Misster Congeniality

I was told by a friend to switch to melody hits to watch a Mr. Egypt competition. I thought he had mistyped it on msn, and that it was Miss Egypt. I switched the channel and found men in shorts with their bare torso walking along the catwalk and standing there rigidly.

Now the first thing I did to be honest was laugh out loud, it was hilarious seeing those guys walking in their swim suits and pose so inflexibly. It seems that they had to be in good shape but it wasn’t a Mr. Olympia contest. It was a sexiness contest. There’s something that caught me off guard seeing those men compete in a beauty contest.

Anyway, I’m googling this Mr. Egypt competition and the URL address I get is http://www.missegyptonline.com/mregypt.html which throws me off balance a bit but then I get used to it. There’s a Mr. Photogenic, Mr. Fitness, Mr. Performance and a Mr. Congeniality… Mind goes straight to the movie (without the ending where she says all these girls are intelligent hard workers etc…)

The initial feeling I had was that those men were objectified. They were judged according to their bodies and looks. While that may be very normal to do with women, it felt very odd when seeing men in that position. I don’t want to philosophize about a very light topic as this but somehow I fear that equality will not serve to de-objectify women as much as it serves to objectify men. There is a call for men to look better and become sex symbols.

The presence of more and more sex symbols and male models will put a pressure on men such as that put on women when they observe ultra thin tall models. Try as they may, not all women can achieve that, and evidently not all men can achieve the bodies either. The main area of concern is that the bodies presented, are not part of an athletic competition but an aesthetic competition.

What gave it away is that those men weren’t all that GREAT looking, they were okay but they had slim athletic bodies. So the idea wasn’t the good looking man, but the complete man, body mostly and face secondly. Of course those with inadequate bodies were eliminated right away leaving a series of ‘Amr’s to continue in the competition. All of them seem to have been picked initially from a gym, and guess what the prize for the best body was? It was a six month membership in Gold’s gym. You’d have thought that they would have given this prize to the worst body, but the chances are that guy was already a member anyway.


So this was a show for the pleasure of the ladies, well, the ironic part is that they had models swaying around the guys and dancing and mid show they brought in 2 female singers who were the definition of sex appeal. I would understand if they brought in sexy males to do some more dances and finally target those poor women who have been deprived of sex actuating shows, but This Is Egypt. They have to bring in sexy women into everything, it’s sort of a working formula for whoever they’re targeting. They must be for all the male onlookers laughing away at the show. There is however a theory posed by a friend of mine that says that they had to put in those arousing women so that they get the ‘best’ out of these men. I responded of course that this will truly show who has the bigger ‘best’. Well done… they were able to get women exactly what they wanted. Too bad the guys had to wear formal suits straight after the sexy women though.