"Your love belongs to me" Race and romantic fantasies

''I'm the Sheik of Araby,

Your love belongs to me,

At night when you're asleep

Into your tent I'll creep."

In the Spike Jones version of this song, he adds a few verses about the titular Sheik having a harem.

A little Googling turns up references to songwriters other than Snyder, Smith, and Wheeler (eg Irving Berlin) writing songs with Arab/Middle Eastern themes, especially harem themes. And in the 1890s, "belly dancing" became a craze in the United States and the song itself is inspired by the Rudolph Valentino movie, "The Sheik", which was one of the earliest examples of desert romance novels, dating from 1919. Why were romantic fantasies about people of different races and ethnic groups really common in periods when marrying outside of culture was generally frowned upon? There was Lady Jane Digby in 19th century England who married a Syrian Bedouin and is supposed to have been the inspiration for Diana in Hull's novel, so maybe this and other RL cases of interracial marriage were part of the appeal? Kind of "If it happened for them, it could happen for me?"

edited 24th Jul '12 3:16:37 AM by MorwenEdhelwen

The road goes ever on. -Tolkien

What is forbidden always looks more attractive. Especially if it is "forbidden", but unlikely enough that it won't happen anyway — note that the populations which were fetishized were not especially common in the West at the time, and that on the other hand romances between Black people and white-skinned people were not such an object of fantasy at all.

edited 24th Jul '12 9:03:20 AM by Carciofus

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

Yeah, for example: it was generally considered a "bad idea" for mortals to get romantically involved with gods, spirits, and demigods in Classical Mythology, but they did it all the time, because it's always hot to fantasize about having sex with someone/something that is different.

It's kind of like the experiment they did with lab mice. When presented with the same mates they had already become familiar with, the mice weren't interested in mating. But introduce a new mate, and the mice were suddenly slutting it up all over again.

Also related is the timeless excuse of a mortal, pious man, or chaste woman being seduced by an outsider, god, demon, or some other creature and being coerced into sex of Questionable Consent. That way, the character can still look "righteous" to a degree, but sexual fantasy is still fulfilled.

Appeal of the exotic?

Fight smart, not fair.

@King Zeal: So how do you think the following Dead Horse Trope:

"White person in exotic place meets person of different ethnicity and falls in love with them only to discover they (the non-White partner) is really White" ties in to all that?

edited 24th Jul '12 11:02:22 PM by MorwenEdhelwen

The road goes ever on. -Tolkien

It's another way of playing the trope "safe". Character falls in love with forbidden fruit; fruit turns out to be not so forbidden, thus rewarding the fantasy.

Isn't that But Not Too Foreign or something?

Fight smart, not fair.

@Deboss: Don't really think so IMO. But Not Too Foreign is when a character actually "has" foreign ancestry, but in this storyline, they actually have no foreign ancestry at all. In the Harlequin/Mills&Boon desert romances, the hero often has European ancestry, which would be But Not Too Foreign. This could be a Fauxreigner variant. I should start a YKTTW for it.

edited 24th Jul '12 11:00:54 PM by MorwenEdhelwen

The road goes ever on. -Tolkien

Jungle Princess and whatever the male variant is might be what you're looking for. All the exocitness with none of the actually being another race. You know, like Tarzan.

It also appears in the operetta The Bohemian Girl" and in "Notre Dame de Paris" aka Hunchback of Notre Dame" with Esmeralda

The road goes ever on. -Tolkien

Have started a YKTTW, Faux Interracial Relationship, for it.

edited 25th Jul '12 4:00:44 PM by MorwenEdhelwen

The road goes ever on. -Tolkien

Well my cousin married a Turkish girl who he went to college with. She's really nice, and very pretty, and has a really sexy accent. The accent does a lot of it, people like things that are "exotic" to them.

At the turn of the century, "Orientalism" was a very big trend across the board: furniture, clothing, music not as strong, but anything exotic and "Arabic" was to die for. This is also when British Imperialism really got kicking into gear so more people across the economic levels had access to knowledge, however flawed and stereotypical, of the area from Turkey to Indonesia.

Most of the beginning attempts to translate items like Rumi's poetry, Arabian Knights, and the Hindu religious scriptures were beginning at this time by, (you guessed it!) English White Lords! So what parts do you think they talked about? The morality of violence, the love of the family unit? Hell no! Sexually repressed, Victorian men who have been told forever touching their naughty bits gives them a one-way ticket to hell jumped on the dream of having a multitude of beautiful, exotic women living just to please them.

That is how the idea of the "haram" got butchered. Haram, from Harram, means "forbidden". The Haram was the entire quarters where the royal family and the leading advisers stayed. It was "the Golden Cage" to most royal children growing up.

Most people ignored the idea you were only permitted to have four wives and under only specific conditions, and just relished in having more than one wife.

