This is headline news that made the front page of Hacker News: One-night stands will be illegal at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.
In that discussion, Westerners are having a cow about how backwards and "barbaric" Middle Eastern countries are:
So you commit sexual assault and find yourself facing like 142 counts of this, that and the other because every single thing you did will get catalogued under SOME law or other and added to your list of crimes so they can throw the book at you.
But generally speaking, no one really cared what you did behind closed doors in a consenting relationship. A quick google gets me an article suggesting those laws have likely been updated in the last three decades and now explicitly state that it's only sodomy in cases of sexual assault or a few other situations, like involving public indecency.
Wherever you live in the world, there will be a difference between what is technically illegal and what actually gets vigorously enforced. This ends up being a touchy subject when it comes to sex.
I don't know a heckuva lot about Islam or Middle Eastern culture. What little I do know is mostly not from Google, thanks.
No, what little I do know comes in part from talking to people online back when I was very ill and had terrible insomnia. From about 2am to 5am, if I wasn't talking to people in places like Syria, Iran or Pakistan, I had nothing to do to try to prevent myself from slashing my wrists.
So that was MY motive for talking to people online. This was likely their motive, a photo of me sharing my "Christmas spirit" sans veil or hijab:
Prior to the pandemic, it was not the norm in my part of the world to cover your face in public. It was in their part of the world and, wow, I must be easy that I didn't.
I am not wealthy enough to have any hope of traveling to the World Cup and if I were I would be highly unlikely to have a one night stand with a stranger. For an American, I'm fairly conservative and hard to get next to, so I was always rather amused by the seeming assumption that I was a loose American woman.
I'm appalled by Westerners who know seemingly even less than I do jumping to really ugly conclusions about the culture there. Just because you don't know the secret handshake for that part of the world concerning things like casual sex doesn't mean there isn't one.
Here is a woman commenting in that discussion about actually traveling in a conservative country. Her remarks fit with some of the things I've read by Middle Eastern authors.
Without looking it up, the Georgia sodomy law was likely updated due to a homosexual couple getting arrested for acts that likely would not have gotten a heterosexual couple arrested. (I'm from Georgia. I remember reading stuff.)
Laws tend to get enforced somewhat unevenly. Sometimes that gets done to pursue justice, like in the above example of giving a sex offender 142 counts for a particular assault. Other times, it gets done due to bias or due to someone violating other "rules."
Of course, outsiders are at very real risk of stepping on toes and doing something stupid that could get them arrested for something that locals don't normally get arrested for. That's always true simply because outsiders don't know the social norms, etc.
If you actually really want to go to the World Cup and -- by God! -- GET LAID, let me suggest you worry less about culturally uninformed click-bait rage-fests and more about figuring out the secret handshake that probably exists.
Now for some chill time:
The first sentence in the article reads "Any extramarital sexual encounter (...) could result in a seven-year jail sentence."When I was 18 or 19, one of my college classes covered the fact that a long list of sexual acts was illegal in the state of Georgia. At that time, oral sex was classified as sodomy though the legal expert guest lecturer assured us this really only got used to add extra counts in cases of sexual assault and was not generally enforced.
So you commit sexual assault and find yourself facing like 142 counts of this, that and the other because every single thing you did will get catalogued under SOME law or other and added to your list of crimes so they can throw the book at you.
But generally speaking, no one really cared what you did behind closed doors in a consenting relationship. A quick google gets me an article suggesting those laws have likely been updated in the last three decades and now explicitly state that it's only sodomy in cases of sexual assault or a few other situations, like involving public indecency.
Wherever you live in the world, there will be a difference between what is technically illegal and what actually gets vigorously enforced. This ends up being a touchy subject when it comes to sex.
I don't know a heckuva lot about Islam or Middle Eastern culture. What little I do know is mostly not from Google, thanks.
No, what little I do know comes in part from talking to people online back when I was very ill and had terrible insomnia. From about 2am to 5am, if I wasn't talking to people in places like Syria, Iran or Pakistan, I had nothing to do to try to prevent myself from slashing my wrists.
So that was MY motive for talking to people online. This was likely their motive, a photo of me sharing my "Christmas spirit" sans veil or hijab:
I am not wealthy enough to have any hope of traveling to the World Cup and if I were I would be highly unlikely to have a one night stand with a stranger. For an American, I'm fairly conservative and hard to get next to, so I was always rather amused by the seeming assumption that I was a loose American woman.
I'm appalled by Westerners who know seemingly even less than I do jumping to really ugly conclusions about the culture there. Just because you don't know the secret handshake for that part of the world concerning things like casual sex doesn't mean there isn't one.
Here is a woman commenting in that discussion about actually traveling in a conservative country. Her remarks fit with some of the things I've read by Middle Eastern authors.
Without looking it up, the Georgia sodomy law was likely updated due to a homosexual couple getting arrested for acts that likely would not have gotten a heterosexual couple arrested. (I'm from Georgia. I remember reading stuff.)
Laws tend to get enforced somewhat unevenly. Sometimes that gets done to pursue justice, like in the above example of giving a sex offender 142 counts for a particular assault. Other times, it gets done due to bias or due to someone violating other "rules."
Of course, outsiders are at very real risk of stepping on toes and doing something stupid that could get them arrested for something that locals don't normally get arrested for. That's always true simply because outsiders don't know the social norms, etc.
If you actually really want to go to the World Cup and -- by God! -- GET LAID, let me suggest you worry less about culturally uninformed click-bait rage-fests and more about figuring out the secret handshake that probably exists.
Now for some chill time: