Kitabı oku: «Put What Where?: Over 2,000 Years of Bizarre Sex Advice»

John Naish
Put What Where?
Over 2000 years of bizarre
sex advice

DEDICATION

Happiness is the true test. Never mind what books – including this one – say you should do. If you are happy, and your partner is too, leave well enough alone.

Eustace Chesser, Love Without Fear (1940)

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Preface

1 Introduction

2 Mankind’s First Manuals

3 Classical Gaffes

4 No Sex Please, We’re Medieval English

5 Bali High

6 Renaissance Renegades

7 Masturbation Mania

8 Carlile, the Contraceptive Convict

9 Drysdale’s Revolutionary Dream

10 Manual Martyrs

11 Kama Sutra Chameleon

12 Mr Sex in Sandals

13 American Duty

14 Sexual Pioneers

15 Edwardian Enjoyment

16 The World’s Dullest Sex Book

17 Ellis, the Impotent Icon

18 Scouting for Boys: Uncut

19 Trouble Down Under

20 Cult of the Virgin Marie

21 Van de Velde Record?

22 Buy Me and Stop One

23 Target for Tonight

24 Frigid Fifties

25 Saucy Sixties

26 Comfort and Joy

27 Sex as Lifestyle

Select Bibliography

Index

Also by the Author

Copyright

About The Publisher

PREFACE

This book is both a history of sex advice and a treasury of bizarre suggestions from throughout the ages. It is organized like a club sandwich. The historical chapters cover this strange world in chronological order, from 200 BC to the 1970s, and are interlayered with the cream of humankind’s oddest sex-advice quotes. These are grouped by topic and take you, stage-by-stage, through the whole gamut of love-making, from finding a partner through to sex, fetishes, afterplay and unfaithfulness. If you learn nothing else, please remember: never bite your partner’s eyeballs.

One
INTRODUCTION

Mating. Reproduction. The survival of the species. How much more crucial does it get?

You’d think homo sapiens would have sorted out that one pretty sharpish. But no. Since the start of civilization, human sex has been absurdly complicated by a steady dripfeed of self-appointed experts: moralists, pundits, visionaries, ju-ju men, zealots and learned academics – all claiming to know the magical secrets of lovemaking. And they were all prepared to sell their wisdom to you at a very reasonable price. Just as every generation likes to think it invented sexual intercourse, we also like to think we invented sex advice, or at least built it on a very limited number of predecessors: the Kama Sutra, maybe Marie Stopes’ 1918 Married Love and the 1970s The Joy of Sex. But in fact today’s maelstrom of lovemaking manuals, videos and DVDs has a far richer and more twisted heritage than that. The genre is way older than the novel, and takes us right back to an ancient Chinese tomb-hoard of books first written in 300 BC.

Every era has had its Dr Ruths dictating to us the correct way, the right place, the essential time, the appropriate shape, the perfect partner and, of course, the ultimate naughtiness. And what a proud parade: they feature, to mention but a few, Roman poets, medieval woman-haters, Victorian adventurers, astral travellers, gay sandal-makers, dope peddlers, racial-purity fanatics, wholewheat snack-makers, an impotent love guru, a divorced virgin and a toga-wearing erectophobe. If these self-appointed sexperts share one common characteristic, it’s a special strain of eccentricity. Along with the throng of plain charlatans came the freaks, geeks, dreamers, anarchists, rebels and lost souls who were so out of kilter with society that they felt driven to preach about a legally perilous subject in a manner almost guaranteed to offend those in authority, scandalize friends and families, and frequently land them behind bars.

One of their great motives was, as usual, power – the power to tell people what they should and should not do in their most private moments. But they were also driven by a streak of evangelism, the messianic eye-gleam of people convinced that they had found the sexual solution to life’s miseries. In many ways, the old advice books were not actually about sex itself, but alchemy: promising to reveal secret formulae for the perfect existence, the greatest happiness, and to open up a conduit to divine wisdom. Some even claimed that secret bouts of ritualistic congress could grant you magical powers and immortality.

Despite (or because of) this legion of advisors, sensible sex advice was a long time coming. It was only very recently that we finally learnt the precise mechanics of reproduction. This information gap didn’t stop the experts, though. They simply made it all up, using as their guide a hodge-podge of previous books, current fashion, a bit of fieldwork and their own deep personal prejudices. But if old sex books can’t help us much with the art and science of lovemaking, they do open for us a new window on to history’s lurid mosaic of obsession, fear, lust, hatred, fantasy and insanity. Welcome to the human condition.

So much for the writers, but what about us, the readers? Why do we spend precious money and time on sex manuals? Bonobo monkeys are our closest primate cousins, and although you wouldn’t catch a bonobo monkey with his nose stuck in a mating manual, they enjoy a sexual repertoire – multi-positions, group sex, lesbianism, etc. – that is at least as complex, acrobatic and experimental as most human couples ever sample. True, bonobos have sex in public, which humans mostly don’t – so their young get an education that consists of ‘watch it, learn it and try it’. Then again, the human imagination, and the ample amount of time it dedicates to sexual fantasy, can generally be trusted to work out all the physical permutations on its own. But there is something else about the private nature of human sex: it plants nagging questions in people’s heads – am I normal; am I doing it in a way that is correct, fun, efficient and legal; and, of course, can I do it better?

Education aside, one can’t ignore the titillation factor associated with anything to do with sex, particularly in decades past when such information was heavily censored and even the most straightforward information could be considered hot stuff – although much of it came across as a mix between an engineering treatise, a lengthy sermon and a wholefood cookbook. That sort of illicit thrill scores bulls-eye on the brain’s reward centre – which responds by sending the message, ‘That was good, let’s do it again, it might be better next time’. Thus, sex manuals throughout history have elbowed hot cakes into second place on the sales charts. The books have frequently used the same sales lure – there’s an amazing secret regime revealed inside that will truly change your life. Today the same trick is used to sell diet, exercise and psychological self-help books. The song remains the same: our modern era is remarkable only in the sheer, overwhelming volume of sex advice being churned out and avidly consumed. One in four British women says they own a sex manual, according to a survey by the publishers Dorling Kindersley in 2003. Writers and publishers are putting out new sex books every month. Everyone is at it, from former porn stars to the car-workshop manual maker Haynes. Then there are DVDs, videos, websites and mass advertising – the Sunday Telegraph carries adverts for a ‘clitoral stimulator’ and none of its readers’ horses bolt.

We’ve become saturated with sex advice. That should, in theory, make for bookshelves crowded with surprising, amazing and revelatory material. In reality, though, it doesn’t. Now that medicine has sorted out the science and most of us share a liberal sense of morality, the texts all tend to say rather the same thing, albeit in a variety of permutations. Ho hum. That’s why, if you still fancy a spot of true variety and spice between the covers of a sex manual, there’s only one place to go – back in time, to where all the strange folk and their peculiar practices lie quietly waiting for you. Just one word of warning, though: please don’t try any of it at home.

Caution! Before You Start Sex, Remember...

