The lack of insight by Americans into how strange American ways of being are to the rest of the world is almost perfectly captured in this story: American Sex and the Middle East. The point of the story is that people in the middle east find American actions and attitudes in regard to sexual relations incomprehensible and baffling. This is the final para:

I don’t know how California’s sexual consent on campus code will strike Middle Easterners once they get wind of it. When they learn that the codes are being imposed because elite young Americans are so often hammered, let alone that on a regular basis they cavort around their coed dorms like horny satyrs and nymphs, they will not be surprised. Their default expectation of us is already one of disgust at our immodesty, disrespect, materialism and impatience. Will they find any of this as funny as I do? Well, I’m headed back to the Arab Gulf for a few days later this month, and I intend to ask. I’ll let you know what I find out.

What’s so special about the Middle East when it comes to this? I suppose having been brought up in the culture and having watched it evolve, I have some understanding of what is going on but it is still incomprehensible and baffling, specially if the aim of it all is to find peace, contentment and a satisfying life. It just looks to me as a world that has spun out of control with absolutely no mechanism to bring it back into a sensible orbit.

[From Instapundit]