In August 2021 a statue of Aphrodite was removed from a Burberry shop by the Kuwaiti government after it received multiple citizens’ complaints about the statue offending the cultural and religious insensitivities of Kuwait. And in 2011 in Oman, after Al Ain residents complained to a newspaper that nothing was being done to stop a goat grazier using the cemetery, an act they felt violated the sanctity of the cemetery, the municipality forced said grazier to relocate. These two examples prompt an important question: why, in response to citizen complaints, did the Kuwaiti and Omani governments respond? While this question may seem simple, current Middle Eastern scholarship and, indeed, wider political science, struggles to provide an adequate answer because of its inattention to the place of popular socio-cultural contestation in state-society relations. Where Gulf scholarship and wider political science does investigate culture, it does so in a top-down manner, examining how regimes use culture when presenting or portraying themselves to their populations. Using Kuwait and Oman as case studies, this paper argues that Gulf citizens regularly voice socio-cultural concerns and call on their governments to act, and that, conversely, governments are often aware of these concerns and will regularly respond to them. This paper does so by applying — for the first time to the Gulf monarchies — the theory of authoritarian responsiveness, which argues that authoritarian regimes often respond to their citizens concerns as a method of ensuring popular quiescence and regime longevity. The paper utilises data from fieldwork research carried out between January and June 2023 involving interviews with bureaucrats, activists, NGO members, academics, and ordinary citizens supplemented by other qualitative research sources, including newspaper archival sources. This paper sheds a light on the underexplored and under-theorised place of socio-cultural concerns in Gulf states by centring bottom-up socio-cultural contestation, and in so doing expands our understanding of the integral place of the socio-cultural in Gulf state-society relations. Moreover, as authoritarian responsiveness has yet to be applied to the socio-cultural sphere, this paper expands our understanding of the theory, and potentially the dynamics of authoritarian states more generally.