SEX: IT’S WHAT Dr. Heba Qutb is all about. One of a handful of Egyptian sex therapists, Qutb has become a household name from her constant appearances on satellite television after Hala Sarhan (then-Dream TV’s famously mischievous talk show host) kick started the rage for TV talks about sex nearly two years ago with a long discourse on the joys and pitfalls of masturbation.

If you’ve never seen Qutb on your living room screen, little can prepare you for the first time you catch her show: The diminutive thirty-something looks more like the mom whose kids you take home in the carpool than a sex expert.

In fact, Qutb’s frank discussions of sex and a woman’s right to sexual pleasure have shocked her own circle of school and club moms, unaccustomed as they are to hearing the words foreplay, doggie-style and masturbation from anyone, let alone a muhajiba with two PhDs.

“When people, especially women, ask me how I get the guts to sit with men and discuss sex so coolly, I just say, ‘Well, it’s our religion that says all these things, not me.’ And of course it also has a lot to do with personality,” she chuckles. “If you are serious and respectable, anything you say will be taken seriously; no one will dare get out of line and I never give them a chance to,” she says, a touch of steel in her voice.

In a strange way, it’s exactly what her friends have always expected from her. Qutb, a graduate of the Lycée, remembers being called after a particularly ribald show by a former classmate who had gone on to become a lieutenant colonel in the security apparatus. “He said, ‘You’ve scandalized all of us!’ He was laughing, of course, and said ‘I always knew you had it in you!’”

Jokes aside, Qutb’s colleagues and family have been supportive of her choice of fields. A lecturer in forensic medicine at Kasr Al-Aini Medical School, Qutb has successfully defended her PhD dissertation on sexuality in Islam at Florida’s Maimonedes University and is now a licensed sex therapist and educator. She’ll head back to Florida in December to attend her graduation ceremony.

Mohsen Allam/Egypt Today

Her first specialty, though, is forensic medicine, in which she holds both an MA and a PhD.

“I did my masters on physical and sexual child abuse, then decided to do my PhD on sexual abuse in general. In order to be able to study the abnormal, I had to study the normal first. So I started reading up on sexuality. I was shocked, and very annoyed. They never taught us anything about this in college! Why isn’t this taught? Where are we as doctors?”

After graduating with her PhD in forensics in 1999, Qutb hung out her shingle as a solo practitioner.

“I opened my practice in 2001 and mainly depended on referrals from my friends in OB-GYN, endocrinology and psychiatry. The media hadn’t picked up on the subject yet, which only happened after Al-Naama wel Tawous came out in 2002,” Qutb explains.

(Al-Naama wel Tawous [The Ostrich and the Peacock], starred Lebleba as a sex therapist who openly discussed a wife’s dissatisfaction with her marital sex life. The film was the first to show that couples could seek help for their sexual problems.)

By 2002, Qutb decided she needed a degree in sexuality and so hit the web to research long-distance learning options.

“The only university I found in the Middle East was in Israel. That wouldn’t have worked, but then I found Maimonedes, the mother university for sexology,” she says. “I wanted to study sexuality in Islam, but thought my supervisor wouldn’t like it. I was surprised to find that he suggested it, saying the West needed a better understanding of Islam’s edicts after 9/11. I said ‘Great.’ ”

Her findings were astounding, she says.

I discovered that Islam understood sex before the rest of the world. For example, Islam stresses the importance of foreplay and understood the importance of French kissing long before the French did.

“I discovered that Islam understood sex long before the rest of the world,” she claims. “Masters and Johnson [the famous American sex researchers] said women had the right to sexual pleasure in the 1950s, but Islam did so 1,425 years ago. For example, Islam stresses the importance of foreplay, which has been scientifically proven to be an essential part of the second stage of sex. I also found out that the Prophet Mohammed (PBUH) had talked about ‘al-bikr wa liaabiha’ [the virgin and her saliva], which means they understood the importance of French kissing long before the French did.

“In studies, the exchange of saliva between lovers causes a lot of excitement. It leads to the production of testosterone and to reflex stimulation of the sexual organs,” she explains.

Qutb goes on to mention a hadith in which the Prophet (PBUH) says: “Let none of you fall on his woman like an ox, but let there be a messenger between you.” When his companions asked, “What messenger?” the Prophet answered “The kiss and the word.”

“Verse 223 of Al-Baqara also mentions foreplay,” Qutb says, quoting: “‘Your wives are a tilth for you, so go into your tilth when you like, and do good beforehand for yourselves, and be careful [of your duty] to Allah, and know that you will meet Him, and give good news to the believers.’

“It says ‘wa qaddimo li anfosikom’ [and do good beforehand for yourselves]. The letter waw [and] means that the act and what happens before it have to go together. But then wait, it also says for yourselves, and science has proven that foreplay has a positive impact on the man, too. The excitation causes the pineal gland to secrete nitric oxide (NO3), a very precious and essential chemical that the brain secretes frugally but that helps channel the blood flow to the genitals, causing erection and arousal in both males and females,” she says.

