Sex in History by Reay Tannahill

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SEX IN HISTORY by Reay Tannahill

Part one: The Prehistoric World In the Beginning pg.19 Monogamy must be restful in comparison with the situation of the chimpanzee, the gorilla, and the baboon, perpetually on call to satisfy the demands of every female in the troop who happens to be on heat.

Pg.21 Through anthropologists equate monogamy with lack of an estrous cycle (blandly ignoring the evidence of five thousand polygamous years of recorded history), genetics take a different view. … In more favorable conditions, however, when children could survive under their mother’s care alone, men would tend to be promiscuous because it would be in their genes’ interests for them to be spread around; in effect, the Stone Age Casanova was motivated not by the desire in his loins but by the DNA in his chromosomes. (footnote: none of this should be taken to imply that the human participants in the drama were aware of how procreation worked. Almost certainly they were not. But the genes knew about it, and that was good enough.)

pg.24 over the last hundred years anthropologists have been consistently taken aback to discover primitive tribes still apparently ignorant of the relationship between coitus and conception, and its seems likely that such ignorance was general until about as late as 9000 B.C. For much of the Paleolithic era man lived on I-thou terms with the world around him. Where the modern city dweller views the rest of the world as “it,” primitive man saw the river and the sea, the birds and the fish, earth, trees, animals, and plants as “thou,” different from him in appearance but not in essence. Man into master pg. 40 For hundred of thousands of years, man had been the student of animals, woman the experts of plants.

Pg.41 It does not, perhaps, sound like very much. But most of the institutions and many of the inventions that were to emerge between the beginning of the Neolithic revolution and the beginning of recorded history seven thousands years later were to be unmistakably male in origin. Male historians – those whose nerves are still strong enough – sometimes attribute this to a natural masculine superiority. Feminist writers argue either that there was a female contribution that has been deliberately suppressed, or that Neolithic woman was kept in such subjection that her ideas and opinions went for nothing. modern emotions and prejudices aside, part of the explanation may well have been that woman was too busy for speculative thought. She has farming and fuel-collecting and housekeeping to attend to; child bearing and child-rearing, and the endless, muscle-straining task of husking the grain. It was man, peaceably tending his flock, who had the time and opportunity for constructive thought, the time to dream up new ideas, to make connections, to wonder, to produce the materials that would, in the end, mesh together to make civilization.

Pg.42 And Darwin himself might have said the same. He never knew that fertilization was accomplished by a single sperm.

Pg.46 Second Taboo If his semen was the mystical catalysts of the process that ended in childbirth, then menstruation, which demonstrated woman’s failure to conceive, must have appeared as an insult and a rejection, a blood-letting that brutally denied his new role as child-maker. The Father Figure What must have been traumatic in the full psychoanalytical sense was not only the discovery of the male contribution to procreation, but its potential scale. A single male could impregnate more than fifty ewes. With the power comparable to this, what could man not achieve?

Part Two: The Near East, Egypt, and Europe, 3000 B.C.- A.D. 1100

p.g. 57 … the hetairai, the educated courtesans…

p.g. 71 Contraception Not until the end of the seventeenth century A.D. were scientists to discover that seminal fluid was not just a liquid but a suspension medium for millions of individual sperm, and it was more than another 200 years before they learned that a single one of these was all that was needed to accomplish fertilization (see pages 341-46). Until then, those who advocated or practiced contraception had not been aware of the scale of the challenge.

p.g.78 The Second-oldest Professions if the word “profession” is taken to imply specialization on a more or less full-time basis, then the shaman, or witch doctor, was probably ahead of the prostitute by thousands, or even tens of thousands or years. … Much historical material on sex is tangential rather than direct, coming from the law, medicine, and literature. But the law is more concerned with what is inadmissible than what is admissible; medicine with what is abnormal rather than normal; and literature it is not making deliberate concessions to romance, caricature, dogma, or the dramatic unities, with the extraordinary rather than the ordinary.

p.g. 82 She “doted upon her paramours,” men “whose members [penises] were like those of asses, and whose issue [ejaculation] was like that of horses…. ‘I will deliver you,’ said the Lord, ‘into the hands of those you hate… and they shall deal with you in hatred, and take away all the fruit of your labor, and leave you naked and bare, and the nakedness of your harlotry shall be uncovered…’” (Ezekiel 23, 8; 28-9)

Greece p.g. 93 By No Means Inferior “woman are by no means inferior to men,” Socrates remarked kindly- then spoiled the effect by adding, “All they need is a little more physical strength and energy of mind.” He was, however, being generous, for the Greeks had no very high opinions of women, and during the period when pederasty was in vogue the feeling was reciprocated.

P.g. 106 Rome Until the end of the first century B.C., a husband was legally entitled to kill his wide of the spot if she were caught in the act of adultery. (footnote: in effect, this permission was perpetuated in some European countries, notably France, until the twentieth century. Crime passionnel was not only a legally recognized defense, but one that juries were often prepared to accept even from women.)

p.g. 117 Religious Diversions Venus, originally the agricultural goddess of the Romans (in the days before Ceres), coalesced with tempestuous Aphrodite to become mother of the nation, guardian of marriage, and, incongruously, patron of the harlots who frequented the Circus Maximus in search of clients whose blood has been stirred up by the Games, or the camp of the Praetorian Guard on the eastern outskirts of the city, or the evil-smelling brothels that were to be found in every town in the peninsula.

p.g. 118 The word phallus comes from Greek. The Latin was fascinum, which had the associated meaning of “magical spirit,” and this is the derivation that most dictionaries prudishly gives for the modern word “fascinate.”

p.g. 125 the competition, therefore,, was stiff. There is no word in Latin that corresponds with the modern word “spinster.”

p.g. 128 There was plenty of contraceptive information available for those who needed it, or thought they needed it, especially among the literate upper class. However, in view of the general tenor of relationships between husbands and wives, it is possible that the most widely used form was the simplest and most reliable of all-abstention. The main alternative, particularly for men who liked to feel they were in control of the situation, would be coitus interuptus, while women, if they were sensible, relied on the olive oil recommended by Aristotle in the fourth century B.C rather than the technique Lucretius attributed to harlots 300 years later. It was their custom, said Lucretius, to undulate their hips during intercourse, which gave their partners pleasure and at the same time directed the seminal fluid away from the danger zone. In fact, the evidence of Greek vase painting makes it clear that the hetairai knew a better method. Unless their clients were strongly opposed to it, they usually insisted anal intercourse.

