The Dubai craze is baffling

Marcus Fakana, a British 18 year old, has been in prison in the United Arab Emirates since December. His crime? He had consensual sex with a 17 year old British girl on a trip to Dubai. Now, thanks to the granting of a royal pardon by Dubai’s ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Marcus has been freed and is back home in London. The merciful monarch did this as part of a tradition of releasing lesser miscreants during Eid, the feast that marks the end of Ramadan. 

The freeing of Fakana is further confirmation that Dubai, the glittering city beloved by TikTok teens and influencers “generating content,” is a very peculiar choice for an earthly paradise, particularly for the West’s young.    

As you get older, and new generations start to unroll like a carpet behind you, you begin to not understand new things. This is to be expected. There are the jokes you don’t get, the ironies that you miss, the inexplicably heated crazes for the very ordinary. 

This phenomenon came fairly early for me, while I was still a teenager. I could not, for the life of me, fathom the expectation that one would dissolve into Bacchante-style ecstasies about, say, The Thompson Twins or, a little later, “Madchester” – the raucous dance music scene that emerged in England’s second city. So I am an old hand at this. But still, the Dubai influencer craze remains utterly baffling to me.

What is the attraction? It has lovely beaches, yes, but so has Great Yarmouth on the east coast of England, and in Yarmouth you have the advantage of not being clapped in irons for a perfectly healthy youthful romp, or for sipping at a port and lemon. 

It’s also very much out of kilter with the other current teen manias. You can forget any LGBTQ-ing in the UAE. Article 354 of the Penal Code criminalizes “indecent acts,” which includes consensual homosexual acts. Penalties can include up to 7 years in prison, and cross-dressing or public displays of affection may also lead to legal consequences under public decency laws. 

What Dubai does offer are the trappings of a luxury lifestyle. It is a city of gift bags, eye-wateringly high restaurant receipts and high-end consumer goods of all kinds against a backdrop of thrusting crystal stalagmites of tat that make Trump Tower look positively restrained and tasteful. The vast majority of its content creators celebrate beauty, fitness, fine dining etc. This is the polar opposite of the stylings of the horrible, muddy “Just Stop Oil/Queers For Palestine” youth cult, but it is equally unlovely. 

It is supposedly aspirational – but aspiring to what? Luxury and status, presumably, to people who don’t understand either – neither the children lapping up this output on the socials nor the slightly older influencers serving it up to them. 

Young Westerners go to Dubai to – in that especially gruesome phrase – “generate content.” Anybody over 15 years of age who uses this term in earnest needs to be led gently away with a paper bag over their head, for their sakes as much as ours. 

Children and younger teens are attracted to glitter and glamour. And fair enough, this is hard to come by in most Western countries today. But all things are relative – I remember my father telling me how Cardiff was regarded as Sin City in the Wales of his youth because it had a cinema and a nightclub. And I found Hemel Hempstead, a sleepy commuter town north of London, thrillingly futuristic when I was 6 years old. I think it’s much the same dynamic going on here.

But as the Fakana case shows, using Dubai for this purpose comes with considerable risks – fun, fun, fun with a side order of mediaeval theocracy. There is even a campaign group, Detained In Dubai, for people who find themselves on the wrong side of the penal code. (There is not, as yet, a campaign group called Detained In Lytham St Anne’s.) British citizen Laleh Shahravesh, for example, was arrested in 2019 for calling her ex-husband an “idiot,” and his new wife a “horse” on Facebook. 

How would you relax in Dubai? You don’t even know the laws or customs you might be transgressing. An acquaintance of mine was at a café in the Middle East and was getting dirty looks from all around. He eventually realized it was because he was sitting with his legs up, revealing the soles of his shoes – terribly bad form in the Arab world. 

The latest Dubai danger are events called “Porta-Potty parties,” secretive events organized by ultra-wealthy men who entice young female influencers with extravagant gifts, five-star hotel stays, and large sums of money – with absolutely no strings attached, obviously. Nothing good is going to happen at something called a “Porta-Potty party.”

You’d think the incarcerations detailed by Detained In Dubai would be enough to put people off, but the lucrative lure of clicks, views and likes is too strong. Still, it is time for everybody, not just Mr. Fakana, to ditch this dazzling dump and come home.