A Curious History of Sex
Page 9
The bloody sheet test also has a long pedigree. It is found in the Bible, old medieval romances, and it’s even said that Catharine of Aragon was able to produce blood-stained sheets to prove she married Henry VIII as a virgin.18 Of course, as long as people have subscribed to this deeply flawed test, there have been ways of faking it. Given what was at stake should the gift of a bride’s virginity be unwrapped by someone else before the ‘I dos’, you can understand why a girl might tell a fanny fib on her wedding night, and for as long as medical texts have been telling us how to prove virginity, they’ve also been giving advice on how to restore it. The Trotula is the name given to three twelfth-century Italian texts on women’s health. At least one of the three was authored by a woman, Trota of Salerno, who practised medicine in the southern Italian coastal town of Salerno. The Trotula has this exceptionally devious advice for a girl whose cherry is on the blink:
This remedy will be needed by any girl who has been induced to open her legs and lose her virginity by the follies of passion, secret love, and promises … When it is time for her to marry, to keep the man from knowing, the false virgin will carefully deceive the husband as follows. Let her take ground sugar, the white of an egg, and alum and mix them in rainwater in which pennyroyal and calamint have been boiled down with other similar herbs. Soaking a soft and porous cloth in this solution, let her keep bathing her private parts with it.
But the best of all is this deception: the day before her marriage, let her put a leech cautiously on her labia, taking care lest it slip in by mistake; then blood will flow out here, and a little crust will form in that place. Because of the flux of blood and the constricted channel of the vagina, thus in having intercourse the false virgin will deceive the man.19
Silver-bound hinged cowrie shell containing a painting of a man unlocking the chastity belt of a reclining woman.
The Book of Women’s Love recommends the following to restore virginity: ‘take myrtle leaves and boil them well with water until only a third part remains; then, take nettles without prickles and boil them in this water until a third remains. She must wash her secret parts with this water in the morning and at bedtime, up to nine days.’ However, if you’re in a real hurry you can ‘take nutmeg and grind to a powder; put it in that place and her virginity will be restored immediately’.20 Nicolas Venette (1633–1698), the French author of the seventeenth-century L’amour Conjugal, gave this advice to fake a maidenhead:
Make a bath of decorations of Leaves of mallows, Groundsel, with some handfuls of Line Seed and Fleabane Seed, Orach, Brank Ursin or bearfoot. Let them sit in this Bath an hour, after which, let them be wiped, and examin’d 2 or 3 hours after Bathing, observing them narrowly in the mean while. If a Woman is a Maid, all her amorous parts are compress’d and joyn’d close to one another; but if not, they are flaggy, loose, and flouting, instead of being wrinkled and close as they were before when she had a mind to choose us.21
Cover page from Monk of the Order of St Francis, Nocturnal Revels: or, The History of King’s-Place, and Other Modern Nunneries, 1779.
As Hanne Blank argued in her marvellous Virgin: The Untouched History, many of the ingredients listed here are astringents or anti-inflammatories that were thought to tighten the vagina. Although Venette doesn’t list it here, one of the most well-known twinkle tighteners was alum water. In Francis Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785) he cites ‘pucker water’ as ‘Water impregnated with alum, or other astringents, used by old experienced traders to counterfeit virginity’.22 Alum is a class of chemical compound that is used widely today in food preservatives and industry. Insanely, there are numerous websites out there that still recommend alum for tightening the vagina. I will just take this moment to say, dear God, please do not do that to your poor chuff; do your Kegels and keep the faith.
Other than wishing to fake it on their wedding night, another reason a girl would want to pass as a novice is that maidenheads came at a premium. By the eighteenth century, virgins were a lucrative business, and any working girl or madam would know how to fake a hymen for maximum profit. Nocturnal Revels (1779) provides explicit details about women selling their virginity several times over, and quotes the famous madam Charlotte Hayes as saying a virginity is ‘as easily made as a pudding’. Charlotte goes on to say that she sold her own ‘thousands of times’.23 The eponymous heroine of the original bonkbuster Fanny Hill (1749) tells the reader precisely how virginity is faked in the sex industry.