The Christian Church p.g. 138 The Christian Church During the so-called Dark Ages, reading and writing became the preserve of the monasteries, and what was read and what was written were virtually at the sole discretion of the Church. Monastic scribes were fully occupied in copying what was orthodox; what was unorthodox simply did not exist. Whether deliberate or not, censorship was very close to being complete. … It is undoubtedly a tribute (if an ambiguous one) to such men as St. Jerome and St. Augustine that much of what the modern world still understands by “sin” stems not from the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, or from the tablets handed down from Sinai, but from the early sexual vicissitudes of handful of men who lived in the twilight days of imperial Rome.

p.g. 139 Gnosticism is a term created by modern scholars to describe a collection of religious groups, many of which thought of themselves as Christians, which were active in the first few centuries A.D (from Wikipedia.org)

p.g.142 … pudena (from the Latin pudere, “to be ashamed”)

p.g. 143 What was clear right from the start, however, was that if it was sinful to find enjoyment in sex, then the great majority of ordinary people were sinners.

p.g. 149 (visual reference: “The tree of consanguinity,” a table of kindred and affinity devised by Isidore of Seville, c. 600 A.D. The closest prohibited relationships come at the center, where the trunk joins the formalized branches; they are mother, father, son, and daughter. The further out toward the perimeter, the more distant the degree of kinship.)

p.g. 152 The major sex sin was contraception. A modern American scholar who has studied 20 surviving penitentials dating from the sixth to the ninth centuries found that all but one considered it very grave indeed, especially if it involved “poisons creating sterility,” anal intercourse, or oral intercourse “seminem in ore, “semen in the mouth”). These were almost as culpable as homicide and attracted penances ranging from three to 15 years. It appears that “a poor little woman” who “acted on account of the difficulty of feeding” extra mouths was likely to receive lesser penances. Whereas one who “acted to conceal a crime of fornication” would rate the greater. A similar distinction was presumably drawn in the case of coitus interruptus, which rated two to ten years. The long-term penances usually seem to have consisted of fasting in one form or another- abstaining from food and drink (with the exception of bread and water), or from sex, or from anything that could be interpreted as self-indulgence. An alternative that came in during the eleventh century was self-flagellation (for monks) or, for laity, whipping by the parish priest, while there was another category that entailed the singing of penitential psalms. A man who, however involuntarily, experienced nocturnal emissions, was expected to rise at once and intone seven psalms, followed by another 30 in the morning. Abortion within 40 days of contraception (before the fetus had acquired its human soul) was fractionally less sinful than contraception, possibly because abortion so often carried its own pain and penalties.

p.g. 154 To begin with, the name of Sodom was treated as a kind of portmanteau word for sins that the Jews were particularly familiar with, or that particularly offended them – pride, adultery, abuse of hospitality, and an irreligious spirit. But by the second century B.C. the free-living and promiscuous Greeks had attracted Jewish censure, and references to Sodom in such literature as the Palestinian Pseudepigranpha began for the first time to specify “fornication” and “uncleanness.” Then, with homosexuality common in rome and pederasty by no means unknown in the Hellenized cities around the Mediterranean, the matter was settled once and for all.

p.g. 155 today, in such states as Virginia, for example, the so-called sodomy statues do not specifically ban homosexuality but anal and oral intercourse, regardless of the sex of the persons involved.

p.g. 156 Thus, by east stages, an imprecise Bible story, colored by Jewish disapproval of Greek habits and then by Christian revulsion at “sins against nature,” had the ultimate effect of transforming the homosexual into a danger to the state.

p.g. 161 The Christian Achievement What happened, almost inevitably, was that the Christian sense of sin, which might have been a force for good, was diverted from areas where it could have been more usefully employed. By some mysterious alchemy, sexual purity came to neutralize other sins, so that even the moral oppression and physical barbarity that became characteristic of the Christian church in later medieval and Renaissance times scarcely appeared as sins at all in comparison with the sins of sex and heresy.

Part Three: Asia until the Middle Ages, and the Arab World

p.g. 164 China “The more women with whom a man has intercourse, the greater will be the benefit he derives from the act,” said one, and another added, “If in one night he can have intercourse with more than ten women it is best.” This was one of the doctrines of Tao, “the Way,” “the supreme Path of Nature,” a philosophy that permeated the whole structure of Chinese thought and society for more than 2000 years.

p.g. 165 “The interaction of one yin and one yang is called Tao, and the resulting constant generative process is called ‘change.’” … When the sexual parallels came to be drawn, woman- despite a common misapprehension not only in the West but sometimes in China itself- was classified not as pure yin but as “lesser yin,” and man, similarly, as “lesser yang.”

p.g.166 It took little effort of the imagination to recognize that sexual intercourse was the human equivalent of interaction between the cosmic forces of yin and yang, even when the parallels were drawn not in the direct fleshly sense of vagina and penis, but more subtly as yin essence (the moisture lubricating a woman’s sexual organs) and yang essence (man’s semen).

p.g.170 The basic way of avoiding this, said Master Tung-hsuan (who is believed to have been a seventh-century physician), was as follows. At the last moment, “the man closes his eyes and concentrates his thoughts; he presses his tongue against the roof of his mouth, bends his back, and stretches his neck. He opens his nostrils wide and squares his shoulders, closes his mouth, and sucks his breath. Then [he will not ejaculate and] the semen will ascend inward on its own account.” What the Master recommended, effect, was a few moment’s powerful self-discipline.

p.g. 171 (footnote: “Jade Stalk” was one of several Chinese synonyms for the penis, and the reference was not, of course, to green jade but to the more precious, creamy-colored “white” jade. Other synonyms were Red Bird, Coral Stem, Heavenly Dragon Pillar, and Swelling Mushroom. A woman’s sexual organs might be The Open Peony Blossom, Golden Lotus, Receptive Vase, or The Cinnabar (or Vermilion) Gate.

p.g. 175 The titles of the other positions were highly poetic, and the descriptions frequently acrobatic. There was Winding Dragon position and the Mandarin Ducks; Bamboos by the altar and the Cleaving Cicada; Phoenix sporting in the Cinnabar Cleft; and Gamboling Wild Horses.

p.g.178 But they had no particular reservations about public ceremonial mass sex, which made its first appearance toward the end of the second century and appears to have been relatively common by the fourth. Toward the end of the Han period, when Chinese economy and society were in a state of crisis, the head of the Taoist “church,” a man named Chang Chueh, decided to try to overthrow the Han and set up a Taoist empire. He embarked on this ambitious scheme with an army whose men wore yellow scarves around their heads and practiced mass sexual disciplines on nights of the new and full moons, their aim being shih tsui, “deliverance from guilt.”

p.g. 182 Women themselves made use of the “Burmese Bell,” at first inserting one in the vagina before intercourse, but later using them for solitary pleasure. In this case a pair of the little silver globes was necessary, one containing a drop of mercury and the other a tiny vibrating metal tongue; they gave a uniquely erotic sensation even at the slightest movement of hips or legs. Rin-notama bells for women became popular in the West in the eighteenth century and again in the late twentieth, though the modern set consists of three, not two, and the third is hollow. (note: geisha balls)

p.g. 183 No sex-approving early Taoist Master, and certainly no sex-abjuring early Buddhist, could ever have foreseen the day when Chinese royal brides and grooms had to be taught the facts of life by reference to a working model- of a Buddha! The Mysterious Room … Yet Taoism and Confucianism were not altogether conflicting ideologies; indeed, it can fairly be argued that between them they kept the Chinese world in motion through their own yin-yang interaction- Taoism the yin creed, flexible and intuitive; Confucianism compelling, uncompromising, unmistakably yang. Until as late as the twelfth century, the Chinese people placidly subscribed to both, ruling their personal lives according to Taoism while recognizing Confucianism as a creed admirably suited to the needs of society and the state.

p.g. 186 The only real point of interest about this catalogue of wifely virtues was that it emanated not from a Hebrew Psalmist or Athenian misogynist, but from the well bred and highly intelligent Lady Pan Chao, one of the first and greatest Chinese woman scholars, who was partly responsible for compiling the official history of the Han dynasty. p.g. 193 The top-class brothel, patronized by high officials, wealthy merchants, writers, and artists, was variously known as a “house of singing girls,” a “sing-song house,” or a “tea house,” and was very expensive indeed. …. But not all customers saw it in quite the same way, since none of the ordinary yin-yang restrictions applied to intercourse with a prostitute whose yin essence was so powerful because of her numerous liaisons that she easily gave back to a man far more than he could possibly lose by ejaculation.

p.g. 194 in about AD 1000, tiny feet became both a criterion of beauty and a symbol of sexual desirability. Foot binding forced women into a kind of hobbling walk that apparently strengthened and tightened the vaginal muscles, making women into excellent bedfellows. The upper-class Chinese woman’s leggings became more erotic than the garter was to be in Victorian England, so that even an artist who drew the most explicit nudes still did not omit the leggings.

p.g. 198 in the last analysis, the Chinese seem to have had a more interesting and varied list of sins and, however eccentric, a better sense of balance than their contemporaries in the agonized Christian West. It was only when neo-Confucianism, a composite philosophy incorporating the theories of the sage with fragments of Taoism and shreds of Buddhism, began to take a vicelike hold on Chinese society in mid-medieval times that what had been one of the most sophisticated and civilized cultures in the world began its long slide into moral Victorianism.

