John Naish
Put What Where?
Over 2000 years of bizarre
sex advice

DEDICATION

Happiness is the true test. Never mind what books – including this one – say you should do. If you are happy, and your partner is too, leave well enough alone.

Eustace Chesser, Love Without Fear (1940)

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Preface

1 Introduction

2 Mankind’s First Manuals

3 Classical Gaffes

4 No Sex Please, We’re Medieval English

5 Bali High

6 Renaissance Renegades

7 Masturbation Mania

8 Carlile, the Contraceptive Convict

9 Drysdale’s Revolutionary Dream

10 Manual Martyrs

11 Kama Sutra Chameleon

12 Mr Sex in Sandals

13 American Duty

14 Sexual Pioneers

15 Edwardian Enjoyment

16 The World’s Dullest Sex Book

17 Ellis, the Impotent Icon

18 Scouting for Boys: Uncut

19 Trouble Down Under

20 Cult of the Virgin Marie

21 Van de Velde Record?

22 Buy Me and Stop One

23 Target for Tonight

24 Frigid Fifties

25 Saucy Sixties

26 Comfort and Joy

27 Sex as Lifestyle

Select Bibliography

Index

Also by the Author

Copyright

About The Publisher

PREFACE

This book is both a history of sex advice and a treasury of bizarre suggestions from throughout the ages. It is organized like a club sandwich. The historical chapters cover this strange world in chronological order, from 200 BC to the 1970s, and are interlayered with the cream of humankind’s oddest sex-advice quotes. These are grouped by topic and take you, stage-by-stage, through the whole gamut of love-making, from finding a partner through to sex, fetishes, afterplay and unfaithfulness. If you learn nothing else, please remember: never bite your partner’s eyeballs.

One
INTRODUCTION

Mating. Reproduction. The survival of the species. How much more crucial does it get?

You’d think homo sapiens would have sorted out that one pretty sharpish. But no. Since the start of civilization, human sex has been absurdly complicated by a steady dripfeed of self-appointed experts: moralists, pundits, visionaries, ju-ju men, zealots and learned academics – all claiming to know the magical secrets of lovemaking. And they were all prepared to sell their wisdom to you at a very reasonable price. Just as every generation likes to think it invented sexual intercourse, we also like to think we invented sex advice, or at least built it on a very limited number of predecessors: the Kama Sutra, maybe Marie Stopes’ 1918 Married Love and the 1970s The Joy of Sex. But in fact today’s maelstrom of lovemaking manuals, videos and DVDs has a far richer and more twisted heritage than that. The genre is way older than the novel, and takes us right back to an ancient Chinese tomb-hoard of books first written in 300 BC.

Every era has had its Dr Ruths dictating to us the correct way, the right place, the essential time, the appropriate shape, the perfect partner and, of course, the ultimate naughtiness. And what a proud parade: they feature, to mention but a few, Roman poets, medieval woman-haters, Victorian adventurers, astral travellers, gay sandal-makers, dope peddlers, racial-purity fanatics, wholewheat snack-makers, an impotent love guru, a divorced virgin and a toga-wearing erectophobe. If these self-appointed sexperts share one common characteristic, it’s a special strain of eccentricity. Along with the throng of plain charlatans came the freaks, geeks, dreamers, anarchists, rebels and lost souls who were so out of kilter with society that they felt driven to preach about a legally perilous subject in a manner almost guaranteed to offend those in authority, scandalize friends and families, and frequently land them behind bars.

One of their great motives was, as usual, power – the power to tell people what they should and should not do in their most private moments. But they were also driven by a streak of evangelism, the messianic eye-gleam of people convinced that they had found the sexual solution to life’s miseries. In many ways, the old advice books were not actually about sex itself, but alchemy: promising to reveal secret formulae for the perfect existence, the greatest happiness, and to open up a conduit to divine wisdom. Some even claimed that secret bouts of ritualistic congress could grant you magical powers and immortality.

Despite (or because of) this legion of advisors, sensible sex advice was a long time coming. It was only very recently that we finally learnt the precise mechanics of reproduction. This information gap didn’t stop the experts, though. They simply made it all up, using as their guide a hodge-podge of previous books, current fashion, a bit of fieldwork and their own deep personal prejudices. But if old sex books can’t help us much with the art and science of lovemaking, they do open for us a new window on to history’s lurid mosaic of obsession, fear, lust, hatred, fantasy and insanity. Welcome to the human condition.

