Setting aside its peculiar obsessional Nature, the new Christian morality ran perversely counter to human psychology in the way it denied any legitimate outlet for sexual feelings. The terrible distortions and corruptions of personality that this would create were not unknown to contemporary physicians. Soranus of Ephesus remarked in the second century, ‘If the body feels no sexual desire it seems to suffer just as the spirit does.’ Much later, Ambrose, the official poet of the Third Crusade, confirmed the medical belief that lack of sex was bad for the health. ‘A hundred thousand men died there’, he wrote of the Crusade, ‘Because from women they abstained / They had not perished thus / Had they not been abstemious’. Furthermore, around the time of Magna Carta in England, the Church, whilst proscribing sex at practically all times, simultaneously set down detailed instructions on how husbands should have sex with their wives to best effect.
A sage known as Giles of Rome, according to a 2003 book, 1215: The Year of Magna Carta, advocated Galen’s venerable advice on raising the ‘temperature’ of women by foreplay so as conception might successfully take place. When the wife began ‘to speak as if she were babbling’, Giles said, it was time for the husband to make his grand entry.
The idea that missing orgasms was unhealthy was almost certainly the perception of the ordinary man and woman. This sentiment continues to be a commonplace in the contemporary West, where it co-exists a little uncomfortably with Christian abstemiousness and fear of sexual desire. To choose but one example of semi-scientific confirmation that denial of sex is harmful, a 1983 survey, Sex and Self-Esteem, Medical Aspects of Human Sexuality, noted in conclusion: ‘Orgasm and other forms of sexual expression are such a source of self-affirmation that two-thirds of psychiatrists believe people “nearly always or often” lose self-esteem when deprived of a regular outlet for sexual gratification.’
Yet the madness traceable to one peculiar obsession of a few misguided, if idealistic, men 2,000 years ago did not abate. The damaging effects of lack of sex have continued to rear their ugly Hydra head for thousands of years now, in a range of unpleasant manifestations. The obscene paedophilic excesses of a handful of Catholic clergy the world over in the modern age is just one of the more dramatic and corrosive of these. Some of the most egregious examples of the twisted behaviour engendered down the centuries by the Christian cult’s rejection of sex and, worse still, denial of the enjoyment of orgasm, occurred when Europeans attempted to export their ‘civilised’ Christian ideals to colonial subjects whose ideas on sex, to our current view, were rather advanced and sophisticated.
Spanish colonists in particular encountered an ancient tradition of sexual equality and reverence for the orgasm in South and Central America. They attempted to introduce the radical new idea to the ‘primitives’ that women’s genitals were partes vergonzozas, ‘the shameful parts,’ and that female sexuality was an abomination.
The indigenous people sometimes argued the case for their own ways. There is a description of a cleric, Fray Tomas Carrasco, preaching to a crowd against their ‘promiscuity’ and urging them to embrace monogamy. A woman bravely stood up and spoke out against the new European ways of male domination and female sexual shame. Unfortunately, she was killed by lightning in mid-oration, which the friar interpreted as proof she was a witch, while her own people saw it as evidence that she was quite right.
As Naomi Wolf has written: ‘Europeans who witnessed these native women’s assertion of their sexuality saw not divinity but depravity. According to the colonisers, Pueblo women could not even conceive of modesty or shame in relation to their bodies. Since, in the Western tradition, human beings in Eden were redeemed by shame, and particularly, as Christian theology evolved, by feminine shame, Europeans were inclined to see Hell where the Pueblo saw everyday pleasure.’
One of the world’s most grotesque examples of a community warped to near destruction by the belief that Christianity and shame about sex go hand in hand is provided by the primitive island of Inis Beag, off the west coast of Ireland, as it was when anthropologists discovered its bizarre sexual culture in the 1960s.
