Women as temptation incarnate became targeted as inherently sinful. Any physically desirable woman was viewed by elements in the Church as evil – a superstition that still persisted in Ireland into the late-twentieth century when the Magdalen Homes finally ceased incarcerating girls and condemning them to a lifetime’s servitude, in some cases merely for being pretty. In 1450, official Catholic dogma began to assert that witches existed and flew by night. Jacob Sprenger and Henry Kramer, Dominican brothers and Professors of Sacred Theology at the University of Cologne, tortured ‘confessions’ from women and burned to death over 30,000 ‘witches’ on charges of fornicating with the Devil, whose penis, the Church claimed, was covered with fish scales.
Yet despite such outrages, sex continued its slow but inexorable journey towards its place in the sun. If the celebration of masturbation, especially by women, is one of the best indicators of a sexually liberated society, this example from The Delights of Venus by Johannes Meursius, a seventeenth-century Dutch poet, is suggestive of a culture not overly burdened by Christian strait-lacedness; Meursius’s lines were in praise of dildos.
Just at sixteen her breasts began to heave
Yet scarce knows what the titillation means.
All night she thinks on Man, both toils and sweats,
And dreaming frigs, and spends upon the sheets;
But never knew the more substantial bliss,
And scarce e’er touched a man, but by a kiss.
Her virgin cunt ne’er knew the joys of love
Beyond what dildoes or her finger gave …
Come this way, I’ve a pretty engine here,
Which us’d to ease the torments of the fair;
This dildo ‘tis, with which I oft was wont
T’assuage the raging of my lustful cunt.
For when cunts swell, and glow with strong desire,
‘Tis only pricks can quench the lustful fire.
And when that’s wanting, dildoes must supply
The place of pricks upon necessity.
Contraception, another key indicator, along with masturbation and gay sex, of the existence of sex for fun, was officially unacceptable but widely practised from the third century onwards, at least by prostitutes. Chaucer mentions contraceptive sponges and tampons used by those who have sex ‘moore for delit than world to multiplye’. As far as male contraception was concerned, coitus interruptus was described in a 1375 Book of Vices and Virtues as a sin ‘agens [against] kynde and agens the ordre of wedloke’. But it was still used routinely by husbands to separate orgasmic pleasure from child-begetting.
Shakespeare, inevitably, is our barometer of how far an understanding of sex was ingrained in the popular culture of post-Medieval ‘Merrie England’. As the mainstream BBCl or HBO dramatist of his day, he trod a skilful path between rudeness and respectability; hidden reference was his method of getting sexy bits in. Thus he mentions dildos, if a little obscurely, in 1611 in A Winter’s Tale (‘He has the prettiest Loue-songs for Maids and with such delicate burthens of dildos and fadings’), although Ben Jonson did so the previous year in The Alchemist (‘Here I find the seeling fill’d with poesies of the candle: And Madame, with a Dildo, writ o’ the walls’). The lines, ‘Graze on my lips; and if those hills be dry, Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie’, are often attributed to Shakespeare but alternatively believed to be Alexander Pope’s. But scattered throughout confirmed Shakespeare material there are also numerous less-than-subtly concealed terms for genitals, both male (‘cod’, ‘thing’) and female (‘quaint’, ‘count’, ‘sheath’). ‘Arise’ or ‘stand’ often refers to an erection; in Macbeth, the porter describes how alcohol can make a man ‘stand to or not stand to’, illustrating his theory by pointing and then dropping a key.
The Elizabethans were in thrall to the rather melodramatic notion of every orgasm shortening a person’s life by one minute. This was more likely a seduction ruse by men to convince the ladies that each selfish orgasm ‘hurts me more than it will hurt you’, but Shakespeare exploited the idea for all it was worth. Thus the word ‘die’ is often interchangeable with ‘orgasm’ (the French idea of le petit mort was curiously pervasive), although it is only fair to add that a love-death connection is also common in love poetry, as well as to connect romance with concepts of transience, impermanence and mortality.
But one can be fairly sure that patrons of the cheap seats at the Globe would have known precisely what Shakespeare was getting at when Cleopatra kills herself after Antony’s death, holds the asp to her breast and calls, ‘Husband, I come!’ Romeo and Juliet, similarly, is stiff with death-orgasm images. There is a recurring motif in the play depicting death as Juliet’s bridegroom including a passage where Romeo dreams he is dead and anticipates that he will ‘lie’ with the dead Juliet. There is also what seems to be a distinctly sexual image where Juliet kills herself with Romeo’s dagger.
