This week, two of the articles I looked at “World Report on Trafficking Humans: 20% of Victims are Children; Women Dominate the Trafficking” and “Fifty Shades of Grey boycotted by domestic violence, anti-porn groups” had to do with the ways in which women are changing since the revolutions of the Arab Spring. These articles are related because they portray different sides of the issue of the way women are dealing with sexuality, the business and personal side of it. Both of these articles also show that the roles of women in the sex industry are changing along side the change in all other aspects of life in the Middle East. Women are infiltrating all aspects of life even if they were originally jobs allocated for men. Also, as seen through the banning of “50 Shades of Grey” the government finds it dangerous for women to view the movie because they are not supposed to feel pleasure or try different things in the bedroom and the movie would encourage that even though it is already happening. This approach seems to be a Political Realism approach, by making the movie seem blasphemous this shows the strong state leadership, and because of the influx of women in the sex trafficking industry this shows that the state is mostly being run by one party politics and there is little checks and balances and rampant corruption.

Two of the most important sources that I found this week were the “Women’s Rights Ranking” by the BBC, and the article “VOICES: Women’s Rights in Egypt – Re-examining a Revolution.” When I chose my topic I had no idea that women’s rights were the worst in the Middle East because of the high levels of sexual harassment, marriage trafficking of women, female genital mutilation, and the conservative Islamist groups. The “Voices” article discusses some reasons for these problems, the most important of which appears to be Egypt’s Constitution because of the ambiguity in the language of the document concerning the rights of women. The women in Egypt were very active during the protests of the Arab Spring and many of them acknowledged their rights as human beings and it seemed that things were looking up for them, however after the protests died down and the Conservative Islamist government was instated the rights of women were not expanded or discussed. Both sources are hopeful that women in Egypt will not give up but rather remember the power and self-worth that they felt during the protests and work for an education to become involved with politics and economics so that policy and cultural change may occur in time.

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