This essay first appeared in Cliterati on January 25th; I have modified it slightly to fit the format of this blog.
Every generation thinks it invented sex, or at least non-vanilla sex. And I don’t just mean teenagers who are squicked out by the idea of their parents shagging, either; among vanilla folk and/or those outside the demimonde, the delusion seems to persist through life that nearly everybody who lived before a moving line (hovering like a will-o-the-wisp exactly at the year the believer reached puberty) only had missionary-position sex for the purpose of procreation. Even if the individual is familiar with the Kama Sutra, knows about classical Greek pederasty or has seen the menu of a Victorian brothel, these are likely to be dismissed as islands of kink in a vast sea of unsweetened vanilla custard stretching back into prehistory. Even doctors quoted in newspaper articles are wont to make incredibly stupid, totally wrong statements like “the concept of having oral sex is something that seems less obscure to you than it did to your parents or grandparents.” Well, my dears, I’m old enough to have given birth to many of you reading this, and I can assure you that oral sex was not remotely “obscure” to us in those long-ago and far-off days of the early ‘80s; nor was it “obscure” to any of the older men I trysted with in my late teens, many of whom are now old enough to be your grandfathers; nor was it “obscure” to my own grandparents’ generation, who came of age in the Roaring Twenties; nor to the 5.5% or more of the female population who worked as whores in every large city of the world in the 19th century, nor the 70% or more of the male population who had enjoyed their company at least once; nor to any of the long procession of harlots and clients stretching back to before busybodies invented the idea of policing other peoples’ sexuality. Know what else wasn’t “obscure” to them? Anal sex. BDSM. Role-playing. Exhibitionism & voyeurism. Homosexuality. Cuckolding. I could go on and on, but I think you get the idea. Here’s a hint: most lawmakers have always been pompous ignoramuses too obsessed with telling other people what to do to actually have normal lives, so by the time they get around to banning something it’s a pretty safe bet the majority of everybody else in that culture over the age of 16 already knows about it, and many of them are doing it.
Chief among the popular sex acts that modern mythology pretends were “obscure” is masturbation, at least for women. The common delusion is that because a culture didn’t like to talk about something, it must not have existed; accordingly, the idea has arisen that Victorian girls were somehow so carefully controlled that they never discovered that touching oneself between the legs (or riding rocking horses) feels good. And because many women have difficulty reaching orgasm without some form of masturbation, that must mean that pre-20th century women all went around in a perpetual state of sexual frustration. In the past few years, the ridiculous myth has arisen that Victorian doctors actually gave women orgasms without knowing what they were, and that the vibrator was invented to speed up what they viewed as an odious task.
Where do I begin? In the first place, this tale is so incredibly recent I never heard of it during any of my extensive sexological reading in my teens and twenties; it seems to date to the nineties at the earliest. Next, it’s a lovely example of Anglocentrism; just because Britons and Americans were so publicly hung-up about sex in the 19th century, doesn’t mean everyone else in Europe, Asia, Africa and the entire Southern Hemisphere was; are we to believe the bulk of female humanity was bereft of the blessing of orgasm until wise white sages bestowed the gift of the vibrator on their benighted nether regions? Furthermore, the idea that public posturing actually indicates private feelings, to the point that those who spread this legend actually imagine that dudes were strenuously trying to avoid touching strange women’s twats, is just so colossally dumb it could only be believed in the middle of the neo-Victorian Era. And a brain has to be pretty deeply mired in 21st-century chauvinism to actually believe that those silly old Victorians didn’t know what a freaking orgasm looked like. But you don’t have to take my word for all that:
…some historians have claimed women were brought to a “hysterical paroxysm” (supposedly an orgasm that nobody wanted to admit to), by their doctors through “pelvic massage” (masturbation). To aid them, a vibrating device was invented because there were just so many women who needed this form of treatment that the poor doctors’ hands were getting tired, and they had to use a machine…this…idea…seems to have taken root in our popular culture, helped by “shock exposés”, a few books, and the 2011 film Hysteria, where…Victorian doctor…Mortimer Granville, turns his 1880s invention of a muscular massage device into a sexual awakening for his female patients. So did the real Dr Granville invent an electronic device for massage? Yes. Was it anything to do with the female orgasm? No. He actually invented it to help stimulate male pain relief, just as massage is used today.
Victorian doctors knew exactly what the female orgasm was; in fact, it’s one of the reasons they thought masturbation was a bad idea…Marriage guides…often claimed that a woman in a sexually satisfying relationship was more likely to become pregnant, as the wife’s orgasm was just as necessary to conception as her husband’s…The Art to Begetting Handsome Children, published in 1860, contains a detailed passage on foreplay…A Guide To Marriage, published in 1865 by the aptly named Albert Sidebottom…[advises] young couples…that “All love between the sexes is based upon sexual passion”…In 1877, Annie Besant, a one-time vicar’s wife, helped to publish Fruits of Philosophy, a guide that set out every possible contraceptive method available…its British circulation reached over 125,000 in the first few months alone. So can we please stop saying Victorian women were having unknown orgasms stimulated by their doctors?…
Unfortunately, most people value the truth far less than they value the ability to feel smug. And people several generations dead are so easy to feel smug about; after all, they aren’t around to tell you that you’re more ignorant about their lives than you pretend they were about sex.
