Yet it is worth nothing that there were allegedly payoffs for the woman beyond the thrill a few achieved by having their feet fiddled with. Women reported that having their feet bound altered the vagina, causing ‘a supernatural exaltation’ during sex. It was also claimed by some that the teetering, swaying ‘willow walk’ of women with bound feet caused an upward flow of blood producing better enjoyment of intercourse.
India, where a little discreet foot fetishism was also known, continued to be China’s main rival in promotion of the sexual arts. The Indian corpus of sexological texts, known as the Karma Shastra and dating from the eleventh century, acknowledge the area later termed the ‘Gräfenberg zone’ and then the G-spot in Europe, and also seem to be well acquainted with female ejaculation.
In the twelfth century another compilation of erotic greatest hits appeared, the Ananga Ranga, a self-help book which included section from the Kamasutra and was designed by its author, Kalyana Malla, to help prevent marital problems brought on by sexual boredom. Kalyana Malla was a court sage and poet commissioned by a Mogul emperor, King Ahmad, who wanted to improve his lovemaking skills to live up to his handsome appearance. Kalyana Malla stated: ‘The chief reason for the separation between the married couple and the cause which drives the husband to the embraces of strange women, and the wife to the embraces of strange men, is the want of varied pleasures, and the monotony which follows possession.’
Imagination was the key to staying sexually fulfilled, he argued, as many sex therapists would still be saying a thousand years later. By thinking up new positions, he wrote, you could fantasise that you had dozens of sexual partners; each position, additionally, could open up another hitherto un-felt sexual delight. Kalyana Malla advocated a variety of what might be called gym equipment to facilitate adventurous positional gambits; the most popular of these was identical to a modern children’s swing, but put to sexual use with the woman sitting on it with her legs up, presenting her vulva to her partner at convenient penis-height, and with the benefit of the effortless motion of the ‘love swing’ to ease herself up and down his stationary erection.
From sexual anatomy to subtleties of the emotions, the Ananga Ranga’s understanding of sex was not bettered in any Western culture until modern times. The Madana-chatra – or clitoris – the text specifies, is the upper part of the yoni. ‘Before proceeding to the various acts of congress, the symptoms of the orgasm in women must be laid down. As soon as she commences to enjoy pleasure, the eyes are half-closed and watery; the body waxes cold; the breath, after being hard and jerky, is expired in sobs or sighs, the lower limbs are simply stretched out after a period of rigidity; a rising and outflow of love and affection appears, with kisses and sportive gestures; and, finally, she seems as if about to swoon. At such time, a distaste for further embraces and blandishments become manifest; then the wise know that, the paroxysm having taken place, the woman has enjoyed plenary satisfaction; consequently, they refrain from further congress.
‘The woman who possesses Chanda-vega, or what is known as furious appetite, needs carnal enjoyment frequently and will not be satisfied with a single orgasm … And, moreover, let it be noted, that the desires of the woman being colder and slower to rouse than those of the man, she is not easily satisfied by a single act of congress; her slower powers of excitement demand prolonged embraces and if these be denied her, she feels aggrieved. At the second act, however, her passions being thoroughly aroused, she finds the orgasm more violent, and then she is thoroughly contented.’
Although we know less about its isolated culture, Japan in the Middle Ages was also both sophisticated sexually and of a mind to enjoy the pleasures of the flesh. The Tale of Genji, an eleventh-century Japanese sex-romp, is based around the practice of Yobai, or ‘night crawling’, a process of stealing in (by previous appointment, hopefully) to a girlfriend’s bedroom for a little illicit lovemaking: ‘With the lights dimmed and nineteen-year-old Saki feigning sleep on her futon, the reporter creeps into her dimly lit room. He parts the folds of her yukata [sleeping gown] and allows his fingers to creep up her reposing thighs towards the promised land. Already damp with lust, she makes purring noises and, in short order, the two are coupling in erotic samurai combat.’
The Japanese later designated part of the capital, Edo (modern Tokyo), as ‘the floating city’ – the equivalent of London’s Soho, after the city was rebuilt following a fire. There was strict zoning, so pleasure palaces were all erected together in an area with over 3,000 registered prostitutes.
