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The mattress hypothesis was best exemplified, however, by a one-time priestly initiate in England, now a novelist, Paul Crawford, who has written on the dangers of celibacy in the modern age, and how this ‘destructive force in the life of the Church' has distorted priests' behaviour. ‘My experience training for the priesthood at Oscott College during the 1980s gave me first-hand experience of the unhealthy development of human sexuality among its clergy,' Crawford wrote in the
Guardian
. ‘The life of the Catholic priest, with its marked isolation, loneliness and sexual denial, cannot fail to frustrate individuals and deform otherwise natural urges and desires into more bizarre, or simply counterproductive and pathetic appetites.

‘Even masturbation was outlawed. I will never forget the burning faces of men being told that this was sinful, when in all truth it was an absolute necessity as far as most of us were concerned … To sublimate direct sexual expression, many of the men in the seminary entered a strange twilight world of glib affection, camply addressing one another as “Mother” or “Dearest”. More humorous than in any way disturbing, this behaviour did seem to signpost sexual frustration. On one occasion, when a male relative of mine visited me, a student forced himself on him in the toilets and tried to kiss him.' Celibacy continues in a variety of cultures to be regarded as a source of power.

Nothing in history quite approximates the ferocity with which Christianity pursued its case versus the orgasm. There is, as Desmond Morris has observed, no one quite so obsessed by sex as a fanatical puritan. What is most puzzling about the continuing phenomenon is that the rejection of sexual enjoyment has at no stage been seen by Christian revisionists as in any sense a grievous insult to God, who must, surely, have created the parts of the body responsible for orgasm, which would suggest that the process is therefore free from sin.

A certain logic can be seen in parts of the Christian sexual tradition. For women, a practical reason for celibacy is that it
was the only 100 per cent-sure way of avoiding, and particularly dying in, childbirth. It is also possible to contrive an argument against masturbation on the grounds that it is taking liberties, if only a little, with God's creation. Then again, if masturbation were a sin, surely God would have been bold enough to speak outright about it, rather than hide coded, ambiguous references to it in the Bible for uneducated preachers to interpret for him?

Self-denial and censorious zeal, it has to be concluded, seem to speak to something deeper in the human psyche than any professed religious belief. Even if Jesus had demanded free love and promiscuity of his adherents, the suspicion remains that the textual references would have been removed in mysterious ways – or re-interpreted to within an inch of their life. What it is that motivates the religious obsessive's hatred of sex could, for a psychoanalyst, be any number of childhood traumas and dysfunctions. However, an economic explanation has to be high on the list of possible reasons for the Christian church's obsession with sex.

If there is one thing, after all, the Church is more fixated on than sex, it is money. Mandatory priestly celibacy, as we have seen, was a mechanism for keeping Church property from leaking away by inheritance to clerics' children. Sex as a joyous activity for laity, it might also be argued, could equally damage the Church's fiscal interests, as it could lead to a surfeit of bastard children who would effectively be heathen – and ineligible to be part of the customer base of the Church.

Many other facets of human history have been founded on such obliquely commercial foundations; it is quite likely that the mass enjoyment of orgasm, too, has been seen as ultimately bad for religious business.

‘O Venus, that art goddesse of plesaunce!
Syn that thy servant was this Chauntecleer,
And in thy servyce dide al his poweer,
Moore for delit than world to multiplye.'

Geoffrey Chaucer,
‘The Nun's Priest's Tale'

Throughout much of the world, the Medieval era and the Renaissance were the heyday of unfettered, guiltless, uncomplicated enjoyment of orgasm. China, India, Japan, the Middle East and Central America (before Christian values were fully hammered home by Spanish colonists) were all centres of orgasmic excellence. Even in the Christian world, as we shall see, there was widespread flouting of the stern official strictures against the enjoyment of sex; clerical marriages were officially allowed so long as husband and wife did not have sex, a prohibition that was manifestly no more than a formality when Popes routinely had children and Henry III, Bishop of Liège, was known to have sired sixty-five illegitimate offspring.

