I’m not alone in this ignorance. It seems to be widespread in this age of sexual decadence in which we all now live. I have only to read the questions on sex in the Internet magazine Elaph to discover the extent of Arab sexual deprivation. I picture the specialist pulling out his hair as he writes up his findings. How can we talk about sex education when even a rudimentary knowledge of anatomy is still to be acquired?
Yesterday, I happened upon the response of an exasperated physician: “Looking for the hymen in the Arab World has become like looking for a needle in a haystack . . . And waiting for girls to acquire a sound sexual culture is like waiting for Godot.” In the fifteenth century, the sheik al-Suyuti authored a book for use by women on the art of making love, but the readers of Elaph would not understand a word of it: you may as well give a Neanderthal woman a book on computer programming.
Young men are no better off. Indeed, the number of questions they ask regarding the length of the penis (in repose, erect, at half-mast, real and ideal) would be worthy of the Guinness Book of Records.
Every time I venture into this terrain I am more convinced than ever that those who read the old books on sex will be sure to avoid the pitfalls of deprivation. It follows therefore that bringing these books out into the light is a matter of public well-being. We must no longer fear them, but recite from them publicly. We must no longer hide them, but bring them into the open.
This idea will form the conclusion of my study. I shall call for these books to be republished again and again, to be distributed, to be taught.
Hungry for knowledge, I forced myself to explore the word of Arab erotica on my own. I studied our literature assiduously at university, but not one of my professors ever mentioned these ancient texts. When I talk about them, I discover how few of those around me have read them and learnt from them. Several years ago, a literary magazine published the various names used for the male member, as found in one of the erotic tomes. This caused a minor scandal: everyone reads magazines, but books are hidden, reserved for those curious souls who search them out.
During a semi-official banquet, the director of the library, a Frenchman, came out with a witticism: the supine position, he said, was best for both bottles of wine and women. Everyone denounced his shamelessly sexist pronouncement. I reflected that if he could say such a thing aloud he probably didn’t think it through. I have learnt life lying down. I don’t think I lay down in order to learn, but learning came in concentrated form in the arms of a man.
Yesterday, in my friend Fadia’s office, I found myself gazing at her and thinking that her chastity belt was strangling her, that her beauty needed years of rolling around on the body of a man to emerge. He should rub her skin, at length, as though she was in a bathhouse, and only then her self would be exacted from the layers of imposed abstinence. Indeed, he should rub and rub until he had expunged all the bad, stagnant blood. Only then would she make peace with her body and with the world.
I know she’s caught in a vicious circle: she cannot learn on her own, and for the moment the man is absent. Her initial education cannot succeed without a man. There is no denying that the man makes things easier, facilitates a woman’s apprenticeship. Where is that man? Why has his path not crossed Fadia’s? Why has he not seen in her the radiance that I see? Why does she live alone, her fire consuming her?
The scenario is unchanging. Fadia and I begin by talking about work and then the discussion drifts elsewhere. How, that day, did we get started on the subject of sex education? Why did the conversation wander off?
“No one taught us how to behave around boys,” she complained. “No one taught us how to decipher that unknown world, a completely different world.”
“When we’re small, we are taught. When we get older, we teach ourselves,” I replied.
They didn’t teach us? Indeed. But I did not want anyone to teach me. I learn on my own, filching my knowledge from the one I’m learning from. I learn by pretending to be blind, deaf, and dumb.
Fadia was still talking, but I’d lost the thread . . .
“My mother worked it out only recently. She’s proud of us now. She says, ‘My daughters are as independent as men. They work and live on their own. Like men.’”
“Like men?”
“She’s not used to seeing women lead that sort of life. For her, a woman has to be kept.”
Fadia said, “Men are afraid of independent women.”
Fadia said, “I’m waiting for a faithful man before I commit.”
“Well then, you’ll stay single,” I joked, hoping my laughter would soften my words.
“Why? There have to be some faithful people in this world. My mother was faithful to my father. My brother is faithful to his wife.”
“How can you talk about other people with such confidence?”
“I’ll put my hand in the fire if they’re not faithful.”
“Don’t promise to put your hand in the fire unless you’re speaking for yourself. Other people, whoever they may be, are full of secrets.”
“I’m sure of what I’m saying,” she said, over and over again.
I said nothing and she changed the subject. “Women talk too much. We don’t know where to stop or how to stop. They didn’t teach us.”
I told her about the latest episode of the American serial Sex and the City. The heroine is making love with a man who is sucking her breasts and murmuring sweet nothings. She reacts: she is not his mother, he isn’t a suckling child but a man and so he shouldn’t call her breasts by such ridiculous childish names, or suck her nipples that way, because she’s a woman whom he desires and not a wet-nurse, and so on. During her lecture, the man’s erection droops and finally collapses altogether. In the end, he puts on his clothes and departs, and she sits there with her eyebrows raised in astonishment, wondering why on earth he has left. The viewer understands very well that she should have shut up and left him to suckle her breasts until he was satisfied. Until they were both satisfied. But the heroine didn’t understand.
