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The Casanova reference indicates how the invention did not catch on for sexual purposes until a couple of centuries later. It was only named in print a century after Fallopius, in 1665, in
A Panegyric upon Cundum
by a notorious sexual swordsman, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. Some believe the word was derived from a Dr Condom, who procured contraceptives for the libidinous Charles II, but this may be a myth. More likely, it comes from the Latin
cunnus
(for the vagina) and
dum
(in its sense of ‘able to be fooled'). Equally likely, especially given the Restoration timing of Rochester's reference, it was a pun alluding scurrilously to Charles's supplier.

Either way, Fallopius's condom, before it was perfected in the twentieth century by the invention of rubber, acquired a reputation as a not always effective, or honourable, part of the armoury of lovemaking. The French wit Madame de Sévigné (she who famously did not have time to write a short letter, so wrote a long one instead) later described the contraceptive sheath as ‘gossamer against infection, steel against love', while the glib Casanova seems to have used them as a method of seduction by referring to them as a device ‘to put the fair sex under shelter from all fear'. James Boswell, meanwhile, attested to their failure even to hold back the male orgasm, which was always one of their supposed benefits. He recorded in his diary in 1764: ‘Quite agitated. Put on condom; entered. Heart beat; fell. Quite sorry, but said, “A true sign of passion.”'

The mid- to late-seventeenth century was a time of steady, if unsure, progress towards a better understanding of sex. For one thing, the completely new concept of young married couples living together in a dwelling exclusively their own began to develop in Europe as the norm. It cannot be a coincidence that the word ‘orgasm' begins at the same time to be used in its present Oxford English Dictionary sense of ‘the height of venereal excitement in coition'. The English physician Nathaniel Highmore re-coined the term
‘orgasmum
from the Greek around 1660. The first manifestation in English of plain ‘orgasm' is in the translation of a 1684 book by a Swiss physician, Théophile Bonet: ‘When there appears an orgasm of the humours, we rather fly to bleeding as more safe.' It was not until 1771, however, according to the OED, that a writer called T. Percival, mentions something more unambiguously sexual, ‘a kind of nervous orgasm, or spasm on the vitals'.

Even before orgasm had its own name, it was seen as a problem
in women. In 1653, Pieter van Foreest, a prominent Dutch doctor, published a medical compendium with a chapter on the diseases of women. For the affliction commonly called hysteria (‘womb disease') he advised that a midwife massage the genitalia with one finger inside the vagina, using oil of lilies or similar as lubrication. In this way, van Foreest said, the afflicted woman can be aroused to ‘the paroxysm'. This form of therapeutic masturbation for frustrated women was not a new ‘treatment', but a revival of the finger ‘stimulation' first recommended, as we saw earlier, by Galen for widows, the chaste and nuns, and periodically mentioned again every few hundred years. In 1660, however, Highmore summed up the problem of the considerate male lover through the ages when he likened genital massage to ‘that game of boys in which they try to rub their stomachs with one hand and pat their heads with the other'.

A midwife, Jane Sharp, in her 1671
The Midwives Book
, one of dozens of supposed midwifery guides (more likely pornography) published in the full flush of liberated, Restoration London, wrote of the clitoris: ‘It will stand and fall as the yard [penis] doth and makes women lustful and take delight in copulation.' A Danish physician, Caspar Bartholin, similarly explained in his
Anatomy
of the same period that the clitoris is ‘the female yard or prick … [which] resembles a man's yard in situation, substance, composition, repletion with spirits, and erection'. The Dutch anatomist Regnier de Graaf, writing again in the same decade, argued: ‘If those parts of the pudendum [the clitoris and labia] had not been supplied with such delightful sensation of pleasure and of such great love, no woman would be willing to undertake for herself such a troublesome pregnancy of nine months.' The English surgeon, William Cowper, in his
Anatomy of Humane Bodies
(1698), shows the clitoris for the first time as a distinct organ – a reference that was mysteriously missing again in early-twentieth-century editions of
Gray's Anatomy
.

