The Arabians Nights is a famous story book read by many that contains a collection of Middle Eastern folktales. While looking closely at one folktale in particular, The Story of the Porter and the Three Ladies, it brings into question the representation of Middle Eastern women. The tale oversexualizes and plays into the fetishization of women. This is not the only tale in which these ideals can be seen in the book but, the reader can clearly explicitly see a pattern of sexual content throughout The Story of the Porter and the Three Ladies.
The tale leaves readers at risk of coming away with wrong ideals of middle eastern women. The three ladies in the story are seen as dependent and wild for men. It can be argued that this story is mainly just focusing on the women’s untraditional actions. In speaking of modern feminism women wouldn’t be whole heartedly serving a man like the porter was, “He danced and sang lyrics and ballads and carried on with the girls, … kissing, biting, grouping, … while one girl thrust a morsel in his mouth, another flirted with him, another served him” (Haddaway 87). This is so unrealistic for modern times where a woman’s purpose does not need to be serving a man. The tale just paints a bad picture for women in general and has an underlying meaning that women need a man and they are unstable. This is even explicitly said in the tale by the porter, “You are three and you need a fourth, a man” (85 Haddaway). Women are depicted as delicate creatures in which they need to gain some guidance from a man. However, through the story the presence of a man made the women act wild and untrue to themselves but, was this the point from the author. Did the author want the women to seem so head over heels for any man that came within their reach. It is supposed to be a false metaphor that women are always wanting a man and crave attention from them. This idea is part of what is at stake for the representation of women. Certainly it is most definitely not true that all women crave the attention of a man.
There are very vivid details used to describe the female characters in the story and not the male. When the porter meets the doorkeeper the text describes her as, “She was all charm, beauty, and perfect grace, with a forehead like the new moon, eyes like those of a deer or wild heifer, eyes like the crescent in the month of Sha’ban…” (Haddaway 82). The description of the women continues to go on after this and leads into a love fevered poem even furthering the beauty of the doorkeeper. When looking closer at the structure of the text, it took about three paragraphs for the description of the doorkeeper to be finished. And this isn’t even included later on in the story where the doorkeeper’s nakedness is sketched. The porter sees, “Then she washed herself under her breast, between her thighs, and inside her navel” (88 Haddaway). The author clearly had a choice to just simply say the girl took a bath but they continue to overstimulate the descriptions with clear sexual links. In contrast while looking at the description of the men from the narrator in the story we only get a few sentences on their looks and that is it. The men use most of their dialogue in the story admiring the three ladies and explaining the predicament they are in when arriving at the house. In the story the most description of the mens looks we get is one word, “After the doorkeeper had listened to Ja’far’s speech, looked a their dress, and seen that they were respectable, she went back to her sisters and repeated Ja’far’s story” (95 Haddaway). Men have not been objectified at all in this tale, they have only been held to a more respectable standard because they aren’t being seen as vulnerable as the women. This brings into question the point of the men in the story while it is mainly focusing on the sexualized descriptions of women.
Overall, The Story of the Porter and the Three Ladies is extremely problematic because of its portrayals of women. It affects the world’s perception of middle eastern women to be man crazy and sexual objects used by men. In reality, middle eastern women are so much more and The Arabians Nights breaks more so into ideals of masculism when some argue that the main character Shahrazad follows a feminist archetype.
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