The Guide to Getting It On (149 page)

The Bigger Issues of Birth Control—Then vs. Now

At the beginning of the 1800s, it was beyond the consciousness of Americans to believe that they could have control over any aspect of their health. Life was fragile. Even if a loved one was healthy, death could whisk him or her away at the snap of a finger. So how could you possibly control something as profound as when you became pregnant? It’s hard to imagine today, but the concept of birth control required a shift in consciousness in the early part of the 1800s.

Pregnancy had always been a concern for most women, but the option to do something about it didn’t arrive in America until the 1800s. Before then, there was no difference between sex for pleasure and sex for pregnancy.

The option to use birth control was not welcomed by all women. Many of the feminists during the 1800s worried that contraception would rob women of the one effective reason they had for saying “no” to sex—because they didn’t want to become pregnant. And men in the 1800s had to digest the idea that if their wives could have sex without becoming pregnant, what would keep them faithful? What would keep their daughters chaste?

Both males and females who were social purity crusaders accused women who advocated for the right to control the size of their families as being proponents of free love. Politicians accused middle- and upper-class women who used birth control of committing race suicide. Yet America’s Protestant ministers—the very people who you would expect to be opposed to birth control—seldom spoke out against it.

Our concerns about birth control today are much different than they were in the 1800s. They center around cost, convenience, effectiveness and side effects. The bigger moral and philosophical issues were for our ancestors in the 1800s to work out.

Technology and the Presses of Satan—The Birth of Modern Pornography

The 1800s saw the birth of America’s first anti-obscenity laws. Anti-obscenity laws don’t just drop from the skies. There needs to be enough indecency floating around to create a fuss, and it needs to have inserted itself far enough into the mainstream to be seen by more than its intended audience. During the 1800s, these conditions were easily met and exceeded many times over. The term “flaunted” would not be an exaggeration.

(Recently, a person with a controversial past and a penchant for media attention tried to open a brothel in Nevada. It would have male prostitutes for female customers. The other brothel owners in Nevada were upset about this, because they feared the publicity would motivate a movement to shut down all of the legal brothels in Nevada. These brothel owners were acutely aware of something that the commercial sex industry in America during the 1800s had no clue about—that “vice” is usually tolerated as long as the citizens are allowed to turn a blind eye to it. It seldom matters whether the sexual “vice” is prostitution, pornography, cross-dressing or homosexual enjoyment, as long as the public isn’t forced to trip over it.)

Leaps in technology during the nineteenth century helped it become the temporal birthplace of pornography as we know it today.

First came the modernization of the printing press and new printing technologies. This allowed cost-effective print runs that could be tailored to fit the mass markets for mainstream porn and smaller niche markets for the kinky stuff. Then followed the technology that allowed paper to be made by machine. Before that, sheets of paper were crafted by hand. Handmade paper was often scarce and expensive.

And you can’t call it pornography if it isn’t captured in a camera’s lens. The invention of the photograph in 1839 and the ability to mass produce it by the 1860s not only made the Kodak moment possible, but helped put the N in nasty. Finally, there was the invention of the moving picture in 1877, and the ability to show it to large audiences in 1895.

Pornography that has survived from the 1800s is amazingly explicit and shows most of the same sexual acts that pornography does today. As for written erotica, here are just a few of hundreds of titles that were popular in the 1800s. Some of these titles were best-sellers:

Amorous Adventures of Lola Montes

Aristotle’s Master-Piece (an explicit how-to that saw many incarnations)

Awful Disclosures by Maria Monk, of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal

Confessions of a Sofa

Curiositates Eroticæ Physiologiæ; or, Tabooed Subjects Freely Treated. In Six Essays, viz.: 1. Generation. 2. Chastity and Modesty. 3. Marriage. 4. Circumcision. 5. Eunuchism. 6. Hermaphrodism, and followed by a closing Essay on Death.

Exhibition of Female Flagellants, in the Modest & Incontinent World, Proving from indubitable Facts that a number of Ladies take a secret Pleasure in whipping their own, and Children committed [sic] to their care, and that their Passion for exercising and feeling the Pleasure of a Birch-Rod, from Objects of their Choice of both Sexes, is to the full as Predominant as that of Mankind.

Fanny Greeley: Confessions of a Free-love Sister

Marie de Clairville; or, The Confessions of a Boarding School Miss

Male Generative Organs

Physiology of the Wedding Night

Romance of Chastisement; or Revelations of the School and Bedroom. By an Expert.

Scenes in a Nunnery

Six Months in a Convent

The Amours of a Musical Student: being A Development of the Adventures and Love Intrigues of A Young Rake, with Many Beautiful Women. Also Showing The Frailties of the Fair Sex, and their Seductive Powers.

The Amours of Sainfroid and Eulalia: being the intrigues and amours of a Jesuit and a Nun; developing the Progress of Seduction of a highly educated young lady, who became, by the foulest Sophistry and Treachery, the Victim of Debauchery and Libertinism

The Bridal Chamber, and its Mysteries: or, Life at Our Fashionable Hotels.

The California Widow; or Love, Intrigue, Crimes, & Fashionable Dissipation.

The Child of Nature; or, the History of a Young Lady of Luxurious Temperament and Prurient Imagination, ….

The Intrigues and Secret Amours of Napoleon

The Lady in Flesh Coloured Tights

The Marriage Bed—Wedding Secrets Revealed by the Torch of Hymen

The Wanton Widow

The Lustful Turk

Venus’ Album; or, Rosebuds of Love

Oral Sex in Another Time

In the 1800s, the medical experts of the day claimed that oral sex was an unnatural act because a woman couldn’t become pregnant from it. However, oral sex was present in pornographic photos from the nineteenth century and it was no stranger to the erotic literature of the day, where it was sometimes referred to as “gamahuching.” This rolls off the tongue as smoothly as “cunnilingus” and “fellatio,” which begs the question of how things that feel so good can sound so bad.

