The legendary debauchery of Dubai The West has always fetishised Arabian nights

There is decent evidence for at least some of these acts — not least one particularly stomach-churning video which emerged in 2022, sparking the first wave of social-media obsession with the influencer/sex-worker crossover. We must not be shocked that in every city the world over, there are enough freaks to make a party; even less so when a city is sloshing with gold. But what is so different, so unsettling, about the “Dubai porta potty” legend — as it is known for reasons you can work out for yourself — is how wilfully it has taken root, and how ancient the Western fantasies are that it speaks to.

For centuries, the orientalised perversity of the Arabian world has been a titillating, disgust-flecked obsession in the West. What began in pre-Islamic Persia with Scheherazade’s tales in One Thousand and One Nights quickly spread throughout Western Europe after Antoine Galland’s French translation in 1704. This provoked a flurry of imitations, contes de fées set in oud-scented wonderlands. The archetypes were set: as in Western fairytales, bloodthirsty aristocrats and fraught sex-relations are everywhere — a wife is caught in bed with a black slave; she transfigures her husband with magic, but is killed in retribution. A woman’s dismembered body washes up in a river; her husband has killed her, wrongly suspecting that she was unfaithful. The jealous Prince Behram imprisons Princess Al-Datma in a tower and, pursuing her after her escape, murders her. These fairytales fed the Western appetite for Eastern narratives of cruelty and debauchery, and came to shape the character of the deviant Arab which lingers today.

As the 20th century unfurled, this trope picked up scandalous pace. The Sheik — first a novel by Edith Maud Hull which sold one million copies upon its release in 1919, and then a film starring Rudolph Valentino in 1921 — portrayed its kidnapping protagonist as exotic and sexually aggressive, an arc which is redeemed when he is discovered to not in fact be Arab at all, but a harmless Western romantic in disguise. The allure and threat of the voracious Sheik spawned a thousand afterlives, not least with the wildly popular 1921 ditty The Sheik of Araby, composed to answer the mania surrounding the film. What is essentially a parody song contains some rather choice lyrics: “At night when you’re asleep / Into your tent I’ll creep.” It’s a love song — the damsel will “rule this world with me”, after all — but the comedy comes from a vision of a lascivious brute who invades tents, pompously reiterates his status as sheikh, and is both floppily romantic and latently vicious.

Later renditions only reinforce this type, and have been compiled by the writer Jack Shaheen in the documentary Reel Bad Arabs. Versions of the sheikh haunt pop culture: Disney’s Aladdin (1992) includes the lyrics: “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 Happy Hooker, we get a gag about being “forced to perform unspeakable acts with circumcised dogs” (sound familiar?); the Burt Reynolds caper Cannonball Run II (1984) includes the quip: “I have a weakness for blondes and women without moustaches.”

It is not hard to appreciate the modern mythologies of Arabian nights — now situated in VIP areas of Dubai nightclubs, the presidential suites of golden hotels — as continuations of centuries-old titillating fantasies of otherness and sexual abandon. Key to these stories is the alabaster-skinned Western blonde, who is regularly abducted by some high-ranking Arab, bored of 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 Sahara, also from 1983, in which it is Brooke Shields’s turn to play defiled American beauty. Now, this role has been taken on by the scores of influencers who, modern legend tells us, are going out to Dubai to be defecated on.

This eternal plot relies on assumptions about both Eastern and Western women: that the former exist in both oppressive conservatism and in a world of supposed harems, and that the latter are more highly prized for their own blend of defilable innocence and sexual liberation. Tayeb Salih’s 1966 novel Season of Migration to the North certainly points to such an assumption held by the murderous Sudanese lothario Mustafa Sa’eed, who spends his twenties roleplaying the oversexed Eastern villain to the young women of London. In the novel, Western women are willing, naive and corrupting. If there is a thriving sex trade based on itinerant British Instagram models, then this provenance must be part of the sales pitch.

Whether these stories are true or not is less interesting than the appetite for them itself — an appetite which shows that we have not become any more self-critical about our prurient fascination with sex, Eastern-style, than The Sheik’s swooning readers in 1919. But while there is little doubt that the Dubai sex industry is big, monstrous and, by the very nature of prostitution, riven with exploitation, it might also be the case that these stories of hardcore depravity say something about us and our desire to see Western vulnerability — stereotypically contained in the body of the blonde woman — defiled and jeopardised by a sexy and unknown other, to enact our own fears and fantasies. If Instagram influencers are our new Hollywood stars, then they, too — just like the ultimate woman-child blonde, Marilyn Monroe, will forever be subject to suspicion over having done sex work to get to where they are today. Because of the mystery of an influencer’s day-to-day job — and the huge crossover with porn sites such as OnlyFans — this suspicion is even more marked.

We do not tell these squeamish stories out of compassion for their protagonists. For many, they are little more than masturbatory fantasies, or opportunities to imagine untold degradations to another woman and her hated high cheekbones. The legend of the Dubai sex industry, the natural heir of the desert romance, allows us the luxury of contemplating vicious things being done to women at one remove: it is happening over there and, we assure ourselves, never here. Yet the fact is, shoving a live salmon in unmentionable places for £40,000 is, if true, just another grotesque tumescence of our own porn-saturated culture that social media has helped to create — and is probably just as likely to go down in a Kensington mansion as an Emirati penthouse. Instead of addressing the cruelty at the heart of prostitution itself, these one thousand and one tales of our new Arabian Nights keep sex work safe and harmless: an exotic, erotic joke.

And these fables serve another purpose too: they keep our snobberies contained in the dystopian glass city in the desert, confirming our worst fears about what happens when decadent sexual tastes meet the unbounded wealth of the Gulf, the West’s playground. If Dubai remains, in the orientalising imagination, a moral vacuum — Sodom-sur-Mer — it is only to comfort us that we are different. In fact, the worst things about this story, the cruelty, the ostentation, happen absolutely everywhere.

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Poppy Sowerby is an UnHerd columnist

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