In each of the head bed-posts, just above where the bedsteads are inserted into them, there was a small drawer, so artfully adapted to the mouldings of the timber-work, that it might have escaped even the most curious search: which drawers were easily opened or shut by the touch of a spring, and were fitted each with a shallow glass tumbler, full of a prepared fluid blood, in which lay soaked, for ready use, a sponge, that required no more than gently reaching the hand to it, taking it out and properly squeezing between the thighs, when it yielded a great deal more of the red liquid than would save a girl’s honour.24
Other sneaky tips include having sex during menstruation to ensure blood, and placing a bird’s heart, or a pig’s bladder stitched up and containing blood, into the vaginal cavity so it will ‘bleed’ on cue.25
Despite a deeply engrained historical belief in the bleeding virgin, this has never been unanimously accepted by the scientific community. There have always been lone voices of reason who recognised this as a load of cobblers. Physicians such as Ambroise Paré not only denied that virginity could be proven with a hymen, he claimed there was no such a thing as a hymen back in 1573. Since then there have been occasional whispers that the hymen is not quite the certificate of authenticity it is touted to be. By the nineteenth century, these whispers had become an audible grumble. Dr Blundell questioned the value of this ‘mystic membrane’, and Erasmus Wilson stated that the hymen ‘must not be considered a necessary accompaniment to virginity’ in 1831.26 Edward Foote wrote that ‘the hymen is a cruel and unreliable test of virginity’ and that ‘physicians know it is a very fallible test of virginity’.27 By the twentieth century, the grumble had become a deafening shout and by the twenty-first century the shouting had been replaced by dramatic eye rolls and exasperated cries of ‘for fuck’s sake! Not this bollocks again!’ The research I referred to at the beginning of this chapter identified some 1,269 studies in electronic databases that research the validity of virginity testing and hymen reliability, and they overwhelmingly reach the conclusion that you cannot ‘prove’ someone is a virgin and hymens tell you naff all about the owner’s sexual past.28 And yet the myth persists, and women are routinely subjected to pointless and invasive examinations to try and establish their sexual experience.
Francisco Goya, A Young Woman Casting Aside Her Virginity to Become a Prostitute, 1798.
Today virginity examinations are largely carried out on unmarried females, often without consent or in situations where individuals are unable to give consent.29 Virginity testing on schoolgirls has been reported in South Africa and Swaziland to deter pre-marital sexual activity. In India, the test has been part of the sexual assault assessment of female rape victims. In Indonesia, the exam has been part of the application process for women to join the police force.30 But even if you could prove someone’s virginity, the issue isn’t really the examination itself (although it’s bad enough) – it’s cultural attitudes that value women based primarily on whether they are sexually active that are the issue. There is no way of ‘proving’ if someone has had sex by examining their genitals, because ‘virginity’ is not something tangible. The hymen is simply a stretchy tissue inside the vagina, but it doesn’t seal it up like a Tupperware lid. Hymens come in many different shapes and thickness – some bleed when torn and others do not. The hymen absolutely does not ‘pop’ when broken and cannot prove anyone’s sexual history any more than your elbow can. You cannot ‘lose’ your virginity because virginity is an invention, not a physical fact – no matter how sparkly
your piss may be.
* * *
* Despite the social emphasis on keeping your flower unplucked, research published by the Journal of Sex Research found that adult virgins of both sexes (aged over twenty-five) face considerable social stigma in the US, and believe that they are not desirable as romantic partners. Male adult virgins felt their masculinity was called into question and women believed they were written off as ‘old maids’ (Amanda N. Gesselman, Gregory D. Webster, and Justin R. Garcia, ‘Has Virginity Lost its Virtue? Relationship Stigma Associated with Being a Sexually Inexperienced Adult’, The Journal of Sex Research, 54 (2016), 202–13).
