This is just too funny. Over at Aqoul, they've been tracking the remarkable resurgence of bad romantic fiction about Arab shaykhs. Sample, from Lynne Graham:
"He stilled like a lion on the prowl. Magnificent, hugely confident, his silent grace of movement one of his most noticeable physical attributes. In the sunlight he was a golden feast of vibrant masculinity. His luxuriant black hair shone. His tawny skin glowed with health and his stunning bronze eyes gleamed like precious metal, both brilliant and unreadable. Indeed, he was quite staggeringly beautiful..."
Anyway, I won't spoil their fun, just link to it, but I have to reproduce the table which eerie's hard scholarly research produced:
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?
UPDATE: boldly going where I dare not tread. Hilarious!
Somebody trying to write bad fiction would never be able to match this sentence -- the back half of the sentence so eerily beautiful in its blithe inattention to the front half:
"His stunning bronze eyes gleamed like precious metal."
Posted by: globecanvas | August 15, 2005 at 02:09 PM
Just you and me, Shaykh baby, in our tent by the oasis. Send the dancing girls away!
Posted by: Nur al-Cubicle | August 15, 2005 at 02:25 PM
Oh the shame.
Posted by: collounsbury - aqoul | August 15, 2005 at 04:40 PM
I wonder if any 20th century lit experts can comment on similar phenomenon in recent history...
Did everyone write/buy romance novels about Iowa farm girls and Samurai after Pearl Harbour? Were Russian soldiers ripping the bodices of California housewives on the cover of bestsellers during the cold war?
Posted by: Shaula Evans | August 16, 2005 at 12:30 AM
Globecanvas: Please, no more samples. I like my eyes, and don't want to claw them out.
(That was baaaad.)
Shaula: Probably not for the latter.
Meanwhile, for WW2, I would imagine the Germans were more popular. The myths about Asian...sexual capacity weren't very complimentary.
Posted by: John Penta | August 16, 2005 at 12:35 AM
Hah. I remember at the height of the Bin Laden hunt a South African magazine (called "You") ran an article about how Bin Laden had become a sex symbol for Western women.
Posted by: Jake | August 16, 2005 at 04:27 AM