Boreal

LOVE, SEX & ISLAM

Sex in the Here-And-Now

Huguette

Lucette was a romantic lover who did for me one of the most significant things a woman can do for a man, and that is to give him back his confidence, a lifetime of confidence.

The last woman I befriended before my Lucette was an elementary school teacher, Huguette, who lived on the same floor in my building. Her boyfriend was an out-of-towner who usually visited on weekends and holidays. We did what friends without benefits do together: we shopped for groceries, shared meals, played tennis, went to the beach… Spent what was, for me, a magical summer evening sitting under a tree in Gatineau Park listening to legendary Québec poet, song-writer and singer Gilles Vigneault as the night fell and a canopy of stars lit up the sky.

After moving closer to the school where she was teaching, Huguette invited me over. When she opened the door to let me in, she was wearing a bathrobe. I thought nothing of it. I’d seen her in a bathrobe before. No big deal. She gave me a tour of her new place, ending in her bedroom where, like in a song popular at the time, Stay Awhile by The Bells, she dropped her robe on the floor. Unlike in the song, it did not end well.

All these months as friends with no benefits, all she had allowed was a pat on the behind when congratulations were in order. I had dreamt of this night and becoming her boyfriend, later maybe even her husband. It would turn out to be the most disconcerting evening of my life.

Huguette was a dark-haired, dark-eyed, full-breasted beauty who could rightly have expected that when we were both naked and I grabbed her by her patting place and pulled her against me, she should have felt something between us.

It may have been her first time with someone who could not rise to the occasion. How else could you explain why, lying atop the covers of what was not a waterbed—it was way too early to turn in and this was an invitation to sex, perhaps even love-making—she just looked on as I tried to coax it into cooperating, to no avail?

Perhaps I could have tried pleasing her with my fingers—not that I would not have done that anyway, once I knew I could count on it to do its part when the time came to find a replacement.

Islam allows pleasing a woman through penetration with your fingers, but not with anything other than an appendage of the human body, such as a dildo. Whether an object shaped like a man’s penis can be used during sex actually came up during a discussion between Uzza and the boys: can an impotent husband use his fingers as a substitute to pleasure his wife, and can she pleasure herself with artificial devices?

Bob: I had a girlfriend who swore off sex with men after discovering sex toys. She bragged about having a different man every night of the week who never disappoints.

Uzza: The type of sex toys I think you are referring to are out of the question, such as dildos and latex penises that come in all sizes and shapes and that simulate the real thing.

Bob: So you know about those?

Uzza: It is not what you think, and even if it was, what difference does it make?

Archie: To that virgin of yours, a hell of a lot.

Uzza: Well, SHE CANNOT HAVE THEM!

Bob: WHY THE HELL NOT?

Uzza: The young sex slave of an old man who could not get it up asked him to put his fingers in her vagina and stimulate her that way. He went to see his imam, who was not any imam but Ali ar-Reza, a descendent of Muhammad, to ask him if that was okay.

Archie: Let me get this straight. An old guy has a young girl who is willing to have him touch her that way—bless her—and he has to go to ask his imam if it’s okay. Is there any part of a Muslim’s existence in which your religion will not stick its fingers, eh, I mean nose?

Uzza: No, I do not think so. A golden rule of Islam based on, you guessed it, a saying of Muhammad, is, if you do not know if something is illegal, do not do it until you have consulted a religious authority of some kind. With more than six thousand revealed truths and twice as many sayings of Muhammad to inform a believer's every waking moment, if you are a believer, it is actually not bad advice.

Bob: So, what did the imam say?

Uzza: He said it was okay, as long as whatever he put in there was part of his body, and that ruling has remained a mainstay of all four mainstream schools of Islamic law as explained by Sayyid Athar Husayn S.H. Rizvi author of Islamic Marriage Handbook.

“As far as the methods of mutual stimulation in foreplay… no foreign object should be used. The restriction on the use of foreign objects is based on the following hadith:

Ubaydullah bin Zurarah says that he had an old neighbor who owned a young slave-girl. Because of his old age, he could not fully satisfy the young slave-girl during sexual intercourse. She would therefore ask him to place his fingers in her vagina as she liked it. The old man complied with her wishes even though he did not like this idea. So he requested Ubaydullah to ask Imam Ali ar-Reza (A.S.) about it. When Ubaydullah asked the Imam (A.S.) about it, the Imam (A.S.) said, ‘There is no problem as long as he uses any part of his own body upon her, but he should not use anything other than his body on her.’”

Not only can the wife of an impotent man not relieve her sexual tension with something artificial, but like every other believing woman, unless her husband is at home and willing to take the time to please her, she is out of luck. Of course, she can’t demand that he put those fingers to work on her behalf, but he can demand she please him that way at any time—even, you may remember, if she is busy getting dinner ready.

Self-abuse, which Woody Allen described as “having sex with someone you love,” is not permitted in Islam. It all has to do with Revelations 70:29-31, which scholars and clerics have interpreted as Allah restricting “the way of fulfilling the sexual desire only to wives or slave women” (Fatwa 81167):

70:29 And those who guard their private parts;

70:30 Except from their wives or what their right-hands possess (their slave-girls); for they are not therein blame-worthy.

70:31 He who seeks [pleasure] beyond that – those are the transgressors.

No amount of self-abuse would do the trick, and Huguette was no help. Frustrated, I broke down in tears, as if not being able to get it up wasn’t embarrassing enough. My dream was slipping away and there was nothing I could do about it. Perhaps it was serendipity. If things had gone the way I imagined, Lucette and I may never have gotten together.

They say you have to quickly put what is a traumatic experience for most men behind you if you don’t want it to have a lasting psychological impact. But how do you do that if you fear another failure, which is almost a guarantee if that is where your mind remains?

A few weeks after that infamous evening, I got a call from my sister. She was in town with her husband for a teacher’s conference and invited me and a girlfriend to join them at Ottawa’s premier hotel, the Chateau Laurier, for the closing ball. I couldn’t ask Huguette to go, obviously, but there was that beautiful girl in an enclosed office still working away on a Friday afternoon.

I went over and asked her if she liked to dance. I had said the magic words. Lucette loved to dance, and she would have been good at it even without the ballet lessons. There would be a second date, then a third at her place. She shared an apartment with her parents. I felt safe. No chance of another embarrassing failure that night.

We sat down on the couch in the living room. We talked, we kissed a little, then we kissed a little more; then a long, passionate kiss with her arms wrapped around my neck, my hands holding onto her waist, her long skirt draped across my lap hiding what was going on underneath, should her parents enter the room unexpectedly.

I had not even dared to unbutton her blouse. Somehow, she knew this was not the time to have me overthinking what might—or might not—happen. Often, I felt she knew me better than I knew myself, and not only in matters of intimacy.

She made me feel like a better man in every way, and that is what I told her on our wedding day. As I placed the ring on her finger and looked into her sparkling blue eyes, I said something totally unrehearsed: that I was marrying her not only because I loved her, but because I liked the person I became when I was with her.