I stole that title from a one-liner I heard on The Blue Collar Comedy tour, but I feel it applies quite well to our readings. The knee-jerk reaction of the husband who discovers that his wife is sleeping with another man – as found in The Arabian Nights – is to kill them both, and with one stroke if possible. As you can probably guess, I’ve been wondering with exceeding wonder about the way adultery is portrayed in The Arabian Nights, and how that contrasts to the way we tend to see it in the west. In a traditional western story, when a wife commits adultery, it’s usually because her husband isn’t satisfying her. So she looks elsewhere – oftentimes to the village priest or some other “unlikely” figure – for gratification, and we all share a laugh over how she was able to get away with it. In the few eastern stories we’ve read, the prevailing trend is that the women sleep with other men – usually black slaves as Kathryn pointed out – with no apparent motive. Unlike the western story, where the circumstances of the adultery contribute to the humor, the eastern story robs us of this background, and makes us accept that the woman is sleeping around merely because she can. I’ll probably come back to this topic later, after we have a little more foundation to base our conclusions on, but for now, I’d like to return to the matter of the wive’s overwhelming lover of choice.
Why a black slave? The answer to that is simple: because in arabia, africans were foreigners, and every culture attributes some sort of sexual supremacy to outsiders. Don’t believe me? Look at our own culture. Black men are supposedly “gifted” in certain areas of the anatomy. Asian women are supposed to possess some innate skill in the bedroom that will fulfill a man beyond his wildest dreams. The list goes on and on, and many of these same stereotypes existed in the Islamic world of which we read. So the fact that the wife of a sultan is seeking her pleasure with a black slave serves one main purpose: to establish the wife as a faithless nymphomaniac. Since the sexual prowess of black men is so legendary, naturally, that’s who she will choose as her lover. The fact that he is a slave just reinforces the fact that she cares for naught but her satisfaction, flingling class and social taboo to the wayside.
I’m not necessarily sure what any of this means – if anything – and I realize that I may just be reading too far into a minor detail, but while the jury is out on that, I leave you with this: