Learning to Speak Lingerie

August 3, 2015 7:02 PM

"Days start late, and nights run long; they ignore the Spring Festival and sell briskly after sundown during Ramadan. Winter is better than summer. Mother’s Day is made for lingerie. But nothing compares with Valentine’s Day, so this year I celebrated the holiday by saying goodbye to my wife, driving four hours to Asyut, and watching people buy underwear at the China Star shop until almost midnight." Chinese lingerie merchants in Egypt. (New Yorker via Longform)
posted by pravit (10 comments total)

But, whenever I visit, I can’t help thinking: Here in Egypt, home to eighty-five million people, where Western development workers and billions of dollars of foreign aid have poured in for decades, the first plastic-recycling center in the south is a thriving business that employs thirty people, reimburses others for reducing landfill waste, and earns a significant profit. So why was it established by two lingerie-fuelled Chinese migrants, one of them illiterate and the other with a fifth-grade education?

Fascinating article. Scrappy Chinese migrants are bringing similar industry to Africa; see this NYT article. The book reviewed is good too, and one-of-a-kind.

Edit: That teaches me to post before finishing the article. The very next paragraph mentions this book!
posted by glass origami robot at 9:46 PM on August 3, 2015

“I just can’t hire men,” Xu Xin, who had started a cell-phone factory, told me bluntly. After many years with Motorola in China, Xu had come to Egypt in the hope of producing inexpensive phones for the local market. “This work requires discipline,” he said. “A cell phone has more than a hundred parts, and, if you make one mistake, then the whole thing doesn’t work. The men here in Egypt are too restless; they like to move around. They can’t focus.”

I feel like I am reading everything through the lens of the emotional labor thread now. Industries failing because there aren't enough women workers to keep shifts going, because they are the (only) ones who stick around and pay attention to detail? I know "the master's tools..." and all that, but maybe this is one of those times when capitalism actually might help change the system. Assuming the women want it to change, which the article didn't make clear.

Really fascinating stuff here. It bothered me that the writer needed to repeatedly call out that the woman boss was wearing a "Playmate" apron when asserting authority. Saying it once is interesting color. Repeating it may have been an attempt to show irony, but to me it felt like they were not-so-subtly undermining her, lest we ever make the mistake of respecting her business acumen for its own sake. Especially when at least one of the women mentioned was illiterate even in her own language. "Ha ha you are wearing sexualized clothing you don't understand" is a cheap shot.
posted by Mchelly at 10:55 PM on August 3, 2015 [3 favorites]

This makes me think I have no idea how to run a business.
posted by boilermonster at 11:43 PM on August 3, 2015

I feel like I am reading everything through the lens of the emotional labor thread now. Industries failing because there aren't enough women workers to keep shifts going, because they are the (only) ones who stick around and pay attention to detail? I know "the master's tools..." and all that, but maybe this is one of those times when capitalism actually might help change the system. Assuming the women want it to change, which the article didn't make clear.
Mchelly

Don't go overboard here. This isn't some objective truth about men and women doing factory work. There have been and are plenty of places where men do just fine on routine, repetitive assembly work. Places like China where these women come from. You shouldn't try to universalize this particular situation.
posted by Sangermaine at 6:40 AM on August 4, 2015

Not universalizing, only talking about Egypt. If this shows the country can't support industry because of (patriarchal) culture, then maybe this would spark people to find incentives to change the culture.
posted by Mchelly at 8:20 AM on August 4, 2015

What happens when they run out of oil (easy money)? Will they make war to market some other area's oil? Is this the fact of ISIS? Is ISIS the end of the oil boom? The pre collapse return to the middle ages?

The pragmatic chinese out in the middle of nowhere. The one child policy cut their warren of family ties leaving them free somehow and so flat affect.
posted by Oyéah at 8:40 AM on August 4, 2015

I'd imagine the lingerie market is good for sellers in a place like Egypt. Less competition from other forms of sexyware means you have a wider sales funnel for your outfitting outfit.
posted by oceanjesse at 10:32 AM on August 4, 2015

Two amazing quotes from the article:

Egypt is full of grandiose and misguided projects in the desert, both ancient and modern, and TEDA is one of the strangest: a lost Chinese factory town in the Sahara, where Ozymandian dreams have been foiled by a simple failure to get women out of their homes.

--

And, from the Chinese perspective, the fundamental issue in Egypt is not politics, or religion, or militarism—it’s family. Husbands and wives, parents and children: in Egypt, these relationships haven’t been changed at all by the Arab Spring, and until that happens there is no point in talking about a revolution.
posted by polecat at 11:19 AM on August 4, 2015 [1 favorite]

I'm getting old. I found this article here, then opened a few tabs and windows, moved away to doing something else, came back to read the article adn then... tried to post it as an FPP... Meh, a pox upon my memory
posted by infini at 11:53 AM on August 4, 2015 [1 favorite]

Whenever I see an arusa shopping for lingerie with friends or family, I have the feeling that the woman is on display, and preparing for a future role. At China Star, I asked the mother if her daughter would work as a lawyer after the wedding. “Of course not!” she said. “She’ll stay at home.” She spoke proudly, the same way that I often hear Egyptian men tell me that their wives spend their days in the house. In Egyptian Arabic, another meaning of arusa is “doll”—children use this word for the toys that they dress and undress.
posted by infini at 12:07 PM on August 4, 2015 [2 favorites]