The De-Textbook
Page 8
FIGURE 3.23 Painting of the Council of Trent, or some other sex party from history.
Biblical Times: The Unrated Cut
THE MYTH: The Bible is all chaste lessons: Turn the other cheek; do unto others; quit coveting your neighbors’ shit (paraphrased).
THE TRUTH: There’s also a lot of insane sex going down, presumably to make sure everyone keeps paying attention through the slow sections.
Rather than using phrases like “reverse frog squat,” biblical sex is described almost exclusively as “coming in unto” (modern people tend to drop the “in unto”). But once you get past the unimaginative verbs, the Bible has some nasty, nasty stories. Case in point, Genesis 19:30–36:
And Lot . . . dwelt in the mountain, and his two daughters with him . . . the first born said to the younger . . . Come, let us make our father drink wine, and we will lie with him, that we may preserve seed of our father. And they made their father drink wine: and the firstborn went in, and lay with her father.
This isn’t some obscure passage out of some obscure book of the Bible, either. You know Lot. He’s the star of the Sunday school lesson that most closely resembles the Nazi face-melting in Raiders of the Lost Ark—only his wife gets turned into a pillar of salt for looking at their hometown as it gets spectacularly destroyed by the Lord. The Sunday school lesson tends to end there, which is probably a good thing.
Of course, there are also the passages that suggest whoever wrote them was just horny, like this gem from Ezekiel 23:19–20:
Yet she became more and more promiscuous as she recalled the days of her youth, when she was a prostitute in Egypt. There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of a donkey and whose emission was like that of horses.
It’s weird that pastors and rabbis never get around to that section in their sermons. People would probably read the Bible a lot more if they knew there were entire sections dedicated to bestiality similes.
The Famously Prudish Victorian People: Freaky as Hell, Y’all
THE MYTH: The Victorian era was a time when porn was a woman showing her ankle.
Even if you retained nothing from your history education, there are certain periods in time that you can sort of picture as soon as they’re mentioned. We say “medieval” and you immediately imagine castles and knights and filthy peasants. We say “Victorian” and you think of very proper people in wigs, corsets, and frilly blouses, fanning themselves and just generally being very prim and proper.
Queen Victoria is rumored to have told her daughter to “just lie back and think of England” on her wedding night.
FIGURE 3.24 Revisionist historians have suggested the young man in this Victorian etching is not, in fact, helping the fair maiden tie her shoe.
THE TRUTH: Oh, it’s true that Victorians weren’t exactly into halter tops and assless pants—in public. In private, they made up for it by producing extraordinary amounts of porn. And not just any porn, but the nasty stuff—we’re talking incest, rape, pedophilia, orgies, BDSM, you name it.
Here’s a taste from a piece published in 1907, Memoirs of a Young Rakehell.
Her dark pubic hair, I noticed, climbed all the way up to her navel . . . her nipples were set in a small field of light brown hair. Lifting her breasts, I saw that she also had some short, fine black hairs underneath. The sight of all this healthy fleece caused John Thomas to harden even more. I ripped off my nightshirt and straddled the lovely creature, whose rhythmic movements set my pickle slapping back and forth against her belly.
As for the famous prudishness of Queen Victoria, not only is the “think of England” exchange untrue, but the queen’s diaries reveal that she was extremely fond of sex (she had nine children, after all) and gave her husband nude artwork as a gift. Were they paintings of her?
We’ll leave that to your imagination.
FIGURE 3.25 Queen Victoria. Yeah. Drink it in.
And Now, Some Lyrics Mozart Wrote About Ass-to-Mouth
THE MYTH: Classical composers almost never composed works about ass-to-mouth.
THE TRUTH: The same genius who wrote Piano Concerto No. 24 in C Minor also wrote this (and we are not kidding):
Lick my ass nicely,
lick it nice and clean,
nice and clean, lick my ass.
