American Sex and the Middle East

 "We Americans have sex, sometimes, but we talk about it publicly all the time these days, especially the kind that tends to dwell at the sloughs of the bell curve of normality. We generally assume—without letting ourselves in on the assumption most of the time, so self-absorbed are we—that the cultural conversations we have on subjects sexual stay in the United States, if not in Vegas. It rarely dawns on America’s cultural warriors that foreigners overhear these conversations, and that they also consume our sexually vulgarized popular culture productions through exported movies and television serials. Some of these foreigners are Middle Easterners, and the narrative produced by American writers and readers, producers and viewers, affects the image of American society—our politics and policies with it—in the region. The consequences are not always trivial."

[The American Interest]