In 1684, the first practical sex manual was published anonymously in London, entitled Aristotle’s Masterpiece, or the Secrets of Generation Displayed in All Parts Thereof. Neither a masterpiece nor anything to do with Aristotle, it was a bestseller for over a century. Besides advice on pregnancy and so on, it also strongly advocated foreplay and promoted male stimulation of the clitoris, stating that, ‘blowing the coals of these amorous fires’ pleased women. Aristotle’s Masterpiece remained the definitive ‘dirty book’ of the next hundred years or more, a volume young men with only limited interest in gynaecology and obstetrics would study in private out of sheer academic interest.
A tide of basic smut too, not all of it necessarily progressive, accompanied the Restoration. Visual pornography from Europe began to appear for the first time – the home-grown product did not generally start to be produced until the next century. There are exceptions: an example of engraved English porn from the 1660s shows a plume of female public hair being worn by a man in his hat. For the moment, however, most British porn was literary. The Earl of Rochester in a 1680 collection, Poems on Several Occasions, wrote colourfully of ‘… the common fucking post / On whom each whore, relieves her tingling cunt / As hogs on gates do rub themselves and grunt’. In his The Imperfect Enjoyment of the same year, he attested to what appears to be his own premature ejaculation:
But whilst her busy hand would guide that part
Which should convey my soul up to her heart,
In liquid raptures I dissolve all o’er,
Melt into sperm, and spend at every pore.
A touch from any part of her had done’t: Her
hand, her foot, her very look’s a cunt
And here is John Donne, from a rather more elevated literary stance, in ‘To His Mistress Going to Bed’:
Licence my roving hands, and let them go
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O my America, my new found land,
My kingdom, safeliest when with one man manned,
My mine of precious stones, my empery,
How blessed am I in this discovering thee!
To enter in these bonds, is to be free;
Then where my hand is set, my seal shall be.
One of the most interesting literary contributions to the history of the orgasm in Restoration England comes from an extraordinary woman named Aphra Behn. Before becoming the first female professional writer, Behn was an English spy, code-named Agent 160, and is also believed later to have been James II’s mistress. Not surprisingly, given her background, Behn’s great fascination was with the interdependence between sex and power, of both of which she had her fill in her intriguing life. So Behn it was who wrote the first female complaint against impotence in her poem ‘The Disappointment’.
… The willing Garments by he laid,
And Heav’n all open to his view;
Mad to possess, himself he threw
On the defenceless lovely Maid.
But oh! what envious Gods conspire
To snatch his Pow’r, yet leave him the Desire!
He Curst his Birth, his Fate, his Stars,
But more the Shepherdesses Charms;
Whose soft bewitching influence,
Had Damn’d him to the Hell of Impotence.
Despite such advances for the cause of female sexuality, male masturbation remained a thoroughly awkward subject during the Restoration period, even in prematurely liberated Holland. In 1677 a Dutch microscopist, Anton van Leeuwenhoek, discovered sperm while examining a human semen sample. But how was he to explain where he obtained the guilty material? Leeuwenhoek carefully noted: ‘What I describe was not obtained by any sinful contrivance … but the observations were made upon the excess with which nature provided me in my conjugal relations.’ It was not for another century that Lazzaro Spallanzani, a priest and scientist worked out the role of ‘spermatic worms’. He made oilskin ‘trousers’ for male frogs which allowed them to mount females in time-honoured fashion, but not for their sperm to escape. The females remained unfertilised. When Spallanzani took some of the sperm collected in the trousers and mixed them with the females’ eggs, they were fertilised.
