Well-known photographers from Helmut Newton to Guy Bourdin are among those who gained fame by portraying women as objects of desire. An exhibition in Berlin features their provocative works.

The monstrous feminine: a vessel for male pleasures, her “promiscuity” often cited as a symptom of feminine malaise and corruption. This hypersexualisation of the Oriental female was used as a rhetorical strategy to heighten the nature of her angelic nature of her Occidental counterpart.

Nowadays credited to a fifteenth-century Egyptian polymath called Jalal adʹDin al-Suyuti, “The Book of Exposition” is an exploration of promiscuity under the societal constraints of the Arab-Islamic world, using bawdy and salacious scenarios to stimulate and evoke fantasies in the readerʹs mind.