In 1684, the first practical sex manual was published anonymously in London, entitled
Aristotle's Masterpiece, or the Secrets of Generation Displayed in All Parts Thereof
. Neither a masterpiece nor anything to do with Aristotle, it was a bestseller for over a century. Besides advice on pregnancy and so on, it also strongly advocated foreplay and promoted male stimulation of the clitoris, stating that, ‘blowing the coals of these amorous fires' pleased women.
Aristotle's Masterpiece
remained the definitive ‘dirty book' of the next hundred years or more, a volume young men with only limited interest in gynaecology and obstetrics would study in private out of sheer academic interest.

A tide of basic smut too, not all of it necessarily progressive, accompanied the Restoration. Visual pornography from Europe began to appear for the first time – the home-grown product did not generally start to be produced until the next century. There are exceptions: an example of engraved English porn from the 1660s shows a plume of female public hair being worn by a man in his hat. For the moment, however, most British porn was literary. The Earl of Rochester in a 1680 collection,
Poems on Several Occasions
, wrote colourfully of ‘… the common fucking post / On whom each whore, relieves her tingling cunt / As hogs on gates do rub themselves and grunt'. In his
The Imperfect Enjoyment
of the same year, he attested to what appears to be his own premature ejaculation:

But whilst her busy hand would guide that part

Which should convey my soul up to her heart
,

In liquid raptures I dissolve all o'er
,

Melt into sperm, and spend at every pore
.

A touch from any part of her had done't: Her

hand, her foot, her very look's a cunt

And here is John Donne, from a rather more elevated literary stance, in ‘To His Mistress Going to Bed':

Licence my roving hands, and let them go

Before, behind, between, above, below
.

O my America, my new found land
,

My kingdom, safeliest when with one man manned
,

My mine of precious stones, my empery
,

How blessed am I in this discovering thee!

To enter in these bonds, is to be free;

Then where my hand is set, my seal shall be
.

One of the most interesting literary contributions to the history of the orgasm in Restoration England comes from an extraordinary woman named Aphra Behn. Before becoming the first female professional writer, Behn was an English spy, code-named Agent 160, and is also believed later to have been James II's mistress. Not surprisingly, given her background, Behn's great fascination was with the interdependence between sex and power, of both of which she had her fill in her intriguing life. So Behn it was who wrote the first female complaint against impotence in her poem ‘The Disappointment'.

…
The willing Garments by he laid
,

And Heav'n all open to his view;

Mad to possess, himself he threw

On the defenceless lovely Maid
.

But oh! what envious Gods conspire

To snatch his Pow'r, yet leave him the Desire!

He Curst his Birth, his Fate, his Stars
,

But more the Shepherdesses Charms;

Whose soft bewitching influence
,

Had Damn'd him to the Hell of Impotence
.

Despite such advances for the cause of female sexuality, male masturbation remained a thoroughly awkward subject during the Restoration period, even in prematurely liberated Holland. In 1677 a Dutch microscopist, Anton van Leeuwenhoek,
discovered sperm while examining a human semen sample. But how was he to explain where he obtained the guilty material? Leeuwenhoek carefully noted: ‘What I describe was not obtained by any sinful contrivance … but the observations were made upon the excess with which nature provided me in my conjugal relations.' It was not for another century that Lazzaro Spallanzani, a priest and scientist worked out the role of ‘spermatic worms'. He made oilskin ‘trousers' for male frogs which allowed them to mount females in time-honoured fashion, but not for their sperm to escape. The females remained unfertilised. When Spallanzani took some of the sperm collected in the trousers and mixed them with the females' eggs, they were fertilised.

Less helpfully in this same generally progressive era, scientists were discovering (or rather substantiating their preexisting prejudices) that women did not need an orgasm to conceive and concluding that it was best after all if the female sex remained passive during intercourse. As Thomas Laqueur has pointed out of this movement, Westerners, ‘no longer linked the loci of pleasure with the mysterious infusing of life into Nature'. Or as Emma Dickens put it in her book
Immaculate Contraception: The Extraordinary Story of Birth Control:
‘Out, for scientists, went the Medieval idea of women as lusty equals in sexual congress, and in came a limited and boring role for women. This is not a world of which Chaucer's Wife of Bath would have wanted to be a part at all.'