Less helpfully in this same generally progressive era, scientists were discovering (or rather substantiating their preexisting prejudices) that women did not need an orgasm to conceive and concluding that it was best after all if the female sex remained passive during intercourse. As Thomas Laqueur has pointed out of this movement, Westerners, ‘no longer linked the loci of pleasure with the mysterious infusing of life into Nature’. Or as Emma Dickens put it in her book Immaculate Contraception: The Extraordinary Story of Birth Control: ‘Out, for scientists, went the Medieval idea of women as lusty equals in sexual congress, and in came a limited and boring role for women. This is not a world of which Chaucer’s Wife of Bath would have wanted to be a part at all.’
12
The Foundations of
Victorian Prudery:
The Orgasm from the
Late Restoration to 1840
‘None of our wares e’er found a flaw, Self preservation’s
Nature’s law’
From an advertising jingle by Mrs Phillips,
an eighteenth-century condom wholesaler in London.
News did not travel fast in the middle of the second millennium. In 1740, nearly two hundred years after Mateo Colombo, the clitoris was ‘discovered’ yet again, this time by a Swiss biologist, Albrecht von Halter. Von Halter observed how sexual feelings in women were focused on ‘… the entrance of the pudendum … When a woman, invited either by moral love, or a lustful desire of pleasure, admits the embraces of the male, it excites a convulsive constriction and attrition of the very sensitive and tender parts, which lie within the contiguity of the external opening of the vagina, after the same manner as we observed before of the male. When the clitoris grows erect and the blood is flushed into the woman’s external and internal genitalia, the purpose is to raise the pleasure to the highest pitch.’
The eighteenth century in Europe, in terms of sheer crudity, was the bawdiest century of all, twentieth included. A mass response to the austere days of Oliver Cromwell, just a few decades earlier, the 1700s were in many ways the first 1960s. The eighteenth century saw the profoundest schism yet between those who regarded orgasm as a pleasure to be enjoyed whether or not one was attempting to reproduce – and those who subscribed to the old Christian morality, which continued to teach that orgasm was only morally acceptable within marriage, and then only if experienced with the intention of bringing about conception.
Christianity, too, was deeply divided on the issue of enjoyment of sex. The religion was so segmented into competing brands by now that it is impossible to speak for Christianity as a whole. But a comparison between the Catholics and the Puritans should suffice to show the variety of views now available. The Roman Catholic Church continued on its schizophrenic way; a suitable vignette to demonstrate how it was developing can be found in 1714 when the Church ended the confessional requirement that men name the women with whom they had fornicated. This was not exactly a liberalising move; the reason as we have seen was that it had been discovered that priests were using the information they were given as hot tips for partners with whom they could quietly commit their own sin of fornication.
The Puritans, surprisingly, in spite of Cromwell’s sober legacy, were not especially anti-sex. They were pious and severe, but also highly sexed and quite sentimentally romantic. According to one scholar, D. Daniel, in a 1966 essay ‘Christian Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender’, ‘Married sex was not only legitimate in the Puritan view; it was meant to be exuberant’, and the Puritans ‘were not squeamish about it’. Even so, they still believed excessive desire was animal, and prayed before sex.
With the notable exception of the notorious seventeenth-century ‘Blue Laws’ in New Haven, Connecticut, which outlawed every form of pleasure and promoted public whippings, branding or execution for
adulterers, and the Salem ‘witch’ killings, the Puritans rejected the heartless joylessness of European Calvinism and condemned the Catholic ideal of virginity. Puritan sternness was often only a seemly mask for a mischievous, playful culture.
Most Puritans were, it is believed, good lovers. John Milton typified the Puritan world view. He was showily virtuous, but had a healthy, idealistic and romantic view of sex. His epic poem Paradise Lost Depicts Adam and Eve as romantic lovers; he despised St Augustine’s woman-hating and miserable-ism, and even lobbied Parliament for modern, easy divorce. But the Amish people, whose frank sexuality is to this day expressed in the practice of rumspringa, the Pennsylvania Dutch word for ‘running around’ (a period when teenagers are allowed to test to the limit the ‘Devil’s Playground’ outside their closed communities), provide the best example of the Puritans’ dualistic, but generally permissive, attitude to sex.