We can know that lesbianism wasn’t invented until the 20th Century though; probably by suffragettes. If it had been around any earlier Victoria would have been sure to outlaw it.
Therefore Sappho’s poetry was purely speculative. A sort of sexual sci-fi that anticipated the real thing by two and a half millennia. The Victorians were well aware she was really the headmistress of a boarding school for girls so she must have been respectable.
Queen Victoria could not have outlawed lesbianism as she has no power to do so – she was a figurehead like her descendant Queen Elizabeth II. But she had a fair amount of influence, and she objected to the outlawing of female homosexual behaviour by the British Parliamentat the same time as the outlawing of its male counterpart. She objected because she was thoroughly heterosexual, and reportedly she did not believe that there were women who enjoyed sex with other women. Parliament went along with here, and deleted legal penalties from the proposed law, and as a result engaging in lesbianism was not made illegal in Britain.
I don’t see how you can “know” this at all. The word “lesbian” might be new, but whether or not Victorians considered Sappho “appropriate reading” does not have any effect on whether or not Sappho might have been speaking figuratively. This is a logical fallacy. It infers one conclusion from an entirely unrelated matter. I assure you, we women have been keeping ourselves amused as long as there have been women. 😉 There’s even tales about Eve and Lilith, if you believe in the Biblical creation story.
Actually my comment was an ironic reference to an apocryphal but widely believed story about Victoria and beliefs apparently sincerely promoted by some Victorian classical scholars about Sappho.
This myth was repeated in the Massage book by Gordon Inkles. He said that “our society” was so anti-pleasure that the Victorians had these steam-powered machines etc. The section was illustrated with several engravings of that era showing small steam engines with peculiar looking assortments of belt-driven machines attached. Evening-suited gents were standing next to them if memory serves. These would presumably be the Doctors–unless they sold tickets as in the still older days of 18th Century Bedlam. Nowadays that chapter seems like an early example of the steampunk genre .
And Maggie still hasn’t posted a picture of her vintage vibrator.
Maybe she burst a boiler with it.
What are you talking about? I posted a picture in a comment responding to the very comment where you first mentioned it, back in December.
Oops. Sorry Maggie.
I generally view comments via my email client – which I have set to filter imbedded content – so I missed it.
Well, people certainly knew enough about sex to sire and give birth to more babies in the past to include the Victorian age, 1940s and 1970s than they do today. I once read in a GAME blog known as Black Dragon that married couples (and others) had more sex in the 1970s than in the 1940s, but people in the 1940s had more sex than they do today. Maybe our period of history has people who are really the most sexually frustrated and having the least amount of sex in addition to being horrible prudes in human history, but we have so much hubris, delusion and narcissism to think otherwise as a group with individual exceptions of course.
That’s because there was nothing to do at night.
LOL!!! Well, sex is more fun than watching television. It’s really too bad that most people don’t know that today. In my opinion, it is worse on average with women than men.
I enjoyed the ad for the Ladies’ Syringe (sorry, had to correct their incorrect non-punctuation). I wonder what options accounted for the price range of 5 to 20 pounds?
Recently I read the Carnal Prayer Mat, a Chinese erotic novel from the 15th century. It could easily have been written yesterday. One sentence I found amusing (my own translation from my French copy):
”…even among prostitutes, there are only the ugly ones that nobody wants who go out and sell their smiles, posing by the door. Those who are worth anything stay comfortably at home and wait to be visited. ”
Another proof that the new generation certainly did not invent Incalls along with the internet either.
Reblogged this on Sable Aradia, Priestess & Witch.
Sometimes this fiction is slightly altered, like in North Korea where it is acceptable to include risqué scenes in novels as long as they occur in the “decadent past”. So the regime promotes the idea of interesting and varied sex in previous centuries compared to the supposedly boring present.
That ancient statue sure says a lot, doesn’t it?
Fruits of Passion is online thanks to The Gutenberg Project:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/38185/38185-h/38185-h.htm
Interesting history but when are women going to confront the widespread existence of clitoral erectile dysfunction in the here and now?
What about the workers!
You mean sex workers? Are you suggesting that sex workers risk losing valuable business if wdespread female sexual dysfunction becomes well-known? If that’s your position, then I would disagree with you.
Sex workers have everything to gain by becoming the first women with the courage to publicly acknowledge the probable cause of widespread clitoral erectile dysfunction and how to prevent it in future generations of growing girls.
Maggie is the most courageous women I know of, and she has already earned her place in hisotry as the greatest champion of the decriminalization of sex work. But despite the possible fallout for the tiny minority of sex workers in this world, she would be more likely to be remembered for what she does to help the millions of girls being mentally castrated every day.
Nah, I just said that because around here when a fixated politician rolls out the same old hackneyed trope someone’s supposed to yell out “What about the workers?” to show they’re getting into the spirit.
[…] Maggie McNeill can definitely confirm that your great-grandparents knew more about sex than you give them credit for: […]