The Guide to Getting It On (146 page)

W
hen people ask why I wrote this book on sex, I usually say it was revenge for eight years in Catholic school. But even before I went to school, I had started to appreciate the influence of religion on people’s lives—both good and bad.

One of my earliest memories as a child was being at a holy-roller revival in a big tent with people waving their arms in the air and begging the Lord to save their souls. (Our family wasn’t evangelical, but the baby-sitter was.) Later, as a teenager, I would revisit the revivals out of curiosity.

Revivals were like the circus. They rolled into town for a couple of days, and then rolled out in the dark of night. The county where we lived was poor, so it was interesting to see the Evangelists arrive in shiny new Cadillacs.

At what seemed like a pre-arranged moment during the revival, one of the women who had arrived in one of the new Caddys would start screaming that she’d had inoperable cancer and had been saved by Jesus. She would then crawl up the aisle to the collection basket, waving serious amounts of cash as she wept and wailed. Sometimes the preacher would lay his hands on her and she would faint, other times not. On the second night of the revival, at the very same moment, this same woman would be wearing a different colored wig and would scream that the Lord had saved her from the ravages of alcoholism and sexual excess. Again, with big bills in each hand. Many in the audience followed, admitting to their own transgressions of the flesh, and asking that Satan be cast from their souls.

The most important thing that I learned at the revivals wasn’t that they were well-planned and well-orchestrated. Rather, it was their impact on the people who went to them. Even to my young self, I could see how these events put hope into the lives of people who didn’t have much. It’s where they went to confess and be saved, until the next time.

Maybe that’s why people would show up at those revival tents and wave their arms in the air and not notice that the woman who started the parade of bill-waving sinners was a ringer from the bank of the preacher. I didn’t know then—and I still don’t know—if that was such a bad thing. It’s hard for any of us to live our lives without hope.

As for my own personal experience with religion and hope, there was a radio evangelist by the name of Brother Popoff who I sometimes listened to on the all-night radio station that beamed up from Mexico. He was on after The Wolfman. If you sent him money, he promised to send you a special prayer cloth. So I taped some dimes and quarters to a card, and sent him what I had.

A few weeks later, a piece of red cloth arrived in the mail. It was about one-foot square, with no seams on the sides. The accompanying note said for me to lay it over anything that was troubling me. So I went to bed every night with that red prayer cloth tucked inside the front of my briefs.

I never did see much of a dividend, but then again, not too many people go on to write 1,184-page books on sex.

CHAPTER

74

Sex in the 1800s

W
hat? The longest chapter in Goofy Foot history is on sex in the 1800s? Perhaps that is because sex in the 1800s was fascinating. So fascinating that the authors of America’s definitive text on sexual health included this chapter in their four-volume set.

So if you bought
The Guide
to learn how to give better oral sex, you might want to turn to the first half of this book. But if you want to see how Americans enjoyed sex during our nation’s own adolescence, you’ve struck it rich.

In the pages that follow, you will discover how prostitution was a vital part of American culture long before men and women started dating. Time and technology would need to intervene for dating to evolve.

If you had been a young man in the 1800s, you might have had sex with prostitutes on a weekly basis. And unlike today’s teenager who works at the mall or at Burger King, if you were a 16-year-old working-class girl in the 1800s, you most likely would have been a maid or seamstress who worked 60 hours a week for pennies a day, or you may have turned tricks in a brothel.

In this chapter, you will also learn about the birth of pornography as we know it today, about condoms that only covered the head of a man’s penis, and about oral sex in the century of the Civil War.

Best of all, learning about sex in the 1800s will help you have a better perspective on sex today, and that is one of the things this book is about.

Many of the facts and perspectives used in the pages that follow are from the authors listed below. Without their efforts, we would know little about the incredible richness of America’s sexual landscape in the 1800s:

Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Timothy Gilfoyle, Elizabeth Haven Hawley, Janet Farrel Brodie, Andrea Tone, Al Rose, James Morone, Sharon Ullman, Alecia Long, David Nasaw, Lewis Erenberg, George Chauncey, Alan Brandt, Anne Seagraves, Ruth Rosen, John & Robin Haller, Karen Lystra, Thomas Lowry Patricia Cohen, John Donald Gustav-Wrathall, Mark Carnes, William Cohen, Elizabeth Reis, Jan MacKell, Anne Butler, James Kincaid and Angus Maclaren.

Bicycle Seats or Live Sex Shows?

There are all kinds of ways to learn about sex, from downloading porn on the Internet to taking your clothes off with someone you love. Each lights up a different part of your brain and feeds a different part of your curiosity.

Of all the ways to learn about sex, the chances are excellent that you’ve never read about the ways our forefathers and foremothers did it in the 1800s. This chapter invites you into a lovemaking time machine. You’ll get to look at how our great-great-great-grandparents got it on when they were young.

Just like today, sex in the 1800s had its contradictory ups and downs. For example, let’s take a brief look at two things that you wouldn’t think would be happening in the same century at the same time: live sex shows and concerns about women on bicycle seats.