As for cunnilingus, references to it appear in nineteenth century erotic literature and in pornographic photos as well. Woman-to-woman oral sex was one of the favorites in the live sex-shows. If a man paid to watch one woman give another oral sex, it seems that he might be inclined to try it on a woman himself, if he was allowed the opportunity.

Unlike today, a man in the 1800s who wanted to receive oral sex from a prostitute needed to find a brothel or a girl with a reputation for giving it. The buzz words to look for were “French,” “French talents,” “French-house,” “unnatural practices” and “indecent dances and dinners.” This means that when a man encountered a prostitute with the name “French Blanche LeCoq” or “French Marie,” he was safe to ask for oral sex, especially if she spoke with a Midwestern accent.

In New Orleans’s famous red-light district of Storyville, there was a brothel known as Diana and Norma’s. This was a so-called French house, which means that fellatio was the specialty. Because blow jobs were all that Diana and Norma’s offered, the rooms could be smaller (they didn’t have to fit a bed) and the men didn’t need to take off their shoes and pants. Due to the faster turnover and smaller space, Diana and Norma’s was able to take advantage of the economies of scale and offer oral sex for the same price as intercourse. This was unusual during the 1800s, when blow jobs were considered kinky sex and usually cost more.

The best known “French House” in Storyville was that of Mme. Emma Johnson, who called herself the “Parisian Queen of America.” Rather than being born in Paris or Versailles, French Emma was a native of Louisiana’s Bayou country. Her oral skills were so renowned that even though she was notoriously long in the tooth, she offered a “sixty-second plan” where any man who could handle more than a minute of her ministrations without ejaculating did not have to pay. Emma Johnson’s brothel offered more than oral sex, including live sex circus shows where the male performer had a mane, four legs, hooves and a tail. (It goes without saying he was hung like a horse.)

In his 1961 interview with former Storyville prostitutes, author Al Rose recorded the following words of a black woman who had worked out of a small row house known as a crib:

“Mos’ly for plain fuckin’ on a weekday night, I use’ t’ get twenny-fi’ cent. Ten cents in d’ daytime. We chawged fifty cent, mos’ alway fo’ suckin’ off and’ seven’y-fi cent fo’ lettin’ d’ prick come in our ass.... Good weeks I could take fo’ty dolluh, Big money dem days... Dey [black men] come fo’ fuckin’. Dat’s all day hawdly done. White boys?... Shit! Dey come fo’ everyt’in’ else. Mos’ly dey come fo’ suckin’ off. Sometime’ dey come fo’, fi’, six at one time, all jam in dat po’ li’l crib an’ pay me a dime to let ‘em watch me suck ‘em. Shit! Carrie don’ caiah!” —From
Storyville, New Orleans: an Authentic, Illustrated Account of the Nortorious Red Light District
by Al Rose, University of Alabama Press, (1978).

Another Storyville prostitute interviewed by Rose was proud to recall that the madam of the house she worked in required the girls to give oral sex only when they were menstruating. She was disgusted to say that at some of the brothels, the women didn’t do much else but give oral sex all of the time!

(Beginning in 1933, the American Social Health Association began doing a survey of the kind of sex acts that were requested of prostitutes. Only 10% of the requests in 1933 were for sex acts other than intercourse. By the end of the 1960s, nine out of ten requests of prostitutes were for oral sex or a combination of oral sex and intercourse.)

As for oral sex in New York City, during the 1880s there were a dozen brothels in close proximity to the newly-opened Metropolitan Opera House. Since a number of these brothels were “French-run,” it is likely that the prostitutes performed arias the likes of which these opera goers had never known. Anti-vice investigators reported that because the girls in these French-run houses performed oral sex, other prostitutes would not associate or eat with them. But it is unlikely that one group of prostitutes cared about the sexual talents of another. If there was rivalry, it was for other reasons.

The Great Masturbation Panic

With many wonderful puns that were not lost on readers in the 1800s, Charles Dickens’ famous novel
Oliver Twist
(1837-1839) refers often to the male body and its sexual maturation. Consider the following passage:

“I suppose you don’t even know what a prig is?” said the Dodger mournfully.

“I think I know that,” replied Oliver, looking up. “It’s a th—you’re one, are you not?“ inquired Oliver, checking himself.

“I am,“ replied the Dodger. “I’d scorn to be anything else.” Mr. Dawkins gave his hat a ferocious cock, after delivering this sentiment, and looked at Master Bates, as if to denote that he would feel obliged by his saying anything to the contrary.

The word “Prig,” which was a term for thief, sounds very close to the word “frig” which was a well-known slang word for masturbation. Then we have a “ferocious cock” which is followed by “Master Bates.” The puns and references to masturbation keep getting better, as Master Bates produces four handkerchiefs to clean up the mess that his name suggests will occur.

In spite of masturbation being well known and practiced in the 1800s, a serious anti-masturbation panic arose in the middle of the century. There are many reasons why masturbation started being described as such an evil at that time. One factor was the creation of the modern insane asylum in the early 1800s. The physicians at these harsh facilities discovered that patients often masturbated. Instead of viewing masturbation as one of the few pleasures that inmates of these dungeon-like asylums could give themselves, physicians published scientific articles claiming that masturbation had caused the insanity of the poor wretches who were under their care. In other words, the patients had masturbated themselves into the looney bins.