Tight buns and corsets cause nymphomania

Dr John Cowan, The Science of a New Life (1888)

The constricting of the waist and abdomen by corsets, girdles and waistbands prevents the return of venous blood to the heart, and the consequent overloading of the sexual organs causes the unnatural excitement of the sexual system.

The majority of women, adoring followers of the goddess Fashion, wear their hair in a large, heavy knot on the back part of the head, and when their own is insufficient to make a roll enough, false hair is added. This great pressure on the small brain produces great heat in the part and causes an unusual flow of the blood to the area of amativeness and, if persisted in, a chronic inflammation of the sexual organ, and a chronic desire for its sexual exercise ... It is almost impossible that she should lead other than a life of sexual excess.

Sexual jealousy can ruin your skin

Fang Nei Chi (Records of the Bedchamber), Sui Dynasty (AD 590–618)

A woman should not allow herself to become jealous or sad if she sees her man copulate with another woman, for then her yin essence will become overexcited. She will be afflicted by pains while sitting and standing, and the vaginal emissions will flow spontaneously. These are ills that will cause a woman to wither and age before her time. Therefore she should guard against this.

Never share a bedroom

Marie Stopes, Married Love (1918)

It may enchant a man once – perhaps even twice – to watch his goddess screw her hair up into a tight and unbecoming knot and soap her ears. But it is inherently too unlovely a proceeding to retain indefinite enchantment ... So far as is possible ensure that you allow your husband to come upon you only when there is delight in the meeting. Whenever the finances allow, the husband and wife should have separate bedrooms, failing that they should have a curtain which can at will be drawn so as to divide the room they share. No soul can grow to its full nature without its spells of solitude. A woman’s body and soul should be essentially her own, and that can only be so if she has an inviolable retreat.

Ejaculating may repel your partner

Theodoor Hendrik Van de Velde, Ideal Marriage, Its Physiology and Technique (1928)

After mental and emotional excitement the smell of the semen is more acrid, after muscular exertion, more aromatic and, after several repeated acts of coitus in rapid succession it becomes fainter, but stale and unpleasant.

I know of one highly talented and delicately sensitive woman who abruptly terminated a liaison on finding, at the first act of sexual intercourse, that the special seminal odour of the man was intolerably unpleasant to her ... It may be said in general that the odour of semen is exciting and stimulating to women and unpleasant, even nauseating to men. For a woman, the odour of the beloved man’s semen is delightful and excites her anew; but that of an unloved mate fills her with loathing.

Never make love with goblins

Fang Nei Chi (Records of the Bedchamber), Sui Dynasty (AD 590–618)

If a person has an unbalanced sex life, his sexual desire will increase. Devils and goblins will take advantage of this condition. They assume human shape and have sexual intercourse with such a person. They are much more skilled in this art than human beings, so much so that their victim becomes completely enamoured of the ghostly lover. Those people will keep the relation secret and will not speak about its delights. In the end they succumb alone, without anyone being the wiser.

The after-effects of copulation with an incubus can be cured by the following method: the man should copulate all day and night without ejaculating, then after seven days the disease will be cured. When his body is so fatigued that he cannot continue the act, the man should let his penis rest in the woman’s vagina and he will benefit all the same. If this disease is not treated as indicated here, the victim will die in a few years.

If one wishes a proof of the existence of incubi, one has but to repair alone to a marsh place far away in the mountains, in spring or autumn. One should stay there in a condition of complete tranquillity, staring into space and concentrating one’s thoughts on sexual intercourse. After three days and three nights, the body will suddenly become alternately cold and hot, the heart will be troubled and the vision blurred.

Then, a man engaging in this experiment will meet a woman, and a woman a man. During sexual intercourse with such an incubus one will experience a pleasure that is greater than ever felt while copulating with an ordinary human being. But at the same time one will become subject to this disease which is difficult to cure.

Evil women can contain iron

Albertus Magnus, De Secretis Mulierum (The Secrets of Women) (c. 1478)

O my companions you should be aware that although certain women do not know the secret cause of what I shall describe, many women are familiar with the effect, and many evils result from this. For when men have sexual intercourse with these women it sometimes happens that they suffer a large wound and a serious infection of the penis because of iron that has been placed in the vagina, for some women or harlots are instructed in this and other ill deeds.

Post-climax calamities

Havelock Ellis, Psychology of Sex: a manual for students (1933)

So profound is the organic convulsion involved by the process of detumescence that serious effects have sometimes followed coitus. Especially in men, not only death itself, but numerous disorders and accidents have been known to follow immediately after coitus, these results being mainly due to the vascular and muscular excitement involved by the process of detumescence.

Fainting, vomiting, involuntary urination and defecation have been noted as occurring in young men after first coitus. Epilepsy has been not infrequently recorded. Lesions of various organs, even rupture of the spleen, have sometimes taken place.

In men of mature age the arteries have at times been unable to resist the high blood pressure and cerebral haemorrhage with paralysis has occurred. In elderly men the excitement of intercourse with young wives or with prostitutes has sometimes caused death. Such results are, however, exceptional. They tend to occur in persons who are abnormally sensitive or who have imprudently transgressed the obvious rules of sexual hygiene.

Sex during the monthlies causes ...

The Treasury of Natural Secrets (anon., Italy, 16th century)

Physical weakness

Ten years’ premature ageing

Simple-mindedness

Loss of libido

Aches and pains in stomach, feet, eyes, brain, head

Ringing in ears

High fevers

Tremors

Weak nerves

Poor eyesight

Baldness

Backaches

Kidney and bladder pains

Bad breath

Foul body odour

Just put the Hoover down

Dr Alex Comfort, The Joy of Sex (1972)

Never fool around sexually with a vacuum cleaner.

Two
MANKIND’S FIRST MANUALS

In archaeology, as in life, if you want to find sex books, look in the son’s room.

The first lovemaking guides in human history may well be in the form of 4,000-year-old cave paintings found in countries such as France, Peru and Japan, showing women or couples in various positions, naked or wearing strange headgear. But without any words to accompany the pictures, we simply don’t know: they could have been educational, religious or ceremonial, or simply prototypes of readers’ wives. The earliest actual written sex books we have were only discovered in 1973. They date from around 2,400 years ago and were hidden in a Chinese family tomb, in the section where the son was interred. The books were greatest-hits compilations of Chinese wisdom that had already been around for a century. The questions they raised have proved extremely persistent – if you read a modern sex manual, glossy magazine or newspaper advice column, they will still be there.

If the advice these ancient books contain were written in the form of modern magazine coverlines, it would read:

FOUR SEASONS OF SEX:

AND WHY AUTUMN IS HOT, HOT, HOT

Your 100 thrusts to happiness

Wild new positions: tiger roving, gibbon

grabbing ... and fish gobbling

Sexplanation: read your partner’s writhing

From your wrists to your peaks – the ultimate

in-the-mood massage

Aphrodisiacs to keep you up all night!