Nudity, the researchers found, was abhorred by the islanders, even among small children, and animals regarded as sinful for going about undressed. Dogs would be whipped for licking their genitals. Girls and boys were separated at all times. Bathing was unknown, dressing was done only under bedcovers, and breastfeeding was highly uncommon. Any type of sexual expression needless to say, masturbation even to open urination, was severely punished by beatings. Parents believed that after marriage, ‘Nature would take its own course’. As a result, there were many childless couples due to neither spouse knowing what was expected of them. Marriages were arranged and forced on couples, their average ages at marriage being thirty-six for men and twenty-five for women. A man was still considered a ‘boy’ until he was forty. The Church taught women that sex was a duty to be endured and that to refuse sex with their husband was a mortal sin. Underwear was kept on during sex and menopause regarded as an inevitable madness that afflicts women, some of whom confined themselves to bed at forty and lived as invalids until old age. Psychologists studying the island found that its inhabitants sought escape from sexual frustration by masturbation, drinking, and alcohol-fuelled fights.
There is a popular view of the human psyche as a mattress; if our desires are thwarted in one area, they will simply prompt something else to pop up like a broken spring elsewhere in our behaviour. The mattress theory is famously illustrated in antiquity by Teresa of Avila, the fourteenth-century Spanish saint, who experienced rapturous visions of ‘angelic visitation’ which sound suspiciously like nothing more or less Godly than a rather spectacular orgasm.
As St Teresa put it: ‘In his [the angel’s] hands I saw a long golden spear and at the end of the iron tip I seemed to see a point of fire. With this he seemed to pierce my heart several times so that it penetrated to my entrails. When he drew it out, I thought he was drawing them out with it and he left me completely afire with a great love of God. The pain was so sharp that it made me utter several sharp moans; and so excessive was the sweetness caused me by this intense pain that one can never wish to lose it.’
Orgasmic-style, rapturous bodily sensations may be more common in those of a religious disposition than has been generally acknowledged. We spoke earlier of the oddly copulatory rocking of Orthodox Jews praying and reading the holy scriptures. Burgo Partridge, in his history of orgies, wrote wisely in reference to the early days of Christianity: ‘Abstinence from sexual activity leads to an almost total mental preoccupation with the subject and psychoneurotic symptoms and sexual hallucinations were developed on a really astonishing scale. A terrific outburst of “incubi” and “succubi” swept the bedrooms of Europe. These were nocturnal visitors, connected in the minds of the Christians with witchcraft and devilry, who indulged in liberties with the afflicted person, always of a sexual Nature. They were particularly common in nunneries, and seemed also to be highly infectious.’
Common sense prevailed widely, though; many medical men were aware that incubi were delusions, and it was frequently said at the time that, ‘incubi infest cloisters’. More telltale still was the fact that these nocturnal ‘spirit visitors’ often left the nuns with a phantom pregnancy; a more eloquent example of the subconscious trying to impose itself through bodily processes would be hard to find.
It took Geoffrey Chaucer to point out satirically that incubi became much less spoken of after ‘limitours’ – wandering friars notorious for sleeping with women while their husbands were absent – appeared on the medieval scene. R.C. Zaehner in his 1957 book Mysticism Sacred and Profane further noted: ‘There is no point at all in blinkering the fact that the raptures of the theistic mystic are closely akin to the transports of sexual union, the soul playing the part of the female and God appearing as the male. The close parallel between the sexual act and the mystical union with God may seem blasphemous today. Yet the blasphemy is not in the comparison, but in th
e degrading of the one act of which man is capable that makes him like God both in the intensity of his union with his partner and in the fact that by this union he is co-creator with God.’
Amongst women, nuns unsurprisingly seem to have been particularly unhinged by voluntary orgasmic deprivation. In 1565, an epidemic of erotic convulsions reportedly affected a convent in Cologne. According to a Dr De Weier, who was called in to investigate, the nuns would throw themselves on their backs, shut their eyes, raise their abdomens erotically and thrust forward their pudenda. Partridge mentions imaginary night-time visitations among the sex-starved by ‘witches’ and their demons, but ‘witches’ themselves who testified at various times in the Middle Ages to ‘night-flying’ were probably (broomsticks notwithstanding) using hallucinogenic drugs and ointments and enjoying LSD-like firework displays. But there were accounts too of self-proclaimed witches, often sexually inactive crones, swearing that they had flown when they outwardly appeared to be asleep; it is very possible that they were experiencing self-induced orgasm.
