The legendary debauchery of Dubai

Later renditions only reinforce this type and are put together in the documentary by writer Jack Shaheen Flush bad Arabs. Versions of the Sheik haunt pop culture: Disney’s Aladdin (1992) contains the text: “Oh, I come from a land, from a faraway place where the caravan camels roam; where they cut off your ear if they don’t like your face, it’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home. In the 1975 bawdy comedy The lucky whorewe get the joke that we are “forced to perform unspeakable acts with circumcised dogs” (sound familiar?); the Burt Reynolds caper Cannonball Run II (1984) contains the joke: “I have a soft spot for blondes and women without mustaches.”

It is not difficult to appreciate the modern mythologies of Arabian Nights – now situated in VIP rooms of Dubai nightclubs, the presidential suites of gold hotels – as continuations of age-old tantalizing fantasies of otherness and sexual abandon. The key to these stories is the western blonde with alabaster skin, who is regularly kidnapped by a high-ranking Arab because he is bored by the casual debauchery of his harem. In The Jewel of the Nile (1985), Kathleen Turner is our kidnapped heroine; it’s a trope repeated in the Connery Bond film Never say never again (1983) and Saharaalso from 1983, in which it is Brooke Shields’ turn to play the defiled American beauty. Now this role has been taken on by dozens of influencers who, modern legend tells us, are heading to Dubai to relieve themselves.

This eternal plot is based on assumptions about both Eastern and Western women: that the former exist in both oppressive conservatism and in a world of so-called harems, and that the latter are more highly valued for their own mix of defiling innocence and sexual liberation. Tayeb Salih’s 1966 novel Season of migration north certainly points to such an assumption on the part of murderous Sudanese lothario Mustafa Sa’eed, who spends his twenties playing the oversexed oriental villain to the young women of London. In the novel, Western women are willing, naive and corrupting. If there is a booming sex trade based on traveling British Instagram models, then this provenance needs to be part of the sales pitch.

Whether these stories are true or not is less interesting than the hunger for it itself – a hunger that shows that we have not become more self-critical about our lustful fascination with sex, in the Eastern way, than The sheikh‘s swooning readers in 1919. But while there is little doubt about Dubai’s sex industry is large, monstrous and, by the nature of prostitution, riven with exploitation, it could also be that these stories of hardcore depravity say something about us and our desire to see Western vulnerability – stereotypically embodied in the blonde woman’s body – defiled and endangered by a sexy and unknown other, to act out our own fears and fantasies. If Instagram influencers are our new Hollywood stars, then they too – like the ultimate woman-child blonde Marilyn Monroe – will forever be the subject of suspicion because they did sex work to get where they are today. Due to the mystery of an influencer’s daily job – and the huge crossover with porn sites like OnlyFans – this suspicion is even greater.

We don’t tell these prudish stories out of sympathy for their protagonists. For many, they are little more than masturbation fantasies, or opportunities to imagine untold humiliations against another woman and her hated high cheekbones. The legend of Dubai’s sex industry, the natural heir to desert romance, gives us the luxury to reflect on the cruel things done to women at a distance: it happens over there and, we assure ourselves, never here. But the fact is that shoving a live salmon into unmentionable places for £40,000 is, if true, just another grotesque tumescence of our own porn-saturated culture that social media has helped create – and probably just as likely to will be set in a Kensington mansion as a penthouse in the Emirates. Rather than addressing the cruelty underlying prostitution itself, these thousand and one stories of our new Arabian Nights keep sex work safe and harmless: an exotic, erotic joke.

And these fables also serve another purpose: they keep our snobbery within the dystopian glass city in the desert, confirming our worst fears about what happens when decadent sexual preferences meet the boundless bounty of the Gulf, the playground of the West. If Dubai remains a moral vacuum in the orientalizing imagination – Sodom-sur-Mer – it is only to console us that we are different. In fact, the worst things about this story, the cruelty and ostentation, happen absolutely everywhere.