And

Exclusive: your love route to immortality

The manuscripts were among a treasure-house of ancient books discovered in Mawangdui Tomb Three, in the city of Changsha in the Hunan province of China. The tomb was a horseshoe-shaped mound of earth about 30ft high and 90ft in diameter that contained the bodies and possessions of the Hou Family. It took two years, from 1972 to 1974, to excavate the 2,100-year-old Han-period tombs, which contained more than 3,000 cultural relics and a complete female corpse. In among 28 silk books were seven medical manuscripts, which together constitute mankind’s first Joy of Sex.

The tomb’s occupants, Dai Marquis Licang, his wife and son, were part of the local political elite. Licang was the King of Changsha’s prime minister for seven years from 193 BC. Each body lay in its own tomb, inside a set of coffins stacked like Russian dolls, one inside another. The Number Three Tomb-the book room – is now restored to its original state. The son was called Li, and his skeleton indicates that he was about 30 when he died in 168 BC, though most of the medical manuscripts seem to have been copied in 200 BC. References in them indicate they are from earlier texts that must have circulated around 300 BC.

Li was an avid book collector whose hobby covered several specialist fields, including medicine. He would have been a whizz on Mastermind. We can only guess why his extensive library was buried alongside him: perhaps it was thought to have magical powers, or maybe the books were simply there to show his new pals in the afterlife what a wise and wealthy guy he’d been. The sex books were written on silk or on strips of wood or bamboo, and were found on top of a pile of silk manuscripts stored in the side compartment of a lacquer box.

Two of the texts focus on the bizarre mystical practice of ‘sexual cultivation’, which promises that if a man spends years having intercourse with hundreds of women (preferably virgins) without ejaculating, he will have received so much yin energy from female orgasms, and conserved so much of his male yang energy by not orgasming, that he will become immortal (either that, or his testes would explode). The idea was attributed to Ancestor Peng, who is said to have died at the age of 300, some time around 4 BC and 3 BC, thanks to his strict ‘way of hygiene’ which covered personal cleanliness, diet and sex. Ejaculating frequently, the books warn, wears a man out, because semen is full of the life-force, chi.

A man could preserve his penis chi either by not climaxing, or by climaxing but preventing ejaculation. Medical experts suggest this can be done by applying hand pressure to a point between the scrotum and the anus, which blocks the urethra. Peng’s theory was that the semen would be diverted up the spine into the brain. In fact, if you block your urethral tube behind your scrotum, the sperm is squirted into your bladder and gets urinated out. This whole idea might seem insane, but it has resurfaced in different forms for centuries. It reappeared in Chinese books printed in 1066, 1307 and 1544, and was later published in Japan. It also crops up in different cultures around the globe at different times. It even became popular, as we will see, in nineteenth-century America.

The Mawangdui guides do not only cover non-ejaculation. There is an entire regime dictating when to have sex: in spring you can do it from evening until after midnight; in summer from evening until midnight; in winter from evening until around 11pm; and in autumn, hooray, whenever you like – though the text then says that men should never try having intercourse in the morning.

The books also tell you in confusing and often tedious detail the precise operation of lovemaking, with a guide to foreplay using slow, sexual massage, the ‘ideal 100-thrusts’, and then the ‘ten refinements’ – which basically involve going up, down and from side to side, and changing your speed and depth – information that must surely have been old hat even 300 years before the birth of Christ. And with around 21 centuries to go before the invention of Viagra, the manuscripts offer their own aphrodisiac ideas, involving such exotic stimulant ingredients as swarming beetle larvae, wasps and dried snails.

The ancient Chinese also brought us the first sex-advice Q&As. The format so beloved of Cosmopolitan and co was created by books in which the legendary Yellow Emperor asked ‘your common questions’ of a team of expert female advisors with names such as the Plain Girl and the Mystery Girl, as well as (of course) a qualified doctor. The Yellow Emperor texts were frequently illustrated with pictures of sexual positions, and given to brides as part of their trousseau.

Despite its general uselessness, much of this advice remained in circulation in one form or another in China until the sixteenth century, when it was suppressed by the new regime of Confucianist emperors. They found all this sex stuff generally unspeakable and censored it so efficiently that subsequent Chinese writers never knew that it had even existed.

When to Have Sex

Never after a meal

Perfumed Garden of Sheik Nefzaoui (16th century), translated into English by Sir Richard F. Burton

If you wish for sex, you should not have your stomach loaded with food and drink. If your stomach is full, only harm can come of it to both of you; you will have symptoms of apoplexy and gout, and the least evil that will be the consequence of it will be the inability of passing your urine, or weakness of sight.

And not before lunch

Ancestor Peng, in the introduction to Yinshu (The Pulling Book), c. 186 BC

Morning is not the recommended time for men to practise sex.

Daytime – all day

R.T. Trail, Sexual Physiology: a scientific and popular exposition of the fundamental problems in sociology (1867)

If children are to be begotten ... the sexual embrace should be had in the light of day. It is only then that the magnetic forces and the nervous system are in their highest condition of functional activity and the body, refreshed by sleep, is in its most vigorous condition. But it should not be the hurried act of the early morning, like a hasty meal before a day’s work ... Surely, if sexual intercourse is worth doing at all, it is worth doing well And it would not exalt its importance one iota above its real merits if certain days were set apart, consecrated, to the conjugal embrace. It might be one day in seven, or one day in twenty, or more or less.

Seasonal sex

Giovanni Marinello, Medicine Pertinent to the Infirmities of Women (Italy, 1563)

Least harmful: spring and winter

Use sparingly: summer

Use even more sparingly: autumn

Spring for men, autumn for women

Nicholas Venette, The Mysteries of Conjugal Love Reveald (1703)

Men are most apt for the company of women in winter and in spring; women most desirous of commerce with man in summer and autumn; and this proceeds from the contrary complexion, in respect both to the times and persons, which complexion is nothing else than the different mixtures of warmth with cold, and moisture with dryness ...

In my opinion, copulation is more seasonable in spring and winter; it may be used in the time of autumn, but in the heads of summer it should be carefully avoided, when the ordinary discharges of the body are so great...

We ought to embrace when our belly is moderately filled, for at such a junction we feel a strange desire to be meddling.

Cheek the zodiac, and never after war ...

Ananga Ranga of Kalyanamalla (Stage of the Love God), by the Indian poet Kalyan Mall (16th century)

Hot weather

Cold weather

Any time, in fact that’s not springtime or the rains

Daytime – unless it’s your woman’s favourite time

When ill with fever

When tired from travel

When observing a religious rite

At the new moon

When the sun or a planet passes from one side of the zodiac to another

In the evening

When tired from warfare

Geddinthere! (Times she might be in the mood)

Koka Shastra (The Scripture of Koka), by the Indian poet Kokkoka (12th century)

When tired from travel

Convalescing from a fever

Weary from dancing

The sixth month of pregnancy

A month after giving birth

Etiquette: when to introduce a new mistress to your wives

Chinese householder’s notebook (c. 16th century)

Recently I heard about a certain official who took unto him a new concubine. He locked himself in with her behind double doors and did not appear for three days. All his wives and concubines were highly incensed at this behaviour. This is indeed the wrong way.

