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Notes -
It's basically an erotic rape fantasy. Mocked by this meme: https://imgur.com/a/EGjKmW8
It was most likely inspired by Margaret Atwood hearing about how in the 70s places like Beirut and Damascus went from being popular gay vacation spots to having all women covered.
Of course the blue tribe women watching it couldn't admit either of those things. So they claimed it was a profound warning about Trump.
That all seems rather far-fetched.
There's a tendency to overstate the matter -- while parts of the Ottoman Empire largely ignored male homosexual behavior, much of the post-Ottoman Empire turned religious bans on homosexual acts into civil law ones, either under local pressures or Western ones; there were complex social and sometimes legal norms against 'effeminacy' that weren't quite a ban on gay stuff but sometimes got used that way; a lot of this is graded on a pretty heavy curve given explicit and enforced bans in Western countries in the 1950-1960s -- but they definitely had a dedicated western European fandom even into 1972-1973.
((Uh, not always in good ways. A lot of the western gay tourist culture used 'boy' in the sense of 'adult twink', and a number didn't.))
The various civil wars were a good part of it, various migrations (both in response to Israel and to refugee flight) another part, increasing Islamist fear/demonization of 'Westernized' culture yet another, both in relationship to homosexuality and for treatment of women.
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It is fascinating to me that the same people who worry about Trump creating the Handmaid’s tale are the same people who support immigration from MENA
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