People have a natural interest in sex. Without sex, we wouldn't be here. And yet, we seem to have a love-hate relationship with sexuality. To many Westerners sex is a gift from God but we should only experience this gift under certain limited situations. To others, sex is at best a necessary evil and shouldn't even be discussed.
But people will talk. If it's not polite to talk about what your friends do in private, it's okay to talk about people in a far-away country. That way, you can work out your psychological need to discuss sexuality while taking an pseudo-anthropological approach to this discussion. This is exactly what happened in Victorian Britain, where "proper" people who would