The discussion began here at Publius when A.M. Mora y Leon linked to a piece at the new Foreign Policy blog, commenting that whenever there are searches for sex material, the vast majority of them come from domain extensions that pertain to highly Islamist countries like Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Just going through the top keywords in our statistics, “Iran”, “sexy”, and “women” are in the top ten. I’ve noticed that these words are generally used in the same search string. As good looking as Persian women are, they only seem to lose out in the search to one woman: Yulia Tymoshenko.

Foreign Policy followed up to this piece, but even more interesting is this post by Michael Totten who uses Google Trends to find out what countries google certain terms the most. He finds that the top four countries to google “man sex boy” are Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iran. I’m guessing after this posting I’ll be receiving a portion of that traffic. But I decided to google iran sexy” and iran women” to see the results. It shouldn’t be surprising: Iran, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Pakistan, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates.

It would be reasonable under normal conditions to assume that people from the Middle East would want to look at women from their own region. But then again, in such a conservative place in the world, wouldn’t one expect that they would shun porn?… I’m thinking deep down, in such a repressive environment, a lot of people want their women unveiled, and maybe a little bit else.