Unrestrained male sexual appetite defines the despot’s monstrous rule yet wins popular support.

Evidence

The fifth palace, denominated “The Retreat of Joy, or the Dangerous,” was frequented by troops of young females beautiful as the houris, and no less seducing, who never failed to receive with caresses all whom the Caliph allowed to approach them; for he was by no means disposed to be jealous, as his own women were secluded within the palace he inhabited himself. Notwithstanding the sensuality in which Vathek indulged, he experienced no abatement in the love of his people, who thought that a sovereign immersed in pleasure was not less tolerable to his subjects than one that employed himself in creating him foes. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 508

Categorization

• XREF: The irony that the pleasure-swamped caliph is MORE loved by his people points to the deeper textual anxiety: unconstrained desire as both power and threat—what the reader’s monster-figure analysis tracks.