So much for the writers, but what about us, the readers? Why do we spend precious money and time on sex manuals? Bonobo monkeys are our closest primate cousins, and although you wouldn’t catch a bonobo monkey with his nose stuck in a mating manual, they enjoy a sexual repertoire – multi-positions, group sex, lesbianism, etc. – that is at least as complex, acrobatic and experimental as most human couples ever sample. True, bonobos have sex in public, which humans mostly don’t – so their young get an education that consists of ‘watch it, learn it and try it’. Then again, the human imagination, and the ample amount of time it dedicates to sexual fantasy, can generally be trusted to work out all the physical permutations on its own. But there is something else about the private nature of human sex: it plants nagging questions in people’s heads – am I normal; am I doing it in a way that is correct, fun, efficient and legal; and, of course, can I do it better?

Education aside, one can’t ignore the titillation factor associated with anything to do with sex, particularly in decades past when such information was heavily censored and even the most straightforward information could be considered hot stuff – although much of it came across as a mix between an engineering treatise, a lengthy sermon and a wholefood cookbook. That sort of illicit thrill scores bulls-eye on the brain’s reward centre – which responds by sending the message, ‘That was good, let’s do it again, it might be better next time’. Thus, sex manuals throughout history have elbowed hot cakes into second place on the sales charts. The books have frequently used the same sales lure – there’s an amazing secret regime revealed inside that will truly change your life. Today the same trick is used to sell diet, exercise and psychological self-help books. The song remains the same: our modern era is remarkable only in the sheer, overwhelming volume of sex advice being churned out and avidly consumed. One in four British women says they own a sex manual, according to a survey by the publishers Dorling Kindersley in 2003. Writers and publishers are putting out new sex books every month. Everyone is at it, from former porn stars to the car-workshop manual maker Haynes. Then there are DVDs, videos, websites and mass advertising – the Sunday Telegraph carries adverts for a ‘clitoral stimulator’ and none of its readers’ horses bolt.

We’ve become saturated with sex advice. That should, in theory, make for bookshelves crowded with surprising, amazing and revelatory material. In reality, though, it doesn’t. Now that medicine has sorted out the science and most of us share a liberal sense of morality, the texts all tend to say rather the same thing, albeit in a variety of permutations. Ho hum. That’s why, if you still fancy a spot of true variety and spice between the covers of a sex manual, there’s only one place to go – back in time, to where all the strange folk and their peculiar practices lie quietly waiting for you. Just one word of warning, though: please don’t try any of it at home.

Caution! Before You Start Sex, Remember...

Tight buns and corsets cause nymphomania

Dr John Cowan, The Science of a New Life (1888)

The constricting of the waist and abdomen by corsets, girdles and waistbands prevents the return of venous blood to the heart, and the consequent overloading of the sexual organs causes the unnatural excitement of the sexual system.

The majority of women, adoring followers of the goddess Fashion, wear their hair in a large, heavy knot on the back part of the head, and when their own is insufficient to make a roll enough, false hair is added. This great pressure on the small brain produces great heat in the part and causes an unusual flow of the blood to the area of amativeness and, if persisted in, a chronic inflammation of the sexual organ, and a chronic desire for its sexual exercise ... It is almost impossible that she should lead other than a life of sexual excess.

Sexual jealousy can ruin your skin

Fang Nei Chi (Records of the Bedchamber), Sui Dynasty (AD 590–618)

A woman should not allow herself to become jealous or sad if she sees her man copulate with another woman, for then her yin essence will become overexcited. She will be afflicted by pains while sitting and standing, and the vaginal emissions will flow spontaneously. These are ills that will cause a woman to wither and age before her time. Therefore she should guard against this.

Never share a bedroom

Marie Stopes, Married Love (1918)

It may enchant a man once – perhaps even twice – to watch his goddess screw her hair up into a tight and unbecoming knot and soap her ears. But it is inherently too unlovely a proceeding to retain indefinite enchantment ... So far as is possible ensure that you allow your husband to come upon you only when there is delight in the meeting. Whenever the finances allow, the husband and wife should have separate bedrooms, failing that they should have a curtain which can at will be drawn so as to divide the room they share. No soul can grow to its full nature without its spells of solitude. A woman’s body and soul should be essentially her own, and that can only be so if she has an inviolable retreat.

Ejaculating may repel your partner

Theodoor Hendrik Van de Velde, Ideal Marriage, Its Physiology and Technique (1928)

After mental and emotional excitement the smell of the semen is more acrid, after muscular exertion, more aromatic and, after several repeated acts of coitus in rapid succession it becomes fainter, but stale and unpleasant.