After the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, however, the England of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, unlike the United States, was not remotely in the thrall of Puritanism. Despite having equally rejected the misogynies of Catholicism, it had, in most ways, become a bad place for women to live. The feminist writer Joan Smith explains that even respectable men were permitted to seduce servants and use prostitutes, and until 1774 in England it was legal for a man to place his wife in a lunatic asylum for any reason he chose. A legal decision of 1782 established that a husband could beat his wife with a stick so long as it was no thicker than his thumb. And a woman who at that time committed adultery would rarely or never see her children again. Even when the 1774 reform was passed by Parliament, Smith observes, locking up a wife (like Mr Rochester’s ‘mad’ first wife in Jane Eyre) was legal, and as late as 1840 a judge ruled that a man was still entitled to lock his wife up to prevent her running away with a lover.
It is the eighteenth-century ‘medicalisation of sex’, as it has been called, that underpinned this period’s polarisation between a clinical and a burlesque view of orgasm. It was widely believed once again (a view still in play in the twentieth century) that the female orgasm, or ‘hysterical paroxysm’ (‘the most common of all diseases except fevers,’ according to one contemporary doctor) helped women to conceive. This led to another revival of the idea of the therapeutic orgasm, but administered to women less as an expedient way of calming them down than as a course of medical treatment. Doctors in the eighteenth century were not as keen as they would be in the nineteenth to perform manually this laborious task, which could take up to an hour before the Victorian genius for mechanisation reduced it to ten minutes or less. So physicians used midwives and even husbands as their masturbating proxies.
Clitoral stimulation by a medical index finger was not the only method of rousing in recalcitrant women a healthy, conception-aiding orgasm. Other methods advocated were vigorous horseback riding or simply sitting in a rocking chair. Bernard Mandeville, author of a 1711 book on hysterical paroxysm, Treatise of Hypochondriack and Hysteric Passions, recommended a stiff ride out followed by three hours of ‘massage’. The reasons he put forward for the hysteria were a little contradictory; it was caused either by sexual frustration or masturbation.
Another pseudo-medical pioneer of the eighteenth century was James Graham, a moralist who, a little ironically, found himself imprisoned in 1783 for giving obscene public lectures on sex. He travelled round England and the American colonies spreading the word for healthy sex, within a strict marital context. He was also one of the world’s first sex therapists, helping couples with difficulties conceiving. His patented sex aid was a magnetic, vibrating bed. When he was imprisoned, he was trying to raise £20,000 for an updated musical version of the bed.
In Europe, sexual advice was being given to the great and good by a prominent doctor Dutch physician, Gerard van Swieten, who was famous as a health reformer and founder of the Vienna Medical School. In 1740, van Swieten was consulted on a delicate matter by the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria. Maria Theresa was unhappy, unfulfilled and confused by her inability after three years of marriage not only to conceive, but even to manage a moment of penetrative sex with her shy young husband, the Holy Roman Emperor Francis I. There was no question of blaming the Emperor, so gossip in the Viennese court had it that the Empress was ‘sterile’ as it was called then, or sexually dysfunctional as we would say today.
Van Swieten’s pronouncement on the matter does not look all that remarkable in the Latin in which he cautiously clothed it: ‘Praeteria censeo, vulvam Sacratissimae Majestatis, ante coitum, diutius esse titillandam! Had van Swieten delivered it in modern language, the conclusion of his prescription might have caused a stir, however. The diagnosis translates as: ‘Furthermore, I am of the opinion that the sexual organs of Her Most Sacred Majesty should be titillated for some length of time before coitus.’
And it would seem that van Swieten’s advice, that sex worked better if it was pleasurable for both parties, hit home too. After three years of sexual drought, Maria Theresa almost immediately became pregnant and went on to have sixteen children, the eleventh of whom was Marie Antoinette, later Queen Consort of King Louis XVI of France. The couple also began to enjoy a reputation for being passionate and ardent lovers. All, it would seem, because the Empress was emboldened to ask her husband to tease her clitoris a little, to treat sex as a pleasure – and thus to turn their lovemaking overnight into something more than a clinical attempt to provide a successor.
