Why Didn't Samantha Sleep With an Arab Man?
...For much of the 19th and early 20th centuries, European leisure travelers made endless romantic speculations about the “secrets of the harems,” writes Judy Mabor in Veiled Half-Truths. They filled their fantasies with erotic scenes of dark-eyed women, but kept their distance; even as they fantasized, they pitied the poor, backwards Arab women, Mabor writes. In later years, however, Westerners began to feel guilty about these one-sided Orientalist fantasies. In Muriel Spark’s The Mandelbaum Gate, Hideous Kinky, and Sheltering Sky, the Western woman sleeps with an Arab man. The experience turns the tables on the usual fantasy. Now it’s the Western woman who becomes the other, exotic and dangerous. She gets humbled as she is forced, temporarily, to live by Muslim mores. For a while, she leaves her smug cocoon of Western superiority.
In Sex and the City 2, Samantha could easily have slept with an Arab man; she sleeps with everyone else, after all. This might have helped her understand the sex appeal of the veil, and the allure of a world in which sex is not always immediately there for the taking (just as she once experienced this on the show with her tantric yoga instructor lover). But nothing like that happens. The Arab men on the show are all tea-pourers or personal shoppers or camel herders. The cute butlers who are assigned to the women at their posh hotel are off-limits because one is sweetly in love with his wife, and the other is gay. The rest of Arab mankind is a sweaty, hairy, angry mob even Samantha wouldn’t touch...
Commentary by walford
SATC2 demonstrates that elites in the Western entertainment industry cannot deal with how it really is for women in Arab/Muslim culture, so when a major movie is set in that part of the world, they settle for shallow, banal stereotypes that completely ignore the suffering of their sisters behind the veils.
Western Feminists have totally abandoned the millions of women who suffer daily in the Middle East in favor of cultural relativism and Leftist ideology to the point of not even bothering to tell their horrific stories.
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