), _Decline in India’s camel population is worrying_. I also remember reading in a foreign diplomat's biography on how he earned India some extra diplomatic brownie points in the middle-east by gifting some camels and offering to inseminate some of theirs artificially.
(1)
https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2021/11/10/india-pushkar-c...
(2)
https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/decline-in...