"Psssh. Even if you could catch a miracle on a picture any person would probably delete it to make space for more porn." - Aszur

@Gabrael: Not to mention the fact that men, even if they were royal, weren't allowed to just walk into the harem. If you've seen The Desert Song, you'll realise that there's a scene where Ali Ben Ali, the sheikh character, just walks into the harem. The harem was the women's quarter of a large house, and not all the women were meant to be sexual partners for the men. Sidenote on TDS: The fact of men being limited to four wives and the specific conditions where polygamy is allowed aren't mentioned in the operetta. And there are tons of other implications.

edited 25th Jul '12 6:39:37 PM by MorwenEdhelwen

The road goes ever on. -Tolkien

It's one of those things when the reality vs. the rumor were grossly messed up. Certain men were allowed in the haram because they lived there, like certain doctors, the equal of the crown prince, and their instructors. It was the family home.

Again, it's more glamorous for rich, white aristocrats to whisper and attempt to live vicariously through a myth that Arabs are exotic, passionate, sex-driven entities than the honest truth that under Sharia and tribal law, most men with multiple wives did so only because their brother died or to secure a political or economic ally. Even the Caliphs could only have four wives.

People have always been drawn to rumor and myth, especially about other groups different of their own. Look at the Marvel character Thor, the Prince of Persia video game series, Slumdog Millionaire, and the rise of Greek and Roman mythology knock offs like God of War, 300, Troy, and Immortals in just our generation. People love the "exotic" more than they love the accurate.

I don't blame them for that. I've enjoyed enough of these knock offs from various time periods beginning from Marco Polo, the novel The Black Rose, Kingdom of Heaven, the entire Orientalist movement in Western art movements, and other artistic creations. But I am also an academic nerd as well as an artistic nerd.

What makes me concerned is when too many people rely on the myths and exaggerations created by ill-informed or just apathetic artists as the truth, when they're anything but. These concerns are even more pressing in matters of romance and love.

"Psssh. Even if you could catch a miracle on a picture any person would probably delete it to make space for more porn." - Aszur

@Gabrael: Yes. Unfortunately, a lot of Westerners, even now, still like to think that that was (or is, in the case of countries where polygamy is still legal) the case. That's one of the reasons why The Desert Song is such a Guilty Pleasure for me. And it doesn't only apply to romance; it applies to other aspects as well, like the "belly dancer as exotic siren." (Azuri in the operetta is a great example.)

@Barkey: Many of my friends talk about liking certain guys because of their accents.

edited 2nd Aug '12 2:03:10 AM by MorwenEdhelwen

The road goes ever on. -Tolkien

I've seen psychology publications claming there's a genetic imperative to preferring lovers who are very unlike your own parents and that this may explain the number of people who are attracted to people of different race. They weren't convincing but it's a decent theory.

On the other hand, people also talk about genetic sexual attraction between genetically similar people who did not grow up together (and hence, do not trigger the Westermarck Effect.)

I don't know, honestly.

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

@Michael and Carciofus: Maybe it varies? (I wouldn't know.)

edited 26th Jul '12 5:59:01 AM by MorwenEdhelwen

The road goes ever on. -Tolkien

Probably a result of different sampling or it's just that the variance is so high that there is no point in saying ine way or the other.

I personally expect that the term "sexual attraction" itself is a simplification of the effects that produce the feelings you get when someone is really smokin' hot. Probably there are multiple effects which all get described as sexual attraction when they're different things.

To be fair, the only-four-wives rule is not always kept.

But yeah, the "Arabian Nights" Days version of Harem Girls is rather distorted. For one thing, it doesn't often include the fact that the traditional way around "only four wives" was to simply purchase slave girls, who don't count. (Wonder why that isn't included?)

edited 26th Jul '12 6:23:37 PM by Ramidel

Well, for an evolutionary standpoint, attraction to the "exotic" makes sense. Expanding the gene pool, and all that. As for the upper class Victorian English fascination, with the level of repression they had going on back then, you can't blame them for having fantasies of hyper-sexed cultures.

@Ramidel: In one of the two projects I'm working on, the teenaged protagonist's mother figure is his old wet nurse/nursemaid, who's a slave that used to belong to his father. The protagonist is the son of the tribe's chief and his paternal grandmother was also a Black slave, who was freed after his grandfather died. The nursemaid raised him because his mother died in childbirth.

edited 26th Jul '12 8:30:38 PM by MorwenEdhelwen

The road goes ever on. -Tolkien

Also the following operettas were all released in the early 20th century, and all have Orientalist themes.

• Algeria/The Rose of Algeria
• The Rose of Stamboul
• The Desert Song

The last one was the basis for something I'm working on now.

edited 28th Jul '12 1:51:55 AM by MorwenEdhelwen

The road goes ever on. -Tolkien