It is in the Sonnets that Shakespeare loosens his ruff a little more. But while Sonnet 116 (‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments …’ is the staple of wedding services, extolling as it does the correctly chaste ingredients for a seemly relationship, few of us can quote so freely from Sonnet 129, which is on the trials and tribulations of the orgasm. Nicknamed ‘the Lust Sonnet’, it deals with sentiments quite different from the sort of meaningful relationship alluded to in 116. In the Lust Sonnet, the word ‘love’ does not appear at all.
Shakespeare elucidates instead upon the problems surrounding sex and the pitfalls and disappointments of orgasm that are still keeping modern-day sex therapists in business. So neurotic is 129 on the matter of sex – it names and shames orgasm as the source of lust, which is characterised as ‘perjur’d, murd’rous, bloody, full of blame Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust’ – that one scholar, John Robertson, suggested in his 1926 book The Problems of the Shakespeare Sonnets that Shakespeare did not write it; but he may merely have been protecting the Bard’s reputation in a Britain still suffused with Victorian sexual attitudes.
Dr Marvin Krims, a psychoanalyst and lecturer in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, gives particular attention to the Lust Sonnet in his essay ‘A Psychoanalytic Exploration of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129’. ‘From the initial pejorative portrait of lust as emotional exhaustion and orgiastic offal (‘Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame / Is lust in action’) … the sonnet delivers a dismal account of what the words also endorse as an exceedingly enjoyable and profoundly satisfying experience,’ writes Krims. (‘Spirit’ here means semen, so its waste or expulsion is ejaculation. ‘Shame’ refers to genitalia, since the Latin ‘pudenda’ (not actually used by the Romans) derives from pudere – ‘to be ashamed’ and translates as ‘things to be ashamed of’.
‘Sex,’ Krims deduces of Shakespeare’s attitude, ‘is both desirable and dreadful, from seduction to final satiation. And the concluding couplet, in a tone of supreme irony, assures us that there is absolutely nothing we can do, “To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell”.’
Another academic in the psychiatric field, Brett Kahr, a psychotherapist at the School of Psychotherapy and Counselling, Regent’s College, London, makes the point that Shakespeare, reflecting the culture around him, was no early advocate of women’s liberation. ‘In Measure for Measure,’ Kahr wrote in a 1999 essay in the Digital Archive of Psychohistory, ‘Shakespeare has described men as “great doers”, and as creatures who go “groping for trouts in a peculiar river” [i.e. having sex recreationally]. These fragments offer some idea of how Renaissance men continually failed to understand women, regarding them instead as objects of obscurity who must be probed and prodded by a “rapier and dagger man”, another one of Shakespeare’s references to male sexual behaviour which teems with violence of an extreme Nature.’
The defining sexual advance of the Medieval Christian world (achieved in spite of Christian values rather than as a result of them, it must be stressed) was made in 1559 by a scientist in Venice. That his na
me, in this age of exploration, was Columbus – more properly Mateo Renaldo Colombo – is one of history’s sweeter ironies because his achievement was to plant the flag, you might say, on a piece of uncharted territory which was arguably as unexpected and important a discovery as the New World found by Christopher Columbus. For Mateo Columbo it was who identified a small organ which, he believed, was ‘pre-eminently the seat of woman’s delight’.
Like a penis, Columbus reported in his book De Re Anatomica, ‘if you touch it, you will find it rendered a little harder and oblong to such a degree that it shows itself as a sort of male member … If you rub it vigorously with a penis, or touch it even with a little finger, semen swifter than air flies this way and that on account of the pleasure … Without these protuberances, women would neither experience delight in venereal embraces nor conceive any foetuses.’ We know this ‘protuberance’ as the clitoris, from the Greek for ‘little hill’.
There are more than a few sub-ironies in the Mateo Columbus story, as wonderfully unravelled by an Argentinian psychotherapist Federico Andahazi in his poetic novelised version of it, The Anatomist, which was published in 1997. Christopher Columbus, Andahazi pointed out, ‘discovered’ America when the Native Americans knew where it was all the time; Mateo Columbo revealed what half the world’s population – women – had a pretty shrewd idea about, so far as location and function were concerned, and none more so than on the pre-Christian American continent.