The right method is for the man to control his desire and, for the time being not approaching the newcomer, concentrate his attention on the others. Every time he has sexual intercourse with his other women, he should make the newcomer stand at attention by the side of the ivory couch. Then, after four or five nights of this, he may for the first time copulate with the newcomer, but only with his principal wife and the other concubines present. This is the fundamental principle of harmony and happiness in one’s women’s quarters.

Three
CLASSICAL GAFFES

Owning a sex manual was not something you would shout about in ancient Greece: it was considered a sin against moderation, the primary virtue of the ancient world, and linked by critics to other faux pas such as gluttony, drunkenness and using prostitutes.

Greek writers of sex manuals were treated like the tabloid journalists of the day and labelled with the snappy title of anaiskhuntographo – ‘writers of shameless things’.

This did not deter aspiring sex advisors from putting pen to papyrus, though, and writing love guides became a feminine speciality. An AD 10 lexicon claims that the first Greek to have published a sex manual was Astyanassa, whose official job title was Helen of Troy’s ‘body servant’. She is credited with being both the first person to discover all the workable positions for intercourse and the first to write them down. She was followed by Elephantis and Philaenis. Elephantis, the prostitute-poetess, is supposed to have detailed nine different postures. The Emperor Tiberius is said to have been an avid reader, but tantalizingly, although these postures are often mentioned in classical texts, they remain lost somewhere beneath the mattress of time.

The other leading writer, Philaenis, is also believed to have been a woman (though it might possibly have been a man pretending, in order to boost sales). Only a few fragments from a papyrus of hers, from 2 BC, survive. In her preamble, she claims to have written it all from her own experience, as an objective and scientific guide. On flattery, she recommends, ‘Tell an older woman that she looks young. Tell an ugly woman that she looks “fascinating”. Pick the woman’s worst feature and then make it appear desirable.’ Other writers who appear to have flourished at the time include Paxamus, a general hack who wrote the Dodecatechnon, a book of twelve erotic postures – which is once again sadly lost.

We have more luck with the Romans, particularly the celebrated writer Lucretius, who at around 50 BC seems to have stumbled on the ‘Love Hurts’ idea so beloved of pop songs. The fourth section of his On the Nature of the Universe, dedicated to sex and sensation, warns readers that they must dodge Cupid’s darts: ‘The wounded normally fall in the direction of their wound: the blood spurts out towards the source of the blow. So, when a man is pierced by the shafts of Venus, whether they are launched by a lad with womanish limbs or a woman radiating love from her whole body, he strives towards the source of the wound and craves to ejaculate the fluid drawn from out of his body into that body. His speechless yearning foretells his pleasure.’ Messy.

Lucretius recommends that you try your best to avoid all this. His solution is to evade true love by embarking on a promiscuous sex spree: ‘If you find yourself thus passionately enamoured with someone, you should keep well away from images that remind you of them. Thrust from you anything that might feed your passion, and turn your mind elsewhere. Ejaculate the build-up of seed promiscuously and do not hold on to it – by clinging to it you assure yourself the certainty of heartsickness and pain ... Do not think that by avoiding romantic love you are missing the delights of sex. No, you are reaping the sort of profits that carry with them no penalty.’

The Roman period also brought us the first example of a sex-manual martyr. Poor old Ovid (aka Publius Ovidius Naso) is only the first of a long line of authors whose sullied reputations, trashed careers and broken lives litter the pages of this book. He got himself banished to a far fringe of empire for writing a bawdy guide to sexual postures, theirs amatoria (The Art of Love), which is a lads’-mag treasury of tips on grooming, sex and seducing your friends’ wives.

Ovid was born in 43 BC in Sulmo – modern-day Sulmona in central Italy – and studied in Athens before moving to Rome where he dutifully worked his way up to a decent civil service job. He then decided on a radical career move into the world of art and became a full-time poet. The gamble paid off handsomely and his writing and wit soon won him imperial fame and fortune. But at the age of 40 he made a rather less popular move, by treating his Roman readers to a pornographic poem. The Ars amatoria begins innocently enough: ‘If anyone among this people know not the art of loving let him read my poem and having read be skilled in love. By skill, swift ships are sailed and rowed, by skill nimble chariots are driven: by skill must love be guided.’ But its long closing passage was particularly risqué, suggesting sex-position tips for women that would show off their best parts (viz, if you’ve long legs, put them on your partner’s shoulders; if you’re saggy from childbirth, let him take you from behind; if you’re short, go on top, and so on).

The verses mortally offended the somewhat strait-laced Emperor Augustus. The poem, along with another, undisclosed error, got him banished to the freezing cold, primitive town of Tomis on the Black Sea. (He cryptically wrote, ‘two crimes, a poem and a blunder have brought me to ruin. I must keep silent.’) He continued writing poetry and begging to be allowed home, but to no avail. Ovid died in exile eight years later, in AD 17. The persecution of his saucy poem did not, however, stop there. All Ovid’s works were burned as obscene by the Dominican reformist preacher Girolamo Savonarola, in Florence in 1497 (though Savonarola met the same fiery fate himself a year later, after he upset the Vatican). And as late as 1928, an English translation of Ars amatoria was banned from America by US Customs.

The authorities might well remain reluctant to allow one of the late classical world’s other guides on lovemaking to be published. The Affairs of the Heart is effectively the inner monologue of a bi-curious male. Written by Lucien (or very possibly someone doing a rough imitation of his work) around AD 4, it records the disputes between a straight philanderer and a gay pederast over whose sex life is more honest and pleasurable. The straight guy wins, and the text recommends that male readers should choose wives over young boys – not least because they last longer: a woman is desirable from maidenhood to middle age, whereas boys pass their prime as soon as their beard starts to grow. What’s more, it adds, a woman can be used sexually just like a boy, thus offering ‘two roads to pleasure’. Bonus, eh?

Where to Do It

Outdoors

Marie Stopes, Married Love (1918)

There are some who do realize the sacredness and the value of nature and sunlight. There must be many beautiful children who were conceived from unions which took place under natural conditions of nature and sunlight.

But beware cops and other vermin

Dr Alex Comfort, The Joy of Sex (1972)

Outdoor locations in wild areas are often flawed by vermin, ranging from ants and mosquitoes to rattlesnakes and officious cops.

And certainly not in these places

Ananga Ranga of Kalyanamalla (Stage of the Love God), by the Indian poet Kalyan Mall (16th century)

In the presence of a holy man, a respectable old person or a great man

By rivers or streams

Next to wells or water tanks

Temples

Forts or castles

Guard-rooms, police stations, or other government places where prisoners are held

On a highway

In someone else’s house

Forests, meadows or uplands

Cemeteries

The consequences of carnal connection at such places are disastrous. They breed misfortunes. If children are begotten, they turn out bad and malicious.