I know of one highly talented and delicately sensitive woman who abruptly terminated a liaison on finding, at the first act of sexual intercourse, that the special seminal odour of the man was intolerably unpleasant to her ... It may be said in general that the odour of semen is exciting and stimulating to women and unpleasant, even nauseating to men. For a woman, the odour of the beloved man’s semen is delightful and excites her anew; but that of an unloved mate fills her with loathing.

Never make love with goblins

Fang Nei Chi (Records of the Bedchamber), Sui Dynasty (AD 590–618)

If a person has an unbalanced sex life, his sexual desire will increase. Devils and goblins will take advantage of this condition. They assume human shape and have sexual intercourse with such a person. They are much more skilled in this art than human beings, so much so that their victim becomes completely enamoured of the ghostly lover. Those people will keep the relation secret and will not speak about its delights. In the end they succumb alone, without anyone being the wiser.

The after-effects of copulation with an incubus can be cured by the following method: the man should copulate all day and night without ejaculating, then after seven days the disease will be cured. When his body is so fatigued that he cannot continue the act, the man should let his penis rest in the woman’s vagina and he will benefit all the same. If this disease is not treated as indicated here, the victim will die in a few years.

If one wishes a proof of the existence of incubi, one has but to repair alone to a marsh place far away in the mountains, in spring or autumn. One should stay there in a condition of complete tranquillity, staring into space and concentrating one’s thoughts on sexual intercourse. After three days and three nights, the body will suddenly become alternately cold and hot, the heart will be troubled and the vision blurred.

Then, a man engaging in this experiment will meet a woman, and a woman a man. During sexual intercourse with such an incubus one will experience a pleasure that is greater than ever felt while copulating with an ordinary human being. But at the same time one will become subject to this disease which is difficult to cure.

Evil women can contain iron

Albertus Magnus, De Secretis Mulierum (The Secrets of Women) (c. 1478)

O my companions you should be aware that although certain women do not know the secret cause of what I shall describe, many women are familiar with the effect, and many evils result from this. For when men have sexual intercourse with these women it sometimes happens that they suffer a large wound and a serious infection of the penis because of iron that has been placed in the vagina, for some women or harlots are instructed in this and other ill deeds.

Post-climax calamities

Havelock Ellis, Psychology of Sex: a manual for students (1933)

So profound is the organic convulsion involved by the process of detumescence that serious effects have sometimes followed coitus. Especially in men, not only death itself, but numerous disorders and accidents have been known to follow immediately after coitus, these results being mainly due to the vascular and muscular excitement involved by the process of detumescence.

Fainting, vomiting, involuntary urination and defecation have been noted as occurring in young men after first coitus. Epilepsy has been not infrequently recorded. Lesions of various organs, even rupture of the spleen, have sometimes taken place.

In men of mature age the arteries have at times been unable to resist the high blood pressure and cerebral haemorrhage with paralysis has occurred. In elderly men the excitement of intercourse with young wives or with prostitutes has sometimes caused death. Such results are, however, exceptional. They tend to occur in persons who are abnormally sensitive or who have imprudently transgressed the obvious rules of sexual hygiene.

Sex during the monthlies causes ...

The Treasury of Natural Secrets (anon., Italy, 16th century)

Physical weakness

Ten years’ premature ageing

Simple-mindedness

Loss of libido

Aches and pains in stomach, feet, eyes, brain, head

Ringing in ears

High fevers

Tremors

Weak nerves

Poor eyesight

Baldness

Backaches

Kidney and bladder pains

Bad breath

Foul body odour

Just put the Hoover down

Dr Alex Comfort, The Joy of Sex (1972)

Never fool around sexually with a vacuum cleaner.

Two
MANKIND’S FIRST MANUALS

In archaeology, as in life, if you want to find sex books, look in the son’s room.

The first lovemaking guides in human history may well be in the form of 4,000-year-old cave paintings found in countries such as France, Peru and Japan, showing women or couples in various positions, naked or wearing strange headgear. But without any words to accompany the pictures, we simply don’t know: they could have been educational, religious or ceremonial, or simply prototypes of readers’ wives. The earliest actual written sex books we have were only discovered in 1973. They date from around 2,400 years ago and were hidden in a Chinese family tomb, in the section where the son was interred. The books were greatest-hits compilations of Chinese wisdom that had already been around for a century. The questions they raised have proved extremely persistent – if you read a modern sex manual, glossy magazine or newspaper advice column, they will still be there.