India

p.g.200 By the time of the Kamasutra, India was saturated with the ideas of Hinduism, a class-conscious religion whose essential beliefs influenced every facet of life. it was based on the sacred authority of the Vedas-the Bible of the light-skinned Aryan invaders who, in the second millennium B.C., had driven their dark-skinned predecessors down to the south of the peninsula- and it divided society into dour unequal classes. Brahmins were superior to Kshatriyas, kshatriyas to vaisyas, and vaisyas to sudras. And all were superior to the conquered people, who had no status at all.

p.g.201 dharma artha kama … Artha and kama were perhaps concessions to the basic human instincts, the sugar on the pill of sanctity. But they were sanctified, just the same. Sex, for the Hindu Indian as for the Taoist Chinese, was a religious duty- not one that would put him straight into tune with the infinite, but certainly one of the least taxing and most pleasurable ways of improving the state of his karma.

p.g.202 The Problem of Love The Aims of dharma, artha, and kama were directed toward the improvements of each individual’s own karma, essentially personal and self-centered, and the interaction of one person’s behavior with that of another bore as much relationship to the past and future of both as it did to their present.

p.g.203 There had been a literature of love ever since the beginning of recorded history, sometimes pallidly romantic as in early Egypt, sometimes cheerfully bawdy as in Greece. But although sec often figured in love poetry, love figured very little in sex literature before the kamasutra. There, however, it was recurring theme.

p.g.204 Hindu society, for example, was no more enthusiastic than any other about one man seducing another man’s wife, and the Kamasutra was quite emphatic about the conditions which justified such a course. If the woman could influence her husband on the lover’s behalf, that was all right. It was fine, too, if the woman could be relied on to help her lover kill her husband, so that they both inherit his riches. And so on (15). But lacking motives of self-interest that could be defined in terms of artha, mere carnal desire was not good enough. Seducing another man’s wife was permissible only if the seducer’s love was so strong that it was leading him along the road to destruction. Helpfully, the Kamasutra listed the signposts, so that he could take action before the situation became irretrievable. They were, in succession, “love of the eye, attachment of the mind, constant reflection”; then came sleeplessness, loss of weight, rejection of accustomed pleasures, shamelessness, madness, fainting and finally death (V1). But recognition of love as something on a different plane from sex, though it lent the Kamasutra a distinctively human quality, at the same time deprived it of subtlety. Separating love from sexuality forced it into the position of supplying a guide to sexuality only. And a very matter-of-fact one. There is no poetry at all in the Kamasutra, no mellowing use of that romantic-spiritual language that has encouraged lovers through the ages to believe that their own feelings are something quite apart from the gross bodily desires of others. It makes an instructive contrast with the Chinese sex manual which, acknowledging no real distinction between love and sex, treated the matter with a cool delicacy that easily accommodated both.

p.g. 209 Practice of Sex It is apparent that Gupta society, on its jet-set level at least, felt no need to be reticent either about its love or its love-marks. There was a sturdy sexuality about Indian civilization that contrasted strikingly with attitudes in other countries. Even in china, where sex had an equally important place, it was considered a matter of the bedchamber or the brothel, something essentially private and personal. But in India a great deal of life was lived in public; privacy might sometimes be found for the body, but rarely for the mind or the emotions. In any case, sex was natural, enjoyable, a virtuous pursuit of the third Aim, so why hide it?

p.g.211 Almost 200o years before the Western world discovered it, India knew what social security was all about.

p.g 216 The Kamasutra in the Round Brahma Siva Visnu … But when divine wives began to assume importance it was in a unique form. Most aspects of the daily life of India’s gods, like those of other countries, bore recognizable resemblance to the daily life of India’s people, but in the matter of job demarcation between husband and wife there was an unexpected reversal, for the god sat back, calm and aloof, while his wife did the work.

p.g.220 Long after, the British who rules India for almost tow centuries were to be disgusted to the very depth of their Victorian souls. They might be genuinely reluctant to interfere in the religion of their new subjects, but they could feel only contempt for a people who worshipped a phallus as if it were a god. When they discovered that the reverse was true, they regarded it as a distinction without a difference.

p.g.223 The Jewel in the Lotus mantra yantra … The greatest and the most frequently used of all- which had much the same purpose as a preliminary genuflexion in church- was Om mani padm hum, whose resonance set up its own subtle vibration in space as it did on the palate. It had (and has) many layers of meaning, but is usually translated in the frankly sexual form of “the jewel is in the lotus,” which is another way of saying “the lingam in the yoni.”

p.g.225 The primary appeal of Tantra, it must be remembered, was the cultivation, not the rejection, of pleasure as a means to release, and there is no good reason to believe that in the early days these five enjoyments were regarded as anything other than what they appeared to be, even if later theorists converted them into symbols. Christians will remember that it took almost 1200 years for the bread and wine of the Last Supper to become the body and blood of the Redeemer.

p.g.226 Anatomically improbable though this may sound, it was perfectly reasonable on a secondary level of Tantric theory, that relating to the “subtle body.” This idea. That inside every fleshly body there was an ethereal replica consisting of nerves, emotions, channels of energy, intellect, soul substance- whatever, in fact, contemporary knowledge was unable to account for- was fairly common in pre-scientific societies, though it was not always charted with quite the sophistication that the Indians and Chinese brought to it.

p.g.228 Stripped of its religious imagery, its spells, its self-hypnosis, its prayers (which differed radically between Buddhists and Hindus), Tantra is like the Bible stripped of its poetry and its quality of revelation. Few religions look attractive in the nude. However, as one modern European scholar remarks, thee is more to Trantricism than sex and magic. Hindu and Buddhists critics, he says “have constantly suggested that the Tantric uses religion as a mantle for sexual desire and debauchery; the Tantrics have constantly answered that the complicated, elaborate and exceedingly difficult procedure followed by the Tantrics would not at all be necessary to gratify sexual desire, whose objects are much easier to obtain without any [such rigorous] trappings.” Which is undoubtedly true.

