In the early Abbasid era, Indian and Persian erotic texts were translated to Arabic and added to a growing corpus of literature dealing with sex from various angles, medical, entertaining, ethical, etc. Some of these texts are preserved in the oldest extant erotic manual, Jawami’ al-ladhdha, or Encyclopedia of pleasure, a yet unpublished work that was probably written in the late tenth century, providing a sexual ethics for elite men. In this paper, I analyze representations of slave women in Jawami’ al-ladhdha, and discuss how these can be understood as reflections on changes in the Abbasid elite families, brought in by ample access to female slaves. The author of Jawami’ al-ladhdha introduces a wide range of sexual positions and techniques but he is not fully comfortable with exposing free, noble women to the sexual excesses he makes available for his urban male readers. These should be part of sophisticated men’s repertoire, but only parts of this repertoire are suitable for free women, for whom “ordinary” sexual intercourse in itself is “a humiliation” not to speak of the advanced sexual positions. For those, men need slave women. Nevertheless, the author promotes harmony between spouses and does not want to alienate free women. He accentuates their status, asserting that “God preferred wives to slave women, and so we also give them preference”, and their refined nature. Free, noble women are (in general) delicate and bashful; men have to treat them tenderly. Slave women, on the other hand, are more robust, they need more strenuous sexual exercises. Thus, men can appeal to their free wives’ sympathy, as in an anecdote about a wife who discovers her husband having sex with her slave girl, and urges him to continue or else the slave will lose her mind. These are strategies, I suggest, for securing men’s (in this case a tenth century urban elite) access to slave concubines, without jeopardizing valuable marriage ties. The consequence is a hierarchy for the elite family in which the man is not only superior, he is omnipotent and can satisfy delicate free wives and robust slave concubines alike. Free wives are subordinated, but still favored, as they are granted divine preference. This hierarchy, however, is peculiar for the society in which this particular book is written, so finally, the paper will compare it with later works, were the roles of wives and slave concubines are more ambiguous.