Why is the presence of Arab- or Middle Eastern- themed porn so totally underrepresented in the larger U.S. internet porn market? Oh dear. I’m already treading in dangerous territory. Then again, when am I not treading in dangerous territory?
Let me clarify my question. The aims of the West in the Middle East at present are clearly imperialist, clearly have deep debts to the imperialist, Orientalist projects of the 19th century. In that earlier phase of Western intervention into the Middle East and its local cultures, the sexually fascinated (to the point of being predatory?) modus operandi of Europe was undeniable.
European men like Flaubert and Sir Richard Burton were enabled by their countries’ political and economic involvement in “the Orient” to go on sexually-charged tours of Egypt, Morocco, Syria, Lebanon, Arabia – and let us not forget Turkey! Both the word and concept of odalisque arrive with us as a result of European fascination with (and a particular reading of) harem life in Turkey. The odalisque is a visual trope common in Western art of the 19th century from which, one could reasonably claim, derived later pornographic themes like the pin-up, or the Playboy centerfold, or indeed any pornographic format in which the body of a woman is arrayed before the viewer as a meal upon a table.
The theme of “the Lustful Turk” was a significant category within early modern written and visual pornography itself. A book of that title (circa roughly 182 
either spawned or is the most notable entity within a whole European genre of pornographic fiction involving the region we now call the Middle East. I don’t particularly care to spell out a remedial lesson on Orientalism, here, or what is implicated by the coeval nature of European sexual and political agendas in the “Orient” during the height of French and British imperialism.
Sex, war, and power all travel merrily along with each other in a dizzying game of leapfrog. So – where is the equivalent today to “The Lustful Turk” of old?
I will quickly grant that there is a stock of images and concepts built into the Western sexual lexicon that relate to the Middle East and the Arab. The “Sexy Harem Chick” is still a viable Halloween option. Bellydance is still seductive. I Dream of Jeannie has lost almost all of it’s sexual cogency, but the echoes and filaments remain. The exotic, mysterious and vaguely “Eastern” woman is still an intelligible sexual archetype, but only just, while we seem to have completely forgotten the masculine seductive power of “The Sheik.”
Online pornography is another pop cultural realm, certainly, and only a fragment of American sexual thought/impulse/practice/desire can be said to be represented therein. However, the internet is the stage for vast amounts of themed sexual imagery and content being produced, sought, and made available to vast numbers of people. The question of what, precisely, the nature of pornographic culture of the internet can tell us about contemporary sexuality as a whole is completely unanswered as of this point. However, clearly there is a relationship between these two entities, neither mutually inclusive or exclusive.
When it comes down to online porn, the Middle East is not an overwhelmingly popular theme. If you search for “Middle Eastern” or “Arabic porn,” you’ll find it, of course. But you won’t find any such category represented should you visit the many sites serving as portals to online pornography’s vast and chaotic world – “adult directories” or “link listings” such as Persian Kitty or Richard’s Realm. These sites organize vast lists of links to web-based pornographic material using a fairly standardized, predictable and consistent set of genres or categories. These categories are to snippets of porn what “tags” are to blogposts.
The category or genre of a particular tidbit of online pornography (as many readers will know but perhaps some will not) may be derived from either the specific sexual activity represented or the kinds of people engaged in the represented activities. (“Voyeurism,” a fairly common category, is also kind of an odd-one-out, fitting precisely in neither of these two camps). The most common categories in the activity-based categories might be sketched out as follows: Hardcore, Oral, Anal, Group, Interracial, Gay, Lesbian, Fetish, Toys.
The most common categories in the sexual-actor-oriented group would be: Black, Asian, BBW (stands for “big beautiful women”), Mature, Young, Trans or ‘She-males,’ and Amateur. As far as specifically ethnic categories are concerned, “Latina” has joined “Black” and “Asian” as a fairly standard category, with “Indian” (as in: the subcontinent) perhaps unexpectedly making a bid for fourth place in the most-commonly-invoked-ethnicities-for-purposes-of-pornographic-classification sweepstakes. The number of themes designated by the adult directories that are based on the readable ethnicities of participants are almost exclusively limited to these four general groupings.
I’ve spent more print-space than I had intended discussing the organizational methods of internet porn. Let me recap some earlier points, in the interest of returning to my original question. The word “interested” has two shades of meaning – one has to do with having curiosity or fascination, the other to do with making or having a claim or share in something. The West has long been “interested” in the Middle East in both of these senses. This interestedness continues today, bloody at its extremities.
In the 19th century, the Western fascination with the “Orient” was marked by a distinctly sexual dimension, the legacy of which remains in our sexual-representational lexicon in a less vital form. Cross-cultural sexual fascinations, as well as those that emphasize “Otherness,” remain powerful and viable. Particular, traceable pornographic tropes involving racial and ethnic markers continue to be a vital part of the way we organize our collective sexual imagination, particularly the branch of that imagination that comprises internet pornography. But the sexualization of the Middle East has largely lost its currency. Why?
Imagine asking the average American to describe a “typical Middle Eastern woman.” The image most likely to be rendered for you is of a silent, cowed, timid, completely veiled woman. This is not the same woman as the sexually confident, lasvicious, dark-eyed bellydancing seductress. These two archetypal images are in some ways fundamentally incompatible. Both images of the Middle Eastern woman have been a part of Western discourses since at least the 19th century, but have always existed in tension with each other.
By our own historical moment, the dominance of the image of the disempowered and asexual Middle Eastern woman has become fairly standard. We have 1980s Western feminism to thank for this. Western feminism in the late 70s through to the mid-80s (and on into today, in some circles of feminist thinking) attempted to unite women as a class globally by emphasizing the universality of female oppression at the hands of men and patriarchy. The flip-side of this benevolent, ironically “paternalistic” move on the part of Western feminism was its patronizing overtones and slightly nauseating self-congratulatory aspects.
In 1994, in an article entitled “Orientalism and Science Fiction,” author Hoda Zaki* wrote, “In many feminist circles, it is popular to view Middle Eastern women as being the most oppressed women in the world. Western feminists have ranked women’s oppression globally, and more often than not, western women emerge from this ranking as the most liberated…I resent the constant portrayal of Middle Eastern women as absolute victims.”
Although so-called-“Radical Feminists” have made their case for defining women who participate in pornography as “victims,” it can’t be denied that in general, pornography is not scripted around unwilling or timid women.
This begs the question: What stories are scripted around unwilling, timid women in distress? Somebody’s got to come rescue them! Who better than Captain America?
I’m going to have to end this inelegant, rambling essay in a more truncated way than I’d prefer. Images of Middle Eastern women as asexual victims of their own culture have triumphed in the popular American imagination over (equally flawed) images of exotic“Oriental” women as confident, mysterious sexual agents. “Good girls in distress,” damsels even, innocent madonnas-not-whores, they have become incompatible with the Western pornographic imagination.
The “we’re bringing them democracy” rhetoric, cultural imperialism wrapped in the camouflage of reason and natural law, has been present in all attempts to defend our presence in Iraq. The most insidious rationale for wars on the Middle East is this urge to, as Gayatri Spivak puts it, “rescue brown women from brown men.”
*Zaki, Hoda. “Orientalism and Science Fiction.” Food For Our Grandmothers. Ed. Kadi, Joanna. Boston: South End Press, 1994. 181-187.
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