‘None of our wares e'er found a flaw, Self preservation's
Nature's law'

From an advertising jingle by Mrs Phillips,
an eighteenth-century condom wholesaler in London.

News did not travel fast in the middle of the second millennium. In 1740, nearly two hundred years after Mateo Colombo, the clitoris was ‘discovered' yet again, this time by a Swiss biologist, Albrecht von Halter. Von Halter observed how sexual feelings in women were focused on ‘… the entrance of the pudendum … When a woman, invited either by moral love, or a lustful desire of pleasure, admits the embraces of the male, it excites a convulsive constriction and attrition of the very sensitive and tender parts, which lie within the contiguity of the external opening of the vagina, after the same manner as we observed before of the male. When the clitoris grows erect and the blood is flushed into the woman's external and internal genitalia, the purpose is to raise the pleasure to the highest pitch.'

The eighteenth century in Europe, in terms of sheer crudity, was the bawdiest century of all, twentieth included. A mass response to the austere days of Oliver Cromwell, just a few decades earlier, the 1700s were in many ways the first 1960s. The eighteenth century saw the profoundest schism yet between those who regarded orgasm as a pleasure to be enjoyed whether or not one was attempting to reproduce – and those who subscribed to the old Christian morality, which continued to teach that orgasm was only morally acceptable within marriage, and then only if experienced with the intention of bringing about conception.

Christianity, too, was deeply divided on the issue of enjoyment of sex. The religion was so segmented into competing brands by now that it is impossible to speak for Christianity as a whole. But a comparison between the Catholics and the Puritans should suffice to show the variety of views now available. The Roman Catholic Church continued on its schizophrenic way; a suitable vignette to demonstrate how it was developing can be found in 1714 when the Church ended the confessional requirement that men name the women with whom they had fornicated. This was not exactly a liberalising move; the reason as we have seen was that it had been discovered that priests were using the information they were given as hot tips for partners with whom they could quietly commit their own sin of fornication.

The Puritans, surprisingly, in spite of Cromwell's sober legacy, were not especially anti-sex. They were pious and severe, but also highly sexed and quite sentimentally romantic. According to one scholar, D. Daniel, in a 1966 essay ‘Christian Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender', ‘Married sex was not only legitimate in the Puritan view; it was meant to be exuberant', and the Puritans ‘were not squeamish about it'. Even so, they still believed excessive desire was animal, and prayed before sex.

With the notable exception of the notorious seventeenth-century ‘Blue Laws' in New Haven, Connecticut, which
outlawed every form of pleasure and promoted public whippings, branding or execution for adulterers, and the Salem ‘witch' killings, the Puritans rejected the heartless joylessness of European Calvinism and condemned the Catholic ideal of virginity. Puritan sternness was often only a seemly mask for a mischievous, playful culture.

Most Puritans were, it is believed, good lovers. John Milton typified the Puritan world view. He was showily virtuous, but had a healthy, idealistic and romantic view of sex. His epic poem
Paradise Lost
Depicts Adam and Eve as romantic lovers; he despised St Augustine's woman-hating and miserable-ism, and even lobbied Parliament for modern, easy divorce. But the Amish people, whose frank sexuality is to this day expressed in the practice of
rumspringa
, the Pennsylvania Dutch word for ‘running around' (a period when teenagers are allowed to test to the limit the ‘Devil's Playground' outside their closed communities), provide the best example of the Puritans' dualistic, but generally permissive, attitude to sex.

After the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, however, the England of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, unlike the United States, was not remotely in the thrall of Puritanism. Despite having equally rejected the misogynies of Catholicism, it had, in most ways, become a bad place for women to live. The feminist writer Joan Smith explains that even respectable men were permitted to seduce servants and use prostitutes, and until 1774 in England it was legal for a man to place his wife in a lunatic asylum for any reason he chose. A legal decision of 1782 established that a husband could beat his wife with a stick so long as it was no thicker than his thumb. And a woman who at that time committed adultery would rarely or never see her children again. Even when the 1774 reform was passed by Parliament, Smith observes, locking up a wife (like Mr Rochester's ‘mad' first wife in
Jane Eyre)
was legal, and as late as 1840 a judge ruled that a man was still entitled to lock his wife up to prevent her running away with a lover.