by Kate Lister
Lysol douche adverts are not shy in informing women that vulvas stink, and usually feature a young wife whose husband is on the verge of walking out because she has neglected her ‘personal feminine hygiene’. A distraught and humiliated woman is shown left alone and tearful because her husband couldn’t stand the smell of her ‘old lady’ (1885). Homes lie in ruins, children are left fatherless and the poor woman will now die alone, and all because she failed to disinfect her ‘grumble’ (1938). It’s an unbelievably cruel campaign.***
A Lysol douche advert. ‘Still “the girl he married”’, thanks to scouring her genitals with floor cleaner.
Because Lysol could not advertise itself openly as a form of contraception, they had to subtly hint at its spermicidal properties. Many of the adverts mention how effective Lysol is at destroying ‘organic matter’, which is a coded reference to sperm.
Not only is douching with toilet disinfectant not a reliable method of contraception, but it is also extremely dangerous. In the first half of the twentieth century, drinking Lysol was a common method of suicide and newspapers are crammed full of such tragic cases. Despite repeated claims that Lysol was gentle and would not damage delicate tissue, by 1911 doctors had recorded 193 women who had been poisoned with Lysol douches, and five deaths from ‘uterine irrigation’.17 Despite never admitting liability, Lysol changed their formula in 1952 to be a quarter as toxic as before.
Eventually, contraceptive douching was replaced by the Pill and latex condoms (things that actually work). But this just meant that marketers redoubled their efforts to convince women they smelled bad and only their product could cure this.
A 1928 advertisement for Zonite douche liquid in McCall’s Magazine shows a grumpy woman who regrets not disinfecting her vulva sooner.
Whole-page adverts pushing flavoured douches were common in the 1970s. In 1971, Essence Magazine ran an article called ‘Beauty Wonders: No Smell So Sweet’, which asked women if ‘you’re getting more attention in a crowd than usual, or if your ole’ man turns off the instant you come near, then it’s about time to check out why. Could be, your hygiene-thing isn’t as up-tight as it should be … and that’s inexcusable, my dears.’18 The article then recommends all manner of wipes, soaps and deodorants to make sure women could walk down the street without people passing out in their wake. The blunt and offensive nature of vintage adverts may shock you, but the vaginal deodorant business continues to boom today. The marketing may have softened its approach since warning young women their husbands will leave them if they haven’t scoured themselves raw and installed an air freshener, but these products still make their money by convincing customers their vulvas require a specialist cleaning kit, that it needs extra cleaning that only they can provide – and that stinks.
1950 advert for ‘Dr Pierre’s Boro-Pheno-Form Feminine Hygiene Suppositories’.
A word that crops up again and again in vintage douche adverts is ‘dainty’. Women must douche to maintain their ‘dainty feminine allure’, to ‘stay dainty’, and ‘safeguard your daintiness’. The idea that one must remove all vaginal odour in order to be ‘feminine’ and ‘dainty’ is telling. There is nothing sexy about dainty. Vulvas aren’t dainty. They can eat a penis and push out a baby. They are bloody, sweaty, sticky, hairy, seats of awesome pleasure, and their natural odour is immediately linked to sex. I suspect this is what we have been trying to wash away. A ‘dainty’ woman is not a sexual woman. Her pussy won’t smell of sex, it will smell of furniture polish, or a fondant fancy. The desperation to have germ-free, smell-free genitals stems from a fear of being sexual or being thought of as sexual. A vulva does not need drain cleaner to be healthy. Nor does it require being water-cannoned before it is safe for you to leave the house. Make peace with your smells, they know what they’re doing.***
* * *
* Physicians such as Soranus (c. AD 98–138) and Oribasius (c. AD 320–400) recommend rinsing the vagina after sex as a form of contraception. Robert Jütte, Contraception: A History (Cambridge: Polity, 2008).
** It’s worth pointing out here that the company behind the early twentieth-century Lysol douching campaign was Lehn and Fink. Today, Lysol is owned by Reckitt Benckiser who had nothing to do with the original campaign, and whose customer service team are just lovely to random women who email them out of the blue to ask about putting Lysol in their ‘fanny’ (1834). For the record, although the Lysol product from ninety years ago is not the Lysol product people see on shelves today, they did ask that I make sure everyone reading this book fully understood that ‘today’s Lysol product should only be used as per label instruction. Any other form of use or exposure is to be avoided.’
