Muslim Girls: the New Tokens of The Real World

July 28, 2010 By

“This is the true story of seven strangers, picked to live in a house, work together and have their lives taped,  to find out what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real.”

Those words have forever ushered in MTV’s “real” drama-filled saga, The Real World. The Real World has long been known for its token cast members: in an all-white, heterosexual cast, MTV would often cast one or two people of color and/or from the LGBTQ community, ostensibly to heighten tensions and increase ratings.

Season 19 of the Real World saga, set in Sydney, Australia, offered viewers a new entrée to salivate over: “the Muslim woman.” Parisa, an American-Iranian woman, was the first Muslim to appear on The Real World. She was the only person of color that season, and replaced both the token gay and black cast members. I guess they thought one Muslim woman was enough to conjure up the drama the other two token characters promised.

Wendi Muse at Racialicious put it best, saying:

“Maybe they felt like throwing a brown Muslim girl into the vanilla pot would liven it up a little, but honestly, I feel like this is MTV’s as-per-usual approach to diversity: do something controversial, put the people (or person, in this case) of color in an awkward position that makes them react in an outrageous, albeit usually justified, way, then sit back and watch the ratings go up.”

The show had not aired at this point, but Wendi’s predictions were right. The season’s most memorable moment was when fellow cast member Trisha pushed Parisa in a fit of rage. Drama had been brewing between the two cast members since the first episode, and eventually led to Trisha’s horrifying outburst.

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Rowdy Saudis: MTV’s “Resist the Power: Saudi Arabia”

June 7, 2010 By

As part of the True Life series, MTV recently aired an episode titled, “Resist the Power! Saudi Arabia,” in which the lives of several young Saudis were filmed. The show documents a handful of struggles experienced by Saudi Arabia’s large youth population. Among them, the show follows a young man named Ahmad in his fight to provide women a voice within Jeddah’s City Council and Fatima, a 20-year-old psychology student (pictured below), who is pioneering a colorful abaya line that will challenge the status quo of the all-black attire.

Fatima. Image via MTV.

Fatima is pictured in brightly-colored hijabs and abayas juxtaposed against a sea of black abaya-donned women. She says that it is not uncommon for people to stare at her when she wears colored abayas. A male fabric storeowner tells her that a black abaya is what “shows the woman’s modesty.” She says wearing black abayas is the “practice of Islam in our culture, but that is not Islam at all.”

Later, they show Fatima with her mother and friend on a boat. As she looks at the men riding jet skis in circles around them, she says, “Here, women are precious, they are the jewels of the family, and there are a lot of things I would really want to experience but I can’t.” In a later scene, Fatima and a friend, dressed as boys to avoid being stopped by the religious police, go bike riding. She says, “A woman should do anything a man does…the journey to reach a goal as big as equality between genders is not an easy goal. I just want women to believe in themselves. It is our right to have a voice.”

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