Airing the Dirty Laundry of Morocco's Sex Industry: Hiding from the Gaze of the Colonizer in the Postcolony

In an effort to protect its image, the Moroccan government banned the movie Much Loved (Zin Li Fik), which depicts the lives of sex workers in the country. But just days after the the premiere of the movie at the Cannes film festival the government released data from a 2011 report that acknowledged the presence of 19,333 sex workers, primarily in the cities of Marakech and Casablanca.

In the days following the release of the film, social media and Moroccan online news outlets buzzed with discussion of the topic. One op-ed piece in the Moroccan Times criticised the film not only for its depiction of this side of society and of sexuality, but for the filmaker's choice to do so on the international stage, rather than within the country itself.

The refrain of "don't air the nation's dirty laundry to an international audience" is common in postcolonial countries, and it takes the form of desiring not to acknowledge marginal behaviors and economic sectors (as in this case) or to bring internal political issues to international bodies (as some authors in Azebaijan have said about groups that requested European countries boycott the European games because of the county's human rights abuses).

These types of situations suggest the continuing of focus on the gaze of the colonizer and the desire to maintain uniformity of national identity and a strict adherence to normative representation of the body politic. The question, however, is whether the discussion would have ever arisen if the topic had not been brought to the international public sphere. The answer may reside in the openness of the society itself.

In a closed political environment, where the government has tight controls on what is being published or broadcast, controversial topics may never reach the fore of discussion and may find themselves swept into a corner. Morocco, a country with a rating of "Partly Free" in the Freedom in the World Index, has begun having discourse on the topic with both supporters and detractors of the filmaker weighing, and could utilize this chance to address the problem.

As public discussions move to the Internet, the relations of social media and governments become more significant for a society's ability to address its issues. Facebook's and Twitter's challenges with authoritarian governments that wish to suppress opposition, such as Turkey and Russia, and the increased ability of governments to block such websites, mean societies might have a decrease ability to mitigate risk of unrest through the self-correction of dealing with smaller issues.

It remains to be seen what direction such trends will take, but hot-button topics like Much Loved's depiction of the Moroccan sex industry will provide insight into how the trend is developing.