GiB#2 I Male Arabia in-a-box

It strikes me every time I return from travel, how much testosterone flows in the streets of Beirut.

It can’t escape you as soon as you get there: The drive from the airport towards the city center takes you right through the southern suburbs of Beirut (until they build the next bridge to ride above it), one of the most densely populated areas of the city. The sex ratio on the streets of Beirut Suburbia is obvious, weighted heavily towards men, unlike what they say it is in the clubs. For the streets are full of men who hang around outside all day, seemingly with not much to do, while their women are probably hanging out at home somewhere in Lebanon or back in Syria, Egypt, Iraq or Soudan.

Mostly your average working-age Arab guys – shop owners, mechanics, street merchants, or free-floating workers on the hunt for underpaid work hours. They’re typically wearing undershirts and jogging pants, work uniforms or old-fashioned clothes, and maybe underwear like these ones I saw in Souk-el-Ahad. As far as the physics of it,  there is certainly one for every taste. Skin tones ranging all the way from light to dark, hair colors from black to red (great-grandma had a fling with a Crusader), bodies from skinny to buff, from soft to hairy. Ugly, fat, cute or pretty. But as far as chemistry for us GiBs, this is probably not boyfriend material and not our cup of tea at least for those more into the metrosexual type. Although a GiB friend tells me all sorts of great things about the now-regular (paid) lover he picked up from the crowd!

Based on some tourist feedback I got, it is these raw and masculine Arab men, and not the guys-next-door of Beirut (or the sophisticated GiBs for that matter), that make up much of the erotic energy that emanates from this city, that seeds its ground. It took me an absence from the country to be able to see this manly mass as a feature for Beirut, as it clearly creates a fertile ground for a middle-eastern flavored fantasy!