The Orient served Europe as a site for sexuality regulated out of metropolitan life

Evidence

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. Virtually no European writer who wrote on or traveled to the Orient in the period after 1800 exempted himself or herself from this quest: Flaubert, Nerval, “Dirty Dick” Burton, and Lane are only the most notable. In the twentieth century one thinks of Gide, Conrad, Maugham, and dozens of others. What they looked for often—correctly, I think—was a different type of sexuality, perhaps more libertine and less guilt-ridden; but even that quest, if repeated by enough people, could (and did) become as regulated and uniform as learning itself. In time “Oriental sex” was as standard a commodity as any other available in the mass culture, with the result that readers and writers could have it if they wished without necessarily going to the Orient. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 488

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: The ‘commodification’ of Oriental sex parallels the ‘grafting & growth’ piece’s theme of extraction; also connects here to how bourgeois repression displaces desire onto colonial space — a mechanism later Islamophobia readings about the feminized Orient build on.
• DEFINE: Establishes the mechanism by which colonial space absorbs what metropolitan norms repress — a key scaffold concept for reading Orientalist sexuality tropes.

Related

• Europe projected onto the Orient its own repressed desires to escape bourgeois constraint (similarity 0.88)
• Even the quest for liberating Eastern sex became a regulated mass-market commodity (similarity 0.86)
• The Orient granted Western men license for sexual adventures shameful at home (similarity 0.83)
• Orientalist writing edited the Orient to shield European sensibility from its strangeness (similarity 0.83)
• The Orient granted European men license for otherwise-unacceptable sex (similarity 0.83)
• Direct Orient experience threatened European rationality of time, space, and identity (similarity 0.82)
• Colonialism framed weaker regions as feminized space inviting penetration (similarity 0.81)
• European civilization rests on a hidden underground history of displaced instincts (similarity 0.81)
• Orientalist scholarship and travel writing feminized the Orient as a submissive sexual fantasy (similarity 0.80)
• Imperial theses produced the Orient as a space to be cultivated and possessed (similarity 0.80)
• Orientalist writers framed Muslim women as commodified sexual objects to be acquired (similarity 0.79)
• Orientalist writers framed Muslim women’s bodies as commodities to be classified and acquired. (similarity 0.79)
• Orientalism operates as a discourse with material institutional support (similarity 0.79)
• Western scholarly handling turned the Orient from alien into colonial space (similarity 0.79)
• Colonial interests saturated nearly all Western texts on the Orient (similarity 0.79)