Pleasure of Her Sex, Part 5

Part 5

On the other hand…

That said, not all discussions about the importance and benefits of sexual intercourse and a women’s right to pleasure came to the same conclusion. And sometimes one author would express two different views in different types of texts. One example of this is clearly illustrated in Peter Pormann’s article “Al-Razi on the Benefits of Sex: A Clinician Caught Between Philosophy and Medicine.” In this essay, Pormann notes the two different stories al-Razi tells about the effects of sexual intercourse on the body in his philosophical book on Spiritual Medicine and on his medical treatise On Sexual Intercourse. The former, Pormann notes, “warns against the harmful effects of sexual intercourse” (134); al-Razi writes that it “‘weakens the eyesight, wrecks and exhausts the body, speeds up aging, senility, and withering, damages the brain and the nerves, and renders the [bodily] strength weak and feeble, in addition to many other conditions which would take too long to mention’” (as quoted in Pormann, 134). In contrast, On Sexual Intercourse “list[s] various diseases and debilities which can result from having sex, they also stress, in various degrees, its benefits” (134). 

     While the benefits described seem largely to be for men (or not explicitly indicated), al-Razi also addresses specific benefits for women: “Moreover, the pain called ‘suffocation of the womb (ikhtinaq al-arham) occurs in women only because of the loss of sexual intercourse (fuqdan al-jima), and no remedy is better than it [sex]” (136). Pormann also notes a late ninth-century Christian (of Greek origin, living in Syria) author, Qusta b. Luqa, wrote a precursor to al-Razi’s. His texts (he wrote two treatises on the subject of sexual intercourse) also address the diseases that benefit from sexual intercourse (and of course the pleasure derived), as well as those that occur from abstaining. Of particular interest to the point of women’s right (and by necessity) to pleasure from intercourse is Qusta b. Luqa’s note that “women suffer more than men from not having sex because they are afflicted by the suffocation of the womb (ikhtinaq al-rahim) and apnoes (butlan al-nafas) because of excess semen” (140). Pormann suggests that Qusta b. Luqa “seems to have had a particular concern for the sexual health of women” (141), which we also see in the tenth-century Provisions noted above. 

      Al-Razi also notes that, generally speaking, sex is “extremely useful against madness and melancholy, and a powerful remedy for diseases caused by phlegm…and improves their digestion” (136). The benefits noted in al-Razi’s texts are clearly physical (and psychological), but unlike Ibn al- Jazzār and the later al-Ghazali’s “Book of Marriage” and al-Jawziyya’s Medicine of the Prophet, al-Razi separates the physical benefits of pleasure in sexual intercourse from the spiritual—in part perhaps because he takes an opposing view on sexual intercourse in Spiritual Medicine: “this desire [ladhadha i.e., for sex] is the one which deserves most to be rejected, for it is not necessary for staying alive as food and drink are” (as quoted on Pormann, 139). There is a general sense here that desires generally are problematic, but none, perhaps more so than sexual desire, which isn’t, in this text anyway, required for health. These seemingly contradictory positions give us a tantalizing view into the complicated and nuanced cultural negotiation between certain medical and spiritual texts.