Live Sex Shows
If watching live sex shows is what turns you on, it was much easier to find one in the 1800s than it is now. Consider The Busy Fleas, a trio of young women who made up one of New York’s City’s most famous live sex shows. For $5, you could stand close by and watch the three Fleas get very busy, sexually speaking. Unlike today, there were no windows to look through or booths to enter, and no one carded you at the door. You would watch the girls give each other oral sex, do themselves with dildos, place cigars in their vaginas and rectums, suck on each others’ breasts, and lick freshly poured beer off of one anothers’ vulvas while their legs were tucked behind their necks. At the show’s conclusion, you might be one of the lucky audience members who would get to have sex with one of the performers while the other men in the audience watched and cheered you on. As sexually explicit as this might sound, the Busy Fleas sex show was tame and downright virginal when compared to the live “Sex Circus” shows at Emma Johnson’s Brothel in Storyville, the legal red-light district of New Orleans.

Concerns about Women and Bicycle Seats
At the same time that there were explicit live sex shows, America’s professional journals were waiving flags of caution about American women who were starting to ride bicycles. A number of feminists and medical experts were concerned that the shape of the bicycle seat would leave America’s women sexually aroused. They cautioned that the bicycle seat would promote “libidinousness and immorality” in the fairer sex, and that raising a leg in public to get on a bicycle might scandalize a woman of the better classes.

So how do you judge sexuality in America during the 1800s—hardcore live sex shows or concerns about bicycle seats for adult women? For that matter, how do you judge it today—abstinence-only sex education or porn-filled Websites on the Internet? Perhaps it’s a bit of both.

“Evil Is Generally Sniffable, Don’t You Think?”

Disagreements among the American people about what is and isn’t sexually acceptable go back a long way. Consider the following two newspaper reviews from 1896 about a live performance that took place in one of America’s popular burlesque halls. While these are reviews of the exact same performance, it would be hard to find two perspectives that differ more, down to the descriptions of the performers’ legs.

The first review:

“I witnessed the performance of the Barrison Sisters and never saw an exhibition in any theatre more suggestive, lewd and indecent. It was disgraceful. The whole aim of these women seemed to be to excite the base emotions of the audience. Their dresses had been constructed with this one object in view, and all their motions were simply vicious and libidinous. Before the curtain went up the ten legs of these Barrisons could be seen by the audience under the edge of the curtain, indecently twisting and wriggling, as they sat upon the floor. This was designed to whet the appetite of the spectators. Then they came out and turned their backs to the audience, lifting up their dresses in a vulgar and indecent manner. Their underclothes had been specially made to excite the spectators, with many parts plain to the feminine eye... The Barrisons exert an immoral influence. A law ought to be passed putting a stop to such exhibitions, and I will make a recommendation of this kind to the Legislature this Winter.”
By feminist reformer Charlotte Smith, who, by the way, was no fan of the bicycle seat.

The second review:

“As Miss Lona Barrison appeared I began to sniff around for a little evil. (Evil is generally sniffable, don’t you think?) Where was her beauty? That was the first question I asked myself. A complexion like boiled veal and a figure that had neither symmetry nor grace of any sort.... After she had left the stage, without any attempt on the part of the defrauded audience to cheer her by applause, she returned with the five Barrison sisters. They showed us their legs first, for they sat with them poked out under the curtain. I like a leg or two occasionally, but it must be a leg in the true sense of the word. The spindle shanks that the Barrisons betrayed were so screamingly funny and so bewilderingly emaciated that I had hard work to keep in my seat. In fact, I don’t mind saying that the only things immoral about the Barrisons are their legs. They are an affront to symmetry. They should be sewn up in masses of petticoats and kept from an unfortunate public. Amputation would be justifiable.... And then the poor little Barrisons began to do what they had been taught to do for the delectation of imbeciles. They sat on the stage looking hopelessly ill at ease, and ridiculously cheap, and sang a vulgar but stupid song dealing with the physiology of generation. There was no tune to it, no metre to it, no rhythm to it, nothing latent, nothing chic, nothing clever.... The applause, like the letter, never came. Not a gleam of intelligence gleamed in their eyes. Not a wicked look was cast in any direction. Five little frumps tugging away at a cheap concert hall chason was all we saw. Such utter inanity made you feel that you might as well have left your brains at home.”
By Alan Dale, a journalist and popular critic.

While neither of these reviewers had a single kind thing to say about the performance, you would get a very different sense of sexual standards during the nineteenth century if you read only the first review and not the second.

Perhaps people in the 1800s were even more confused about sex than we are today—especially American women, given how large numbers of them were working in brothels while others were wondering what to do about bicycles. (By 1870, the second-largest industry in New York City was the selling of sex.) On the other hand, the mixed messages about sex may have seemed normal back then, just like they seem normal to us today when conservative TV networks and religious talk shows are just a click away from radio shock jocks and pay-per-view porn.