3.6.7
“You’re right,” he said, “but I’d like to ask you about something, now that the conversation has come around to what men want from women and women from men. Since you’ve started to develop an understanding of these differences, tell me by the roof (for it was his custom, whenever he asked her about something important, to make her swear by the roof to which she had climbed before they got married) and tell me true, is the pleasure a woman gets when she looks at a man’s body equal to a man’s when he looks at a woman’s?” “They’re the same,” she said, “or perhaps the former is the greater.” The Fāriyāq went on,94 “Then I said, ‘How can that be when there is no softness or smoothness to a man’s body while a woman is distinguished by numerous charms that are absent in a man, such as softness of skin, fineness of digit, shapeliness of finger and fingertip (these being likened to the ʿiswaddah,(1) to asārīʿ, to the ʿudhfūṭ, and to the ʿanam tree), the quality called dasʿ, softness of the kaʿs, the dakhīṣ, and the rawājib, and the way the flesh covers the rawāhish so that a dimple appears on each knuckle; or softness of hand, smallness and suppleness of foot, fullness of wrist and heel and flatness of instep, smoothness of ʿursh and of ʿasīb, strength of arm and comely largeness of calf, massiveness of calf muscle and roundedness of kneecap, hugeness of haunch, posterior, thigh, backside, and belly; or narrowness of waist, grace of shoulder, declivity of flank, and glossiness of clavicle, breast, and mafāhir; or as length of neck, ʿaṭaf, broadness of brow and length of hair; or sweetness of voice and odor, absence of ḥārr, rayash, ghafar, and surbah and of hair on her mons veneris, her vagina, or her anus; or her ears being small, or cutesy-comely and tiny, or ornamented, or well-defined and pointy and pricked (and what a feast for the eye they are when the upper parts are hung with earrings!)?
3.6.8
“‘Greater than all of this and more wonderful, however, is the protuberance of her two breasts and their perkiness,96 their prominence and their pertness, their bulginess and their curviness, their roundness and their compactness, their firmness and their constrictedness, their massiveness and their glossiness, their creaminess and their smoothness, their convexity and their poutiness, their gibbosity and their slipperiness, their incrassation and their turgidness, their slickness and their sturdiness, their rotundity and their ampleness, their orbicularity and their curvaceousness, their resplendence and their fairness, their lustrousness and their silkiness, their curvature and their satininess, their bulbosity and their thrustingness, their tumescence and their sleekness, their heaviness and their bounciness, their globosity and their whiteness, their incandescence and their tremulousness, their fullness and their fatness, their solidity and their pearliness, their albescence and their sphericalness, their jerkiness and their crammed-togetherness, their curvity and their tightness, their suavity and their distendedness, their cleftness and their bustiness. They are known, among other things, as “the weights” because they can be weighed, either in the hand or in the mind. They are likened to pomegranates and to euphorbia fruit and their nipples are likened to saʿdān prickles.97 Now, it is also the case that….’ ‘Stop now,’ she said, ‘for you have gone to excessive lengths in your description while failing to mention the best part of what they signify.’ ‘Pray tell!’ said I. She continued, ‘If you had cited a word that referred to gobbling on them or rubbing up against them, it would have served better than many of those adjectives.’ ‘That’s not my fault,’ I said. ‘I failed to find any such pearl in the Qāmūs.’
3.6.9
“Then I went on, ‘That’s one thing, and another thing I’d like to ask you is why everyone finds it agreeable for a female to have a certain amount of soft hair or down on her face and particularly on her lip, while the hairless, the beardless, and the smooth-faced male are hated by God and man alike?’ ‘As for the first,’ she said, ‘it’s because the woman, knowing that nothing in the world can take the place of a man for her, is inspired with longing for one by the slightest thing. Even if, after uttering in front of a woman the words aʿūdhu bi-llāhi mina l-shayṭān (“I seek refuge with God from the Devil”), for example, you start to say ra… , she will immediately start fantasizing about a man and straightaway blanch or blush, depending on the direction in which her thoughts have taken her.98 The same will happen if you begin to pronounce ra… following the words bi-smi llāh (“In the name of God”).’ ‘God bless you for a refined and honest woman!’ said I. ‘If such is your nature and its inborn disposition while still unformed, what will they be like when they mature?’
3.6.10
“Then she said, ‘Concerning the good attributes to be found in the woman and not the man (according to your statement and that of the poets who write amatory verses to, and the painters who revel in the depiction of, the former), their absence in the man is no obstacle to his being loved. A woman knows that nothing but a man can bring her joy, so his presence in any shape or form inspires longing in her, as you mentioned earlier. Do you not observe that the women of the lands of the blacks love their menfolk more than women do their husbands in our and other countries? It’s like the situation of a man who has lots of books containing different stories and anecdotes as compared to another who has only one to read. You will notice that the man with many books will move from one to another and reach the last without anything having stuck in his mind and thereafter find the idea of rereading them distasteful. The man with only one book, on the other hand, knowing that he will find nothing else to read when he gets to the end of that, will not move on from a page he is reading until he has pondered it well, mulled over its meanings, committed it to memory, learned from it, scrutinized it, thought about it, absorbed it, weighed it, examined it, conned it, picked at it, finecombed it, and meditated upon it. I came up with this simile of the books because I’ve noticed how taken you are with reading, but I have lots of other examples too.