The mattress hypothesis was best exemplified, however, by a one-time priestly initiate in England, now a novelist, Paul Crawford, who has written on the dangers of celibacy in the modern age, and how this ‘destructive force in the life of the Church’ has distorted priests’ behaviour. ‘My experience training for the priesthood at Oscott College during the 1980s gave me first-hand experience of the unhealthy development of human sexuality among its clergy,’ Crawford wrote in the Guardian. ‘The life of the Catholic priest, with its marked isolation, loneliness and sexual denial, cannot fail to frustrate individuals and deform otherwise natural urges and desires into more bizarre, or simply counterproductive and pathetic appetites.
‘Even masturbation was outlawed. I will never forget the burning faces of men being told that this was sinful, when in all truth it was an absolute necessity as far as most of us were concerned … To sublimate direct sexual expression, many of the men in the seminary entered a strange twilight world of glib affection, camply addressing one another as “Mother” or “Dearest”. More humorous than in any way disturbing, this behaviour did seem to signpost sexual frustration. On one occasion, when a male relative of mine visited me, a student forced himself on him in the toilets and tried to kiss him.’ Celibacy continues in a variety of cultures to be regarded as a source of power.
Nothing in history quite approximates the ferocity with which Christianity pursued its case versus the orgasm. There is, as Desmond Morris has observed, no one quite so obsessed by sex as a fanatical puritan. What is most puzzling about the continuing phenomenon is that the rejection of sexual enjoyment has at no stage been seen by Christian revisionists as in any sense a grievous insult to God, who must, surely, have created the parts of the body responsible for orgasm, which would suggest that the process is therefore free from sin.
A certain logic can be seen in parts of the Christian sexual tradition. For women, a practical reason for celibacy is that it was the only 100 per cent-sure way of avoiding, and particularly dying in, childbirth. It is also possible to contrive an argument against masturbation on the grounds that it is taking liberties, if only a little, with God’s creation. Then again, if masturbation were a sin, surely God would have been bold enough to speak outright about it, rather than hide coded, ambiguous references to it in the Bible for uneducated preachers to interpret for him?
Self-denial and censorious zeal, it has to be concluded, seem to speak to something deeper in the human psyche than any professed religious belief. Even if Jesus had demanded free love and promiscuity of his adherents, the suspicion remains that the textual references would have been removed in mysterious ways – or re-interpreted to within an inch of their life. What it is that motivates the religious obsessive’s hatred of sex could, for a psychoanalyst, be any number of childhood traumas and dysfunctions. However, an economic explanation has to be high on the list of possible reasons for the Christian church’s obsession with sex.
If there is one thing, after all, the Church is more fixated on than sex, it is money. Mandatory priestly celibacy, as we have seen, was a mechanism for keeping Church property from leaking away by inheritance to clerics’ children. Sex as a joyous activity for laity, it might also be argued, could equally damage the Church’s fiscal interests, as it could lead to a surfeit of bastard children who would effectively be heathen – and ineligible to be part of the customer base of the Church.
Many other facets of human history have been founded on such obliquely commercial foundations; it is quite likely that the mass enjoyment of orgasm, too, has been seen as ultimately bad for religious business.
11
Orgasm in the
Middle Ages
‘O Venus, that art goddesse of plesaunce!
Syn that thy servant was this Chauntecleer,
And in thy servyce dide al his poweer,
Moore for delit than world to multiplye.’
Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘The Nun’s Priest’s Tale’
Throughout much of the world, the Medieval era and the Renaissance were the heyday of unfettered, guiltless, uncomplicated enjoyment of orgasm. China, India, Japan, the Middle East and Central America (before Christian values were fully hammered home by Spanish colonists) were all centres of orgasmic excellence. Even in the Christian world, as we shall see, there was widespread flouting of the stern official strictures against the enjoyment of sex; clerical marriages were officially allowed so long as husband and wife did not have sex, a prohibition that was manifestly no more than a formality when Popes routinely had children and Henry III, Bishop of Liège, was known to have sired sixty-five illegitimate offspring.
The dead hand of the anti-sex movement did not properly descend until the emerging Protestant Reformation in Europe began to threaten the formal dismantling of priestly celibacy, along with a more pragmatic all-round approach to sexual matters. In 1563, the Council of Trent reacted on behalf of the traditionalists to the reforming trend by pronouncing uncompromisingly, ‘… that it is more blessed to remain in virginity or in celibacy than to be joined in marriage’.
No such state of sexless, pleasure-free grace troubled the medieval Chinese. Huang O, a female poet of the sixteenth century, wrote as sensitively and yet erotically as any woman in antiquity in The Orchid Boat:
I will allow only
My lord to possess my sacred
Lotus pond, and every night
You can make blossom in me
Flowers of fire.
Huang O was almost certainly referring to her vagina in this verse – an obvious statement, one might say, were it not for the strange historical quirk that from the eleventh-century onwards the Chinese were collectively fixated on the female foot as being configurable as a kind of extra vagina. Their fetishistic passion was, more correctly, for the tiny ‘golden lotus flower’ foot that high-class Chinese parents produced in their girl children by binding their feet from the age of six.
A typical lotus foot in an adult was small to the point of deformity – some four inches long by a thumb’s width across, according to Xiao Jiao, a writer on the history of sex in China, although one suspects this may be a downwards exaggeration. Encased in a tiny silken slipper, it was considered the most private area of a woman’s body, touching it being the ultimate act of intimacy between her and her husband or lover. The toe of this deformed, bud-like extremity was exaggerated to simulate a small pseudo-penis, while the fleshy, soft area under the arches, was regarded, and used, both as a pair of secondary vaginas and as a female analogue for the penis.
An American China specialist, Howard Seymour Levy, wrote of the antique custom of footbinding in a 1966 book on the subject that: ‘The ways of grasping the foot in one’s palms were both profuse and varied, ascending the heights of ecstasy when the lover transferred the foot from palm to mouth. Play included kissing, sucking and inserting the foot in the mouth until it filled both cheeks, either nibbling at it or chewing vigorously, and adoringly placing it agai
nst one’s cheeks, chest, knees or virile member.’
Some women, according to Levy, developed this erotic artistry to the extent that they could deftly grasp a partner’s penis between their feet and guide it into the vagina. A few could also masturbate by rubbing or stroking their own lotus feet. For others, orgasm was said to be enhanced if a lover grabbed their feet during it. Chinese women, both lesbian and straight, would also reputedly practise simulated intercourse by mutually inserting their big toes into one another’s vagina.
Footbinding and its accoutrements titillated many foreigners in Imperial China. Marco Polo, travelling there from Venice in the thirteenth century, admittedly managed to miss seeing the custom (he also failed to notice acupuncture and the Great Wall). But a Dr Matignon, attaché to the French diplomatic mission to China in the 1890s was, like most visitors in the previous thousand years, more observant, writing how: ‘Touching of the genital organs by the tiny feet provokes, in the male, thrills of an indescribable voluptuousness. And the great lovers know that in order to awaken the ardour of especially their older clients, an infallible method is to take die rod [penis] between their two feet, which is worth more than all the aphrodisiacs of the Chinese pharmacopoeia and kitchen.’
Footbinding was banned in China in 1902, and appears to have been an extreme attempt by cruel, possessive men to keep women captive, immobile and helpless. There must also be a suspicion that the tales of women being able to masturbate by manipulating their own deformed feet long be more in the realms of male fantasy than reality. The rheumy modern eye, additionally, will not be slow to detect not a little inherent paedophilia in the notion of men being masturbated by feet the size of a six-year-old girl’s.
O Page 24