Whether it is hailed as the harbinger of progress in economic development or the bane of economic free trade (infitah), Tunisia’s beach resort tourism has become a central sector of accumulation, exploitation, the projection of Orientalist and Occidentalist fantasy, and contestations over gender, sexuality and identity. Beyond economic impacts, the merits of which are debated by other scholars, the socio-cultural impacts on those who toil in the beach tourism industry and on the droves of primarily European tourists is immense and polyvocal. Tunisia’s beach tourism industry can be understood as a provider: it provides opportunities for jobs for a certain fraction of Tunisia’s vast chronically jobless population, but it also provides environmental degradation. Further, the beach tourism industry provides a stunningly beautiful site in which contestation over notions of cultural identity, work, class, and gender are intertwined. In this paper I present preliminary findings from an ethnographic study in a Tunisian beach resort in Hammamet, Tunisia's original site of development of global tourism at the midway point of the last century. The paper will include data from my research conducted during the weeks following the 2015 shooting rampage on the Sousse beach. While there, I conducted two studies of resorts in Hammamet after most foreign tourists fled. This reflection on these 2015 culture sketches will be considered alongside my more recent research (2023) on beach tourism in Tunisia which also centers gender and labor relations between resort workers and the resort guests. Tunisian beaches, as several researchers have described, are contested spaces where tensions over gender and power seem to be exacerbated. While the little research in MENA beach settings tends to be limited to the question of MENA feminine modesty versus European tourists’ lack thereof, I extend this focus to include masculinities at the beach. In this endeavor, I dig into the cogent research on Tunisian masculinities to consider how gender and the economic forces of the beach tourism industry coalesce.