‘Mateo Colombo searched, travelled and finally found the “sweet land” he longed for,’ wrote Andahazi, ‘the organ that governs the love of women.’ The Amor Veneris (such is the name the anatomist gave it, “if I may be allowed to give a name to the things by me discovered”) was the true source of power over the slippery, shadowy free will of women.’
‘What would happen,’ Andahazi speculated in his preface, ‘if the daughters of Eve were to discover that, between their legs, they carried they keys to both Heaven and Hell?’ He went on to tell us precisely what did happen: the Dean of the Medical School in Padua, it turns out, was not best pleased by the other Columbus’s New World of orgasmic pleasure for women: ‘In the eyes of the Dean, the anatomist’s newest findings had exceeded all limits of tolerance. The Amor Veneris, Mateo Colombo’s America, went far beyond what was deemed permissible for science. For more than one reason, the mere mention of a certain “pleasure of Venus” made the Dean’s gorge rise.’
Colombo, we learn from Andahazi, discovered in his anatomical researches a woman from Spain, Inés de Torremolinos, who had what appeared to Colombo to be a tiny penis, and to us, presumably, would have been an unusually well-developed clitoris. The mysterious organ, Colombo noted, was ‘inflamed, throbbing and moist’. (It is probable that, by happenstance, Inés was suffering from clitoromegaly, an enlargement of the clitoris that causes it to appear like a small penis; the condition is caused by excess androgen and is usually accompanied by heavy hair growth on the body.)
Colombo obviously thought at first that he was examining a hermaphrodite, but by the medical understanding of the day in these cases both sets of sexual organs are withered and reproduction is impossible. Yet Inés was a mother of three.
‘Intuitively, the anatomist took hold of the strange organ between his thumb and index fingers, and with the index finger of his other hand he began gently caressing the red and engorged gland. He then observed that every muscle in the patient’s body, up to then completely relaxed, tensed suddenly and involuntarily, while the organ grew somewhat in size and throbbed with brief contractions.’
The second Columbus went on to examine over a hundred other women, both living and cadaver. To his considerable shock, he realized that the Inés de Torremolinos ‘penis’ existed, ‘small and hidden behind the fleshy labia’, in all women. As a scientist, he was delighted to find that Inés’s odd orgasmic behaviour, too, was repeatable experimentally. The anatomist, who admitted he set out on his quest to try better to understand women from a romantic point of view, had discovered the key to love and pleasure. ‘He was unable to explain,’ Andahazi wrote, ‘how this “sweet treasure” had remained undetected for centuries, and how generations of scholars, anatomists from the West and from the East, had never seen that diamond that could be observed with the naked eye simply by parting the flesh of the vulva.’
Colombo reported his momentous findings to the Dean of his faculty in March 1558. Whereas today he might have won a Nobel Prize for Medicine, in the sixteenth-century his reward for ‘discovering’ the clitoris was being arrested in his classroom within days, accused of heresy, blasphemy witchcraft and Satanism, put on trial and imprisoned. His manuscripts were confiscated, and his ‘America’ was never permitted to be mentioned again until centuries after his death.
Another sexual pioneer working at precisely the same time in Venice had better luck. In the wake of history’s first recorded syphilis epidemic, Gabriel Fallopius – whose name was given to Fallopian tubes – invented the condom, or more correctly re-invented it since the Ancient Egyptians and others had used rudimentary sheaths. Fallopius’s condom was a linen sheath, designed ostensibly for protection not as a contraceptive. Fallopius advocated the very unusual and progressive notion of hygiene in a book entitled De Morbo Gallico – The French Disease. ‘As often as a man has intercourse, he should, if possible, wash the genitals, or wipe them with a cloth,’ Fallopius advised. ‘Afterwards he should use a small linen cloth made to fit the glans, and draw forward the prepuce over the glans; if he can do so, it is as well to moisten it with saliva or with a lotion.’
