The Arab World and Internet Porn

There's little to surprise in what follows, but here's another piece about how the Arab world is so eager to defeat the scourge of pornography on the Internet, that they spend more time debating that than, say, saving the Egyptian economy; and yet when it comes to actual searches for porn, the Arab world seems to lead the pack. I have no brief for hard-core pornography but know that every new medium from hieroglyphics and cuneiform to woodcuts, daguerreotype photography, early movies, and so on down the line, the dirty stuff is often among the early adopters. One  can stand at the shore and tell the tide to recede, or actually teach people to avoid the viler stuff. But that's harder than passing laws telling the tide it's illegal (Acts of King Canute I, 1.)

This piece tells us what everybody knew already, but with cooler charts: "Porn in the Middle East – The Elephant in The Room."


Excerpts:

The Arab world undoubtedly has a mixed relationship when it comes to the Internet’s vast treasure trove of adult material. A recent survey conducted by Northwestern University in Qatar found that, from a sample of 10,000 respondents across eight Arab states, the majority was in favour of tighter Internet regulation. Meanwhile, the regular cautionary tales fabricated by local media wheel out a motley selection of ‘experts’ who warn that viewing explicit images will lead to a rise in mental illness, violent crime, and the spread of “sexual deviancy”, for which read homosexuality.

And, undeterred by the overwhelming evidence that such policies are always destined to fail, governments continue to announce plans to block access to X-rated websites, often with large scale public support. In 2011, when many thought the days of Ben Ali-style censorship were coming to an end, a Tunisian court decreed that porn sites would henceforth be banned, as they “contravened the values of Arab Islamic society.” And just a few months before its overthrow, the Islamist government of Muhammad Morsi in Egypt thought nothing of dedicating endless hours to discussing a new $3.7 million anti-porn initiative. Clearly they didn’t think their country had bigger priorities.

But while people may publically express their aversion and opposition to Internet pornography, their private viewing habits suggest something quite different. Put simply, porn is BIG in the Arab world. According to Google AdWords, the 22 Arab states account for over 10% of the world’s searches for “sex”; A total of 55.4 million unique monthly Google “sex” searchers in the 22 (ignoring a further 24 million searches for “sex” transliterated into Arabic) that matches both the United States and India, two countries often cited as world leaders in porn consumption. . . .

. . .It also seems to be the case that viewing porn in the region is not simply big in absolute terms, but also relatively to all other things people search. Data obtained from the Internet analytics company Alexa shows that adult-themed sites account for seven of the 100 most visited websites in the US, a figure that is trumped by at least six Arab states – Algeria, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Tunisia and Yemen. Meanwhile, Google Trends, which shows how many searches for a particular keyword are made relative to all searches on Google, suggests that people in the region are more likely to search for “sex” than almost anywhere else in the world, with the exception of the Indian Sub-Continent.

. . . Even more revealing is the breakdown of the actual keywords people are searching for. While fairly generic searches for “tits” (including البزاز) and “lesbians” (including السحاق) amount to around 895,000 and 718,000 times per month (with the highest number on a per user basis again coming from Iraq) more extreme fetish keywords appear to be far more popular.  Searches for “animal sex” and “incest” (in both English and Arabic) occur on average 1.03 million and 1.18 million times per month across the region, equating to more than one search per 100 Internet users.

And by searches:

Of course, the article notes the obvious hypocrisy, the tendency by Salafis to blame the West for trying to corrupt Islam, quotes Shereen El Feki and otherwise tells us what pretty much everybody knew or suspected.

Sexual frustration tends to encourage a search for any outlet. While I won't say that no one with a healthy sex life ever goes trolling for porn (even couples may, I suppose), I suspect the frustrated do so in greater numbers.

King Canute is still waiting for the tide to obey him.