Low light, on top of the blankets

Rennie MacAndrew, Life Long Love: healthy sex and marriage (1928)

Intimacy should always take place on top of the bed rather than beneath the blankets, so that each can enjoy seeing the physical charms of the other. Exhibitionism is not a perversion as a prologue to the consummation of love. Ideally, intercourse should be performed in a dimly lighted room, certainly not in the dark.

Four
NO SEX PLEASE, WE’RE MEDIEVAL ENGLISH

In the unenlightened Britain of the Middle Ages, the Church was hard at work cementing the foundations for centuries of sexual double-standards and miserabilism.

Its moral leaders could not actually ban sex – they had to be practical, and intercourse was the only reliable way that mere mortals could fulfil God’s command to go forth and multiply. Nevertheless, the clergy shared St Paul and St Augustine’s wholehearted distaste for this undignified and bestial act – especially if anyone appeared to be having fun while performing it. Lust was a tool of the serpent of Satan, which turned the natural and sinless act of marital baby-making into something damnably hellish. Enjoying marital sex (rather than only putting up with it) constituted a venial sin. Adultery or fornication, moreover, constituted a mortal sin. Celibacy was the safest recommended route to heaven.

So when the local peasants sought advice on the physical side of marriage, the clergy were less than encouraging. One of the Church’s authoritative sources of sex do’s and don’ts consisted of an obsessively detailed inventory of acts that was apparently compiled by St Theodore of Tarsus, the Archbishop of Canterbury, from AD 668 to 690. In fact The Penitential of Theodore didn’t contain any do’s – they were all don’ts. The banned list included everything from receiving oral sex and masturbation, to bestiality and simply enjoying a cuddle with your spouse on holy days. Each offence was accompanied by a prescribed punishment, which could have you fasting regularly, getting whipped or paying penance. Masturbating would get you sentenced to 40 days’ penitence – and the same punishment applied for anyone who tried, but failed, to have sex for fun. Lesbians got three years, while male gays got ten. Anyone who slept with their mother got the maximum – 15 years – and were only allowed to change their clothes on Sundays.

Medieval doctors often took a different approach, however. They saw sex as essential to health and warned that long-term celibacy could lead to a dangerous build-up of ‘seminal humours’. They were heavily influenced by Galen, the first-century Classical doctor whose theories provided the backbone of European medical practice for centuries and whose cures, such as frequent bleeding, must have helped to kill millions. But Galen’s influence on lovemaking medicine would have been popular: physicians recommended regular, though not excessive, sexual intercourse to release their patients’ seminal humours. They added that the best moral way that single people and widows could stay healthy was to masturbate. Galen even recommended that physicians or midwives place hot poultices on the genitals of celibate women, causing them ‘to experience orgasm, which would release the retained seed’. The Church naturally disagreed, saying masturbation could only be excused if it was unintentional. But how do you prove you were having a wet dream?

As for sex guides, the contemporary De Secretis Mulierum has a strong claim to be one of the most deceitful, nasty and wicked ever published. Its title translates as The Secrets of Women and the work purported to be about women’s health. The contents, however, reflect the vicious paranoia of its misogynistic authors. It was written most probably in the thirteenth or early fourteenth century – possibly by Albertus Magnus, the theologian and scientist, or more likely by a disciple. It was published with the ostensible aim of helping to unravel the mysteries of creation for celibate monks and clerics who, theoretically at least, would be unfamiliar with a woman’s reproductive parts. Subsequent editions carried additional comments by other scholars, and the book steadily grew into a bizarre testament to medieval Englishmen’s warped attitudes to women and their bodies.

They seemed in particular to be rather frightened by the idea of sex with females, warning: ‘The more women have sexual intercourse, the stronger they become, because they are made hot by the motion that the man makes during coitus. Further, male sperm is hot because it is of the same nature as air and when it is received by the woman it warms her entire body, so women are strengthened by this heat. On the other hand, men who have sex frequently are weakened by this act because they become exceedingly dried out.’

The authors also warned readers that they would be particularly unwise to go near women during their monthlies, because ‘Women are so full of venom in their time of menstruation that they poison animals by their glance; they infect children in the cradle; they spot the cleanest mirror; and whenever men have sexual intercourse with them they are made leprous and sometimes cancerous.’

How Often?

Once a weak man

Dr Sylvester Graham, Lectures to Young Men on Chastity (c. 1837)

As a general rule it may be said to the healthy and robust, it were better for you not to exceed, in the frequency of your indulgences, the number of months in the year; and you cannot habitually exceed the number of weeks in the year without in some degree impairing your constitutional powers, shortening your lives and increasing your liability to disease and suffering – if indeed you do not thereby actually induce disease of the worst and most painful kind and at the same time transmit to your offspring an impaired constitution with strong and unhappy predispositions.

Four times a month, but never after a bath

Lyman B. Sperry, Confidential Talks with Husband and Wife: a book of information and advice for the married and marriageable (1900)

It may be safe to state that the ordinary man can safely indulge about four times a month. More than that would be excess for, perhaps, a large majority of civilized men and women. Sexual activity exhausts vitality; hence when one is fatigued, worried, digesting food or reacting from a bath, the vital energies are deeply engaged in important business. At such times, vitality says to sexual desire, ‘I am otherwise engaged’.

Twice or thrice weekly. Or less

August Forel, The Sexual Question: a scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study for the cultured classes (1908)

The reformer Luther, who was a practical man, laid down the average of two or three connections a week in marriage, at the time of highest sexual power. I may say that my numerous observations as a physician have generally confirmed this rule, which seems to me to conform very well to the normal state to which man has become generally adapted during thousands of years.

Husbands who would consider this average as an imprescriptible right would, however, make wrong pretensions, for it is quite possible for a normal man to contain himself much longer, and it is his duty to do so, not only when his wife is ill, but also during menstruation and pregnancy.

Once a fortnight, or after sexy poems

Marie Stopes, Married Love (1918)

Women whose husbands, for instance, are abroad are the women from whom the best and most definitive evidence of a fundamental rhythm of feeling can be obtained. Such women, yearning daily for the tender comradeship and nearness of their husbands find, in addition, at particular times, an accession of longing for the close physical union of the final sex-act. Many such separated wives feel this; and those I have asked to keep note of the dates, have, with remarkable unanimity, told me that these times came specially just before and some week or so after the close of menstruation, coming, that is, about every fortnight...

Many men, who can well practise restraint for 12 to 14 days, will find that one union will then thoroughly satisfy them; and if they have the good fortune to have healthy wives, they will find that the latter too have the desire for several unions in a day or two ... Expressed in general terms, my view may be formulated thus: the mutually best regulation of intercourse in marriage is to have three or four days of repeated unions, followed by about ten days without any unions at all, unless some external stimulus has stirred a mutual desire ...

In between these periods there may be additional special occasions when there springs up a mutual longing to unite. These will generally depend on some event in the lovers’ lives which stirs their emotions; some memory of past passion, such as an anniversary of their wedding, or perhaps will be due to a novel, poem or picture which moves them deeply.

