A Curious History of Sex Read online

  For SWOP NSW

  For my family (sorry!)

  Contents

  INTRODUCTION

  SEX AND WORDS

  ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore: The ‘Whore’ in Whores of Yore

  ‘A Nasty Name for a Nasty Thing’: A History of Cunt

  SEX AND VULVAS

  Looking for the Boy in the Boat: A History of the Clitoris

  Colonising the Cunt: A History of Racial Fetishization

  ‘As Easily Made as a Pudding’: A History of Virginity Tests

  SEX AND PENISES

  Spilling the Beans: Orgasm and Onanism

  Gland Larceny: Testicular Transplants in the Twentieth Century

  Tough Love: Medieval Impotence Tests

  SEX AND FOOD

  Staff of Life: Sex and Bread

  The Food of Love: A History of Oysters

  Turning Down the Heat: A History of the Anaphrodisiac

  SEX AND MACHINES

  Buzzkill: Vibrators and the Victorians

  On Your Bike: Sex and Cycling

  Boys’ Toys: A History of the Sex Doll

  SEX AND HYGIENE

  Don’t Hold Your Breath: Sex and Smells in the Middle Ages

  Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow: A History of Pubic Hair

  Filthy Fannies: A History of Douching

  SEX AND REPRODUCTION

  French Letters, English Raincoats and Mrs Phillips’s Wares: A History of the Condom

  Bringing down the Flowers: Abortion in Eighteenth-Century Britain

  Period Drama: A History of Menstruation

  SEX AND MONEY

  The Oldest Profession: Sex Work in the Ancient World

  Public Relations: A History of the Tart Card

  Feasting with the Panthers: A History of Male Sex Work

  Conclusion

  Bibliography

  Index

  A Note on the Author

  Supporters

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.

  Sigmund Freud

  Sex is one of the great universal levellers; to paraphrase Geoffrey Rush’s Marquis de Sade, ‘we eat, we sleep, we shit, we fuck and we die’.1 Desire cuts across boundaries of culture, gender and class. It cares little for our ‘rules’ and, as anyone who has ever been caught with their pants down will tell you, it cares even less for common sense. Of course, humans do far more than eating, shitting and fucking – our intellect is what really sets us apart from the beasts. And herein lies the problem. To say that humans have overthought sex is something of an understatement.

  All life on this planet shares the desire to reproduce, but what makes humans unique are the infinitely complex and varied ways we seek to gratify our sexual desires. In Forensic and Medico-legal Aspects of Sexual Crimes and Unusual Sexual Practices (2008), Professor Anil Aggrawal listed 547 different paraphilic sexual interests, and noted that ‘like allergies, sexual arousal may occur from anything under the sun, including the sun’.2 And, in case you’re wondering, sexual arousal caused by the sun is called ‘actirasty’.

  Humans are also the only creatures that stigmatise, punish and create shame around their sexual desires. While all animals have courtship rituals, no wildebeest has ever gone into therapy because it’s struggling to express a latex fetish. The queen honeybee will shag up to forty partners in one session, return to her hive dripping in semen and clutching the severed cocks of her conquests, and not one drone will call her a slut. Male baboons will happily bugger each other all day long and never fear being sent to a gay conversion camp. Yet the guilt we humans feel around our desires can be paralysing, and severe punishments have been doled out to those who break ‘the rules’.

  Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez once wrote that ‘everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life and a secret life’.3 Paradoxically, our secret life is us at our most honest. We force this honest piece of ourselves into secrecy because the systems we have created have rendered it incompatible with our public and private lives. In an effort to control this secret part of ourselves, humans turned sex into a moral issue and developed complex social structures to regulate our urges. We invented categories to try to control it: gay, straight, monogamous, virginal, promiscuous, etc. But sexuality does not fit neatly into man-made boxes; it spills over, and that’s when things get messy. When we try to suppress our desire, it becomes a fault line running underneath our structures of morality, ethics and decency. But when the pink mist descends, people will still risk the earthquake to have an orgasm.

  The act of sex itself has not changed since we first worked out what went where. Penises, tongues and fingers have been probing mouths, vulvas and anuses in search of an orgasm since humans first crawled out of the primordial sludge. What does change is the social script that dictates how sex is culturally understood and performed. For example, according to Pornhub, the largest pornography site on the internet, ‘lesbian’ has remained the number one search term used on their site worldwide since they first launched in 2007. In the Netherlands, ‘lesbian’ searches on Pornhub were up by 45 per cent in 2018 from 2016.4 So, it’s fair to say that the Dutch are giving lesbian sex a big thumbs up. However, they have not always been so appreciative of V-on-V love. Between 1400 and 1550, fifteen women were burned alive in the Netherlands as ‘female sodomites’.5 Those who were not put to death still faced severe punishments. In 1514, Maertyne van Keyschote and Jeanne van den Steene of Bruges were both publicly flogged, had their hair burned off, and were banished from the city for the having committed ‘a certain great kind of the unnatural sin of sodomy with several young girls’.6 Six hundred years later, ‘the unnatural sin of sodomy with several young girls’ is the most watched porn category among the descendants of the same people who thought it reasonable to chuck lesbians on a bonfire.

