Gruesome, kids!
“If women were habitual masturbators, Kellogg recommended burning out the clitoris with carbolic acid as an ‘excellent means of allaying the abnormal excitement, and preventing the recurrence of the practice'...”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/17/books/review-curious-history-sex-kate-lister.html
BOOKS OF THE TIMES
‘A Curious History of Sex’ Covers Aphrodisiacs, Bicycles, Graham Crackers and More
By Dwight Garner
April 17, 2020
"Though it has passages about AIDS and syphilis, Kate Lister’s first book, “A Curious History of Sex,” is not about libido in times of plague and anxiety. But it’s impossible not to read it now through that lens.
If, like me, you remain winter-stunned, feeling like a deflated basketball left too long in the basement, sex (or reading about it) can reassure you we’re not living in a prolonged hallucination. I’ve heard reports that pornography is widely available online, but have been unable to confirm these rumors for myself.
Lister, an Englishwoman, is a strong writer, and her book comes with a story attached. She operates the website (and excellent Twitter feed) Whores of Yore, about historical attitudes toward sex work and desire in general. Her book, like all books issued by the British publishing house Unbound, was crowd-funded, an idea whose time has surely come.
Let’s start with the applicable-to-lockdown sections. Baking has surged in popularity, and Lister has a chapter subtitled “Sex and Bread.” I have a hard time imagining the baking deity Dorie Greenspan recommending this, but Lister relates accounts of women in the 17th century, up on the counter, kneading dough with their buttocks.
The women delivered the resulting loaves to their sweet-pea partners to inflame lust. Lister comments: “Should a lover ever approach you carrying an oddly squashed farmhouse loaf, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
This might be a good time to get a bicycle. Among the best chapters is one subtitled “Sex and Cycling.” Lister explores the history of bicycles as agents in the emancipation of women.
Bicycles permitted women to become vastly more mobile; they could flee restrictive families. Cycling led to the wearing of freer clothing. “The bicycle,” Lister writes, “cannot be ridden sidesaddle.”
The machines horrified many Victorians, she writes, because “they forced a recognition that women had two legs and that they opened.” Men worried that women, upon them, would become excitable and easily led astray.
As old postcards demonstrate (this book is lavishly illustrated), bicycles were as popular with pornographers as martinis were with Alan Alda in old episodes of “M*A*S*H.” They were handy props on which photographic subjects could pose this way and that — and some other ways, too.
Lister writes about aphrodisiacs such as oysters. I did not know, until reading her, that oysters have eyes. I would like to unlearn this fact. Never have I better understood the historian Daniel J. Boorstin’s comment that “the printing press could disseminate, but it could not retrieve.”
If you are solitary, a more pertinent chapter might be the one titled “Turning Down the Heat.” It’s a history of anaphrodisiacs, which are the opposite of aphrodisiacs. Aristotle, Lister reports, thought going barefoot suppressed lust.
In “The Anatomy of Melancholy,” Robert Burton suggested that men rub camphor on their genitals to tamp down libido. There is evidence that inhaling camphor causes breathing difficulties, so save this tip for another time.
If you are lucky enough to have a stash of those tasty morsels known as graham crackers in your house, dip one in milk and, while chewing, recall that they were inspired by the work of the Rev. Sylvester Graham, the dietary reformer and temperance movement leader.
Graham “saw a clear link between rich food and masturbation,” Lister writes. The graham cracker was “designed to bore the libido into submission.” Ditto the cornflake, invented by John Harvey Kellogg. Lister is enjoyable to read on Kellogg’s follies. She writes: “Kellogg was filling his patients full of yogurt at one end and cornflakes at the other.”
Speaking of masturbation, Lister adopts a liberal attitude toward self-care. For men, it is not merely the equivalent of a side quest in a video game but practically doctor’s orders. She cites studies showing that men who ejaculate several times a week are less likely to develop prostate cancer.
There is no room to explain the context, but if the following is information you need during this crisis, perhaps you should print out this bit of Lister’s wisdom and post it somewhere visible: “A farting, giggling fit that lasts an afternoon is not an orgasm.” This is the sort of thing the C.D.C. will never tell you.
This is a poor moment for unnecessary surgery. Lister’s writing about the history of that butchery known as female circumcision burns with a furious glow. There are many villains here. Since I have already mentioned Kellogg, here is Lister on his contribution:
“If women were habitual masturbators, Kellogg recommended burning out the clitoris with carbolic acid as an ‘excellent means of allaying the abnormal excitement, and preventing the recurrence of the practice.’”
Lister is aware that her book, dark passages aside, is a romp rather than an especially serious or comprehensive work of history or criticism. She has the double entendres to prove it: “This is a drop in the ocean, a paddle in the shallow end of sex history, but I hope you will get pleasantly wet nonetheless.”
This is a book of varying merit. At moments, when Lister is piling one fact atop another, “A Curious History of Sex” has a Wikipedia-page vibe. But she manages to pull out of these midair stalls. She’s mostly quite good company on the page.
What next for sex? Will the hazard lights continue to flash? Will we forever mourn a lost idyll? Will we ever get out of our athleisure suits? Will young people find themselves having only unconsummated love affairs, as if they were suffering characters in a Henry James novel?
Will flashing make an unwanted comeback, since it can be performed while social distancing? When England dramatically raised fines for this act in 1975, Auberon Waugh jokingly complained in his diary that only the rich would now be able to afford it. “It could easily be reduced to a form of status symbol or financial boasting,” he wrote.
Wherever we are heading, whatever your proclivities, Lister has this comment: “I promise, it’s all been done before.”
Follow Dwight Garner on Twitter: @DwightGarner.
A Curious History of Sex
By Kate Lister
Illustrated. 456 pages. Unbound. $28.95..."