*** Really do get to know your smells, because a sudden change in smell can indicate a vaginal infection such as bacterial vaginosis. This does not require douching, but it might require an appointment with your GP.
1 Technavio Research, Global Vaginal Odor Control Product Market 2018–2022 (London: Regional Business News, 2018).
2 Jo’s Cervical Cancer Trust, ‘Body Shame Responsible for Young Women not Attending Smear Tests’, Jo’s Cervical Cancer Trust, 2018
3 Louis Keith and others, ‘The Odors of the Human Vagina’, Archiv Für Gynäkologie, 220.1 (1975), pp. 1–10
4 E. B. Keverne and R. P. Michael, ‘Sex-Attractant Properties of Ether Extracts of Vaginal Secretions from Rhesus Monkeys’, Journal Of Endocrinology, 51.2 (1971), pp. 313–22
5 Megan N. Williams and Amy Jacobson, ‘Effect of Copulins on Rating of Female Attractiveness, Mate-Guarding, and Self-Perceived Sexual Desirability’, Evolutionary Psychology, 14.2 (2016), 147470491664332
6 Didem Sunay, Erdal Kaya and Yusuf Ergun, ‘Vaginal Douching Behavior of Women and Relationship Among Vaginal Douching and Vaginal Discharge and Demographic Factors’, Journal of Turkish Society of Obstetric and Gynecology, 8.4 (2011), 264–71 https://doi.org/10.5505/tjod.2011.57805; ‘Douching’, Womenshealth.Gov, 2018
7 Charles Knowlton, Fruits of Philosophy: A Treatise on the Population Question (San Francisco: Readers Library, 1891), p. 74.
8 Dr Blundell, ‘Incapability of Retaining the Urine’, The Lancet, 1 (1829), 673–7.
9 Clifton E. Wing, ‘The Proper Use of the Hot Vaginal Douche’, The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, 102 (1880), 583–4.
10 ‘Reports of Societies’, The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, 14 (1889), 443–5, 444.
11 John Ashurst, The International Encyclopedia of Surgery: A Systematic Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Surgery (W. Wood, 1895), p. 1002.
12 Catalogue and Report of Obstetrical and other Instruments (London: Obstetric Society of London, 1867).
13 James V. Ricci, The Development of Gynaecological Surgery and Instruments (Philadelphia: Blakiston, 1949), p. 526.
14 Knowlton, Fruits of Philosophy, p. 74.
15 ‘Vaginal Douching’, Monthly Retrospect of Medicine & Pharmacy, 4 (1898), p. 555.
16 ‘Over a Century of Healthing’, Lysol.Com, 2018
17 Andrea Tone, Devices and Desire: A History of Contraceptives in America (New York: Hill and Wang), pp. 151–83.
18 ‘Beauty Wonders: No Smell So Sweet’, Essence, September 1971, p. 20.
SEX
AND
REPRODUCTION
French Letters, English Raincoats and Mrs Phillips’s Wares
A History of the Condom
Despite condoms providing the most effective protection against both pregnancy and STIs, they do come in for a ribbing. Even in countries where they are freely available, many people regard them as a necessary evil, and some don’t use them at all. In 2017, a YouGov survey of 2,007 sixteen- to twenty-four-year-olds in the UK found that almost half (47 per cent) of sexually active young people reported having sex with a new partner for the first time and not using a condom. And one in ten sexually active eighteen- to twenty-five-year-olds reported they had never used a condom.1 In 2017, there were 7,137 cases of syphilis reported in England, a 20 per cent increase from 2016, and a shocking 148 per cent increase from 2008. Gonorrhoea is also on the increase in the UK, with 44,676 diagnoses reported in 2017, a 22 per cent increase from 2016.2
I get it. Condoms can be fiddly, they can dull sensation, and they can make the penis look like a clingfilmed bratwurst. But surely a dose of the clap or an unexpected pregnancy are even worse than any of these, so why are some people still so reluctant to wrap it up? I suspect one of the reasons is that antibiotics and antiviral drugs have thankfully provided us with something of a safety net. Of course, if left untreated gonorrhoea and chlamydia can cause infertility, herpes is not curable and HIV remains life-changing (though not necessarily life-threatening with the right medication). I don’t mean to minimise the damage of STIs, but I do want to point out that if caught early, the majority of infections require nothing more than a course of antibiotics and a few awkward phone calls with previous partners. This is a luxury our ancestors never had.