An overwhelmingly positive view of sexual desire, especially female desire, can be traced on the other side of the world, too. Peruvian drinking vessels, made by women potters, have been found in the shape of vulvas, which allowed the drinker to simulate cunnilingus. The Zuñi Indians of New Mexico and Arizona blessed baby girls in a formal ceremony that celebrated their luck in being female. The men would strap on enormous false penises, and support their womenfolk’s equality, singing songs about how happy their sexual organs could make women. Sexual practices among Zuñi women, according to Naomi Wolf, ‘spanned the spectrum from heterosexual to homosexual, and age was no barrier to eroticism’.
Among the Hopi Pueblos of North Arizona, too, before the arrival of Europeans, Wolf has discovered, ‘female desire was the engine that, in a yearly woman-led rite celebrating female fecundity, sexuality and reproduction, would bring about the symbolic re-creation of cosmic harmony’. Pubescent Hopi girls would spend two days in an initiation ceremony dancing naked with other women, caressing clay penises, singing erotic songs and displaying their genitals to the men to incite them to lovemaking.
If gay sex, on the other hand, is the ultimate meter by which enjoyment of sex for sex’s sake can be unambiguously gauged, the orgasm was set even fairer in the Medieval world. Out of range of the uncompromising Judaeo-Christian god, male gayness very nearly rivalled heterosexual values across the Middle East, North Africa, Turkey and as far to the east as Indonesia. In both China and Japan, male prostitution was widespread. China had a god of sodomy and boy prostitutes, Tcheou-wang, while Japan boasted male geisha houses. In both cultures, male prostitutes could be found on designated streets as late as the Second World War.
China was the source of one of the world’s classic homo-erotic masterpieces. In the sixteenth-century Jin P’ing Mei, we read how the hero, Ximen Qing: ‘… opened the boy’s robe, pulled down his pants, and gently stroked his penis … while the boy surrendered his bottom to a mighty warrior, Ximen stroked his stiff penis … Said the boy: “He pushed his poker so violently between my buttocks that today they are swollen with great pain. When I asked him to stop, he pushed his poker in and out all the more.”’
That Christopher Columbus was engaged in the rather more macho business of exploring the globe as the Ananga Ranga was being written provides a fitting illustration of the apparent austerity that was the norm under the Christian sphere of influence in the Middle Ages.
There is certainly no scarcity of examples of this. An eleventh-century doctor of medicine in Germany, Albertus Magnus, suggested a method for the essential business of removing female sexual desire. It was, of course, to burn the penis, eyelids and beard of a wolf, ‘and then make the woman drink the results without her knowing anything about it’. The twelfth-century Italian theologian Peter Lombard maintained in his De excusatione coitus that for a man to love his wife too ardently is a sin worse than adultery. Some Catholic men at this time wore a chemise cagoule in bed, a heavy nightshirt with a hole in the front to allow the erect penis access to the vagina. Like the bed sheet with a hole mythically used by Orthodox Jews to have intercourse through, the chemise cagoule ensured that neither party would derive unnecessary tactile pleasure while procreating.
In the thirteenth century, Saint Francis was so deeply troubled by the thought of having an erection that every time he found himself sporting the beginnings of one, he felt obliged to throw himself into a thorn bush to deal with it. Masturbation was also
deeply frowned on, but by Medieval times people liked there to be a scientific reason for a restriction; a variety of Medieval medical texts duly stated that semen is a precious rare fluid, and that it takes forty parts of blood to make one of semen. Better, therefore, not to waste it. (The same 40:1 proportion, curiously, appears in Hindu writings.)
Reducing sexual intercourse in the interest of modernism to a harsh, ugly, unromantic act had the paradoxical effect of decimating any semblance of female rights – woman being the sex which, be it biologically or as a matter of socialisation, invests the most emotion in sex. It was as a direct result of the Christian debasement of sex that women became more than ever the property of men. As far back as 585, Catholic theologians were arguing that women did not have a mortal soul. By the ninth century the droit de seigneur, that virtually gave noblemen the right to ravish any peasant woman on the road and to deflower the brides of their subjects, was widely established across Christendom.