Beware, you’ll have to keep it up

Theodoor Hendrik Van de Velde, Ideal Marriage, Its Physiology and Technique (1928)

I would warn husbands not to recklessly habituate their wives to a degree of sexual frequency and intensity which they (the husbands) may be quite unable to keep up for any length of time. There are many women of moderate sexual temperament who keenly enjoy long festivals of erotic activity, in which husbands both give and demand their utmost, but who do not suffer or resent when the tempest abates and a calm follows.

But there are others, though they are perhaps less numerous among Northern races, who, when once introduced to the maximum of sexual pleasure cannot modify their desires when this maximum is no longer available. Then indeed the husband cannot exorcise the spirits he has invoked. He has the painful choice between chronic ‘nerves’ on his wife’s part, which destroys marital peace and happiness, and equally chronic sexual overstrain and fatigue of his own.

Often no choice between these twin evils is possible and nerves, health, love and happiness are wrecked all round.

Five
BALI HIGH

Sexual matters, meanwhile, were rather more skilled and sensual in Southeast Asia.

Ancient Balinese culture revered sex as an important religious practice, which meant that Saturday-night quickies were ruled firmly out. Babies were made by mixing male and female fluids with the elements of air, fire, water, earth and space – along with the odd reincarnated soul. The magic only worked if the couple orgasmed at the same time. And they needed to perform synchronized sex consistently, as part of a regime of meditation, chanting and mutual pleasure. What’s more, the quality of the sex was thought to affect the quality of the children. Hence the need for detailed manuals.

Bali’s first erotic guides were written in around AD 900 at the latest, according to recent studies. They originated from Java, where Islam eventually suppressed them. But Islam never reached Bali, and the islanders revered their manuals as living texts, so generations of scholars and scribes updated them continually over many centuries. The books were called Tutur and could only be read as part of several years’ study under close guidance from a teacher. Tutur were considered top-shelf stuff, and were usually marked with the words aywa wera: ‘Do not disseminate indiscriminately.’ The books also warned that if a man failed to follow their guidelines, then he was having sex not as a human but as an animal.

Foreplay was a lengthy business. One guide, Rahasyasanggama, stipulated that lovers must meditate themselves into a state of union with the divine before even starting sex – otherwise it would prove neither pleasurable nor productive. For first sexual encounters, the preliminaries could take weeks, if not months. Six stages were required: chatting up, to ensure compatibility; fantasizing (or in religious terms, visualizing the beloved day and night in order magically to attract the desired person); and then touching – a strict 30-day regime of caressing one part of their potential partner per day, running up one side of the body from big toe to forehead and then, when the moon turned from waxing to waning, coming back down the other side. Stage four required male suitors to pull their lovers towards them psychically through intense meditation: the length of time required was determined by the woman’s tincture – it took three days if they were light-skinned, forty if they were dark. At this point, albino females must have been at something of a premium. Stage five, at last, was sex, though it demanded that the man be skilled and respectful in sexual relations, using (sadly unexplained) positions such as ‘boxing’, ‘squirrel eats a nut’, ‘frog climbs a banana tree’ and ‘thrusting pig’. Stage six required the couple to start again, right from the beginning.

Even after that, properly married couples could not simply dive in willy-nilly whenever they pleased. The guides stressed that they had to practise sex at the right times. The rules forbade lovemaking on the wife’s birthday, as well as the day before a full moon, and on new moons.

Across the water in Java, the ancient sex guides adopted early Islamic rules, which were based on the Prophet’s guidance: no sex standing up, or sitting, or with the woman on top; no talk during intercourse; and sex during menstruation was banned because it created ugly children. Other written advice probably survived from older local folklore: you can tell the shape and size of a man’s penis by looking at his thumb, while a woman’s vagina reflects the shape of her mouth. Or perhaps they got those ones from the playground.

My Place or Yours?

How to pull

Philaenis, papyrus sex manual (2 BC)

Pick the woman’s worst feature and then make it appear desirable. Tell an older woman that she looks young. Tell an ugly woman that she looks ‘fascinating’.

Top womanizers

Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana (3rd century), translated by Sir Richard F. Burton and F.F. Arbuthnot (1883)

The following generally obtain success with women:

Men well versed in the science of love

Raconteurs

Ones acquainted with women from their childhood

Guys who send women presents

Slick talkers

Men who have not loved other women previously

Chaps who know their weak points

Good-looking men

Men who have grown up with women

Men who live next door to women

Men who are devoted to sexual pleasures, even though these are with their own servants

The lovers of the nursemaid’s daughters

Men who have been recently married

Men who like picnics and parties

Liberals

Men who are celebrated for being very strong

Enterprising and brave men

Men who are better looking, cleverer and kinder than your husband

Girls go mad for burnt skulls

Ananga Ranga of Kalyanamalla (Stage of the Love God), by the Indian poet Kalyan Mall (16th century)

Take a human skull from the cemetery or burning ground on the eighth day of the moonlit fortnight of the seventh month Ashvini (September-October), expose it to fire, and collect the soot upon a plate held over it; let this be drawn over the inner surface of the eye-lids, instead of the usual antimony, and the effect will be to fascinate all the women.

Turn yourself into a sex god

Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana (3rd century), translated by Sir Richard F. Burton and F.F. Arbuthnot (1883)

First, get some fashionable gold hyena bones:

Good looks, good qualities, youth, and liberality are the chief and most natural means of making a person agreeable in the eyes of others. But in the absence of these a man or a woman must have resort to artificial means ...

If the bone of a peacock or of a hyena be covered with gold, and tied on the right hand, it makes a man lovely in the eyes of other people.

Or smear either of these on your penis:

The application of a mixture of the leaf of the plant vatodbhranta, of the flowers thrown on a human corpse when carried out to be burnt, and the powder of the bones of the peacock.

The remains of a kite who has died a natural death, ground into powder, and mixed with honey.

Then enlarge yourself:

Rub your penis with the bristles of certain insects that live in trees, and then, after rubbing it for ten nights with oils, rub it with the bristles as before.

By continuing to do this a swelling will be gradually produced in the penis and you should then lie on a hammock with a hole in it, and hang it down through the hole. After this you should take away all the pain from the swelling by using cool concoctions. The swelling lasts for life.

How to be a failure

Perfumed Garden of Sheik Nefzaoui (16th century), translated by Sir Richard F. Burton

Know, O My Brother (to whom God be merciful), that a man who is misshapen, of coarse appearance, and whose member is short, thin and flabby, is contemptible in the eyes of women.

When such a man has a bout with a woman, he does not do her business with vigour and in a manner to give her enjoyment. He lays himself down upon her without previous toying, he does not kiss her, nor twine himself round her; he does not bite her, nor suck her lips, nor tickle her.

He gets upon her before she has begun longing for pleasure, and then he introduces with infinite trouble a member soft and nerveless. Scarcely has he commenced when he is already done for; he makes one or two movements, and then sinks upon the woman’s breast to spend his sperm, and that is the most he can do. This done he withdraws his affair, and makes all haste to get down again from her.