  Pornhub searches for ‘porn for women’ were up by 359 per cent in 2018, with women viewing lesbian pornography 197 per cent more often than men did in the same year. This would have come as quite a shock to Dr William Acton (1813–1875), who claimed that ‘the majority of women (happily for them) are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind’.7 And what the Sunday Express editor James Douglas (1867–1940) would have made of all this is anyone’s guess. In 1928, Douglas attacked Radclyffe Hall’s landmark lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness, writing, this ‘pestilence is devastating the younger generation. It is wrecking young lives. It is defiling young souls.’ Douglas urged society to ‘cleans[e] itself from the leprosy of these lepers’.8 And yet here we are, ninety years later, with millions of women around the world jilling off to such ‘pestilence’ with our leprous souls intact. What a time to be alive.

  This is a book about how attitudes to sex have changed throughout history. It is the curious history of sex and some of the things we have done to ourselves and to each other in the pursuit (and denial) of the almighty orgasm. This is not a comprehensive study of every sexual quirk, kink and ritual across all cultures throughout time, as that would entail writing an encyclopaedia. Rather, this is a drop in the ocean, a paddle in the shallow end of sex history, but I hope you will get pleasantly wet nonetheless. I have tried to choose subjects that provide valuable context for issues today, particularly issues of gender, sexual shame, beauty, language, and how desire has been regulated. I have chosen subjects that are close to my heart, such as the history of sex work, deeply emotive subjects, such as abortion, and also subjects that made me laugh, like ‘cocklebread’ and orgasming on a bicycle. Although it is easy to laugh at the silly things people have believed throughout history, and I hope you do, it is far more valuable to see how similar w
e are to people who have gone before us and question our own beliefs as a result. Sex remains a deeply divisive issue around the world, and in many places is a matter of life and death. These attitudes will turn and turn again – hopefully for the better. But we will never arrive at a place where sex is free of stigma and shame unless we first know where we have come from.

  A note on the use of language. As far as offensive language goes, you are now entering a hard hat area. This is a book that uncovers historical attitudes to sex and gender. Our ancestors had little understanding of gender fluidity and understood gender as binary and biologically determined. As a result, much of the historical material in this book defines women as having vulvas and men as having penises. For example, in the chapter on the history of the word ‘cunt’, ‘cunt’ is understood to be the genitals of a woman. Today, we know that some women have cunts and some do not, just as some men do and some do not. But our ancestors did not view gender or biology in such terms – they understood ‘cunt’ as being a woman’s genitals. While this may be offensive to modern ears, understanding historical attitudes to gender identity and sexual morphology is essential if we are to fully appreciate how heteronormativity and constructs of the binary of masculine and feminine came to dominate cultural narratives today.

  The slang used throughout this book is all genuine historical slang and is followed by the date it was first recorded. My primary source for the historical slang is Jonathon Green’s Dictionary of Slang, which I cannot recommend enough if you want to learn more.

  * * *

  1 Philip Kaufman, Quills (Fox Searchlight, 2000).

  2 Anil Aggrawal, Forensic and Medico-legal Aspects of Sexual Crimes and Unusual Sexual Practices (Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2008), p. 369.

  3 Gerald S. Martin, Gabriel Garcia Márquez: A Life (London: Bloomsbury, 2009), p. 205.

  4 2018 Review, ‘2018 Year in Review – Pornhub Insights’, Pornhub, 2018 [Accessed 29 September 2018].

  5 Jonas Roelens, ‘Visible Women: Female Sodomy in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Southern Netherlands (1400–1550)’, BMGN – Low Countries Historical Review, 130.3 (2015), 3 .

  6 Ibid.

  7 William Acton, The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs in Childhood, Youth, Adult Age, and Advanced Life (London: John Churchill, 1857), p. 101.

  8 James Douglas, ‘A Book That Must be Suppressed’ in Palatable Poison: Critical Perspectives on The Well of Loneliness, ed. by Laura L. Doan and Jay Prosser (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), pp. 10–11.

  SEX

  AND

  WORDS

  ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore

  The ‘Whore’ in Whores of Yore

  Language is an important battleground in the fight for social equality. As the linguist Daniel Chandler succinctly put it, ‘language constitutes our world, it doesn’t just record it or label it’.1 Language is fluid and malleable; it drives social attitudes, rather than simply expressing them. To see the evolution of language we only have to look at what was once everyday terminology to describe people of colour: ‘half caste’ was once perfectly acceptable for a person of mixed race, just as ‘coloured’ was an accepted term for a black person. Such words were not thought of as offensive, merely descriptive, and can occasionally still be heard in usage, though thankfully less often. But when we break down the power structures implicit in such phrases, we can begin to understand how words do reinforce and create our reality. A person who is ‘half caste’ is, by definition, half of something; they are half formed, half made, half a person rather than a whole person in their own right. A person who is ‘coloured’ has been metaphorically coloured in, which suggests an original state of not being coloured in (or, white); it reinforces difference and tacitly suggests racial hierarchy. We might not immediately recognise the implications of such phrases, but describing someone as half formed simply reinforces racial attitudes; as Chandler argued, it makes our reality, it does not record it.