That’s a greasy desire,
nicely buttered,
like the licking of roast meat, my daily activity.
Three will lick more than two,
come on, just try it,
and lick, lick, lick.
Everybody lick his own ass himself.
That is a little ditty called “Lick My Ass Nice and Clean,” which is actually the sequel to an earlier Mozart piece, “Lick My Ass,” a classical party ballad meant to be sung by six people at a time. Look it up, if you don’t believe us.
Mozart was a musical genius, but he also had a sense of humor that would make any middle school kid proud. When he wasn’t writing the greatest music ears had ever heard, he was mostly writing about farts. He regularly wrote rhyming, profane letters to his family, and once wrote to his sister that he wanted to “shit on her nose” and watch it “drip down her chin.” Hey, if poop jokes are good enough for Mozart . . .
3.E
Fictional Scenes from History
And the Deleted Scenes They Should Have Left In
FIGURE 3.26 The pear of anguish, iron maiden, and Spanish chair, all invented after the Middle Ages by people who felt the Crusades needed to be violenced up a little bit.
Think of a time when you had to relay a story that someone else had told you. Did you go out of your way to make the story less interesting? Of course not. You pumped up the details a bit to make your version sound even more rad than the one you heard.
Unfortunately, that’s sort of how history works. Just like a movie based on a true story, many of our favorite historical anecdotes have been carefully edited to make sure they have satisfying endings, audience-pleasing morals, and, above all else, an American protagonist. Here we examine some of the most iconic scenes from history that never happened and take you through the even better true stories we wish they’d told us instead.
FICTIONAL SCENE: King Tut and the Mummy’s Curse
In 1922, archaeologists opened the tomb of King Tutankhamen, thus unearthing the “pharaoh’s curse.” Reports detailed an inscription on the wall of the gravesite that read, “They who enter this sacred tomb shall swift be visited by wings of death.” Sure enough, Lord Carnarvon, a member of the party, dropped dead days afterward from an infected mosquito bite. Then a security guard stationed at the exhibit dropped dead of a stroke. Only one problem: The “curse” allegedly inscribed on the wall never existed. It was wholly invented by a tabloid reporting on the find. Only one more problem: Carnarvon was originally sent to Egypt’s warm climate by his doctor because of his poor health.
Sorry, one more problem: Most of the remaining members of the party lived to a ripe old age.
Oh, wait, we dropped something. Jesus, another problem? OK. That guard who dropped dead? That was in the 1970s, fifty freaking years later, which either means we’re dealing with the world’s toughest guard or the world’s least dedicated mummy. Or, of course, the third option, which is that the mummy’s curse is bullshit.
Studio Notes:
Slap my ass and call me queen, cuz I’m in love with King Tut! People eat up this Egypt shit! (Although, quick thought RE: The pharaoh curse—let’s drop the second-act reveal that the curse wasn’t actually written there. Stronger without it, and it just feels like one too many twists, if you know what I mean.) Less pumped about Princess Wedding Face. People want stories about weddings to have romance and boning! Maybe that’s what they’re doing under the carriage? Wait, isn’t “undercarriage” what fancy people call their vag and peners? Puns = Tshirts = $$ Anyways, just spit-ballin’! The princess should be Asian. And young.
Chaz Blazer
elite Hollywood executive and part-time volunteer whaler
The wedding of Maria Vittoria dal Pozzo to Prince Amedeo of Savoy was never meant to be. Let’s just recount the death toll from this “happy day”: The woman responsible for laying out the wedding dress had “hanged herself instead of the bridal gown.” The colonel leading the bridal procession fell off his horse and died of sunstroke. The party was stopped at the palace gates, and when the gatekeeper was sent for, they found him lying dead in a pool of blood. The best man shot himself in the head immediately after the wedding. The man who drafted the marriage contract fell into “an apoplectic fit.” A stationmaster got pulled beneath the bridal carriage at the railway station. The bridal party turned around at this point and went home, presumably not willing to let the curse spread to the rest of the world. But on the way back, the Count of Castiglione also got pulled under the wedding carriage and was killed. The count was the last one to die that day, but ten years later (a suspiciously nice, round number, isn’t it?), Princess Maria died after complications from childbirth, at age twenty-nine.