But this might not be the case for much longer. So-called ‘super gonorrhoea’, a multi-drug-resistant strain of the disease, is on the rise, and incidents of antibiotic resistance in both chlamydia and syphilis have been reported.3 If alternative treatments aren’t found, we could find ourselves back in a pre-antibiotic world of STIs, and that’s not a pretty place.
For as long as people have been having sex, there have been methods of preventing pregnancy and disease by covering the penis during intercourse. Evidence of such practice is found throughout the Ancient World.* For example, the legend of King Minos of Crete, told by Antoninus Liberalis sometime around the second century AD, tells how his queen, Pasiphae, could not conceive because the king’s semen was riddled with scorpions and serpents. King Minos was advised to have intercourse with another woman, but to place a goat’s bladder inside her vulva to catch his poisoned seed. Once the king had got it out of his system (so to speak), he was free to make love to his wife and produce a clutch of healthy, scorpion-free babies.4 Technically, this is a reference to what we might today call a female condom, rather than a male condom, but it does demonstrate a knowledge of using animal membrane sheaths to prevent exchange of sexual fluids.
Linen sheaths about the length of a finger, with strings to fix them in place, were discovered in the tomb of the boy Pharaoh Tutankhamun who ruled Egypt from c.1332 to 1323 BC.5 Today these sheaths are exhibited in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo as ‘condoms’, which would make them the earliest known example of condoms in the world.6 However, it is by no means certain that these items were condoms, and they may have been some kind of ritual dress instead. Nor is there any other corroborating evidence of condom use in Ancient Egypt, though there is plenty of evidence to suggest birth control was practised. The Kahun Medical Papyrus (c.1825 BC), for example, doesn’t mention condoms but does recommend a contraceptive pessary made from crocodile dung and honey, which would be inserted into the vulva before sex.7 Interestingly, this concoction might actually have worked as a spermicide due to the high acidic levels, but please don’t try this at home.
The earliest firm evidence we have of venereal protection that resembles a condom is found in the work of Italian physician Gabriele Falloppio (1523–1562). Falloppio was one of many physicians desperately trying to fight the advance of syphilis across Europe in the sixteenth century.‡‡‡‡‡‡‡ Falloppio understood that the ‘French Disease’, as he called it, was sexually transmitted and he devised a fabric sheath that fitted around the glans of the penis to prevent transmission. Falloppio’s sheath was to be soaked in a mixture of wine, mercury, ashes, salt and wood shavings. Crucially, Falloppio instructed this wrap be applied after sex; he does not suggest attempting to keep this in place during sex. The theory was that his wrap would cleanse the penis of infection. Falloppio boldly claimed he had instructed over a thousand soldiers in how to use his condom and none of them contracted syphilis.8 As Falloppio’s wrap was designed to be used after sex, it was certainly useless, but it is one of the earliest known accounts of wrapping the penis to prevent infection.
Other sixteenth-century ‘treatments’ for syphilis included steaming and fumigation, guaiacum wood (ground up and drunk, or rubbed into the skin), and, of course, mercury – ingested, injected or applied directly to the sores. Mercury had been used to treat skin lesions since Guy de Chauliac advocated its use to cure scabies in 1363.9 It may have been effective in burning away syphilitic lesions, but it is also highly toxic, causing all manner of neurological problems, as well as swollen gums, rotting teeth and hair loss.
A watercolour of a man suffering from psoriasis and possibly syphilis, by C. D’Alton, 1866. Lettering on back of print states: ‘History of primaries [primary syphilis] rather obscure; eruption on arms and shoulders simple psoriasis – the face and chest decidedly copper coloured and syphilitic.’
