Straight (23 page)

Medieval literature likewise testifies that sexual pleasure was much on people's minds. In Chaucer's “Miller's Tale,” a young and sexually vital wife named Alisoun, married to an old gullible carpenter, becomes a lust object for both the student Nicholas and the young clerk Absalom, whose machinations in trying to bed her drive the story. Drinking songs, poems, and other texts likewise show us that sex between women and men was valued as pleasure, above and beyond its reproductive potential or its role in marriage. In the famous collection of eleventh- and twelfth-century student songs and poems called the
Carmina Burana
is this little rhyme, famously set to music by Carl Orff:

Si puer cum puellula
moraretur in cellula,
felix coniunctio.
Amore succrescente,
pariter e medio
propulso procul taedio,
membris, lacertis, labiis.
If a boy and a girl
linger in a little room,
they make a happy union.
Love increases,
both find that boredom
is driven far away,
and an ineffable game is played
With legs, arms, lips.

 

In a sense, there were two worlds when it came to sexual activity. In the idealized world of the Church, sexual activity was to be avoided whenever possible and even the most correct penis-in-vagina intercourse was to be as dispassionate as possible. In the messy and necessarily pragmatic world of everyday men and women, on the other hand, few were able to live up to the religious standard and few seem to have tried. Medieval and Renaissance people, indeed, believed that women were if anything more lustful than men, and that they took great pleasure in penetrative sex. But just as there were strict limits on what sexual pleasures were legitimate, doxa was also firm about what women were supposed to find pleasurable in having sex with men.

A GIRL'S BEST FRIEND?

“They [women] receive pleasure from the motion of the seed that is in them,” tenth-century Muslim physician Ibn Sina (also known as Avicenna) wrote in a text that, in Latin translation, was a standard of Western medicine for centuries. “They receive pleasure from the motion of the man's seed in the mouth of the womb, descending from the womb.” Thirteenth-century Albertus Magnus claimed that women had more pleasure from sex than men, because women not only emitted their own semen but received the man's emission, while men merely got to discharge. Some also believed, after the classic opinions of Galen, that semen itself induced the urge for penetrative sex, “a serous, irritating humor that produces a most demanding itch in precisely that part of the body contrived by Nature to be hypersensitive to it.”[
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It could be argued, as indeed it has been, that male physicians described women as getting sexual pleasure from exactly what men
wanted them to enjoy. Certainly Ibn Sina's assertions didn't hurt the cause of male penetration any. But there was more to them than just self-service. Ibn Sina was, in some degree, merely telling the truth. Some women do enjoy, physically or psychologically or both, having a male partner ejaculate inside their vaginas. According to the humoral models of the era, it made perfect medical sense that they would. Semen, defined according to Aristotle and his colleagues, was literally the essence of life, a distilled form of the
pneuma
or breath. This made ejaculation both the most important part of any sexual act and the most potentially risky:
pneuma,
like blood, was a finite resource, and a man could suffer terribly if he lost too much. Being masculine, and composed of breath, semen had the qualities of heat and dryness, traits that the cool, dense, and wet female body tended to lack. The masculine body, being more “perfected” than the feminine, did not require infusions of these feminine characteristics, but feminine bodies benefited enormously from perfecting doses of masculine heat. Women derived pleasure from ejaculation because it literally put a good humor into them.

This proved a surprisingly long-lived idea. As late as 1928, British sex educator Marie Stopes made an only slightly modernized version of the same claim. She updated her imagery from a humoral system to a chemical one, but left the nature of the interaction conveniently vague when she claimed that female “hunger for nourishment in sex union is a true physiological hunger to be satisfied only by the supplying of the actual molecular substances lacked by her system.”[
8
] Again—still—on some semimystical, semibiological level, semen satisfied women.