  Language that reflects the humanity of the person or people being described is a constantly evolving process, and while political correctness frequently comes in for scorn, we cannot and will not achieve social equality if the language we use to describe marginalised groups only reinforces stigma. Language informs much of the debate around LGBTQ rights, body issues, ageism and, of course, gender.

  The reclamation of terms of abuse is a linguistic minefield where no one has written down the rules, but we all know there are rules. ‘Fag’, ‘ho’, ‘bitch’, etc., can function as terms of inclusion and even affection when used within specific groups. As a straight, white woman, I cannot call a gay man a ‘queer’, but I can call my female friend a ‘bitch’, whereas a straight man cannot – though a gay man might be able to (minefield, indeed). When a term of abuse is reclaimed and owned by the people it once stigmatised, it is a defiant action, one that takes the power away from the oppressor, galvanises an identity within the formerly oppressed, and sticks two politically incorrect fingers up at the establishment. Of course, many argue that such words, used in any context, only serve to reinforce a prejudice as such words are never shaken free of historical baggage; they create reality, rather than recording it. The word ‘whore’ is also in a state of reclamation among certain groups of the sex work community (others reject it entirely).

  The Whore of Babylon from the Luther Bible, 1534 edition.

  The truth is that I should not have used ‘whore’ in the Whores of Yore website; it’s not my word, and if you’re not a sex worker, it’s not yours either. It’s a term of abuse that sex workers hear every day by those seeking to devalue and shame them, and I had not fully appreciated that. I used ‘whore’ to refer to transgressive sexuality, like ‘slut’ or ‘slag’, rather than a woman who sells sex. I’ve always considered the word to be far bigger than that. I have had feedback from many sex workers questioning my use of the term, and for a while I gave serious consideration to changing it. But the history of that word is an important one, and one that I want to emphasise. Debate around what ‘whore’ actually means is a conversation worth having.

  The German dramatist Georg Büchner (1813–1837) once wrote that ‘freedom and whores are the most cosmopolitan items under the sun’.2 But what does the word ‘whore’ actually mean? Where has it come from, and what does someone have to do to earn that particular title? Why was Joan of Arc, who died a virgin, called the ‘French Whore’? And why was Elizabeth I, the ‘Virgin Queen’, attacked as the ‘English Whore’ by her Catholic enemies? French revolutionaries called Marie Antoinette the ‘Austrian Whore’; Anne Boleyn was the ‘Great Whore’, and in the 2016 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton was repeatedly attacked by Trump supporters as a ‘whore’.3 Perhaps we think we know perfectly well what we mean should we ever choose to drop the W-bomb, but the word is historically and culturally complex. This simple monosyllable is loaded with over a thousand years of attempting to control and shame women by stigmatising their sexuality.

  The word is so old that its precise origins are lost in the mists of time, but it can be traced to the Old Norse hora (adulteress). Hora has multiple derivatives, such as the Danish hore, the Swedish hora, the Dutch hoer, and the Old High German huora. Going back even further to the Proto-Indo-European language (the common ancestor of the Indo-European languages), whore has roots in qār, meaning ‘to like, desire.’ Qār is a base that has produced words in other languages for ‘lover’, such as the Latin carus, the Old Irish cara and the Old Persian kama (meaning ‘to desire’).4 ‘Whore’ is not a universal word; the indigenous Aborigines, First Nation people and native Hawaiians have no word for ‘whore’, or indeed for prostitution.

  From the twelfth century, whore was a term of abuse for a sexually unchaste woman, but it did not specifically mean a sex worker. Thomas of Chobham’s thirteenth-century definition of a whore was any woman who had sex outside marriage (hands up all those who have j
ust learned they are a thirteenth-century whore).5 Shakespeare used ‘whore’ nearly a hundred times in his plays, including Othello, Hamlet and King Lear; but in these plays it doesn’t mean someone who sells sex, it means a promiscuous woman. John Webster’s The White Devil (1612) explores narratives around badly behaved women. In one memorable scene Monticelso defines what a whore is:

  Shall I expound whore to you? sure I shall;

  I’ll give their perfect character. They are first,

  Sweetmeats which rot the eater; in man’s nostrils

  Poison’d perfumes. They are cozening alchemy;

  Shipwrecks in calmest weather. What are whores!

  Cold Russian winters, that appear so barren,

  As if that nature had forgot the spring.

  They are the true material fire of hell:

  Worse than those tributes i’ th’ Low Countries paid,

  Exactions upon meat, drink, garments, sleep,

  Ay, even on man’s perdition, his sin.

  They are those brittle evidences of law,

  Which forfeit all a wretched man’s estate

  For leaving out one syllable. What are whores!

  They are those flattering bells have all one tune,

  At weddings, and at funerals. Your rich whores

  Are only treasures by extortion fill’d,

  And emptied by curs’d riot. They are worse,

  Worse than dead bodies which are begg’d at gallows,

  And wrought upon by surgeons, to teach man

  Wherein he is imperfect. What’s a whore!

  She’s like the guilty counterfeited coin,

  Which, whosoe’er first stamps it, brings in trouble