9.Islam

p.g.230 Through Islam, the West was almost insensibly to absorb ideas and attitudes originating not only in the Classical world but in the furthest reaches of Asia. It would, in fact, be difficult to exaggerate the importance of the Islamic contribution to science, technology, and the arts in the west. Between the eighth and twelfth centuries Islam held all the learning of the known world in its hand, and from Jundishapur to Baghdad, to Cairo, to Sicily and Spain it passed it on. Greek medicine, forgotten in the medieval West; Hindu numerals (which came to be known as Arabic), the nine digits and a zero that superseded the clumsy Roman system and revolutionized mathematics, scientific experiment, and everyday life; Chinese papermaking, which changed the face of scholarship, and the crossbow, which did the same for war; and a long and luxurious catalogue of adjuncts to gracious living- figured silks, stained glass, damascened metals, canopied beds, carpets, new dye colors, the cusped arch of architecture and the Gothic black letter script, glass mirrors, public baths, secular hospitals, the lute, the kettledrum, and the exotic and the escapist tales that were to inspire Boccaccio and Chaucer, von Eschenbach and la Fontaine.

p.g.236 The Development of Harem In the love-desire game, the courtesan’s only serious rival was the 18 year old boy, whose attraction the Arabs felt keenly as their predecessors the Persians and Greeks had done. Both were objects of hedonistic, impermanent devotion hat was no new phenomenon in the civilized world. in effect, love-desire, even as a cult, was far from being unique to the Arabs. … the courtesan was at least a person, however mercenary, whereas the heroine of the “pure love” lyric was not a person at all, only a focal point.

…

Love was of the mind, sex and body, and the Arabs saw no reason to confuse the two.

p.g.237 It was this final form of “pure love” that was to be introduced into Europe with peculiar social results. But before that happened, pilgrims and Crusaders had begun to contract their own loveless and monogamous marriages- business arrangements that took little account of personal chemistry- with the tempting delights of the harem.

Part Four: The Expanding World A.D. 1100-1800

p.g. 255 Although the Christian Church still disapproved, quite impartially, of both sex and women, the twelfth century began to see a change. Woman, who for so long had been a cipher, was transformed- by the game of courtly love that developed from the “pure love” of the Arabs, and the importation of the cult of the Virgin Mary from Byzantium- into the “Lady,” pure, unattainable, virtuous, admirable.

… Woman became not an incubator, but a mother.

p.g. 259 Europe And while the Church could scarcely have been said to encourage them in these activities, it did help to stabilize their legal position; the eleventh-century husband who tired of his wife found it easy to repudiate her, but when marital law passed into the hands of the ecclesiastical courts- who loathed divorce even more than they loathed marriage- this practice came to an abrupt end. There was one other trend too, that in time was to influence the attitude of both Church and man. In Byzantium, the Virgin Mary had long been an object of devotion, and her cult was brought back to Europe in the early twelfth century by pilgrims, Crusaders and merchants. For many long centuries, the Western Church had equated woman with Eve, the architect of man’s downfall; when Eve at last gave way to Mary in the fourteenth century, all women benefited. Most of these influences converged, at different times, in the extraordinary game that evolved during the first half of the twelfth century, the game of courtly love, which began as a literary conceit but was soon to move over into the world of reality; the classic case of life imitating art. courtly love was class-conscious, escapist, soap-opera-sentimental, a kind of idealized affair between a high born lady and a romantic squire, a pretty daydream to while away the idle hours, but it introduced a new code of behavior that was to have a direct and potent effect on the status of women.

p.g.260 Woman into a Lady But the courtly lover and his lady were neither religious misfits nor suitable cases for treatment. Hundreds of millions of people today read thousands of new romances and thrillers every year. The medieval world was not so generously served, but it solved the problem to everyone’s satisfaction (except that of the Church) by acting out its dreams according to the rules of the new game that was introduced just when “love” was sufficiently possible to be attractive, but sufficiently improbable to be a challenge. And, like so many other novelties of the period- including chess, with which it has a lot in common- the love game owed much, if not quite all to the Arabs. … Consciously or unconsciously, the poets of the southwestern France, where courtly love had its genesis in Europe, set about trying to find some bastion that would substitute for the walls of the harem.

p.g.264 jongleur of the generation … The conventions, of courtly love existed at three levels- that of the men, and sometimes women, who composed the songs; that of the troubadours (who might also be composers) who disseminated not only the songs but the whole idea-system surrounding them, fulfilling much the same function as the media today; and that of the fashionable world, which played the new game of love according to the rules set down to the lyrics.

p.g.265 … virtue became the European harem. In the songs, at least. What happened in the love game played by the fashionable world is not so clear. It seems probable that, for most of the way, it followed the pattern of the songs, which scarcely changed between the middle of the twelfth and the end of thirteenth centuries. The heroine was a lady of high birth married to a powerful seigneur, and what worried her lover was not her husband but her high estate. He strove to become worthy and succeeded in attracting her love. For the sake of her reputation, however, their love had to be kept secret, which made it a kind of mystery and set the couple apart from others, even if not from the horde of minor characters who helped or hindered in their intrigue, playing the same roles as they had done in the Arab love songs- confidants who acted as messengers, smoothed out problems, and lent themselves to deceptions; mischief-makers who placed the lovers in danger through indiscretion, disapproval or simple ill will.

p.g.267 Lady into Allegory Courtly love had endowed the Lady with virtue, chivalry with the insignia of command. The roman was subsequently to help envelop her in an atmosphere, a mist- certainly nothing more substantial- of attainments that had formerly been part of the masculine preserve.

p.g. 270 By the thirteenth century, poets and troubadours had begun to confuse the Virgin with the Lady, the sacred love with the profane, and even those who contrived to keep them separate, like Dante Alighieri in Italy, did so more by literary techniques than spiritual intent. The Virgin became Notre Dame, Our Lady, a stately and unmistakably aristocratic figure much more at home in the princely courts of the West than she would ever have been in the inn at Bethlehem.

p.g. 277 Mary Magdalene Chastity belts or no, French and German historians are accustomed to refer to the fifteenth century as the age of bastards, and it may not be a coincidence that this was also the century during which brick fireplaces, flues, and chimneys came into general use, and alcove beds I the communal hall gave way to warm, private sleeping chambers.

p.g.278 That irrepressible gossip, the seigneur de Brantome, recounted how one French lady always insisted on adopting a woman superior position when she was in bed with her lover, so that if anyone accused her of allowing man to “mount” her, she could protest her innocence with absolute truth.

p.g.279 Thomas Aquinas added his mite by comparing prostitution with “the filth in the sea or the sewer in a palace. Take away the sewer, and you will fill the palace with pollution…. Take away prostitutes from the world, and you will fill it with sodomy.” So the Church took out shares in the business and gathered the girls tidily under its soutane.

…

At the same time, dedicated to each-way betting, the Church urged all prostitutes to give up their evil habits. Mary Magdalen was to be their example…

p.g.285 The original buggers were heretics, not homosexuals. The manichaean heresy of the third century had spread disruptively in the East but quietly in the West, and had become well established in Bulgaria, from which it spread in a slightly different form to Provence, Germany, northern France, and Italy. To the Church, Manichaeanism was the most dangerous heresy, and it became easy to speak of Bulgars and heretics as if they were by definition the same; in this way, Bulgari or Boulgres, corrupted into Bugari and Bourgres, became part of the language in Western Europe. In the district around Albi in southern France, the Bulgarian/Manichaean heresy culminated in Catharism, otherwise known as the Albigensian heresy and believed by the Church to be spiritually and socially disastrous. All that most people knew about Albigenses was that they regarded propagation of the species as wrong, forbade sex altogether to the highest ranks (the Perfecti), but simply forbade the lower ranks to conceive children. The heretics, the bougres, were thus sexual deviants from the Christian line, and sexual deviation allied with a ban on conception could only mean homosexuality and/or heterosexual anal intercourse. (No one seems to have thought of coitus interruptus, possibly because it was common, if unconfessed, among the orthodox Christians.) Heterosexual anal intercourse was, in fact, a standard if reprehensible contraceptive method in France in the medieval and post-medieval period, as it had been in classical Greece;

p.g.288 “Woman… is a real devil, an enemy of peace, a source of provocation, a cause of disputes, from whom a man must hold himself apart if he wishes to taste tranquility…. Let them marry, those who are attracted by the company of a wife, by nightly embraces, the screaming of children and the torments of insomnia…. As for us, if it is in our power, we will perpetuate our name through talent and not through marriage, through books and not through children, with the cooperation of virtue and not with that of a woman…”

p.g. 290 But unfortunately, when the Spanish pope Alexander VI Borgia had issued the bulls Inter cetera of May 1493, giving Spain sole dominion over most of the New World, he had made it a condition that the inhabitants should be instructed in the Catholic faith, and this was something “irrational creatures” were regarded as unfit to receive. As a result, there was a basic conflict between the interests of church and State, with the Church and its missionaries arguing that the people of the Americas were not irrational, merely misguided, while the Spaniards who flocked to the Indies in search of gold and silver found it more convenient to think of them and treat them as brute beasts.