Fadia and I had a good laugh. Then she objected, “Still, it’s unacceptable, what he did, absolutely inadmissible.”
“You’re a lost cause.”
I love to learn, but I don’t know how to teach others. Nor does Ibtisam, my closest girl friend. We’ve known each other since childhood, but I don’t remember that we ever shared our discoveries. When we were in love, we wouldn’t give away any details. On occasion, we’d talk about trivial things where love was involved, but never sex, as if we belonged to some sisterhood of angels. As married women, we’ve had a lot of children, but again, even today, we never venture beyond mere allusions.
When I see in films nowadays how young girls talk to one another, I’m astonished by the tone of their shared secrets, so different from our own as girls. Intimate talk is a true cultural exchange. I’ve experienced it at times, but only with women I’ve met by chance, in passing. Never with my closest girl friends, or even with my sisters. Not even after we got married.
The only woman who ever shared the details of her sex life was Rihab, and I listened to her with curiosity. Both of us were expatriates; no doubt this circumstance had helped certain Arab women to free themselves from the tyranny of dissimulation, both orally and in writing.
For a program on the French cultural radio station, a Lebanese director working in France questioned young men and women of Arab origin on their sex lives. In dialectal Arabic with simultaneous French translation, their testimonies were remarkably frank and courageous. They could speak like that because they knew they were addressing a Western audience on a Western program. In any event, no Arab station would ever broadcast such material.
Rihab broke the Law of Dissimulation with vulgar, crude language. She came to Paris from a traditional environment and works with us at the library. Her veiled sisters, whose photos were prominently displayed on the walls in her office, never let us out of their sight whenever she was relating the adventures of her sex life, as if they were so many medals. She was a
greedy woman, both in her manner of talking and of eating. I would laugh along and feign interest. Her stories were always about the latest man in her life, never more than a fleeting presence . . . and who could blame them. Rihab was irritating, exasperating, annoying. Not a single man had ever been able to stay. The first man was seeking a way to obtain legal residence in France for himself and his girl friend; so his arranged marriage with Rihab lasted the time it took for his fiancée to get her papers. Once the divorce was finalized, he went back to his girl friend and married her. Rihab cannot keep track of how many men have followed in his footsteps.
Perhaps it was her stories about men that bound me to her. If I put up with her breathless panting as she delivered her frenetic descriptions, it was, after all, to hear her stories.
“He was at the lady next door’s. He didn’t even try to deny it. When I accused him of being unfaithful, he answered quite simply, ‘I was helping her in the garden. Why are you making a drama out of it?’”
“So why were you making a drama out of it?” I asked, thinking of the series Desperate Housewives, with Gabrielle Solis and her gardener lover.
“Imagine! He dared to say such a thing, and look me in the eyes as he said it. And after everything I’d done for him.”
In the previous episode, Rihab had fed and housed and married the man, “according to the Law of God and His Messenger” at the mosque in Paris, while waiting for the civil marriage at City Hall, just so that the young student could obtain his permanent residence papers.
“For a year he’d had nowhere to sleep. I rescued him. You know, the first time he came to my place was to do some repair work. I’d just moved in and he offered to help. The moment he was in there he never left again.”
Her hysterical giggling punctuated her sentences like so many ellipses.
“He was a student on paper, that’s all. He already had a university degree. In fact, when I met him he was selling vegetables at the market, to get by. No sooner did he move in with me than he quit working.”
“He wanted to devote himself to you full-time, a perfectly honorable commitment,” I said, as serious as could be.
She chuckled again, as though she were recalling happy memories.
“From the first night he came to my bed.”
Her words slowed a moment in the silence of the office, then she concluded, “It was my fault. That’s what happens when they have nothing to do. Helping the neighbor in her garden! I’ll teach him manners. He’ll see.”
Her expression became nostalgic.
“You know what I like about him? The moment I touch his thing it goes stiff. Ready at any time. He must have had withdrawal symptoms before he even got to Paris. At home, the only thing he had was masturbation. For a penniless student, the prostitutes were too expensive.”
I admired her lucidity, her clear awareness of the true dimensions of the story. Rihab was the only one who’d go into minute details. I’ve never heard another woman go this far. Men yes, whether they’re friends or not. Most of them are always eager to tell me their adventures, make me share their experience. And me, always the attentive listener, I’ve been an ideal audience, with my insatiable curiosity and my inexhaustible laughter.
There was Anwar. We were colleagues, at the first library where I worked in Paris. When we were along in the big shared office, he’d tell me stories about the girls he’d flirted with in the street or at the café or on the bus or in the metro, or even at the library. He was married and, out of caution, stuck to generalities and allusions.
Albert, too, was married. His stories rubbed me the wrong way because they had only one goal, which was to convince me of his immense intellectual, emotional, and sexual prowess, should I ever . . .
Ghadir, a bachelor, shared an abundance of details. His fertile imagination knew no bounds.
