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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.