Sex Manuals in Malay Manuscripts as Another Transcript of Gender Relations

This article interprets the narratives of sex manuals produced within the Malay-Indonesian archipelago before the coming of Western colonialism and the dawn of postcolonial Islamic resurgence. In the collection of Malaysian libraries and museums, these manuscripts are largely classified as Kitab Jimak and Kitab Tib. They are all written in the Malay language with indigenous references, though the contents are likely derived from a common genre of texts transmitted from an early Arab-Islamic world and circulated within the region before the coming of European colonialism. The corpora of sexual knowledge in these texts emphasises the valorisation of sexual pleasure in conjugal relationships. Through an extensive list of prescriptions—from sexual techniques to diet, food taboos, medicine, pharmacopoeia, mantras, charms, and astrological knowledge—a near-sacral sexual experience is aspired. Couples are guided in their attainment of pleasure (nikmat) through the adherence of Islamic ethics (akhlak), rules (hukum), and etiquette (tertib). The fulfilment of women’s desire in the process is central in these observances. Nevertheless, despite placing much emphasis on mutual pleasure, these texts also contain ambiguous and paradoxical pronouncements on the position of women, wavering from veneration to misogyny. The article also highlights how intertextual studies of similar texts throughout the Islamic world can be a new focus of studies on the early history of gender and sexuality in Islam.

“Abusers of Themselves with Mankind”: On the Constitutive Necessity of Abuse in Evangelical Sex Manuals

In this essay, I recount the recent narrative of an evangelical awakening on issues of sexual violence though the impact of Rachael Denhollander, an advocate and survivor of sexual trauma. Denhollander’s evangelical credentials authorized fellow US evangelicals to sympathize with the #MeToo movement. I then show how this script of awakening obscures a long history of abuse in relation to LGBTQ persons of faith. I demonstrate how American evangelical sex manuals make abuse both constitutive to a genuine discovery of personhood and simultaneously marginal to one’s self-identification. Paradox becomes a framework for describing the “problem” of homosexuality in evangelical circles. Finally, I reflect on what it suggests to scholars of religion that a religious community ensconces abuse in this distinctive way.

Surviving the “Sexplosion”: Christianity Today and Evangelical Sexual Ethics in the Long 1960s

This paper examines how the editors and contributors to Christianity Today (CT) called for an evangelical sexual ethics in the 1960s. Editors and contributors alike were concerned that the supposed sexual immorality on college campuses, the liberalization of obscenity laws, the approval and sale of the birth control, and secular sex education programs threatened the United States’ social health. They believed that evangelicals needed to learn how to talk about sex, and this belief resulted in the development of conservative Protestant sex manuals by the middle of the 1970s. Overall, talk about sex in the pages of CT demonstrates that evangelicals are neither anti-sex nor traditionalists. They instead forged a new sexual ethic in response to the historical events and developments of the 1960s.

Sex Education in Pesantren: The Study of Kitab on Sex Manuals in Pesantren in Bandung, West Java

This paper examines the sexual agency exercised by married Muslim women in Bandung, Indonesia, in their marital relationships. Dominant discourses teach that women should obey their husbands, and most women believe that they should serve their husbands sexually whenever required. Sex is a taboo subject and women should not discuss sex or initiate sex. Their sexual desire is not acknowledged. However, in-depth interviews with 42 married women, and some husbands, found that a few exceptional women managed to challenge or negotiate around these dominant discourses. The paper examines their exercise of agency with regard to the initiation of sex, positions and practices that they prefer, their ability to say no to sex, ways to avoid having sex and their demand for mutual pleasure in sex.

Slaves for Pleasure in Arabic Sex and Slave Purchase Manuals from the Tenth to the Twelfth Centuries

Women probably made up the majority of the slave population in the medieval Islamic world, most of them used for domestic service. As men were legally permitted to have sexual relations with their female slaves, enslaved women could be used for sexual service. Erotic compendia and sex manuals were popular literature in the premodern Islamic world, and are potentially rich sources for the history of sex slavery, especially when juxtaposed with legal writings. This article uses Arabic sex manuals and slave purchase manuals from the tenth to the twelfth century to investigate the attitudes toward sexual slavery during this period, as well as the changing ethnicities and origins of slaves, and the use of legal manipulations.

Moral Lessons

This chapter discusses the tensions between advocates of Christianity and those of Man: A Course of Study (MACOS). Throughout the 1970s, alternative Christian radio and television shows gained in popularity, as did Christian movies, sex manuals, textbooks, and universities. As a young ambitious lawyer, John Conlan sought to channel this energy, transforming his constituents' collective outrage into political action. When he entered the fray against MACOS in the early spring of 1975, trouble had already been brewing for the curriculum. The shifting political landscape of the early 1970s caught Man: A Course of Study (MACOS) designers by surprise. They had taken the progressive nature of humanity's deep history for granted, but this was precisely how critics of Man: A Course of Study (MACOS) attacked the curriculum's sincere embrace of anthropological cultural relativism and its secular undertones.

Heterosexercising women’s sexual pleasure in Finnish sex manuals

This article examines the ways in which heterosexual women’s sexual pleasure becomes a subject of exercise in Finnish sex manuals published between 2005 and 2015. Our research focuses on the production of the heterosexual mindscape, and how women are encouraged to engage in exercise and adopt a heterosexual state of mind in order to increase their sexual pleasure. Our analysis demonstrates how power constitutes, through sex manuals, paradoxical subject positions for heterosexual women. These manuals take into account both gender and sexual equality for the sake of women’s greater sexual enjoyment, but at the same time they continue to maintain gendered power imbalances and sexism. Throughout the article, we use the term ‘heterosexercise’ as an analytical tool to examine this complexity and to understand the production of heterosexuality as a state of mind.

Pornography and the Novel

This chapter explains how the emerging novel has not only the problem of how to fend off the widespread accusation of lubricity, but also the corresponding problem of what to do with sex when desire drives the plot. There was no clear category of ‘pornographic’ writing during this period. Modern collections of early sex-writing contain medical treatises, smutty poems, law cases, and translations from Continental sex manuals. These clandestine classics overlap with some early types of novel, in period and often setting, in their anti-authoritarian slant, and their scepticism towards everything except the power of bodily desires. The corpus of proto-pornography, inchoate as it was, was not a sufficient matrix for the novel, still less a discursive origin for it, so much as an oblique presence at the margins of vision.

The Foreskin Aesthetic or Ugliness Reconsidered

This article argues that to understand the role and place of the foreskin, we must address the aesthetic question that sits at its root. North American media often describe the foreskin as “ugly,” “gross,” or pejoratively “European”; all of which present, fundamentally, an aesthetic comment on what is pleasing. As such, this article investigates the aesthetic discourse surrounding the foreskin in relation to a range of materials that speak at or around the foreskin. In particular, it looks at sources deemed to be “common”—sex manuals, pregnancy manuals, and film and television—alongside theoretical and scientific studies. Undertaking a close reading of these materials, this article sheds light on the striking similarities that these distinct bodies of literature share and the way that aesthetics undergirds their arguments, often as a silent statement rather than exerted forcefully. Through this argument, this article breaks new ground on the way that we consider the foreskin, and, importantly, the aestheticization processes that shape our understanding of this seemingly ancillary component of the penis. Accordingly, this article contributes to a growing body of scholarship on the politics of the foreskin and circumcision by shifting the debate to consider the aesthetic.