Penile penetration and the ejaculation of semen into the vagina were therefore legitimate pleasures both for women and for men. But they could also be dangerous. Women who developed an unrestrained appetite for such pleasure could, it was believed, debilitate or even kill their men, draining them with relentless demand. “Of woman's unnatural, insatiable lust,” complained Richard Burton in the 1621
Anatomy of Melancholy,
“what country, what village doth not complain?” The fantasy of the insatiable destructive woman—femmes fatales, sirens, and “black widows” are all descended from this idea—got the better of the cultural imagination.[
9
] There is no evidence that
any community ever actually has found itself plagued by sex-mad women, and in any event there is also no evidence that repeated ejaculation does anything worse to men than to make them temporarily a bit dehydrated and tired. But facts were never the point of the specter of the draining, deadly, hypersexed woman. Even today, the image of the monstrous, devouring woman is brandished as a cautionary tale in movies and television and sometimes in real life: these are the voracious antiheroines of films like
Fatal Attraction
and find real-life echoes in the actions of murderers like Aileen Wuornos or Carolyn Warmus. In the hollows and hills of rural Appalachia, people still speak of “white-livered widows,” women whose “high nature” has killed several (usually younger) husbands, drained of their life force by the woman's inveterate hunger for sex.[
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]

The mix of approval, fear, and distaste are telling. Vaginal penetration and ejaculation were, as they still are, seen as good, legitimate acts in which both men and women take pleasure. But even when women desire what they're supposed to desire, and take their pleasure from male orgasm achieved through vaginal penetration, it is made very clear that too much desire is wrong, damaging, perhaps literally deadly. The underlying message that women and men alike are meant to take from these proclamations about women, pleasure, and semen is that women are supposed to want and like men's ejaculations and semen, but never more than the men do.

A NEED-TO-KNOW BASIS

As the middle class emerged, so did its own particular version of the rules of legitimate sex and pleasure centered on the married household, the nuclear family, and the generation of a limited number of well-bred, carefully educated children. It idealized marital sex simultaneously as a response to true love and as a solemn, quasicivic responsibility. Intercourse between married couples was to be deliberate, not spontaneous, a perfectly orchestrated joint undertaking of heads, hearts, and reproductive organs. Physician John Cowan, author of
Science of a New Life
(1897), earned the endorsement of leading feminists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton for his recommendation that couples enjoy a single, transcendently beautiful, extremely intentional sex act per carefully planned and much-wanted pregnancy.
This was surely a bit extreme, to say nothing of impractical—conception is not quite so predictable and reliable as all that. But virtually all middle-class sex writers of the nineteenth century counseled some version of this restrained, deeply domesticated, extremely purposeful sex life. Sex once or twice a week was considered quite enough. More frequent sex risked both the evils of sensuality and the disorder of bodily depletion.

For all its painstaking moderation, though, this domesticated sex life was also expected to provide pleasure, albeit not so much spontaneously shared as jointly curated. Properly reared women of the nineteenth-century middle classes were expected to have little in the way of spontaneous lust of their own, their sexual capacity theoretically laying dormant until marriage. At that point, it was up to the husband to educate his bride in the pleasures of the flesh; in an idealistic spirit, the novelist Balzac wrote in his 1826
Physiologie du marriage,
“The husband's self-interest, at least as much as his honor, prescribes that he never permit himself a pleasure which he has not the talent to make his wife desire.” Women were, if anything, more obligated than men. Writing in 1889, the doctor Henry G. Hanchett informed the wife that it was her “duty to her husband, her children and herself, to heartily enjoy with her husband sexual intercourse, and to keep herself in such condition that she may enjoy it.”[
11
] Middle-class sex between men and women was supposed to be simultaneously mutual and also a thing that “the man doeth and the woman suffereth.”

For those who followed these guidelines, they were simultaneously a way of demonstrating class identity, a way to help shape society, and a way of defending themselves and their families against the deviance that seemed to threaten from all sides. Nobility and the extremely wealthy were viewed as poisonously decadent and self-indulgent, while the working classes were commonly stereotyped as cheap sensualists who lacked either refinement or self-restraint. The poor were brutes and primitives who could do no better and often did much worse. In the United States particularly, there was an additional racial element to these distinctions. African Americans were stereotyped as not merely lacking middle-class sexual restraint and the habit of experiencing refined emotions, but as being incapable of them. The carefully regulated sexual lives of the white middle classes
were part of their careful buffer against the terrifying prospect of social and racial disorder.