The dead hand of the anti-sex movement did not properly descend until the emerging Protestant Reformation in Europe began to threaten the formal dismantling of priestly celibacy, along with a more pragmatic all-round approach to sexual
matters. In 1563, the Council of Trent reacted on behalf of the traditionalists to the reforming trend by pronouncing uncompromisingly, ‘… that it is more blessed to remain in virginity or in celibacy than to be joined in marriage'.

No such state of sexless, pleasure-free grace troubled the medieval Chinese. Huang O, a female poet of the sixteenth century, wrote as sensitively and yet erotically as any woman in antiquity in
The Orchid Boat:

I will allow only

My lord to possess my sacred

Lotus pond, and every night

You can make blossom in me

Flowers of fire
.

Huang O was almost certainly referring to her vagina in this verse – an obvious statement, one might say, were it not for the strange historical quirk that from the eleventh-century onwards the Chinese were collectively fixated on the female foot as being configurable as a kind of extra vagina. Their fetishistic passion was, more correctly, for the tiny ‘golden lotus flower' foot that high-class Chinese parents produced in their girl children by binding their feet from the age of six.

A typical lotus foot in an adult was small to the point of deformity – some four inches long by a thumb's width across, according to Xiao Jiao, a writer on the history of sex in China, although one suspects this may be a downwards exaggeration. Encased in a tiny silken slipper, it was considered the most private area of a woman's body, touching it being the ultimate act of intimacy between her and her husband or lover. The toe of this deformed, bud-like extremity was exaggerated to simulate a small pseudo-penis, while the fleshy, soft area under the arches, was regarded, and used, both as a pair of secondary vaginas and as a female analogue for the penis.

An American China specialist, Howard Seymour Levy, wrote of the antique custom of footbinding in a 1966 book
on the subject that: ‘The ways of grasping the foot in one's palms were both profuse and varied, ascending the heights of ecstasy when the lover transferred the foot from palm to mouth. Play included kissing, sucking and inserting the foot in the mouth until it filled both cheeks, either nibbling at it or chewing vigorously, and adoringly placing it against one's cheeks, chest, knees or virile member.'

Some women, according to Levy, developed this erotic artistry to the extent that they could deftly grasp a partner's penis between their feet and guide it into the vagina. A few could also masturbate by rubbing or stroking their own lotus feet. For others, orgasm was said to be enhanced if a lover grabbed their feet during it. Chinese women, both lesbian and straight, would also reputedly practise simulated intercourse by mutually inserting their big toes into one another's vagina.

Footbinding and its accoutrements titillated many foreigners in Imperial China. Marco Polo, travelling there from Venice in the thirteenth century, admittedly managed to miss seeing the custom (he also failed to notice acupuncture and the Great Wall). But a Dr Matignon, attaché to the French diplomatic mission to China in the 1890s was, like most visitors in the previous thousand years, more observant, writing how: ‘Touching of the genital organs by the tiny feet provokes, in the male, thrills of an indescribable voluptuousness. And the great lovers know that in order to awaken the ardour of especially their older clients, an infallible method is to take die rod [penis] between their two feet, which is worth more than all the aphrodisiacs of the Chinese pharmacopoeia and kitchen.'

Footbinding was banned in China in 1902, and appears to have been an extreme attempt by cruel, possessive men to keep women captive, immobile and helpless. There must also be a suspicion that the tales of women being able to masturbate by manipulating their own deformed feet long be more in the realms of male fantasy than reality. The rheumy modern eye, additionally, will not be slow to detect not a little inherent
paedophilia in the notion of men being masturbated by feet the size of a six-year-old girl's.

Yet it is worth nothing that there were allegedly payoffs for the woman beyond the thrill a few achieved by having their feet fiddled with. Women reported that having their feet bound altered the vagina, causing ‘a supernatural exaltation' during sex. It was also claimed by some that the teetering, swaying ‘willow walk' of women with bound feet caused an upward flow of blood producing better enjoyment of intercourse.

India, where a little discreet foot fetishism was also known, continued to be China's main rival in promotion of the sexual arts. The Indian corpus of sexological texts, known as the
Karma Shastra
and dating from the eleventh century, acknowledge the area later termed the ‘Gräfenberg zone' and then the G-spot in Europe, and also seem to be well acquainted with female ejaculation.