** The Minangkabau of West Sumatra, Indonesia, the Mosuo of Tibet, the Ghanese Akan, the Bribri of Costa Rica, the Garo of Meghalaya, India and the Nagovisi of New Guinea are all regarded as matriarchal societies and all share matrilineal inheritance lines. When property passes from mother to daughter (regardless of paternity), who’s the daddy is of little consequence. The sexual customs of these cultures are far more permissive; unions between men and women are easily dissolved without shame, women are free to have multiple sexual partners, and concepts of adultery, promiscuity and illegitimacy are not known as they are in the West (H. Gottner-Abendroth, ‘The Structure Of Matriarchal Societies’, Revision, 21.3 (1999)).
1 Rose McKeon Olson and Claudia García-Moreno, ‘Virginity Testing: A Systematic Review’, Reproductive Health, 14.1 (2017)
2 World Health Organization, ‘Interagency Statement Calls For The Elimination Of “Virginity-Testing”’, World Health Organization, 2018
3 ‘FGM National Clinical Group – Historical & Cultural’, Fgmnationalgroup.org, 2018
4 ‘Female Genital Mutilation’, World Health Organization, 2017
5 ‘Virginity Testing “Sacred” But Not a Science’, Africa Check, 2017
6 Lucy Pasha-Robinson, ‘Doctors Are Being Ordered to Perform “Virginity Tests” on Underage Girls in Russia’, The Independent, 2018
7 Kathleen Coyne Kelly, Performing Virginity and Testing Chastity in the Middle Ages (New York: Routledge, 2000).
8 Soranus and Owsei Temkin, Soranus’ Gynecology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).
9 Danielle Jacquart and Claude Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1988), p. 44.
10 ‘Lacuscurtius Valerius Maximus – Liber VIII’, Penelope.Uchicago.Edu, 2018
11 Aelian, On the Characteristics of Animals (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959), p. 358; Michael Rosenberg, Signs of Virginity: Testing Virgins and Making Men in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 26.
12 Albertus and Helen Rodnite Lemay, Women’s Secrets: A Translation of Pseudo-Albertus Magnus’ De Secretis Mulierum with Commentaries (Albany: University of New York Press, 1992), p. 128.
13 Rosenberg, Signs of Virginity, p. 24.
14 Kelly, Performing Virginity and Testing Chastity in the Middle Ages, pp. 28–31.
15 Navas, Book of Women (Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2014), p. 142.
16 Albertus, Women’s Secrets, p. 128.
17 ‘Bloody Sheets: An Age-Old Tradition Still Held in Georgia’s Regions’, Georgia Today, 2017
18 Henry Ansgar Kelly and Alan M Dershowitz, The Matrimonial Trials of Henry VIII (London: Wipf and Stock, 2004), pp. 233–4.
19 The Trotula, trans. by Monica Helen Green (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), pp. 103–4.
20 Navas, Book of Women, pp. 142–4.
21 Nicolas Venette, The Mysteries of Conjugal Love Reveal’d, 3rd edn (London, 1712), p. 78.
22 Francis Grose, A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, 3rd edn (London: Hooper & Co.,1796), p. 183.
23 Nocturnal Revels: Or, the History of King’s Place (London: M. Goadby, 1779), p. 164.
24 John Cleland, Fanny Hill, or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (London: LBA, 2007), Kindle edition, p. 146.
25 Tassie Gwilliam, ‘Female Fraud: Counterfeit Maidenheads in the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 6 (1996), pp. 518–48.
26 ‘On the Signs of Defloration in Young Females’, London Medical Gazette: or, Journal of Practical Medicine, 48 (1831), 304–6.
27 Edward B. Foote, Medical Common Sense (New York: printed by the author, 1867), p. 173.
28 Rose McKeon Olson and Claudia García-Moreno, ‘Virginity Testing: A Systematic Review’, Reproductive Health, 14.1 (2017)
29 Independent Forensic Expert Group, ‘Statement on Virginity Testing’, Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine, 33 (2015), pp. 121–24
30 Olson and García-Moreno, ‘Virginity Testing: A Systematic Review’, Reproductive Health, p. 14.
SEX
AND
PENISES
Spilling the Beans
Orgasm and Onanism
The female orgasm is often spoken of as if it were a hidden treasure to be found only with the aid of maps, detailed instructions and a packed lunch. The intrepid sexual adventurer boldly sets out, like Indiana Jones, to navigate the mystery of the female body, read the clues, solve the puzzle and choose wisely before drinking from the Holy Grail. The male orgasm, on the other hand, is spoken of in terms of a bottle of Coke: shake it up until it explodes out the end and makes everything sticky. Job done.
