Europe projected onto the Orient its own repressed desires to escape bourgeois constraint

Evidence

In all of his novels Flaubert associates the Orient with the escapism of sexual fantasy. Emma Bovary and Frédéric Moreau pine for what in their drab (or harried) bourgeois lives they do not have, and what they realize they want comes easily to their daydreams packed inside Oriental clichés: harems, princesses, princes, slaves, veils, dancing girls and boys, sherbets, ointments, and so on. The repertoire is familiar, not so much because it reminds us of Flaubert’s own voyages in and obsession with the Orient, but because, once again, the association is clearly made between the Orient and the freedom of licentious sex. We may as well recognize that for nineteenth-century Europe, with its increasing embourgeoisement, sex had been institutionalized to a very considerable degree. On the one hand, there was no such thing as “free” sex, and on the other, sex in society entailed a web of legal, moral, even political and economic obligations of a detailed and certainly encumbering sort. Just as the various colonial possessions—quite apart from their economic benefit to metropolitan Europe—were useful as places to send wayward sons, superfluous populations of delinquents, poor people, and other undesirables, so the Orient was a place where one could look for sexual experience unobtainable in Europe. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 488

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader Orientalism thesis that the Orient functions as Europe’s mirror of its own repressed wants — the colonial imaginary as displacement of metropolitan frustration, which later Islamophobia readings will echo in projecting anxieties onto Muslims. — connects to: European civilization rests on a hidden underground history of displaced instincts
• DEFINE: Exemplifies the mechanism by which ‘Oriental sex’ became a standardized commodity of mass culture rather than genuine encounter.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 488