Mariah Carey’s bare shoulders are not welcome in Saudi Arabia

Sometimes, my job involves poring over figures of foreign direct investment in Syria over the past decade — and sometimes it consists of looking at pictures of Mariah Carey and calling it research. Today, happily, turned out to be one of the latter days. Some enterprising soul has compiled a selection of pictures of the diva that have been photoshopped by Saudi censors to present a more demure Mariah for a local audience. As shown in the above photo, where Mariah has been attired in what appear to be bell-bottoms, this is not always done expertly.

For the record, this is not my favorite example of Arab media editing the sartorial choices of public figures to accommodate (what it views as) local cultural sensitivities. In 2008, the official Jordanian press agency found its own queen’s bare shoulders too scandalous to show the Jordanian people, and released a picture covering them up.