Maria Theresa went on to become a positive advocate of sexual pleasure, according to Marie Antoinette’s biographer, Antonia Fraser. Marie Antoinette was married at fourteen in 1770 to Louis Auguste, the fifteen-year-old heir to the French throne, but history repeated itself with the newly marrieds unable to consummate their relationship for another two years.
The Empress, who became quite domineering in middle age, saw this entirely as the soon-to-be Queen’s fault, for failing to inspire sexual passion in Louis XVI. Marie Antoinette, according to Fraser, was interested in intimacy based on sentiment, not sex, which she regarded as a disagreeable duty. In the ribald popular pamphlets of the day, which were used to whip up Revolutionary crowds in 1789, Marie Antoinette was portrayed as both a lesbian and an unfaithful wife, since if the King was not satisfying her, somebody surely had to be; the Princesse de Lamballe, Superintendent of the Household, was said by the gossips to be working on the queen’s sexual frustration ‘with her little fingers’.
The level of disrespect to the Royals betrayed by this scurrilous pamphleteering about their sex lives is thought to have been one of the catalysts of the French Revolution. Yet Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette’s disastrous sexual relationship had less to do with the King’s foppishness and Queen’s neurotic instability and more with a simple physical cause, according to research unveiled in France in 2002. The historian Simone Bertière showed that the King was the possessor of a ‘brac-quemart assez considé rable’ (an over-large penis), and the Queen of a condition politely known then as ‘I’étroisse du chemin’, an unusually narrow vagina.
With the Austrian-French alliance that was designed to be cemented by the marriage rendered rocky by the sexual problems between King and Queen and their resultant childlessness, Marie Antoinette’s older brother Joseph II of Austria, according to Bertière, wrote to their brother Leopold with an interesting view on the best way of producing orgasm in sexually shy males. The French King, Joseph reported, was able to have ‘well-conditioned, strong erections and introduce his member, stay there for two minutes without moving, withdraw without ejaculation and then, still erect, wish [Marie Antoinette] a good evening’.
He should, concluded Joseph, ‘be whipped like a donkey to make him discharge in anger’. It was after more such extreme Agony Uncle advice from Joseph that the unhappy couple finally conceived a daughter in 1778, four years after their succession to the throne, followed by three other children before both of them were executed in 1793.
So much, then, for the medicalisation of the orgasm i
n the eighteenth-century, a phenomenon that was going to be a key ingredient of the next stage in the evolution of sex: Victorian prudery. The endemic rakishness of Georgian London tells us something of the other end of the sexual spectrum that in due course contributed, by its conspicuous excess, to the Victorian mindset.
In 1780 an extraordinary kind of Good Whore Guide -Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies: Or Man of Pleasure’s Kalender, Containing the Histories and Some Curious Anecdotes of the Most Celebrated Ladies Now on the Town - began to be published annually. Harris’s detailed the physical charms, attractions and prices of all the known prostitutes in the area. So successful did it prove that a companion guide to the ladies of Piccadilly was soon brought out.
The entries in Harris’s appear today to be rather comical; it is easy to spot the kind of raw material that must have inspired Blackadder Goes Forth:
Miss B., Titchfield-street: This child of love looks very well when drest. She is rather subject to fits, alias counterfits, very partial to a Pantomime Player at Covent Garden Theatre. She may be about nineteen, very genteel, with a beautiful neck and chest, and most elegantly moulded breasts, her eyes are wonderfully piercing and expressive. She is always lively, merry, and cheerful, and in bed, will give you such convincing proofs of her attachment to love’s game, that if you leave one guinea behind, you will certainly be tempted to renew your visits.
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