p.g. Imperial enterprise Even so, legends of giants from the sea are part of the common currency of coastal mythology and often enshrine some vestige of ancestral memory.

p.g.296 In the Manner of Vipers It seems possible that by the time the conquistadors arrived heterosexual anal intercourse may- in response to Aztec and Inca suppression of the homosexual variety- have become more common than it had been before, although it seems never to have been altogether uncommon. The evidence, however, is tenuous. Early American art and religion were not very much concerned with sex, and the law books more with its public than private aspects. But there survives from one area of Peru a remarkable collection of ceramic drinking vessels that would (if they could be regarded as representative) throw a mildly startling light on the sexual habits of the pre-Columbian Andean peoples.

p.g.299 In a few specimens, the spout was molded into the shape of the vulva, and there were two pots with two spouts, one penis-shaped and one vulva-shaped, giving the drinker a choice between fellatio and cunnilingus. It is perfectly possible that these jeux d’esprit do have something to say about the realities of life in the valleys of Chicama, Moche and Viru in the middle of the first millennium, but that they are not to be taken too literally is suggested by the zoophiliac examples, which show women having intercourse with a jaguar, a dog, and in three cases, cormorants.

p.g. 301 Sinners and a Saint St.Boniface

p.g.307 Mexicali Rose Among the Sinaloa on the Arizona border, for example, a new prostitute had to be consecrated at a great festival, “at which all the chiefs of the locality gather and dance naked, and after all have danced with her they put her in a hut that has been decorated for this event, and the chiefs adorn her with [shawls] and bracelets of fine turquoise, and then the chiefs go in one by one to lie with her, and all the others who wish follow them. From this time on, these women cannot refuse anyone who pays them the agreed amount.

p.g.313 The Birth of the Mestizo At last, in 1829, the government took its courage in both hands. Sati was declared illegal in Bengal, and in Madras the following year; anyone assisting was to be held guilty of culpable homicide. But it still persists, even today. There are estimated to have been at least 22 cases since India gained her independence in 1947, the most recent (and highly-publicized) having occurred in Rajasthan in 1987.

p.g.316 The Puritans had their faults, but color prejudice was not one of them. Color prejudice in the West, in fact, is a modern phenomenon. While is not entirely true to say, as one modern scholar does, that “the notion of physical repugnance on the part of the European when faced by people totally dissimilar in appearance is no more than a myth,” the composite of responses nowadays classified as “color prejudice” certainly did not gain real strength until the nineteenth century. What the early Europeans in North America (and Australia and South Africa) suffered from was cultural prejudice, and this conditioned their attitude to the indigenous peoples in a quite specific way. The Spaniards in South America, the Portuguese in Asia, the British in India, were all transients, there to rule, to fight, to administer, to trade- but not to settle. They recognized themselves as foreigners in a foreign land and though they might often hate and fear the country, the climate, and the people, they knew that some day they could go home. Because of this, their attitude to the natives, though sometimes marred by a virulence approaching hysteria, had an oddly detached quality about it. but the situation of Europeans in North America, British in Australia, and Dutch in South Africa, was quite different. Their voyage had been made on a one-way ticket, and they carried the image of “Home” with them in their baggage to be reconstructed on foreign soil. Their attitude to the people they found in the new lands was shaped by a passionate need to protect the way of life, the cast of thought, the centuries of civilization on which their own identity depended, and this was to apply just as much to African slaves in America as to the indigenous people; more, perhaps because the contacts were closer.

p.g. 317 What the Europeans in America did was adopt the ghetto mentality, cutting white and colored people off from each other as effectively as the Jews had cut themselves off from the Gentiles almost 2000 years before, and by much the same means.

12. Europe and America, 1550-1800

p.g.330 The Pilgrim Patriarchs Puritan morality had three direct effects on the American future. It produced a mental state of Victorianism fifty years before Victoria herself mounted the throne on the other side of the Atlantic. It taught American women how to control their menfolk by being sweet and virtuous to the point of caricature, while yet appearing to submit to them like good Old Testament wives. And it gave extraordinary importance to the concept of “the family.”

…

Senators and Congressmen today, struggling (sometimes with much-publicized lack of success) to project an image of dedicated family men, at work, at rest, at church, at play, owe this particular electoral hazard to the early New England settlers who wove the public demonstration of family solidarity into the American ethos. In no other country in the world, until these last few copycat decades, was a politician expected to drag his wife and children onto the public podium with him.

p.g.333 The Family in Europe It seems that what may well have happened was that all Europe was subtly influenced by the religious upheavals of the sixteenth century, so that the whole of the society, and particularly the family, was afflicted by a kind of nervous defensiveness that led it to withdraw into itself, just as the Chinese did under the Mongols and, later the Ch’ing. Despite the disreputable courts of, notably, Charles II and (until Madame de Maintenon took the matter in hand) Louis XIV, despite even the fact that Don Juan first saw the light of day in 1630- in Molina’s play El Burlador de Sevilla y el Convivado de Piedra- and the Earl of Rochester published poems and plays that would bring a blush even to the cheek of the 1980s, Europe at this time was in many ways remarkably straitlaced.

p.g. 335 Natural Morality - European Style (eighteenth century era) Since most philosophers were men, their definition of what constituted “natural” in the sexual field was predictable enough. Rousseau, neatly compromising between chauvinism and commiseration, said that “woman was made to yield to man and to put up with his injustice,” and the illegitimacy statistics of the eighteenth century suggest that this view was widely shared.

p.g. 336 On the other hand, it was in the eighteenth century that the condom began to come into use as a contraceptive. It was the great Italian anatomist, Fallopius, who claimed to have invented it- though as a protection against syphilis, not contraception. In a work published in 1564, two year after his death, he explained how the uncircumcised could guard against infection by fitting a small linen sheath over the gland, and then drawing the foreskin over it. by the eighteenth century, condoms- still advocated as an armor against syphilis, but beginning to be used (as Casanova said) “to put the fair sex under shelter from all fear” – were made usually from sheep gut, sometimes from fish skin, and were stocked and sold in brothels as well as by a few specialist wholesalers such as London’s Mrs. Philips, who was prepared to supply “apothecaries, chymists, druggists etc” as well as “ambassadors, foreigners, gentlemen, and captains of ships &c going abroad.”

