Turning away now from the perverse and fantastic, to consider more ordinary sexual practices, the well-off seem to have slept in separate beds. . . . More detailed information about normal copulation is hard to glean from the Nights, because of the linguistically ingenious and metaphorical modes of describing the sex act favored by the storytellers, as they move smoothly from the description of foreplay to word-play. What we are offered are displays of rhetorical skill, not documentary accounts of fucking.

Robert Irwin, The Arabian Nights: a Companion, Allen Lane, 1994, 175-176.