1919–28: ‘The Sheik of Araby’ — Freedom in Captivity in the Desert Romance

Abstract

Until about 1919 English-speaking people had used the Arab term ‘sheikh’ to describe a venerable Mohammedan, a chief of a Bedouin clan, tribe or village, or a desert potentate. Then, in the early twenties, the word acquired a new significance. ‘Sheik’ (as it was now spelt in popular writings) still retained its older meanings and associations with the Orient, but in popular Western imagination it came to stand primarily for a new image of masculinity. In the idiom of the period ‘sheik’ signified a virile, sensual male, a priapic, violent lover who masters females by sexual prowess and physical force. Significantly, the epithet was applied to oriental and occidental men alike. The new idiom became current at exactly the same time as the ‘flapper’ entered popular myth, and a causal relation between the two developments may therefore be assumed. The image of the desert lover was a reaction against the twin stereotypes of the modern young woman and her male counterpart. Alongside the image of the youth as a sexless androgyne, there emerged that of the male and the female as antipodal yet magnetic poles, drawn together solely by the power of sex. And, alongside the stereotype of the emasculated man, there developed the myth of the male possessed with extraordinary physical powers and a talismanic potency, a myth that was a response to the new type of woman: politically emancipated, economically independent and sexually uninhibited.

Louehungry women thought he was a darling … he became the gigolo of every woman’s dreams.

(John Dos Passos on Rudolph Valentino: ‘The Adagio Dancer’, 1930)

The mass of our popular literature, the bulk of our popular amusements just exist to provoke masturbation.

(D. H. Lawrence, Pornography and Obscenity, 1929)