Science was to be their ally in this effort. The nineteenth-century boom in academic, scientific, and popular commentary on sex was something genuinely new. To the early Enlightenment, sexual urges had been considered hardly different from the needs to urinate, defecate, or eat. But the world had changed, and so had the perception of the sexual instinct. In the nineteenth century it had become an all-powerful force, “a most powerful influence,” as Dr. Frederick Hollick put it in 1885, “upon both individual action and upon the destinies of nations.”[
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]

SHARED PLEASURES

This “most powerful influence” required a substantial anchor for safety's sake, and that anchor was the middle-class family. In the second half of the nineteenth century, one of the forms this took was the dramatic expansion of the literature on sex intended for the nonspecialist, nonmedical audience. Although there were exceptions, like the famous
Aristotles Master Piece
, which appeared first in 1684 and ran to some twenty-seven editions by the 1830s, sex manuals intended for a general readership were few and far between prior to the nineteenth-century explosion of both print and literacy. The increasing role of print in daily life in the later nineteenth century, however, met the new desire for sex information and education head on, with the result that dozens of physicians and other biomedical experts—a group that admittedly incorporated some we might not include today, like phrenologist Orson Fowler—leapt into print with books that aimed to teach the middle classes how to conduct a “scientific” and proper sex life.

Increasingly these doctors and others acknowledged, as influential Philadelphia physician and author George Napheys did in his 1871
The Physical Life of Woman,
that most women had sexual feelings. These were, they emphasized, entirely compatible with propriety, dignity, and, if channeled through the legitimizing conduits of true love and marriage, even with spiritual and social respectability. The jewel in the crown of a companionate marriage, these late Victorians preached, was mutually crafted, mutually satisfying sexual pleasure.

This represented something of a sea change for the Western approach to marriage. The official acceptance of eroticism for its own sake was, in the face of thousands of years of procreation-focused copulation, fairly radical. So was the idea that the quality of marital sex for both spouses actually mattered to the marriage itself. As attitudes shifted, good sex started to signify better marriages, healthier offspring, greater longevity, and a better quality of life. But what exactly was “good sex”? And more to the point, how did one go about having it?

These were, as was immediately apparent, questions primarily about women. Male sexuality was viewed as transparent. Even Havelock Ellis, that inexhaustible chronicler of all things sexual, dismissed the male sex drive in a single sentence in his 1904
Studies in the Psychology of Sex: Analysis of the Sexual Impulse:
“[T]o deal with it broadly as a whole seems unnecessary, if only because it is predominantly open and aggressive.”[
13
] Although impotence occasionally became an issue for men, their sexual functioning and pleasure were an otherwise foregone conclusion. Men did not have a problem attaining sexual pleasure; they only had a problem resisting the impulses to have too much of it or get it in illicit ways. It was women whose bodies, impulses, and responses were the part of the picture of “good sex” that was changing.

This, however, changed sex for men: there was, formally and officially, more on their plates than just looking after their own pleasure. With the acknowledgment that women felt sexual desire and pleasure came the assertion that they should be feeling more of it. But women could not be expected to know how to do this all by themselves. Their husbands were to be their teachers in the school of love, and this was not necessarily easy. “To gain real possession of a woman's soul and body,” Havelock Ellis wrote, required “the whole of a man's best skill and insight.”[
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]

The situation was not made much easier by the fact that while the “repeal of reticence” allowed more open discussion about ideals of pleasurable marital sex, it didn't permit much more in the way of detailing actual technique. Sexologists and sex advisors waxed rapturous about the shared joys and benefits of properly conducted intercourse, and the destination of mutual orgasm—simultaneous mutual orgasm
if it could be managed—was clear. But the map by which one was to get there was vague. Even after the turn of the century had yielded to the notorious permissiveness of the Jazz Age, instructional descriptions rarely got much more graphic than this excerpt from Dr. Walter Robie's 1922
Sex Histories:
“A long sequence of endearments and gentle caresses, and final specific manipulation of nipples and clitoris, and perhaps adjacent structures, to produce the overwhelming erotic feelings and the free flow of precoital mucus which are necessary to make coitus mutually pleasurable and simultaneously climactic, both of which are necessary if it is to be scientifically correct.”[
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]