In our shared office I was the only woman. Each of the men would take advantage of the others’ absence to tell me his real or invented stories. The effect they had on me was identical: I was entertained, I would open my ears wide and laugh. But their hidden strategies, whether conscious or unconscious, never succeeded, for the only thing I ever opened to them was my ears.
It’s certain that I learnt a lot from these and other stories. I listened lightly, or at least made a show of listening lightly. My comments were evasive, and if one of them was trying to gauge the effect of his words from my expression, all he’d see was an indifferent gaiety. But I’d make notes of everything I heard, then arrange them, classify them, sort them, and learn. Isn’t documentation my profession?
In the midst of a summer heat wave, I return to the old books and to the Thinker, and the world around me is ablaze. Is it what I’m writing that affects what I see? Has the world always been on fire like this?
What’s happening? Sex is everywhere. I open the newspapers and find it on the front page and in the headlines and in the weekly supplements. On television. On the radio. In the old days there had only been Brigitte Lahaie, the porn star. Now her gifted disciples have taken over.
What’s happening this summer? Everyone I meet has an erotic story to share. As if an invisible spark were setting everyone’s thoughts on fire. As though others know instantly what I’m looking for. Are the signs of my sexual curiosity so glaringly obvious?
When did I discover that my curiosity about sex is in fact a thirst for knowledge? I laugh when I read that every woman is the sum total of the men who have passed through her life. “We only learn what we know” was something my brother used to say constantly. From him too I learnt.
The desire for knowledge fuels my desire for men. No, my desire for men fuels my desire for knowledge. To learn, by myself, about desire and pleasure, to learn about others, and about the world. After the Thinker, I began to judge every new man in my life based on his pedagogical qualities above all. The more a man teaches me, the more I love him. After the Thinker, I could no longer put up with a man who couldn’t teach me.
For me, the pleasure of learning went along with the pleasure of sex. The center of pleasure and the center of knowledge got mixed up with each other in my head and fused together inseparably. My sexual curiosity grew deeper, deep as an abyss: those who cross my path cannot help but fall into it.
It is said that the virgin, if she be kept too long from copulation, will suffer from a condition that the physicians call “constriction of the womb,” which leads to delirium and melancholia in the brain, to the extent that she may be thought mad, though she is not; suffice that she be fucked for the ill to vanish immediately.
If I were to say that in front of a militant feminist, she’d declare war on me and accuse me of submitting to male chauvinist ideology.
Fadia. She is a desperate case. “When you’re about to shoot someone, you don’t tell your life story,” says the bad guy in the spaghetti western, before dispatching his chatterbox victim. I repeated this to Fadia but she didn’t find it funny. I laughed on my own. I watched her leave the office and shook my head. I suspect she would be capable of taming even the fiercest erection. It’s clear that she hasn’t learnt a thing. She’s at war with her body and with men’s as well, and it looks like it’ll be a long war.
I’d advise her to read the advice of al-Alfiya, a legendary character whom I consider to be a glorious heroine of women’s liberation.
The first time I came across her in my reading, I was awestruck by the breadth of her knowledge. From her life experience she was able to formulate both theoretical and practical teachings, which she presented to the whole world, the female half in particular. She was a genius. May God bless her.
Al-Jahiz, who relates her teachings to us, celebrates her as being the most learned of all the people of her time with regard to the science of coition. What made him admire her still more was that, like himself, she belonged to that school of scholars who speak only of what they know from personal experience, and who will only teach knowledge acquired through the direct observation of real phenomena.
The words of al-Alfiya have only reached us through their translations into Arabic. According to al-Jahiz, this woman came to us through Indian erotica, and she became a legend passed on by the Arabs, essentially the men, with a certain degree of fear, envy, and admiration. The legend begins with her name. She was called al-Alfiya, “the thousand,” because she had slept with a thousand men. Although “slept” is deceiving . . . As if she had spent a thousand nights sleeping . . . She did not sleep and she would not have let a single man sleep. The books say, precisely, “She fucked a thousand men.” Words were exact, among the Arabs of ancient times. There was no business of sleeping or waking. To “fuck” was the word used.
What is the dictionary definition of the Arabic word for fuck? Are there not a number of verbs with the same meaning? It is said that there are a hundred words or more for the vagina, and a hundred more for the penis, but in fact they never have the same meaning: each word is distinct from the others. I did not count them. What is important, above all, is to catch the nuances.
Al-Alfiya’s response to the issue is methodical and rigorous: there are six basic modes—lying on the back, lying on the side, lying on the stomach, bending over, sitting, and standing up. Within each mode there are at least ten positions, and each position has a name. Sixty positions, then, starting from the easy ones that everyone can apply to the arcane that would never occur to anyone and that call for the physical agility of an athlete and the skill of a circus acrobat.
Al-Alfiya would explain to her female listeners what it was that made love of women spring up in the hearts of men, what men took pleasure in and what they hated in terms of women’s dispositions, and what women had to do to procure men’s desire.
The Proof of the Honey Page 8