p.g.338 The Divine Marquis Libertinism was a game for the idle and a game very much like the love-desire of the early Abbasid caliphs (see pages 235-36)…

p.g 339-340 The genre that was to culminate in the novels of Marquis de Sade, the Provencal nobleman who gave his name to the sexual perversion known as sadism, had in fact begun in England in 1747-8 with Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, Or the History of a Young Lady, a moral tale in epistolary form that traced its heroine’s progression, downhill all the way through seven volumes, from seduction to disorderly house to debtor’s prison to deathbed. England was the home of the Gothic horror school, still young in Richardson’s day but already characterized by melancholy ruins, moldering caverns, and brooding silences broken only by the cry of the lone screech owl, and Clarissa struck exactly the right gruesome note. …

… - Valmont, the perfidious Don Juan figure; …

… All these novels were works of extreme sensuality, largely concerned with the torture, physical or mental, of innocent girls, and perfunctorily justified by the argument that virtue triumphed in the end, even in only in the last paragraph, and even if only in the heroine’s ascent to heaven clad all in white and accompanied by massed choirs of angels. Most of the authors, with the exception of Laclos, wrote frankly for money, and the genre would not have survived if there had been no audience for it. But although the cynical morality of Versailles might suggest that the court formed the main market- such books having a special appeal for men whose public role was one of enforced deference to the ladies- this was not the case. When the Marquis de Sade (anonymously) published his first novel Justine, ou les malheurs de la vertu in 1791, court circles had more urgent matters to attend to, and by the time of Juliette, ou es prosperites du vice (1796) they had disappeared altogether. But de Sade’s success was great. Retif de la Bretonne, who was admittedly prejudiced, claimed of Justine that the revolutionary leader Danton “read it for kicks,” and it seems likely that the bourgeoisie enjoyed the more degenerate specimens of the literature galante as much for the illicit sexual excitement they offered as for their exposure of the depravity of the ancien regime.

p.g.341 Justine was banned in France in 1814, the year of de Sade’s death, and Juliette a year later. One almost inevitable result was that the Divine Marquis (as he came defiantly to be called) gained a much stronger hold over the minds of later French and Francophile writers than his dull and repetitive style warranted. Romantics, Decadents, Surrealists, all admitted his influences; Baudelaire, Lamartine, Swinburne, D’Annunzio, Nietzsche, Cocteau, all admired him. Whether this was because the bloodied horrors of his imagination fed some private need in themselves, or whether it was because he had emptied a metaphorical slop-bucket over the outraged head of bourgeois respectability, has never been entirely clear. Seminal Theories Where the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had been a period of physical adventure, the eighteenth sizzled with intellectual activity, and one of the things discovered was the answer to the 10,000-year-old question of how sexual intercourse produced children. Curiously enough, despite the fact that even the most unobservant must have recognized, during the span of more than 400 generations, that children as often resembled their mothers as their fathers, it had always been believed that woman’s contribution to the reproductive process was minimal. In the Western world, it was the Greeks who first propounded the theory that man’s seminal fluid was the essential element in procreation and that woman was only incubator. Aristotle, in the fourth century B.C., thought the fluid was a kind of soul-substance that blended with woman’s menstrual blood to produce the living child. He compared the process with that of turning milk into cheese. “Here, the mild is the body [the material element], and the fig juice or the rennet [the seminal fluid] contains the principle which causes it to set.” Galen, 500 years later, said there was no difference between sowing womb, and sowing the earth, and his Christian contemporary, Clement of Alexandria, defined seminal fluid as something that was almost, or about-to-become man. Between them, they put high philosophical premium on semen, and Clement’s view, in particular, helps to explain why the Church regarded it in an almost mystical light, so that expending it for any purpose other than procreation was a sin in its own right as well as in the more general context of permissible and impermissible sex. If semen was almost-man, then it was directly related to God, which would have made it blasphemous for Christian to quibble about its quality. Things were different in Asia. The Chinese, more realistic despite the abstract nature of Taoist thought, made a positive effort to improve it by means of regular infusions of yin (see page 170). But it was the Hindus, closely followed by the Arabs, who gave serious attention to quality control.

p.g.343 But however much the inhabitants of the great Eurasian landmass might diverge on detail, they were unanimous in the belief that semen should never be carelessly expended. The Chinese thought it weakening on all levels; Indians knew supplies were limited; and the West, true to its hellfire tradition and its exaggerated respect for the dignity of almost-man, held that wastefulness would result in every imaginable kind of physical retribution. “wastefulness” covered homosexuality, masturbation- an appalling sin in Victorian times- and coitus more than once a week. Sinibaldi, the Italian who in 1642 produced the first of Europe’s standard works on sexuality, the Geneanthropeia (translated in 1658 into English, somewhat bowdlerized, as Rare Verities, the Cabinet of Venus Unlock’d), threatened gout, constipation, a hunched back, bad breath, and a red nose. Two hundred years later, it was revealed in a vision to Ellen White, founder of the Seventh Day advertists, that masturbation would turn a man into a cripple and an imbecile. And for more than 50 years after that, the medical profession consistently promised masturbators the reward of blindness and/or epilepsy and on a more grandiose note, complete moral and physical bankruptcy for the overactive Casanova. …

But in the Seventeenth century came the microscope. First, in 1672, the young Dutch surgeon Regnier de Graaf discovered the egg, the ovum and realized that it traveled from the ovary to the womb. But what started it moving? He decided it must be the aura seminalis, the pungent vapor from the male seminal fluid. Three years later, Antony van Leeuwenhoeck put some seminal fluids under the microscope and discovered it was alive with miniature tadpole-like creatures, which he christened animalcules. Decades of argument followed. De Graaf’s followers (the ovists) argued that the egg contained a tiny model of the parent, just waiting to be developed. Van Leeuwenhoeck’s followers (the spermists) had the same idea- only they located the model in the head of the sperm. If either was right, of course, it meant that neither parent was more than an instrument of predestination. According to the “box theory,” if the germinal particle (egg or sperm) contained a performed human- complete, as Leibniz pointed out, with its soul and its allocation of the Original Sin- then each little performed human must also contain within it another of the same, which must contain another, and another- and so on, as infinitum. The whole future human race packed into a series of Chinese boxes. …

By the middle of the 18th century, botanists had proved that plants, at least owed something to both parents, while the ovist-spermist controversy, if it had done nothing else, had cast serious doubts on the old belie that reproduction was a purely seminal miracle. Some scientists, committed to neither side, even began to look at half-castes and recognize that it was more than mere coincidence that black + black = black, and white + white= white, but black+ white = khaki. Gradually it came to be accepted that a child derived its characteristics as much from its mother as its father, but it was not until 1854 that anyone succeeded in observing the fusion of sperm and egg that proved that truth of the matter- and even then it was not human sperm and egg, but those of the frog. Part five: Shaping the Present,: the 19th Century p.g.352 Jus maternum, or “the law of the mother” was not altogether a new idea, but it was propounded in 1861 by the Swiss jurist and historian Johann Jakob Bachofen in the kind of philosophical-scientific language that the Victorians found quite irresistible. Bachofen denied man’s “natural” superiority over women, and claimed, with a wealth of historical and anthropological detail, that when humanity was still close to nature and maternity the only recognizable parental relationship, women had ruled, but that when the spirit conquered man took over.

p.g. 370 The Craze for Virgins Enthusiasts had always claimed that there was a special pleasure in deflowering a virgin, because of the emotional thrill, a blend of aggression, possessiveness and mild sadism. A few modern historians, following the erratic Dr. Duhren, consider defloration of virgins as a particularly English vice, but history proves otherwise. At some periods, it has even been institutionalized, most commonly in the form of droit de seigneur, which granted the king or feudal landlord the right to bed a new bride before her husband did. This is recorded as far back as Sumerian times.