Hypocrisy was also an inescapable element in the official Christian party line on sex. Tomas Sanchez, a prominent churchman and author, suggested in 1621 that any person who feels an orgasm coming on outside of marital intercourse should lie still, avoid touching the genitals, make the sign of the Cross, and pray fervently for God not to allow him to slip into orgasmic pleasure. Yet Sanchez also argues that ‘if, when engaged in sex with a whore, a man withdraws before ejaculation, he is considered to have repented and not sinned against God’s laws’.
And yet the first 1,500 years of Christianity actually encompassed more diversity in attitudes to sex than they are usually credited with. The older, more sexually ‘progressive’ Judaism was proportionately becoming less sensible by the day; Orthodox Jewish elders by the Middle Ages were declaring masturbation to be so heinous a crime that a man should not even touch his penis when urinating. According to a 1987 book, Bizarre Sex, by a London psychotherapist, Dr Roy Eskapa, men at this time were required to ‘aim’ when urinating by lifting the scrotum. Women, records Eskapa, were permitted to examine their own genitals, but only to check if they were menstruating.
Even in the supposedly abstemous Christian countries there was a black market, so to speak, in sex. In fact, there will have been far more people – both outside the Church and within it – enjoying their orgasms than trying their hardest to hate them. Many physicians held that celibacy was unhealthy and prescribed their patients more frequent sex. In everyday life, a quite overt sexuality prevailed. Archdeacons’ courts heard constant sex cases – adultery, incest, fornication and homosexuality prevailed. Fornication was described as ‘the vice of everyone and excused by many’. In the eighth century, Boniface, the Exeter monk and chronicler, characterised the English as a people who ‘utterly despise matrimony, utterly refuse to have legitimate wives, and continue to live in lechery and adultery after the manner of a neighing horses and braying asses’.
Accusations of sodomy were bandied about almost casually in Medieval England. Anselm, a twelfth-century Archbishop of Canterbury, writing to Archdeacon William in 1102 to suggest a court crackdown on this sexual offence, says: ‘This sin had been so public that hardly anyone has blushed for it, and many, therefore, have plunged into it without realising its gravity.’ A serious crime it may have been, but the Knights Templar, famous during the Crusades, were accused of it simply to undermine them politically. The accusation was taken no more seriously than the words of a modern political spin doctor.
Reforming Christians in mainland Europe too, furthermore, were frequently less than high-minded when it came to enjoying a bit of sexual pleasure. Martin Luther (1483—1546) was ceaseless in his struggle against the Catholic loathing of enjoyment. In his own way, he was quite earthy and lusty. He believed sexual impulses were natural and irrepressible, that celibacy was invented by the Devil and that priests should marry. He himself did, arguing that marriage was not even a holy sacrament but a civil matter, and that Christ committed adultery with Mary Magdalene among others so he could know whereof he spoke. The forbidding-sounding John Calvin also accepted that such pleasure could be legitimate, although he also held that too much passion even in the marital bed was sinful, and believed in the death penalty for adultery in his brutal Geneva theocracy.
No account of the history of sexual pleasure at this time can ignore the odd development, from the eleventh century onwards right across Western Europe, of a peculiar, sex-free form of sexual indulgence, namely the famous courtly or ‘true’ love. The creation of a section of the aristocracy in Southern France, this romantic ideal, with its emphasis on character ennoblement through love, is often presented as a new model for loving, male-female relationships, previously unknown in Western civilisation. It was, however, similar in some degree to the Ancient Greeks’ belief that gay relationships were more moral than ‘straight’.
The two defining characteristics of courtly love were that it could only take place between unmarried couples, and that no intercourse – and certainly no orgasm – was involved. Such covert, frustrating, painful, forever-foreplay liaisons were considered morally uplifting, enchanting and exciting, making the knight involved a better man and warrior, the lady a purer, yet more delectable, soul. Intercourse was believed to be false, unspiritual love, the kind of banal and mundane transaction that took place only between man and wife. Troubadour poets begged their ladies not to grant them sexual favours. ‘True love’ meant kissing, touching and fondling, a modicum of naked contact, but never sex.