We’re going to call it: At some point, Princess Maria, perhaps just jokingly, once said she’d “sell her soul to be queen,” and the devil took that to be his RSVP card.
FICTIONAL SCENE: Medieval Torture
The Middle Ages were full of elaborate torture devices invented by committees of sadists just praying that one day their work would appear on the cover of a heavy metal album, right? Actually, all of the coolest torture devices were slapped together centuries later by museums trying to sex up the boring Middle Ages. Take the iron maiden, a hideous vertical chamber with an interior lined with iron spikes. Or the sadistic pear of anguish, which would spread open and violently tear apart whatever human orifice it was pushed into. Or the Spanish chair, an iron seat covered in spikes that a victim was strapped into while his feet were roasted.
Go to a museum, or a Medieval Times restaurant, and you’ll see all of those devices. And those are the only places they’ve ever existed.
Iron maidens didn’t exist at all in the Middle Ages, and there’s no record they were ever used on anyone. That terrible pear thing that they used to punish sodomites and adulterers by ripping the offending organs to shreds from the inside? Also a myth—nobody can find any reference to the device before the seventeenth century, and no record at all of its being used to destroy somebody’s butthole. What about the spiked chair? It’s supposedly a device of the Spanish Inquisition, but once again, there’s no record of Spaniards, or anybody else, using it.
So where did these depraved inventions come from? Well, in the 1800s, “horrors of the medieval times” exhibits were hugely popular, and as far as historians can tell, iron maidens were cobbled together by the people who ran them. It’s not that there wasn’t torture back then (there totally was); it’s just that it wasn’t the kind of elaborate Saw-style genital mutilation that puts butts in the seats at museums.
A BETTER, TRUE STORY THEY CUT: Their sports were basically warfare.
To find the gruesome violent stuff, you need look no further than the sporting events various cultures have cheered for over the centuries, like:
Skin-Pulling
Considering the Vikings’ unhealthy obsession with rape, murder, and fire, it was only a matter of time before somebody mixed all three into one messed-up triathlon. The result: a version of tug-of-war played with an animal’s hide over a fiery pit for the spoils of the town they had just ransacked, which included exclusive rape rights to all the women. The winners got the plunder, and the losers got burned to death.
Mesoamerican Ballgame
The game the Mayans called pitz, but historians call the Mesoamerican ballgame, was basketball crossed with volleyball, but the ball was nine pounds of solid rubber. And there were beheadings.
The nut-crushingly heavy ball was bounced back and forth, and either team could score an instant win by knocking the ball through an impossibly high sideways hoop. Sort of like Quidditch, except the winners would be whisked off to celebrate with some shapely Mesoamerican ladies with a penchant for body painting, while the losing team was led into the back to have their heads chopped off.
FIGURE 3.27 Historical sports like the Mesoamerican ballgame and . . .
Naumachia
A lot of us grew up thinking that a live-action version of the game Battleship would be awesome . . . until they made that movie. But the Romans were actually way ahead of us. They would literally fill an amphitheater with water, throw in some ships, and watch them ram one another. Participants numbered into the thousands, nearly as many as in the real battles they were imitating.
Finding several thousand willing men to fill these ships wasn’t easy, so many of them were likely prisoners on death row dying for people’s entertainment. And that’s awful, but, hey, if you’re on death row and you’re going to die anyway, “being a human peg in a giant game of flaming Battleship” is a pretty badass way to go out, comparatively speaking.
FIGURE 3.28 . . . Naumachia: what happens when you combine the Super Bowl with a Fast and Furious movie directed by a thirteen-year-old’s boner.