p.g.371 Where a man did not exercise the right the gods or their representatives often did. In Rome, before a marriage was consummated, the bride lowered herself on to a sculptured phallic symbol representing one of the lesser gods of fertility, while in Cambodia a thousand years later it was customary for Buddhist priests to deflower each girl before her marriage.

p.g. 372 Most of the girls, said Stead. Were too young to understand what was happening to them, and the trade was, of course, considerable, since a virgin’s first encounter with a customer left her a virgin no longer. Some brothels specializing in virgins found them at the great railroad termini where trains from the country came in; others found London’s parks a more profitable hunting ground. It was not too difficult to persuade nursemaids or shop girls to sacrifice their virginity in exchange for a golden guinea, although they sometimes began to regret it when the moment of truth approached. Because of this virgin brothels were often set apart from other houses and well insulated for sound. Some brothels had their own doctors to supply the certificates of virginity that customers habitually asked for. And not only the certificates, but very often the virginity itself. Most virgins have a tab of membrane, the hymen or “maidenhead,” that partly obstructs the entrance to the vagina. This membrane, when the vagina is fully penetrated for the first time, if often torn or stretched, and depending on its diameter and thickness (which varies from woman to woman) begins to bleed, sometimes copiously, sometimes scarcely at all. Bleeding is, in fact, a largely unreliable guide to virginity, but tight entry and clear traces of blood have always signified maidenhood to the man, and it has always been in the interests of women to know how to stimulate them. Such knowledge was age-old, though it seems to have faded for a time in early medieval Europe before it was revived by the distinguished doctors Avicenna and Albertus Magnus, whose lists of “the signs of virginity and/or its corruption” turned out (quite unintentionally) to be an invaluable guide for the barbers, bathhouse keepers, and retired prostitutes who supplemented their earnings from the proceeds of virginity restoration. To produce convincing bleeding, all that was needed was to insert in the vagina a scrap of sponge soaked in blood that was released by pressure during intercourse; a small fish bladder filled with blood produced a more dramatic effect but was probably rather more difficult to handle when it was being placed in position. Either method, however, was infinitely superior to two of the other ideas sometimes suggested - bloodsucking leeches and fragments of broken glass. Contracting the vaginal opening was less easy. Stitchery might sometimes have to be resorted to, but more often a powerful astringent was used; the steam from vinegar, myrrh water, and an infusion of acorns or sloes were the chief recommendations. In some brothels, professional virgins were patched up several times a week, ad not only in London, but in Paris, Berlin, New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans, where some houses at the turn of the century offered defloration as part of the floor show.

p.g.382 The English Vice Masochism was first defined at the end of the 19th century by the Austrian police doctor and psychiatrist, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, whose Masochism was first defined at the end of the 19th century by the Austrian police doctor and psychiatrist, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, whose Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), a study of pathological sexual behavior in which more lurid details had been carefully translated into Latin, soon became the bible of all pornographers who could afford a good Latin dictionary. ….

The most famous of the Sacher-Masoch’s stories was Venus in Furs, which established once and for all the essential weapons in the masochistic armory.

p.g.383 homme fatal

p.g.385 (the portmanteau word for pleasure inseparable from pain, inflicted or received, is angolagnia.)

p.g. 387 Gustave Flaubert summed up all the obscure, uneasy sexual contradictions of the 19th century when he said, “A man has missed something if he has never woken up in an anonymous bed besides a face he will never see again, and if he has ever left a brothel at dawn feeling like jumping off a bridge into the river out of sheer physical disgust with life.”

14. The Great Debate

p.g. 389 As an argument against woman suffrage, this would have been perfectly tenable even in modern terms if Miss Beecher had not promptly invalidated it by pointing out that women could influence public affairs very satisfactorily without recourse to the ballot box, by the simple expedient of influencing the opinions and outlook of those who did have the vote- their husbands and sons. What she smugly advocated, in effect, was the exercise of power without responsibility, but no one seems to have criticized her for wanting to have it both ways. This was because Victorian men had maneuvered themselves into the position of believing (or something to believe) that women were, by nature, morally superior to men, and in duty bound to exercise an elevating inflence over them.

p.g. 398-399 They had also called for temperance. American women were much more passionately involved in the temperance movement than their contemporaries in Europe, and although many supported it primarily in response to the dictates of the Church, others had a more personal interests. Americans had always put away an impressive quantity of beer and spirits, from home-brewed ale to whiskey, rum, and essence f lockjaw (otherwise known as applejack). Just before the War of Independence it was estimated that the colonists were downing close to four gallons of rum per head per year. As times passed, less and less liquor was brewed at home and more and more had to be paid for, with distressing financial effects. But an even stronger argument against drinking, in women’s view, was that it frequently acted on men as a sexual stimulant, and this to women who had been brought up to think of sex as, at the best a submission, and at worst a degradation, was intolerable. The intercourse forced on them by drunken husbands was rendered no more acceptable by the knowledge that, if the men had not spent all their money on liquor, they would have gone to prostitutes instead.

p.g.400 The woman suffrage movement alienated other potential supporters- the liberal-minded- by taking up a position on immigration. It had been clear since the 1870s that the strongest opponents of woman suffrage, apart from the vested political and liquor interests (and those “religious bigots” who believed that if women were allowed to vote “St. Paul would feel badly about it”) were first-generation immigrants still saturated with European-Catholic ideas about woman’s role. In the early years of the 20th century, America’s great immigration crisis was in flood, and this provoked a resurgence of the same kind of culture-protectiveness that had marked the nation’s earlier history, with Italians, Russians, Poles, Hungarians, Greeks, and “Asiatics” added to the roster of outsiders. The white, American-born, middle-class women who formed the backbone of the suffrage movement became increasingly WASPish. In 1904, for example, Ida Husted Harper, referring slightly to the political contribution made during the previous 35 years by “the majority of negroes, Indians and immigrants who have been enfranchised during that time,” asked her readers to judge “whether women as a body could not bring something to offset these last acquisitions. Those who fear the foreign vote and the colored vote should remember that there are more native-born women in the United States than foreign-born men and women; more white women than colored men and women.” It was the white woman’s vote that would insure a “pure America.” The suffragists won in the end, partly because by 1915 they had gained powerful support from trade unionists and social reformers, but more, perhaps, because the particular aspects of morality which they chose to stress suddenly found a large and willing audience during the course of World War I when the austerities of prohibition and the patriotic logic of immigration restriction ceased (temporarily) to appear reactionary and became, instead, symbols of hundred-per-cent clean-cut Americanism. By a malicious twist of fate, it was not until after the imposition of immigration restrictions (in 1917) and the ratification of prohibition (1919) that the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified and woman suffrage became part of the American Constitution. It was August 1920, 72 years since the demand had first been made at Senate Falls.

