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Anyone In Egypt Can Sue Public Figures For Inciting Debauchery
In Hollywood, wearing the wrong dress to a red carpet gets you snide remarks from TV presenters, and maybe some memes. In Egypt, the same thing can get you ... prison. That's what actress Rania Youssef faced year after she attended the Cairo Film Festival wearing the equivalent of a black swimsuit with a bedazzled fishnet over it. This was enough to get her charged with "inciting debauchery" and questioned for four hours.
If Cardi B had showed up, the event would probably have been cancelled as a result of exploding heads.
Egyptian law allows for any random citizen to make such a complaint against whoever they choose. This is how pop singer Shyma ended up being jailed for a year for "suggestively eating a banana" in a music video. Another singer was arrested for a pretty tame video whose title rhymes with an insult.
While the average Egyptian isn't losing any sleep over these things, some concerned citizens have made a career out of tattling on celebrities. In Youssef's case, it was two lawyers named Samir Sabry and Amr Abdel Salam, who gained notoriety for suing belly dancers and "potty-mouthed" puppeteers and publicly attacking foreign visitors for "insulting Egypt." Said foreigners were also women, in case you were starting to sense a pattern here.
The charges against Youssef were dropped after she apologized for her fashion crime. Matters were presumably helped when word got out to the international press and the lawyers behind it all became global laughingstocks. That's not to say you should go and seek your fortune by performing on the streets of Cairo with belly-dancing sex puppets any time soon.
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For Asian Pop Idols, Dating Is Tantamount To Career Suicide
In the U.S., if a pop star hasn't dated and dramatically broken up with at least three other celebrities by their mid-20s, we assume they must be some kind of weirdo. In Korea, it's exactly the other way around. As a general rule, Korean idols are prohibited (or at least highly discouraged) from dating. Supposedly this is to "prevent scandals," but it probably has more to do with the idea that people are more likely to buy an album if they think they have a shot with someone depicted on the cover.
EMI Records, Ltd.It's why the Beatles kept Ringo around.