It isn't just Christianity that is rumored by its enemies to have more poorly lit incest than a Supernatural fan-fic convention. A minority Muslim sect called the Alevi faces widespread discrimination in Turkey to this day, because somehow this completely different religion has picked up the exact same rumor about pitch-black religious orgies. Clearly, something about unfamiliar worship services causes the human mind to make the jump to "They're taking their clothes off and sticking their dicks in each other," because variations of this rumor can be found far outside the Muslim world. In Europe from the 15th century onward, witches were the ones rumored to be having sex at secret nighttime religious gatherings. During the 1980s, Americans of all kinds became convinced that Satanist groups were stripping naked and getting it on in their local woods at night, which sounds like a great way to get your Dark Lord to bless you with Lyme disease.

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Those robes are hiding a wicked poison ivy rash.

But what's really weird is that people also believe that ...

Whatever the answers to these eternal questions, it's clear that a lot of us are invested in the idea that People Who Aren't Us are ridiculously repressed about human sexuality. Take the story of Victorians covering chair legs because the word "leg" reminded them of shameful human parts: It started as a myth written by a British travel writer about Americans, and now Americans cling to it as a way to make fun of prudish Victorian Brits. Medieval chastity belts are even more obviously impractical than dick-sheets: Do we really believe that it was common for women to wear a belt that rubs trapped poop all around her chafed genital area during an era when treatment for a UTI probably consisted of doctors trying to beat the E. coli out of you? And yet the belief endures that every Crusader put his wife in one.

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On the plus side, the smell would probably keep unwanted suitors away.

Europeans aren't the only ones who are obsessed with kid-grabbing outsiders, either. China's anti-foreigner Boxer Rebellion in 1900 was caused in part by rumors that a Catholic mission was abducting children, mutilating them, and using their body parts to make medicine. In Guatemala in the '90s, after a civil war led to thousands of displaced children and a rise in foreign adoption, a rumor sprung up that foreigners were actually stealing the orphans' organs and exporting them to the U.S., maybe in order to build some sort of weaponized super-Guatemalan out of all the parts. These rumors led to a riot that left an American woman in a coma.

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"It's set the Guatemala 5000 Project back by at least 30 years."

But at least such xenophobic rumors are behind us now, right? Except that in the distant past of October 2013, our stolen-child sense started tingling again when Greek officials discovered a blonde-haired girl living with a Roma couple who seemed too suspiciously swarthy to be her biological parents. Newspapers started sobbing about the trafficking of tow-headed innocents into poverty-stricken Gypsy compounds, and authorities soon raided Roma households in Ireland and seized several unusually blond children from there as well. After a few days, investigators discovered that the Greek girl had been given to the parents to care for by a lighter-haired Roma woman, a completely normal occurrence in a culture that commonly practices informal adoption. The Irish kids' dusky kidnappers also turned out to have an excuse: They were the biological parents. After that, the media stopped caring about those kids and the poverty that was punching them in the face daily, because they were Gypsies all along, so who gives a shit.

If you're reading this site, you can probably guess the truth about these rumors: Those pickable Japanese noses and Chinese man-tights were gag gifts that aren't sweeping anything but awkward office Christmas parties; the "bagel head" phenomenon turned out to be unknown even among Japan's hardcore body modders; and the "porn star" story came from a quote from a single Iranian photographer. Hell, even Japan's coup de grace of brain-killing weirdness, used-panty vending machines, are far from being on every street corner, as foreigners are wont to believe: They were a brief and quickly banned fad found mainly inside sex shops. And yet the world remains full of otherwise smart people who believe this stuff, because they apparently think that every country but their own is a cartoonish dreamlike realm full of illogical people who wear prosthetic noses on their real noses.

The point here isn't that no one in other countries does strange things: Obviously, there are weirdos everywhere. It's that these fads, if they occurred in our home country, would clearly be seen as fringe, weird-person activities. We might know a dude from college who gets horn implants or marries his iguana or whatever, but we realize that this is not a normal thing. But as soon as a wacky hobby crosses an ocean or two, it suddenly threatens to morph into something that everyone and their mom is doing.

For example, growing up, I knew that my home country of Australia was not like it was on TV. But then I traveled to the U.S. for the first time as a teenager as part of a crocodile-wrestling scholarship, and I immediately noticed that most people were hanging out in groups that were segregated according to race. Furthermore, the majority of menial jobs seemed to be done by non-white people. Holy crap, racial discrimination was still around? Teenager-me was completely shocked.

See, I'd grown up watching North American young-adult television, and it had informed me that American people hung out in healthy, multiracial groups who looked past their skin-deep differences. I was naive, yes, but this sort of error is common. Non-Americans are the first ones to laugh when Americans express their ignorance about our home countries, and yet our idea of America often remains a vague, TV-influenced blob.

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This disconnect means that in many parts of the world, urbane, tolerant people who'd rather set themselves on fire than say something like "I would never travel to the Middle East! I might get blown up by a terrorist!" will have no problem telling you that they're too scared to go to America because "everyone has a gun there!" These people might have American Internet friends who stubbornly remain unshot year after year after year, but their friends' continual aliveness is overridden by the hundreds of movie images these people have in their heads of every single street corner in America being blown up by a slow-motion explosion.

C. Coville wrote this column shortly before being blown up in an explosion. Follow her on Twitter and Tumblr.

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