p.g.402The Years Between It took almost 40 years for women in Britain and America to realize hat it was only a symbol. Another revolution was needed, and it was not to occur until the 1960s. … Yet the social changes were striking, particularly for women. Though, as G.K. Chesterton drily remarked, “Twenty million young women rose to their feet with the cry, ‘We will not be dictated to,’ and promptly became stenographers,” the new prospect of independence that had opened up in front of the twenties generation included the prospect of real independence- if they wanted it. No one, however, encouraged them to want it. All the new toys and diversions of the postwar era were showered upon them. Cosmetics, lightweight clothes, cheap jewelry, phonograph records, holidays by the sea, dance halls, restaurants, coffee shops, tea rooms, and above all the cinema, conspired to absorb the brief spending power of those whose working lives were expected to last only for the few years between school and marriage. Men had possessed women, and women had been possessed by men, for more than 5,000 years, and it was to take more than a vote and a salary to break the marriage habit. It was Hollywood, from the days of its first widespread popularity in the 1920s until television undermined its influence in the 1950s, that most consistently, conscientiously, and stylishly sustained the image of marriage as woman’s natural goal, the romantic culmination of her life. Many package deals have been sold to the public, before and since, but never as effectively as Hollywood sold the package deal of glamour, romance, and marriage. Long after “the modern woman” had jettisoned the ideas and habits of her Victorain grandmother, Hollywood was still conditioning her to the belief that woman’s place and destiny were in the home. Not because she had, as In the past, no option, but because she was willingly tied there by the magical power of love. Hollywood’s view of love was by no means new; there was a literary thread going as far back as the days of the troubadours, if not much further but where literature- even in the cloying romantic novels of the 19th century- had recognized it as a rare chemical reaction between favored individuals, Hollywood presented it as he birthright of all nice people, and the white wedding as a guarantee of its lifelong validity. p.g.404 It was Hollywood that supplied the marching songs, provided the images of the girl next door, assured every cinemagoer that when it was all over things would be just as they had been before- only better.

…

According to the Kinsey reports of 1948 and 1953, 70 percent of men had visited prostitutes, and 40 percent of men and 19 percent of women had had at least one homosexual contact in their lives. One farmhand in six had experimented with zoophilia. Although these figures (if true) may well have represented an improvement on earlier centuries, they appeared nothing less than shocking to a generation conditioned to the Hollywood ideal of love.

p.g.405 What the popularity of psychoanalysis did was encourage the discontented to explore their own internal problems, instead of seeking to arrive at some domestic modus vivendi. Deeper knowledge of self did not contribute much to a more tolerant understanding of others. …

In America in 1965, there was one divorce to every four marriages. By 1977, there was one to every two.

p.g.406 Birth Control Although Church and state had always taken account of the question of birth limitation, it became a major public issue only in the 19th century. For this, “the best-abused man the age,” the economist Thomas Robert Malthus, was directly if unintentionally responsible. In 1798, he published an Essay on the Principle of Population that was designed to refute the optimistic belief of Rousseau and, more particularly, William Godwin (widower of Mary Wollstonecraft, the “first modern feminist”), that an increasing population and social ownership of land were formula for Utopia. Malthus claimed that population would always outstrip the available resources, and could see no way of changing this prospect, only of controlling its development by means of a system of checks and balances that would necessarily operate against the poor, the numerical majority.

p.g.411 As historians of costume have pointed out, it can hardly be regarded as coincidence that respectable women first began in the 1880s to wear attractive nightdresses instead of the “markedly unappealing” ones of former times. Freed from at least some of the fears that had helped to contaminate sex for them, they began to compete with prostitutes for their husbands’ continuing attentions. The condom had never been precisely cheap to buy or easy to make . It did not fit very well, and had to be put on carefully and with both hands. But the discovery of vulcanization in led to the manufacture of a crepe rubber type that was improvement in all ways, and by the 1870s it was being used with increasing frequency. An air of impregnable respectability was lent to it and Mr. Gladstone. Fifty years later, liquid latex and automation led to a considerable drop in price; there are no statistics for British or German manufacturers, but in America in the mid-1930s sales approached 317 million a year.

p.g. 415 Ironically, the two women whose names became famous in the Western world for their pioneer work in spreading knowledge of birth control, who became admired as radicals intent on giving women, at last, control over their own destinies, were both committed elitists. “More children from the fit,” wrote the American Margaret Sanger in 1919, “less from the unfit- that is the chief issue of birth control.” And Marie Stopes, in England, given the opportunity, would have adopted Hitlerian methods for sterilization of those who failed to match up to the required mental and physical standards.

p.g.420 It seems, nevertheless, that it is possible to overdo population control. In 1990, a discouraged member of the Japan Family Planning Association speculated that a quarter of the condoms used in the entire world were used in Japan (the Pill was not available). Whatever the reason, the birth rate in Japan has been falling so rapidly that, also in 1990, one scholar caused national consternation by predicting that if something were not done change things the population would be reduced to precisely forty by the year AD 3000.

p.g.422 It is, however, a curious commentary on the whole history of the feminist movement that the two countries in which it was most visible and audible should by 1989- according to those whose task it is to monitor such things- have a world ranking of only 3rd (USA) and 16th (Britain) for actual achievement in the field of women’s equality. Part of the answer may be that, although sound and fury can be politically necessary in order to get things going, he beneficiaries are more often those whose lawmakers hear the message more coolly and rationally- and from a safe distance.

Epilogue

p.g. 423 But it is worth noting that periods of excessive emphasis on sex very often coincide with spells of widespread social purposelessness. It was in the “golden ages” of most civilizations- imperial Rome, Gupta India, T’ang China, Louis XV’s France- when there appeared to be no more worlds to conquer, that sex became of disproportionate importance; a case not of moral turpitude but occupational imbalance. Most people are aware that sex is not everything- but they sometimes act as if it is. Such appeared to be the case in the heyday of the Women’s Lib movement, and it was not long before heterosexual man (and America man in particular) began to lose his nerve. Relling under the combined assault of pollsters, sexologists, and the new and updated edition of the Victorian femme fatale, he began to go into retreat. Research as early as the beginning of the 1970s suggested that he was having intercourse less often, masturbating more often, and developing such a taste for pornography that it was soon to reach plague proportions. Some of it amounted to no more than erotic titillation, but the hardcore movies were designed- cheaply and nastily- to pander to his supposed resentment over his own inadequacy vis-avis the popular image of the liberated woman.

p.g. 425 As Cornell political sociologist Andrew Hacker remarked in 1970, “The trouble [is] … that the institution we call marriage can’t hold two full human beings- it was only designed for one and a half.”

p.g.426 AIDS AIDS appeared, as syphilis had done in the 1940s, like a thunderbolt out of a clear blue sky- sudden, mysterious, and lethal- and despite 500 years of scientific progress doctors in the 1980s found themselves as helpless before the new virus as their predecessors had been before the old.

… What very soon became apparent was that, despite the Gay Plague tag, the virus had no interest in the sexual orientation of its host, only in gaining access to his or her bloodstream.

p.g.427 Risk Factors All the medical profession can do at present is prolong the patient’s life for a year or two (sometimes more) with drugs such as AZT, or treat the specific illness that afflict him- notably the Pneumocystis Carinii pneumonia which is responsible for 70 percent of AIDS- related deaths. Ironically, no one actually dies of AIDS. What its victims die of is their inability to resist infections that other people survive. And in that, at least, they are by no means a historical “first.” In the sixteenth century, the people of Mexico and Peru died in millions because their immune systems were unable to contend with the infectious diseases that arrived with the Conquistadors (see p.308).

p.g. 432 The truth is that there has never been very close match between human instincts and Judaeo-christian sexual morality, and AIDS is as unlikely as syphilis to be defeated by an ideal of human perfectibility alone. It would seem that, until science comes up with a cure, a blunt and unequivocal appeal to people’s sense f self-preservation is likely to be a better bet.