Venatio
It’s Rome, A.D. 54. You take a couple of captured POWs, stuff them into a stadium, and force them to face a monster known as the Beast of Carthage, which in modern English translates to twenty goddamned elephants. Contestants had about a 2 percent chance of survival, and the Romans, fueled by their hatred of Hannibal, played this game so frequently that they drove the North African elephant to extinction.
FICTIONAL SCENE: The “Strange” Disappearance of the Lost Colony of Roanoke
In 1587, 115 desperate English colonists were left in present-day North Carolina, while their leader, John White, sailed to England to beg for supplies. Thanks to the Spanish armada, he didn’t get back to Virginia for three whole years—and by then, everyone was gone. The only clue to the colonists’ disappearance was the word “CROATOAN” carved into one of the posts of the fort. What happened? Were they eaten by cannibal natives? Did they eat one another to avoid starvation? Did aliens invade (and then eat them)?
There’s really no mystery. The settlers probably moved to live with friendly nearby Indians, the Croatans. In fact, they were the only tribe that the settlers were on good terms with. White and his settlers had previously agreed that if they abandoned the settlement, they’d leave a note telling him where they went. And if they were forced to leave, they’d leave the sign of a Maltese cross, which they didn’t do. So when John White saw the word “CROATOAN,” he didn’t think, “Well, here’s a mystery that will never get solved.” He thought, “Phew, what a relief!” And then he went right back to England, because the weather was turning and this guy looked out for number one.
Over the next two hundred years, settlers in Virginia and North Carolina reported meeting Native Americans sporting blond hair and fair skin and speaking English. Oh, and some of them said they were descended from Roanoke settlers. Hang up the trench coat, Columbo. This mystery is solved.
FIGURE 3.29 “CROATOAN, which is Indian for ‘Alien!’”
A BETTER, REAL MYSTERY THEY CUT: What were Japanese people doing in New Mexico in the thirteenth century?
Tucked into New Mexico is one tribe of Native Americans who happen to speak a language unlike any around them. A language called Japanese. OK, maybe the Zuni people aren’t speaking Japanese Japanese, but there are enough similarities between the two cultures that an anthropologist named Nancy Yaw Davis came up with a baffling theory: Maybe Japanese Buddhist monks made it to the Americas in the thirteenth century.
To appreciate how crazy the idea is, we have to back up a bit. The Zuni tribe has been around for at least three thousand years. But sometime around 1300, their skeletal remains suddenly shifted. Mixed in with the regular remains were rounder, smaller skulls and shorter leg bones. So either the Zunis got hold of a shrink ray or someone new joined the Zuni club. Once you start looking at the language similarities, that “someone” suddenly
sounds Japanese. For example, the Zuni word for “clan” is kwe, while in Japanese it is kwai. The word for “clown” is newe in Japanese and niwaka in Zuni. “Priest” is shawani in Japanese and shiwani in Zuni. And both languages use the verb as the last word of a sentence, a feature only 45 percent of languages share. That may seem like a lot, but considering that the Zuni language is nothing like the languages of the people who surround the tribe, it’s a pretty odd connection. And to this day, both the Zuni and the Japanese share frequency of type-B blood, a rare kidney disease, and similar oral traditions about their origins.
FIGURE 4.1 There’s a crucial element of your health and well-being that everyone is too embarrassed to talk to you about as you enter adulthood. Everyone save for a vindictive genre of magazine written by professional liars who hate you. Good luck!
4
Sex and Relationship Advice
Women’s Magazines, Bragging Friends, and Other Sources You’re Going to Want to Ignore
OK, girl talk. The process of awakening into a sexual being is going to be way rougher than your parents’ butterfly metaphor led you to believe. At the exact moment that your physical appearance becomes important to you, the skin on your face is going to explode with pus and blood, your hair is going to look like a paper towel bacon blotter, and that’s not even mentioning what your hormones are about to do to the voice inside your head.