Sheikh your thing

Evan Derkacz
,
 AlterNet
and
 Evan Derkacz
August 15, 2005

It seems that following 9/11, there's been a spike in the popularity of Romance novels revolving around the strong Arab male axis. Of course it's true, there's even a graph to prove it.

Abu writes:

"What the peaking desire for romantic fiction about strong Arab men post 9/11 says about American women (or whoever buys those books), I would not even begin to venture to speculate about having a possible hypothesis. But that's pretty wild, huh?"
Jackmormon takes that challenge:
"My hypothesis so far is that since romance novelists and readers are constantly in search of new diabolical male stereotypes, the recent media coverage of Arab masculinity has sparked an uptick in Arab-male leading roles in romance novels. And since the romance-novel writing business is so fast, I'll bet one could find one hell of a statistical correlation, if one knew how to look."
Of course, who can tell if the increase is due to more demand, greater supply or some combination of both... Critics of Orientalism, start your engines. (Abu Aardvark via Political Animal)
Report typos and corrections to: feedback@alternet.org.

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