Kate Lister - A Curious History of Sex

Sex is one of the great universal levellers; to paraphrase Geoffrey Rush’s Marquis de Sade, ‘we eat, we sleep, we shit, we fuck and we die’. {1} 1 Philip Kaufman, Quills (Fox Searchlight, 2000). Desire cuts across boundaries of culture, gender and class. It cares little for our ‘rules’ and, as anyone who has ever been caught with their pants down will tell you, it cares even less for common sense. Of course, humans do far more than eating, shitting and fucking – our intellect is what really sets us apart from the beasts. And herein lies the problem. To say that humans have overthought sex is something of an understatement.

All life on this planet shares the desire to reproduce, but what makes humans unique are the infinitely complex and varied ways we seek to gratify our sexual desires. In Forensic and Medico-legal Aspects of Sexual Crimes and Unusual Sexual Practices (2008), Professor Anil Aggrawal listed 547 different paraphilic sexual interests, and noted that ‘like allergies, sexual arousal may occur from anything under the sun, including the sun’. {2} 2 Anil Aggrawal, Forensic and Medico-legal Aspects of Sexual Crimes and Unusual Sexual Practices (Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2008), p. 369. And, in case you’re wondering, sexual arousal caused by the sun is called ‘actirasty’.

Humans are also the only creatures that stigmatise, punish and create shame around their sexual desires. While all animals have courtship rituals, no wildebeest has ever gone into therapy because it’s struggling to express a latex fetish. The queen honeybee will shag up to forty partners in one session, return to her hive dripping in semen and clutching the severed cocks of her conquests, and not one drone will call her a slut. Male baboons will happily bugger each other all day long and never fear being sent to a gay conversion camp. Yet the guilt we humans feel around our desires can be paralysing, and severe punishments have been doled out to those who break ‘the rules’.

Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez once wrote that ‘everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life and a secret life’. {3} 3 Gerald S. Martin, Gabriel Garcia Márquez: A Life (London: Bloomsbury, 2009), p. 205. Paradoxically, our secret life is us at our most honest. We force this honest piece of ourselves into secrecy because the systems we have created have rendered it incompatible with our public and private lives. In an effort to control this secret part of ourselves, humans turned sex into a moral issue and developed complex social structures to regulate our urges. We invented categories to try to control it: gay, straight, monogamous, virginal, promiscuous, etc. But sexuality does not fit neatly into man-made boxes; it spills over, and that’s when things get messy. When we try to suppress our desire, it becomes a fault line running underneath our structures of morality, ethics and decency. But when the pink mist descends, people will still risk the earthquake to have an orgasm.

The act of sex itself has not changed since we first worked out what went where. Penises, tongues and fingers have been probing mouths, vulvas and anuses in search of an orgasm since humans first crawled out of the primordial sludge. What does change is the social script that dictates how sex is culturally understood and performed. For example, according to Pornhub, the largest pornography site on the internet, ‘lesbian’ has remained the number one search term used on their site worldwide since they first launched in 2007. In the Netherlands, ‘lesbian’ searches on Pornhub were up by 45 per cent in 2018 from 2016. {4} 4 2018 Review, ‘2018 Year in Review – Pornhub Insights’, Pornhub , 2018 < https://www.pornhub.com/insights/2017-year-in-review > [Accessed 29 September 2018]. So, it’s fair to say that the Dutch are giving lesbian sex a big thumbs up. However, they have not always been so appreciative of V-on-V love. Between 1400 and 1550, fifteen women were burned alive in the Netherlands as ‘female sodomites’. {5} 5 Jonas Roelens, ‘Visible Women: Female Sodomy in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Southern Netherlands (1400–1550)’, BMGN – Low Countries Historical Review , 130.3 (2015), 3 < https://doi.org/10.18352/bmgn-lchr.10101 >. Those who were not put to death still faced severe punishments. In 1514, Maertyne van Keyschote and Jeanne van den Steene of Bruges were both publicly flogged, had their hair burned off, and were banished from the city for the having committed ‘a certain great kind of the unnatural sin of sodomy with several young girls’. {6} 6 Ibid. Six hundred years later, ‘the unnatural sin of sodomy with several young girls’ is the most watched porn category among the descendants of the same people who thought it reasonable to chuck lesbians on a bonfire.

Pornhub searches for ‘porn for women’ were up by 359 per cent in 2018, with women viewing lesbian pornography 197 per cent more often than men did in the same year. This would have come as quite a shock to Dr William Acton (1813–1875), who claimed that ‘the majority of women (happily for them) are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind’. {7} 7 William Acton, The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs in Childhood, Youth, Adult Age, and Advanced Life (London: John Churchill, 1857), p. 101. And what the Sunday Express editor James Douglas (1867–1940) would have made of all this is anyone’s guess. In 1928, Douglas attacked Radclyffe Hall’s landmark lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness , writing, this ‘pestilence is devastating the younger generation. It is wrecking young lives. It is defiling young souls.’ Douglas urged society to ‘cleans[e] itself from the leprosy of these lepers’. {8} 8 James Douglas, ‘A Book That Must be Suppressed’ in Palatable Poison: Critical Perspectives on The Well of Loneliness, ed. by Laura L. Doan and Jay Prosser (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), pp. 10–11. And yet here we are, ninety years later, with millions of women around the world jilling off to such ‘pestilence’ with our leprous souls intact. What a time to be alive.

This is a book about how attitudes to sex have changed throughout history. It is the curious history of sex and some of the things we have done to ourselves and to each other in the pursuit (and denial) of the almighty orgasm. This is not a comprehensive study of every sexual quirk, kink and ritual across all cultures throughout time, as that would entail writing an encyclopaedia. Rather, this is a drop in the ocean, a paddle in the shallow end of sex history, but I hope you will get pleasantly wet nonetheless. I have tried to choose subjects that provide valuable context for issues today, particularly issues of gender, sexual shame, beauty, language, and how desire has been regulated. I have chosen subjects that are close to my heart, such as the history of sex work, deeply emotive subjects, such as abortion, and also subjects that made me laugh, like ‘cocklebread’ and orgasming on a bicycle. Although it is easy to laugh at the silly things people have believed throughout history, and I hope you do, it is far more valuable to see how similar we are to people who have gone before us and question our own beliefs as a result. Sex remains a deeply divisive issue around the world, and in many places is a matter of life and death. These attitudes will turn and turn again – hopefully for the better. But we will never arrive at a place where sex is free of stigma and shame unless we first know where we have come from.