She goes on, citing passage after passage from the Qur’an, all of which lead to the same conclusion: “We study in sexuality how the five senses have to be used for full sexual excitement, but most important is the sense of sight. Of course it works 20 times more on men because men need intercourse 20 times more than most women do. In surat Al-Nour, verse 30 and some of verse 31: ‘Say to the believing men that they cast down their looks and guard their private parts; that is purer for them; surely Allah is aware of what they do.And say to the believing women that they cast down their looks and guard their private parts’

“It says here plainly that sight causes excitement, so do not look. In sexology, the more you use the senses, the more NO3 is secreted; especially when the man performs foreplay and receives positive feedback. It’s a scientific fact,” she says, that better foreplay means better sex for both partners.

Qutb goes back to the verse from surat Al-Baqara.

“It also says ‘anna sheitom’ [whenever you want]. But ‘anna’ also encompasses place, time and method. The Prophet (PBUH) also liked to go against the Jews, who were very strict where sexual intercourse is concerned they demanded that there be a barrier between a man and his wife with a little opening for the sexual organs to meet. The Prophet said, ‘Enjoy yourselves,’ just like the Qur’an did.”

And like the Prophet (PBUH) suggested, it’s all about variation, Qutb says.

“In our clinics, when people come with cases of sexual boredom, we advise them to vary the places, times and positions in which they have intercourse. A good example is when a man asked the Prophet (PBUH) whether he could have intercourse with his wife from behind. The Prophet said, ‘From behind her, but in front.’ [Vaginally, not anally.] This is the ‘doggie position’ the West thinks it invented. It causes more friction for the women’s sexual organs and helps the man feel superior,” Qutb explains.

Convincing as her scientific explanations are, it wasn’t easy at first for her patients to see the light. The field was a new one, Al-Naama wal Tawous had not been released, and patients often went into their first sessions not knowing what to expect.

“I had to explain what sexology meant in simple scientific terms. People sometimes got confused. A woman, in the middle of a discussion, would tell me she suffered from genital itching. I had to explain: ‘You go to an ob/gyn for that. We’re here to talk about sex,’” she says.

Oddly enough, men were much more interested than women in attending sessions once they understood what she was all about.

“In the first 10 minutes, men often feel awkward, but when they feel reassured that nothing sleazy is going on, they commit to the treatment much more than women do. At first, I meet each partner separately, but then I start working with both,” she says.

Her most common cases are women suffering from apareunia, or vaginismus, in which the woman simply refuses sex, most often for psychological reasons: Past baggage, inaccurate information passed down through family and friends, or a painful first intercourse in which the woman wasn’t sufficiently aroused for penetration not to be painful.

“It is all part of the cultural and social heritage we suffer from,” she says. “But this is one of the easiest cases to solve; we can often treat it in 10 days to two weeks. What we need to do is explore the reasons behind it. For example, one bride-to-be got some mixed up idea of what to expect from sex. She came to me and I opened my laptop and was pointing out the female sex organs to her, when she said, ‘Oh, that’s the part that gets cut off [when you lose your virginity] and you have to go to hospital to have it sewn it up.’

“I was shocked. She said she had heard it from her mother she was on her way to apareunia.”

Family upbringing plays a significant role in sexual dysfunctions, she says, particularly among women and even among those who have not suffered female genital mutilation.

“A lot of patients suffer because they heard of negative experiences from family and friends. There was one case in which a woman hadn’t had sex with her husband for three years. We explored her feelings, and she eventually confessed that she heard her older sister tell her mother after her wedding night: ‘It was horrible it felt like a train passed through me.’

“That kind of stuff sinks in and comes out when it’s your turn. Society reinforces it, because some people would never mention a good sexual experience for fear of the evil eye.”

Men suffer from a number of culturally and socially engendered problems as well, mostly because they refuse to accept that women have a right to enjoy sex, Qutb says.

“The result is often chronic premature ejaculation. Others lose interest or get completely turned off,” she points out.

Working from her laptop, Qutb shows her patients pictures, invites them to take notes, and teaches couples to perform sensate-focus massage, also called sexual-print massage.

“It is just like the maze puzzles we used to solve as kids you know, the ones in which you have to lead the mouse to the cheese. I teach couples how to find their partners’ turn on points. Each one of us has a different map. Some couples resist, others refuse to come together. And at some point, I have to stop and say, ‘I refuse to work with only one of you.’”

But not all of it is about treating dysfunction, she says.

“Some couples have been married for years and feel they need to re-kindle their passions. I say to them, ‘All you need is to recharge your batteries,’ which is what I teach them to do.” She does this by introducing them to new techniques or a new way of thinking.

Qutb’s practice currently includes personal consultations and instruction courses. “I work with four curricula that I offer to married couples, couples-to-be, teenagers and, lately, a new curriculum for professionals. I wish I could reach out to sociologists, psychologists and even nurses so they can work with young couples at the beginning of their lives and help teach healthy sexual practices before the problems start.”

Nipping those problems in the bud would do us all some good, says Qutb, who says that once she graduates in December, “it will be time to knock on some official doors. It’s a shame that sexology is not taught in Egypt.”

Maybe then, she says, she can change the sign on her door. It’s only in English right now, reading: “Sex Therapist and Marriage Counselor.”

“It’s not time to put up the Arabic sign yet,” she smiles. “Maybe soon.”  et