The Pleasure of Her Sex: Medieval Women’s Right to Pleasure
One need only to open the New York Times and see the current debate about Flibanserin, the (one) drug designed to address female sexual “dysfunction,” or Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder, to get a small taste of the minefield that is part of the debate over women’s sexual pleasure and reproductive rights (by the way there are over thirty drugs for male sexual dysfunction). From “Insurance Won’t Pay for Women to Have Pleasurable Sex” (one CNN headline reads, June 29, 2016) it’s a short search to the multitude of other conversations about women’s sexuality, popular and scientific: are women’s orgasms better than men’s? Is female orgasm necessary?, to name just a few related to sexual pleasure.
In addition, it’s not surprising that women’s sexual and reproductive rights are a global issue, negotiated in political, economic, social, and religious terrains. To wit, the 1995 United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women and Girls Platform for Action in Beijing articulated the right of women to have “safe and satisfying” sex lives. The 2014 International Conference on Population and Development, which purports (going back to the first meeting in Cairo in 1994) that “fulfilling the rights of women and girls is central to development,” and argues for “prioritizing the rights of young people -- in terms of education, sexual and reproductive health” (http://www.unfpa.org/icpd#sthash.GRPRen0D.dpuf). That’s all well and good in principle. But when the rubber hits the road in terms of practice, it seems that’s another story. Take the practice of Female Genital Mutilation. According to the United Nations Population Fund (United Nations Fund for Population Activities), over 200 million girls and women have been subjected to FGM. The majority of these women live in Sub-Saharan Africa, but this practice occurs in “Asia and Latin America and amongst migrant populations in Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand” (http://www.unfpa.org/resources/female-genital-mutilation-fgm-frequently-asked-questions#sthash.IHWaPxrR.dpuf). According to “Equality Now,” more the 513,000 women in the US have had, or at risk for, FGM (http://www.equalitynow.org/sites/default/files/EN_FAQ_FGM_in_US.pdf). This is not a path to “safe and satisfying sex.” And this doesn’t include the number of sex re-assignment surgeries that lead to loss of genital sensation. Clearly, some women don’t have the same right to pleasure as others.
And if we look at the number of women who suffer from Post Coital Dysphoria, we see that, even when women seem to have a right to pleasure, they don’t feel we deserve it somehow. In one study, 49 percent of female university students experience PCD. A 2011 study in the International Journal of Sexual Health reported that “a third of women said they felt depressed even after satisfactory sex” (The Independent, Tuesday, 6 October 2015). While FGM and PCD don’t particularly compare in terms of relative pain and suffering, we can see cultures worldwide are a long way from providing education and a culture that promotes women (and men) embracing their own right to pleasure.
The topic of women’s right to pleasure was at least as vexed (and varied) in the Middle Ages, and no less global. In this inquiry, I look briefly at different, but interacting, perspectives: Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Indian. A comparative inquiry of this type has (at least) two stories. One tells of a complicated past that might belie our modern day imagination about how female sexual desire was constructed, controlled, and represented. The other draws us to our present day narratives about female sexual desire. Such a narrative might help us to peel back our own various notions about female sexual desire, and what is behind the various ways we attempt to manage, liberate, and adjudicate it, locally and globally. Cross-cultural inquiry, as Sahar Amer notes, “reveals the historical and ideological power structures that construct discursive representations of sexualities” (“Cross-Dressing and Female Same-Sex Marriage in Medieval French and Arabic Literatures” 81). While Amer focuses on the relationship between medieval Islamicate and French representations of female same-sex marriage, the general principle applies to the relationship between the medieval Muslim, Christian, Jewish, and Hindu women’s right to pleasure—that in exploring the multiple ways in which a women’s right to pleasure is defined, managed, represented, and prescribed, we gain a deeper understanding of the power structures at play, as well as modes of resistance to those ideologies.