Such a man is quick in ejaculation and slow as to erection; after the trembling, which follows the ejaculation of the seed, his chest is heavy and his sides ache.

Six
RENAISSANCE RENEGADES

The Renaissance in Europe revived not only the arts of painting and literature: from the late fifteenth century onwards, the sex-advice industry resurfaced and rapidly began to churn out international bestsellers, thanks to a vital new innovation – the printing press.

It had been invented in the mid-1450s and soon became available to entrepreneurs at relatively affordable prices. Ever since this point, the sex industry has relied on latest-tech tricks to pump its wares out faster than bureaucrats and lawmakers can ban them. The relationship has grown so close that the industry has even come to determine the direction that technology takes. In the 1970s, for example, no one knew which of the two rival home-videotape systems, Betamax or VHS, would dominate the market. For a while, it was neck and neck: Betamax had gone on sale first and many users believed it was better quality. But VHS was cheaper for film-making. Porn-movie producers predictably chose profits over art and went for VHS – which meant that masses of home-video buyers quickly followed suit, along with video-rental shops, which in the early days were exclusively pornographic. Bye-bye Betamax. Likewise, the internet would never have grown so rapidly without the financial success of its biggest market by far.

But this sort of innovation first occurred in Renaissance Italy, where many of the new-fangled printing presses were run by fly-by-night organizations. These were the pirate radio stations of their day, creating an anarchic free-for-all of new and seditious books. There were at least 1,300 publishers in sixteenth-century Italy and more than a third of them were based in Venice, which quickly became the main international marketplace, selling books to buyers from all over Europe. The Catholic Church’s censors suddenly found they had trouble keeping up with the written word. Censorship scored a few spectacular successes but ultimately failed to restrict the free circulation of ideas. The average Venetian book’s print run was probably around a thousand, though bestsellers may have run to 4,000 or more.

This wild, new info-frontier had few rules. If you could get away with it, then it was probably OK. Copyright hardly existed and libel laws were just as difficult to enforce. In 1540, preambles to legislation in Venice, where book publishing had become a huge source of local wealth, lamented that shoddy sleazebag printing was bringing disgrace to the city. Laws threatened to confiscate and burn cheap, pirated editions of popular works but these appear to have been merely the products of gesture-politics and no such crackdowns seem to have materialized (we can safely guess that plenty of bribes changed hands, though).

Amid the chaos, sex-manual writers thrived, producing barrow-loads of cheap, low-quality advice books that were poorly covered and bound – that’s if the publishers bothered to bind them at all. Their size and type made them instantly recognizable as lascivious lit. The freely printed word also enabled eccentrics, quacks, visionaries and even churchmen to discuss their strange sex theories in intimate detail in private books, with little fear of criticism. Bizarre medical ideas were no rarity in the Renaissance, which evolved the theory of the wandering womb. If a woman became hysterical or misbehaved, this was blamed on her uterus having got dislodged and gone storming around, wreaking internal havoc. This, the theory claimed, was caused by the womb having been starved of sufficient intercourse or reproduction.

Other ideas included Giovanni Marinello’s cure for premature ejaculation, in his 1563 Medicine Pertinent to the Infirmities of Women. This was based on the theory that women could not get pregnant if they did not orgasm, which presented a problem for premature-ejaculators. The answer for premature-ejaculators, therefore, was for them to tie string around their testicles. When the wife was ready to orgasm, she could untie the knot to receive hubby’s semen – just so long as she was good at undoing knots at arm’s length in the dark while orgasming and at the same time being careful not to injure her husband. Ouch.

But the most notorious of all the Renaissance love manuals did not rely on pseudo-science – it invented the simple formula of neat-drawing-plus-snappy-text that 450 years later was to make The Joy of Sex so successful. I modi (The Ways) was an explicitly illustrated guide to pleasurable sexual positions, which was first published in 1524. The first edition was simply a compilation of fine-art drawings of sixteen different sex acts by Giuliano Romano, the talented 25-year-old Mannerist protégé of Raphael. Pope Clement VII was enraged by it and ordered all copies burned. He also prohibited any form of distribution, imprisoned Romano and warned that anyone who published it again would be executed. In spite of this heavy deterrent, the book became an object lesson in the near impossibility of censoring pirate printers. A second edition emerged three years later, each picture now accompanied by a sonnet written by Pietro Aretino, a journalist, publicist, entrepreneur and art dealer who had become infamous as one of the lewdest wits in all Italy. The captions were forthright, to say the least. As for wit, perhaps tastes have changed. One reads: ‘My legs are wrapped around your neck. Your cazzo’s in my cul, it pushes and thrashes. I was in bed, but now I’m on this chest. What extreme pleasure you’re giving me. But lift me on to the bed again – down here, my head hangs low, you’ll do me in. The pain’s worse than birth-pangs or shitting. Cruel love, what have you reduced me to?’

Ensuing years brought further bootleg copies, and eventually the number of positions grew to 31 as imitators added later and inferior drawings. After Aretino’s death in 1556, the term ‘Aretinian postures’ became synonymous across Europe with acrobatic sex. The book was a popular read and won celebrity endorsement: Casanova recalls in his memoirs how he spent New Year’s Eve 1753 performing Aretino’s ‘straight tree’ position with a nun. He says it featured the man standing and holding the woman upside-down for mutual oral sex. It makes a change from singing ‘Auld Lang’s Syne’.

In Britain, in the wake of the Protestant Reformation, attitudes to marital sex had thawed in some denominations of the Church – especially among the Puritans. Their name has become a modern byword for all things strait-laced, but they actually believed pleasurable marital sex to be part of the holy sacrament. Early legal records in Puritan New England even record cases of husbands being admonished for failing to make love to their wives. Puritan marriage manuals completely contradicted Catholic distaste for spouse-on-spouse action. Writers such as William Whately, who published A Bride Bush, or a Direction for Married Person in 1616, and William Gouge (Of Domestical Duties, 1622) strongly promoted the right of married couples to enjoy ‘mutual dalliances for pleasure’s sake’. They also urged that ‘husband and wife mutually delight each in the other,’ maintain a ‘fervent love’ and exchange ‘due benevolence one to another which is warranted and sanctified by God’s word’.

Francis Rous, the provost of Eton College in Buckinghamshire, published a sermon in 1656 that sounds like the preamble to some medieval handbook of voyeurism. The Mystical Marriage was inspired by the prophet Isaiah’s words, ‘Fear not, for thy maker is thine husband’. Rous exhorted readers, ‘Desire this husband ... Clear up thine eye and fix it on him as upon the fairest of men, the perfection of spiritual beautie ... accordingly fasten on him, not thine eye only, but thy mightiest love and hottest affection. Look on him so, that thou maist lust after him; for here it is a sin not to look as thou maist lust, and not to lust, having looked.’