In the twelfth century another compilation of erotic greatest hits appeared, the
Ananga Ranga
, a self-help book which included section from the
Kamasutra
and was designed by its author, Kalyana Malla, to help prevent marital problems brought on by sexual boredom. Kalyana Malla was a court sage and poet commissioned by a Mogul emperor, King Ahmad, who wanted to improve his lovemaking skills to live up to his handsome appearance. Kalyana Malla stated: ‘The chief reason for the separation between the married couple and the cause which drives the husband to the embraces of strange women, and the wife to the embraces of strange men, is the want of varied pleasures, and the monotony which follows possession.'

Imagination was the key to staying sexually fulfilled, he argued, as many sex therapists would still be saying a thousand years later. By thinking up new positions, he wrote, you could fantasise that you had dozens of sexual partners; each position, additionally, could open up another hitherto un-felt sexual delight. Kalyana Malla advocated a variety of what might be called gym equipment to facilitate adventurous positional
gambits; the most popular of these was identical to a modern children's swing, but put to sexual use with the woman sitting on it with her legs up, presenting her vulva to her partner at convenient penis-height, and with the benefit of the effortless motion of the ‘love swing' to ease herself up and down his stationary erection.

From sexual anatomy to subtleties of the emotions, the
Ananga Ranga's
understanding of sex was not bettered in any Western culture until modern times. The
Madana-chatra
– or clitoris – the text specifies, is the upper part of the
yoni
. ‘Before proceeding to the various acts of congress, the symptoms of the orgasm in women must be laid down. As soon as she commences to enjoy pleasure, the eyes are half-closed and watery; the body waxes cold; the breath, after being hard and jerky, is expired in sobs or sighs, the lower limbs are simply stretched out after a period of rigidity; a rising and outflow of love and affection appears, with kisses and sportive gestures; and, finally, she seems as if about to swoon. At such time, a distaste for further embraces and blandishments become manifest; then the wise know that, the paroxysm having taken place, the woman has enjoyed plenary satisfaction; consequently, they refrain from further congress.

‘The woman who possesses
Chanda-vega
, or what is known as furious appetite, needs carnal enjoyment frequently and will not be satisfied with a single orgasm … And, moreover, let it be noted, that the desires of the woman being colder and slower to rouse than those of the man, she is not easily satisfied by a single act of congress; her slower powers of excitement demand prolonged embraces and if these be denied her, she feels aggrieved. At the second act, however, her passions being thoroughly aroused, she finds the orgasm more violent, and then she is thoroughly contented.'

Although we know less about its isolated culture, Japan in the Middle Ages was also both sophisticated sexually and of a mind to enjoy the pleasures of the flesh.
The Tale of Genji
, an eleventh-century Japanese sex-romp, is based around the
practice of
Yobai
, or ‘night crawling', a process of stealing in (by previous appointment, hopefully) to a girlfriend's bedroom for a little illicit lovemaking: ‘With the lights dimmed and nineteen-year-old Saki feigning sleep on her
futon
, the reporter creeps into her dimly lit room. He parts the folds of her
yukata
[sleeping gown] and allows his fingers to creep up her reposing thighs towards the promised land. Already damp with lust, she makes purring noises and, in short order, the two are coupling in erotic
samurai
combat.'

The Japanese later designated part of the capital, Edo (modern Tokyo), as ‘the floating city' – the equivalent of London's Soho, after the city was rebuilt following a fire. There was strict zoning, so pleasure palaces were all erected together in an area with over 3,000 registered prostitutes.

An overwhelmingly positive view of sexual desire, especially female desire, can be traced on the other side of the world, too. Peruvian drinking vessels, made by women potters, have been found in the shape of vulvas, which allowed the drinker to simulate cunnilingus. The Zuñi Indians of New Mexico and Arizona blessed baby girls in a formal ceremony that celebrated their luck in being female. The men would strap on enormous false penises, and support their womenfolk's equality, singing songs about how happy their sexual organs could make women. Sexual practices among Zuñi women, according to Naomi Wolf, ‘spanned the spectrum from heterosexual to homosexual, and age was no barrier to eroticism'.