Almost all slang terms for orgasm throughout history refer to male orgasms, rather than female. When it comes to orgasm slang, women share with men rather than owning their own: cumming, spending, climaxing, orgasming, etc. are all unisex, with the possible exception of squirting. While there are thousands of nouns for semen, how many can you think of for the natural lubricant women secrete during sex? It doesn’t even have a word of its own in English. In medical parlance, it’s called vaginal mucus, or vaginal secretion. The French call this fluid cyprine, from ‘Cyprus’, the birthplace of Aphrodite, goddess of love. Not to be outdone by the French, Roger’s Profanisaurus arrived in the 1990s to nourish the English lexical wasteland with such gems as ‘fanny batter’ and ‘gusset icing’. However welcome such additions may be, the fact remains that slang for semen and the male orgasm could fill a dictionary, and the female equivalent could fill a footnote.
Perhaps it’s not too surprising that male and female orgasms are discussed in very different terms. Elisabeth Lloyd’s comprehensive analysis of thirty-three studies of sexual behaviour, conducted over the past eighty years, reveals that up to 80 per cent of women have difficulty orgasming from vaginal intercourse alone and between 5 per cent and 10 per cent of women never experience an orgasm.1 Ever. To date, there have only been a handful of studies into the orgasms of trans women after penile-inversion vaginoplasty, but this research has shown that 18 per cent of trans women could not orgasm by masturbation alone, 14 per cent of trans women complained of anorgasmia, and up to 20 per cent experienced difficulty orgasming post-surgery.2 Studies have shown that most women require at least twenty minutes of sexual activity to climax and there are myriad factors that can kibosh a lady’s snap, crackle and pop: age, stress, atmosphere, smells, self-esteem.3 Frankly, it’s a known flight risk.
Comparably straightfor
ward a male orgasm may be, but the history of male orgasm is anything but simple. The historical understanding of what happened to a man’s body and soul once he had ‘blown his beans’ (1972) is a dark and deeply troubling one. From the medieval theologians who actually recommended beans to cure impotence as they believed an erection was caused by air inflating the penis, to Roman priests of Cybele who castrated themselves in frenzied ceremonies, it’s been a bumpy ride for the ‘hot rod’ (1972). But it’s the link between orgasm and energy that I want to focus on here, the ancient theory that orgasm weakens a man’s strength and drains his masculine virility. You know the one. In Rocky (1976), the Italian Stallion’s legendary trainer, Mickey, tells him ‘women weaken legs’.4 British sprinter Linford Christie used to say making love the night before a race made his legs feel ‘like lead’.5 Boxer Carl Froch abstained from sex for three months before knocking out George Groves in their world title fight.6 Each world cup, rumours abound about which coach has imposed a nookie embargo on his players before a match.
It’s important before going any further to state that there is absolutely no scientific data to support this theory. A 2016 systematic review of all the current scientific evidence on the effects of sexual activity on sport performance found that ‘evidence suggests that sexual activity the day before competition does not exert any negative impact on performance’.7 The New York Yankees manager Casey Stengel once said, ‘it’s not the sex that wrecks these guys, it’s staying up all night looking for it’.8 However, the myth persists.
The theory that orgasm creates an energy leak stretches back to ancient China and Taoism. A key belief within Taoism is seminal vitality (yuan ching), and that semen must not leave the body, but be reabsorbed to nourish the brain (huan jing). While a man is encouraged to have sex, he must not orgasm if the life force is to be preserved. The Classic of Su Nu (c. AD 200–500) is a text in the form of a debate between the Yellow Emperor and the goddess Su Nu. The emperor asks the goddess how he can preserve his vital energies, and she tells him to cease ejaculating during sex.