While it's not a particularly happy thing to think about, I'm not talking about their nuclear weapons program and the amount of plutonium/uranium they may or may not have processed.
I'm talking about a far more outrageous incident
Police in Iran have arrested a group of mostly female actors who were making pornographic films, a crime that carries the death penalty under the country's Islamic laws, local media reported today.
U.S. politicians have always liked to talk about how the Iranian people are some of the most modern and pro-Western people in the Middle East.
Apparently they were right.
Dr Naser Fakouhi, one of Iran's leading sociologists and the head of anthropology at Tehran University, has warned that the country's huge number of young people – roughly 70% of the population are aged under 35 – has caused an explosion in internet pornography and the rapid growth of an underground industry.
Seems like Doc Fakouhi (I hope that's pronounced how I think it is!) has acquired an awful lot of knowledge of the subject-no doubt entirely for research purposes.
One of the causes not mentioned in the article is that unlike the rest of the Middle East, Iran does not speak Arabic.
As such, they may have a harder time fulfilling their pornography needs by viewing Israeli porn sites, like much of the rest of the Middle East.
Data also shows that 10 percent of the visitors to the most popular sex site in Israel, Domina, are Arabic speakers. "That is because we offer content in their language," said Tzahi who operates the site.
Nothing seems to stop the porn-consuming Saudi, not even technical difficulties: "In many places Israel is blocked, at times the entire suffix ".co.il" is blocked. Users connect through proxy servers and reach us that way," he said.
Some sites have capitalized on it to the extent that they have tried to advance the peace process through porn. Nir Shahar describes his own porn site:
After installing software that could detect where users are logging on, managers of the site found they were receiving thousands of hits a week from folks in Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq, even though the Israeli net domain .il is blocked from some of these countries.
"We were amazed to find a huge amount of our users from these countries," says Nir Shahar, who manages the site. "We cannot accept money from many of these countries, so they can't download the films. They can only look at the pictures."
To make up for the lack of local download access in those countries, Shahar decided to translate the entire site into Arabic, with detailed descriptions of each scene and plenty more pics. Traffic went up tenfold, with the site receiving up to 100,000 hits a week from Arab auds.
...
"Arab people usually see female Israeli soldiers in a bad situation, so there's a lot of curiosity to see what Israeli girls look like without any uniforms," says Shahar. "We don’t make regular porn films. Our films parody the situation in Israel, so we look at issues like the elections here and Mossad. There is a lot of relevance to the Arab-Israeli situation."