Frederick Quinn makes the following observation concerning the depiction of Muslim women in many French Orientalist paintings: “A turn of an arm or of the head or a bit of curving flesh became sexually suggestive, representing the permissive East, a theme never far below the surface in such works. Languid women with fetching smiles, their nipples covered with see-through gauze, sans pubic hair, and reclining in inviting positions on comfortable divans became staples of the Orientalist artistic repertoire.” Quinn and other scholars today recognize that many Orientalist depictions of Muslim women reveal more about the European male imagination and its particular erotic and sexual desires than about the complex circumstances under which women in the Middle East or North Africa lived.

Green, Todd H, The Fear of Islam_ An Intro…, loc. 199