Most royal courts in Europe subscribed on and off to the courtly love ideal, which was in many ways the motor power of the Renaissance, and the concept still has some attraction today, although one is thinking more Jimmy Carter, who admitted to owning a lustful heart, than Bill Clinton, who enjoyed lust in the flesh. In 1122, the cultured and radical Queen Eleanor of France and England, William the Conqueror’s granddaughter, presided over the most courtly of courts. She believed that love should be an equal relationship, based on mutual respect, admiration and the free interplay of mutual emotions. It was designed to elevate the status of women and inspire progress. A chaplain in Eleanor’s court known only as André assisted the queen’s daughter, Marie of Champagne, in writing a love manual called Tractatus de Amore et de Amoris Remedio (A Treatise on Love and Its Remedy). A poet, Chrétien de Troyes, on Eleanor’s instruction, produced the original story of Sir Lancelot and Guinevere.
Among those for whom neither the strictest interpretation of Christianity, nor the curiously abstemious-yet-indulgent cult of courtly love, held much appeal, meanwhile, aphrodisiacs were popular in the Middle Ages. The root of the orchis plant, roughly the shape of a scrotum loaded with testicles, was thought especially potent at reviving a flagging non-courtly love life. Fashions were also devised to exaggerate the genitals, or simply put them on display. In 610, the Queen of Ulster and the ladies of her court came to meet Cuchulainn, Ireland’s most famous warrior hero, in topless dresses, and flashed their vaginas for good measure to show due respect. Revealing trends in fashion were still not sufficiently saucy for Leonardo da Vinci however, who publicly declared that men should celebrate their genitals by drawing attention to them via their dress. A fashion soon followed for wearing lightly coloured tights and showing off the loins to their best effect with coloured ribbons tied round the groin and waist.
Popular culture was also stiff with bawdy verses, some of which suggest that mutual orgasm was far from an unknown concept, even if a slightly avant-garde one. One anonymous fourteenth-century English poem, ‘Sexual Intercourse’, reads:
That girl was skilled at thrusting under the trees;
she gave me, we were brave, a blow for every blow,
and after my masculinity drops came in her.
Another snippet, an anonymous fourteenth-century ditty included in a collection called Loose Songs published in the late-eighteenth century by Bishop Thomas Percy, gives a glimpse of the timeless male shame of premature ejaculation.
Then off he came
And blus
ht for shame
Soe soone that he had endit.
Male gayness in Medieval Europe does not seem to have been substantially curtailed by Christianity. It was rampant before the new religion took off (‘The Celts [of France] take more pleasure in pederasty then any other nation, to such a degree that amongst them is no rarity to find a man lying between two minions,’ according to the Greek writer, Athenaeus) and still going strong among the Normans when they invaded England in 1066. William the Conqueror’s son, William Rufus, (King William II), was so overtly homosexual that the Church refused to bury him in consecrated ground after he was killed by a hunting arrow in 1100. And, as we saw from Anselm’s letter to Archdeacon William, the native English were not at all averse to gayness. The manner of Edward II’s murder in 1327 suggests his love for his favourite Piers Gaveston was less than Platonic: he was, it was recorded, ‘sleyne with a hoote broche putte thro the secret place poste-riale’ – the red-hot-poker-up-the-bottom story so beloved by generations of bloodthirsty British schoolboys.
Officially, sodomy was condemned everywhere, but it never really abated for long. It was enormously popular in Spain and Holland, while a Scottish traveller and writer, William Lithgow, wrote in 1610 of Padua: Tor beastly Sodomy, it is rife here as in Rome. Naples, Florence, Bullogna, Venice, Ferrara, Genoa, Parma not being exempted, nor yet the smallest Village of Italy: A monstrous filthinesse, and yet to them a pleasant pastime, making songs and singing sonets of the beauty and pleasure of their bardassi, or bugger’d boyes.’
Throughout the Middle Ages, the Church was keen to fight the subversive enlightenment of the emerging Renaissance and reassert the darkness of religion. St Thomas Aquinas’s reaction to courtly love was to state that kissing and touching a woman, even without thought of sex, was a mortal sin. Wound up to near madness by the continuing popularity of sex and sexual thoughts, priests and religious fanatics took to mutual flagellation, going from town to town to pray ostentatiously and whip each other like the finest modern S&M enthusiast.
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