The Seraglio
The term "seraglio" (once used in Europe to refer to the women's palace area) was conflated with that of 'harem,' and imagined to be an imprisoned group of women kept by the sultan. In fact, the 'harem' was simply the women's quarters of the palace, and there is much evidence to imply that the women therein had more access to education and free movement than most of their western counterparts.
Hsu-Ming Teo writes that the harem became emblematic of the national identity-building of the time, in which the Ottoman empire had been assumed to contain "all the characteristics of a society that came to be satirized in European pornography: corrupt, tyrannical power; oppressive state and religious institutions; hypocritical social mores; and, importantly, the vision of an alternative --possibly utopian--sexual arrangement to that of Europe" (Rethinking the Racial Moment: Essays on the Colonial Encounter, Edited by Brookes and Holland, 34).
