eatbees blog

Egypt’s paranoid dictatorship is trying to distract the people from its own unpopularity by cracking down on emos.

Egyptian emos have more to worry about than just being mocked by their peers; they are now being actively targeted by the police. “State security sees us as a dangerous underground, as Satanists, as queers and faggots,” one emo told a state-run newspaper.

What’s an emo? A disaffected teenager with dyed black hair, who is always feeling sad and sensitive. Or to put it another way:

A few well-off, bored teenagers hanging around in shopping malls…. Essentially a consumer culture — it’s all about your image and which music you purchase.

Like every other problem in Egypt, like the recent pig slaughter, this seems to be due to a government that lacks legitimacy, overreacting out of weakness because it fears a challenge from Islamic conservatives.

President Mubarak’s regime has lost all legitimacy amongst Egyptians both politically and culturally, a state of affairs it seeks to reverse by inventing both internal and external enemies of the state and portraying itself as the last hope for the soon-to-be-besieged Egyptian populace…. Culturally the government likes to style itself as a last bastion of Islamic values, the irony of which is obvious to anyone witness to the daily security clampdowns on the Muslim Brotherhood. So now emos are the latest hate-figures; their strange looks and vague connections to undefined, sordid western values makes them the perfect foil for a dictatorship on the back foot.

I wish I had some pictures of Egyptian emos to present here, but apparently there aren’t that many of them. So instead I’m showing you a Western emo as a type specimen.

Could a few thousand oversensitive teenagers be a threat to Egyptian society? Read the article for a portrait of a dictatorship in decline.