It was powerful preaching, particularly from a Church that had not long before preached chastity as the only pure way. In the years approaching 1700, the general English market for sex advice was also getting stronger. We cannot know for certain what books were published or how many were bought, because the vast majority were printed as throw-away items, to be sold and read furtively. Samuel Pepys betrays himself in his diary as one of this growing band of secret sex-book stashers: ‘Away to the Strand to my booksellers and bought that idle, roguish book, L’Eschole des filles, which I have bought in plain binding (avoiding the buying of it better bound) because I resolve, as soon as I have read it, to burn it, that it may not stand in the list of books, nor among them, to disgrace them if it should be found.’

But one book did more than survive: it became so popular that it was still in bookshops early in the twentieth century. It was called Aristotle’s Masterpiece. The 4 BC Greek philosopher’s History of Animals, Parts of Animals, and Generation of Animals had provided the foundation both of Western zoology and Western sexology, and his influence was so great that almost anything attributed to him was believed. When the Masterpiece first came out, some enterprising publisher stuck Aristotle’s name in the title, although only fragments of the information and misinformation it conveys can be traced to him. The first known edition is dated 1684 and was aimed at the common reader, the sort of literate lower-class person who bought ballads and almanacs. The text was primarily a collection of sexual folk wisdom, with hints on the positions to assume if you wanted to have a boy or a girl, and some rather bizarre pregnancy tests. The quality of the science is evident from this ‘any other questions’ exchange at the end of the book: ‘Question: Why don’t birds urinate? Answer: Because that superfluity which would be converted into urine, is turned into feathers.’ Nevertheless, the Masterpiece went through at least 43 editions by 1800 and there were most likely many more, which ended up being hidden, burnt, torn up and otherwise lost by the likes of Pepys.

In France, Nicholas Venette (a pseudonym) became a contemporary rival to the Masterpiece. His Tableau de l’amour conjugal was published in France in 1696, not long after the Masterpiece. Its theme was similar but it felt more sophisticated and, initially, more salacious. It was translated in Britain in 1703 as The Mysteries of Conjugal Love Reveald, priced at six shillings, and soon became Europe’s most popular sex guide – published in more than 100 editions and going well into the 20th century. Venette was a doctor and a father of 12. He was therefore doubly qualified to declare that the Masterpiece’s pregnancy tests – such as drinking honey and water at bedtime (a beating sense around the navel allegedly meant you’d conceived) – did not work.

Venette’s opening literary gambit was one that became practically obligatory right up until the 1960s – getting your retaliation in first with a justification, excuse or apology about daring to write on such a touchy subject. He declared, ‘If on the one hand, sin hath tacked shame to this knowledge; on the other, nature hath placed nothing there but what is delightful and pretty.’ So please don’t burn, jail, fine or sue me. Odd ideas? Try, ‘From the right testicle cometh the male, and from the left, the female.’ So if you tied the left one off, or lay on your right side while having sex, your chances of having a boy would increase. The book would have got him included on a News of the World hate-list for suggesting that women are sexually ‘fit for commerce’ when they reach their 13th birthday.

Venette had a few other strange notions, and in particular one that stemmed from a Galen-inspired belief, which was still popular in the 1700s, that masturbation was a decent way to get rid of excess sperm. Venette suggested that men are superior to woman because, by masturbating, they can renew their seed instead of allowing it to rot in their systems: ‘She sometimes retains it lengthily in her testicles or in the horns of her uterus, where it becomes tainted and turns yellow, murky, or foul smelling, instead of white and clear as it was formerly. Unlike man, who, by polluting himself frequently, even during his sleep, benefits from a seed that is always renewed and never remains in his canals long enough to become corrupt.’

Women Who Make Good Lovers

It’s all in the face

Yu Fang Mi Chueh (Secret Codes of the Jade Room), c. AD 50

A woman with a small mouth and short fingers has a shallow porte feminine and she is easy to please. You can be sure that a woman must have big and thick labia if she has a big mouth and thick lips. If she has deep-set eyes, her porte feminine is bound to be deep too. If a woman has a pair of big, sparkling eyes, her porte feminine is narrow at its entrance, and yet roomy in the inner part. A woman with two dimples is tight and narrow down below.

Short (but normal) is best

Theodoor Hendrik Van de Velde, Ideal Marriage, Its Physiology and Technique (1928)

Women of short stature and small bones can often meet all requirements in the flexibility and capacity of their vaginae. And their sexual vigour and efficiency are also conspicuous, not only in coitus but in their buoyant reaction to the mental and physical stress and strain of menstruation, pregnancy and parturition, their fine flow of milk and easy and frequent conception (note the saying among the English common people: ‘Little women – big breeders’).

In short, little women approximate most often to the typical womanly ideal. But of course this is only the case when this small stature is perfectly proportionate throughout and when the sexual development is adequate. When the small stature is due to some form of abnormality it is more than likely that the genitals will show serious defects structurally and functionally, in some way or other.

Sweaty’s sexy

Fang Nei Chi (Records of the Bedchamber), Sui Dynasty (AD 590–618)

Suitable women are naturally tender and docile and of gentle mien. Their hairs are of a silky black, their skin is soft and their bones fine. They are neither too tall nor too short, neither too fat nor too thin. The lips of the vulva should be thick and large. Their groins should not be covered with hair and the vagina should be moist. Their age should be between 25 and 30 and they should not yet have borne a child.

During coition their vaginas should emit abundant liquid. Their bodies should move so that they cannot restrain themselves. Drenched in sweat, they succumb to the motions of their man. Women endowed with these qualities will never harm a man, even if he himself is ignorant of the correct way of sexual intercourse.

Small-breasted, shrill hairy heaven

Nicholas Venette, The Mysteries of Conjugal Love Reveald (1703)

Woman, hot in constitution and vehemently desirous of commerce with man, is easily distinguished by those versed in the nature of sex. In order to inform the ignorant, the breasts of such a woman are generally very small, but at the same time conveniently plump and hard. There is a profusion of hair about her privities occasioned by the extraordinary heat in those parts. The hair of the head is short and inclinable to curl, her voice is shrill and loud; she is cold of speech, cruel and oppressive to those of her own sex and unsteady in her devotion.

She is very complaisant and obliging in her behaviour towards men, but especially to those of her friends and acquaintance; she is of florid complexion, upright in the gesture of her body and more inclined to be lean than fat. She is sometimes given to excess in wine.

We may be sure, a woman answering this description, is extremely lecherous; and one who, in the act of coition, fulfils her desire greatly to the content and pleasure of the many having carnal knowledge of her ... Let me add that the libidinous woman smells not so rank when she perspires as other women do.

Hefty and breastless: mmm

Fang Nei Chi (Records of the Bedchamber), Sui Dynasty (AD 590–618)

A man should select for his sexual partners young women whose breasts have not yet developed and who are well covered with flesh. They should have hair as fine as silk and small eyes in which the pupil and the white are clearly separated. Face and body should be smooth and speech harmonious. All her joints should be well covered and her bones should not be large. She should either have no pubic and axillary hair at all or such hair should be fine and smooth.