So far as is known, the pre-rubber Fallopius sheath was not at first appreciated as a contraceptive. ‘For the rake cared little whether he left his victim with child or not,’ explained Gordon Rattray Taylor in his 1953 Sex in History. ‘Women, however, were beginning to equip themselves with effective contraceptive devices, and Casanova relates how he once stole a supply of the devices, which are so necessary (as he puts it) to those who wish to make sacrifices to love, leaving a poem in their place.’
The Casanova reference indicates how the invention did not catch on for sexual purposes until a couple of centuries later. It was only named in print a century after Fallopius, in 1665, in A Panegyric upon Cundum by a notorious sexual swordsman, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. Some believe the word was derived from a Dr Condom, who procured contraceptives for the libidinous Charles II, but this may be a myth. More likely, it comes from the Latin cunnus (for the vagina) and dum (in its sense of ‘able to be fooled’). Equally likely, especially given the Restoration timing of Rochester’s reference, it was a pun alluding scurrilously to Charles’s supplier.
Either way, Fallopius’s condom, before it was perfected in the twentieth century by the invention of rubber, acquired a reputation as a not always effective, or honourable, part of the armoury of lovemaking. The French wit Madame de Sévigné (she who famously did not have time to write a short letter, so wrote a long one instead) later described the contraceptive sheath as ‘gossamer against infection, steel against love’, while the glib Casanova seems to have used them as a method of seduction by referring to them as a device ‘to put the fair sex under shelter from all fear’. James Boswell, meanwhile, attested to their failure even to hold back the male orgasm, which was always one of their supposed benefits. He recorded in his diary in 1764: ‘Quite agitated. Put on condom; entered. Heart beat; fell. Quite sorry, but said, “A true sign of passion.”’
The mid- to late-seventeenth century was a time of steady, if unsure, progress towards a better understanding of sex. For one thing, the completely new concept of young married couples living together in a dwelling exclusively their own began to develop in Europe as the norm. It cannot be a coincidence that the word ‘orgasm’ begins at the same time to be used in its present Oxford English Dictionary sense of ‘the height of venereal excitement in coition’. The English physician Nathaniel Highmore re-coined the term ‘orgasmum from the Greek around 1660. The first manifestation in E
nglish of plain ‘orgasm’ is in the translation of a 1684 book by a Swiss physician, Théophile Bonet: ‘When there appears an orgasm of the humours, we rather fly to bleeding as more safe.’ It was not until 1771, however, according to the OED, that a writer called T. Percival, mentions something more unambiguously sexual, ‘a kind of nervous orgasm, or spasm on the vitals’.
Even before orgasm had its own name, it was seen as a problem in women. In 1653, Pieter van Foreest, a prominent Dutch doctor, published a medical compendium with a chapter on the diseases of women. For the affliction commonly called hysteria (‘womb disease’) he advised that a midwife massage the genitalia with one finger inside the vagina, using oil of lilies or similar as lubrication. In this way, van Foreest said, the afflicted woman can be aroused to ‘the paroxysm’. This form of therapeutic masturbation for frustrated women was not a new ‘treatment’, but a revival of the finger ‘stimulation’ first recommended, as we saw earlier, by Galen for widows, the chaste and nuns, and periodically mentioned again every few hundred years. In 1660, however, Highmore summed up the problem of the considerate male lover through the ages when he likened genital massage to ‘that game of boys in which they try to rub their stomachs with one hand and pat their heads with the other’.
A midwife, Jane Sharp, in her 1671 The Midwives Book, one of dozens of supposed midwifery guides (more likely pornography) published in the full flush of liberated, Restoration London, wrote of the clitoris: ‘It will stand and fall as the yard [penis] doth and makes women lustful and take delight in copulation.’ A Danish physician, Caspar Bartholin, similarly explained in his Anatomy of the same period that the clitoris is ‘the female yard or prick … [which] resembles a man’s yard in situation, substance, composition, repletion with spirits, and erection’. The Dutch anatomist Regnier de Graaf, writing again in the same decade, argued: ‘If those parts of the pudendum [the clitoris and labia] had not been supplied with such delightful sensation of pleasure and of such great love, no woman would be willing to undertake for herself such a troublesome pregnancy of nine months.’ The English surgeon, William Cowper, in his Anatomy of Humane Bodies (1698), shows the clitoris for the first time as a distinct organ – a reference that was mysteriously missing again in early-twentieth-century editions of Gray’s Anatomy.
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