The Orient granted European men license for otherwise-unacceptable sex

Evidence

Because this particular transgression of bourgeois respectability occurred beyond Europe and the West, and was thought to be confined to occasions when these men were away from their homes, families, and normal milieu, otherwise shameful relations were accepted as eccentric or exotic. Unlike these men, however, De Haan was not traveling away from his home, but a returnee to his primordial home. Still, the fact that De Haan was a denizen of the Orient seemed to grant him a kind of license for sexual adventure that would have been more difficult to justify in Europe. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 444

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to Said’s Orientalism thesis that the Orient was a site of projected European fantasy and license; also parallels Joseph Boone’s work on homoerotic orientalism.
• ADDENDUM: This ‘Orient as sexual license’ mechanism parallels the cross-cultural moral panics theme in ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ — both trace how place and foreignness relax otherwise-enforced behavioral codes.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 444