Hot, Steamy Kurdish Action

It's not often that I have the opportunity to write something uplifting about the situation in the Middle East. It had become such an unthinkable quagmire, reading the news about the region resembles reading a Stephen King novel - it's gripping, a bit frightening, and you just know the ending's going to be incredibly lame.

But lo and behold, today, thanks to alert blogger PSoTD, I have read some good news about Iraq. The citizens there are discovering the joys of dirty movies!

Movies featuring sex scenes and nudity are becoming more popular across Iraq because of the end of Saddam-era censorship, when officials would regularly visit cinemas to make
sure they were not showing porn and other banned films.

But because Sulaimaniyah is free of religious extremists and other militants - who target liquor stores and other “immoral” commercial enterprises in other parts of Iraq - business is even more brisk.

Okay, granted, this particular news item deals with movie theaters in Kurdish-controlled territory, which is a lot more cool and laid back than the rest of Iraq. The Kurds are like the Fonzie to the Sunni Triangle's uptight Richie Cunningham. Or, failing that, Tom Bosley.

But still, this is good news. It proves once again that Arab people, despite the fiery, anti-infidel image they've gotten on TV, are really just like everyone else. After a long day of goat farming, they just want to relax by going to their town's lone movie house and watching a poorly-subtitled vaguely dirty movie in the desperate hope that some crazed religious nut doesn't blow up the place with a homemade fertilizer bomb. You know, just like anyone.

Ahmed Abdul-Hussein, a Baghdad resident, is in Sulaimaniyah looking for work in construction. In his free time, he sometimes goes to see movies featuring sex scenes.

"I'm here for 15 days, away from my wife,” said Abdul-Hussein, 40, who has four children. “I come to the cinema to see these films to satisfy a few of my sexual desires."

Hey, that's awesome! Iraqis have discovered the joys of public masturbation! We'll globalize these suckers yet, just you wait. Give it a few years, and everyone in Tikrit will be watching Tera Patrick blowing some guy in digital quality on their new Sony PSPs.

Dilshad Mustafa, who is responsible for media in Iraqi Kurdistan’s ministry of culture, said there’s real demand for these movies and the government allows them so as not to be accused of censorship.

"Yes some cinemas in Sulaimaniyah only show sex and seduction films,” Mustafa said. “The reason is that a large number of young people turn out to watch these films, increasing profits for the cinema owners.”

Dilshad sounds genuinely surprised that young Iraqi guys prefer porno to other kinds of films. That's a touch naive, no? In America, porn outgrosses traditional films, publishing and the music industry combined, people! And these Iraqis haven't really been exposed to this kind of thing before. It's almost amazing the entire adolescent male population of Iraq hasn't spontaneously combusted from over-stimulation at this point. We could show them dirty American movies from 40 years ago and it would seem outrageous. The sight of Rita Hayworth showing off her calves could send them into epileptic fits.

The fashion for pornography, though, often angers other cinema-going audiences. “Families can not go to the cinemas nowadays because the movies are immoral, and because the audiences are mostly drunk,” said Baghdad resident Kareem al-Nedawi, reflecting a widely-held view.

Immoral? Full of drunk people? Sounds like most American family activities to me. Americans take their kids to baseball games, and those have more alcoholism on display than an afterparty at Errol Flynn's house.

I'd also just like to say that, before I die, I'd like to attend a porno screening with a theater full of drunk Iraqis. And when I say "before I die," I mean it literally, because I'm fairly certain a roomfull of drunk Iraqis would attempt to murder my Jew ass as soon as the feature ended.