Why would anyone be willing to suffer such hideous treatment? Because the disease itself was even worse. Italian surgeon Giovanni da Vigo (1450–1525) described the progression of syphilis in his 1514 work, De Morbo Gallicus.
The contagion which gives rise to it comes particularly from coitus: that is, sexual commerce of a healthy man with a sick woman or to the contrary … The first symptoms of this malady appear almost invariably upon the genital organs, that is, upon the penis or the vulva. They consist of small ulcerated pimples of a colour especially brownish and livid, sometimes black, sometimes slightly pale. These pimples are circumscribed by a ridge of callous like hardness … Then there appear a series of new ulcerations on the genitalia … Then the skin becomes covered with scabby pimples or with elevated papules resembling warts … A month and a half, about, after the appearance of the first symptoms, the patients are afflicted with pains sufficiently to draw from them cries of anguish … Still very much later (a year or even longer after the above complication) there appear certain tumours of scirrhus hardness, which provoke terrible suffering.10
In its later stages, syphilis attacks the brain, the soft tissues of the face and causes lesions to form on the bones. It is a truly horrific disease and one that was rightly feared. Useless as they were, when considering the alternative one can see the appeal of Falloppio’s condoms.
This condom dates to around 1900, and is made of animal gut membrane, known as caecal.
Soon, sheaths made of animal guts that were to be worn during coitus replaced Falloppio’s linen precautions.§§§§§§§ These early condoms were usually made from sheep guts, though sheaths made from fish bladders were also used. The gut would be cut to size and dried out, and required soaking in milk or water to rehydrate it. They were then fastened on the penis with a ribbon or string, and then washed out after use and reused – several times.
The treatment process of turning sheep intestine into a condom is described in Robley Dunglison’s New Dictionary of Medical Science and Literature (1833).
The caecum of a sheep, soaked for some hours in water, turned inside out, macerated again in weak alkaline lye, changed every twelve hours, scraped carefully to abstract the mucous membrane, leaving the peritoneal and muscular coats exposed to the vapour of burning brimstone, and afterwards washed with soap and water. It is then blown up, dried, cut to the length of seven or eight inches, and bordered at the
open end with a riband. It is drawn over the penis prior to coition, to prevent venereal infection and pregnancy.11
It would have been condoms such as these that our favourite libertine John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester wrote about in a celebratory pamphlet titled A Panegyric upon Cundum (1667). Being a thoroughly debauched scoundrel, Rochester was thrilled at the prospect of being able to have sex with as many ‘creature[s] obscene’ as he could handle without risking either the ‘tormenting sores’ or ‘the big belly and the squalling brat’.
Happy the Man, who in his pocket keeps,
Whether with Green or Scarlet Ribband bound,
A well made CUNDUM – He, nor dreads the ills
Of Shankers or Cordee, or Buboes Dire!12
Rochester could have certainly used a ‘well-made cundum’, as he died in 1680, riddled with syphilis and covered in lesions and sores, aged just thirty-three.
The Scottish biographer James Boswell (1740–1795) also placed his faith in the sheep-gut condom to protect him from venereal disease during his considerable sexual exploits. Boswell refers to condoms in his diary as ‘machines’, ‘sheaths’ or his ‘armour’.¶¶¶¶¶¶¶
17 May 1763
I picked up a fresh, agreeable young girl called Alice Gibbs. We went down a lane to a snug place, and I took out my armour, but she begged that I might not put it on, as the sport was much pleasanter without it, and as she was quite safe. I was so rash as to trust her, and had a very agreeable congress.13
One of the many drawbacks about the sheep-gut condom was that it dried out between uses and needed to be soaked to make it malleable enough to fit over the penis. In one diary entry dated 4 June 1763, Boswell describes frantically dipping it in the canal before he could have sex with a ‘low Brimstone’ he picked up in the park. Despite the setback, Boswell maintained that he had ‘performed most manfully’.14 Manful he may have been, but lucky he was not. Despite his armour, Boswell contacted gonorrhoea at least nineteen times.15 In his diary, he referred to the repeated infection as ‘Signor Gonorrhea’.16 Despite their popularity, these early condoms may actually have helped to spread venereal disease as their users believed themselves to be safe and didn’t take any further precautions.