If the advice these ancient books contain were written in the form of modern magazine coverlines, it would read:

FOUR SEASONS OF SEX:

AND WHY AUTUMN IS HOT, HOT, HOT

Your 100 thrusts to happiness

Wild new positions: tiger roving, gibbon

grabbing ... and fish gobbling

Sexplanation: read your partner’s writhing

From your wrists to your peaks – the ultimate

in-the-mood massage

Aphrodisiacs to keep you up all night!

And

Exclusive: your love route to immortality

The manuscripts were among a treasure-house of ancient books discovered in Mawangdui Tomb Three, in the city of Changsha in the Hunan province of China. The tomb was a horseshoe-shaped mound of earth about 30ft high and 90ft in diameter that contained the bodies and possessions of the Hou Family. It took two years, from 1972 to 1974, to excavate the 2,100-year-old Han-period tombs, which contained more than 3,000 cultural relics and a complete female corpse. In among 28 silk books were seven medical manuscripts, which together constitute mankind’s first Joy of Sex.

The tomb’s occupants, Dai Marquis Licang, his wife and son, were part of the local political elite. Licang was the King of Changsha’s prime minister for seven years from 193 BC. Each body lay in its own tomb, inside a set of coffins stacked like Russian dolls, one inside another. The Number Three Tomb-the book room – is now restored to its original state. The son was called Li, and his skeleton indicates that he was about 30 when he died in 168 BC, though most of the medical manuscripts seem to have been copied in 200 BC. References in them indicate they are from earlier texts that must have circulated around 300 BC.

Li was an avid book collector whose hobby covered several specialist fields, including medicine. He would have been a whizz on Mastermind. We can only guess why his extensive library was buried alongside him: perhaps it was thought to have magical powers, or maybe the books were simply there to show his new pals in the afterlife what a wise and wealthy guy he’d been. The sex books were written on silk or on strips of wood or bamboo, and were found on top of a pile of silk manuscripts stored in the side compartment of a lacquer box.

Two of the texts focus on the bizarre mystical practice of ‘sexual cultivation’, which promises that if a man spends years having intercourse with hundreds of women (preferably virgins) without ejaculating, he will have received so much yin energy from female orgasms, and conserved so much of his male yang energy by not orgasming, that he will become immortal (either that, or his testes would explode). The idea was attributed to Ancestor Peng, who is said to have died at the age of 300, some time around 4 BC and 3 BC, thanks to his strict ‘way of hygiene’ which covered personal cleanliness, diet and sex. Ejaculating frequently, the books warn, wears a man out, because semen is full of the life-force, chi.

A man could preserve his penis chi either by not climaxing, or by climaxing but preventing ejaculation. Medical experts suggest this can be done by applying hand pressure to a point between the scrotum and the anus, which blocks the urethra. Peng’s theory was that the semen would be diverted up the spine into the brain. In fact, if you block your urethral tube behind your scrotum, the sperm is squirted into your bladder and gets urinated out. This whole idea might seem insane, but it has resurfaced in different forms for centuries. It reappeared in Chinese books printed in 1066, 1307 and 1544, and was later published in Japan. It also crops up in different cultures around the globe at different times. It even became popular, as we will see, in nineteenth-century America.

The Mawangdui guides do not only cover non-ejaculation. There is an entire regime dictating when to have sex: in spring you can do it from evening until after midnight; in summer from evening until midnight; in winter from evening until around 11pm; and in autumn, hooray, whenever you like – though the text then says that men should never try having intercourse in the morning.

The books also tell you in confusing and often tedious detail the precise operation of lovemaking, with a guide to foreplay using slow, sexual massage, the ‘ideal 100-thrusts’, and then the ‘ten refinements’ – which basically involve going up, down and from side to side, and changing your speed and depth – information that must surely have been old hat even 300 years before the birth of Christ. And with around 21 centuries to go before the invention of Viagra, the manuscripts offer their own aphrodisiac ideas, involving such exotic stimulant ingredients as swarming beetle larvae, wasps and dried snails.

The ancient Chinese also brought us the first sex-advice Q&As. The format so beloved of Cosmopolitan and co was created by books in which the legendary Yellow Emperor asked ‘your common questions’ of a team of expert female advisors with names such as the Plain Girl and the Mystery Girl, as well as (of course) a qualified doctor. The Yellow Emperor texts were frequently illustrated with pictures of sexual positions, and given to brides as part of their trousseau.

Despite its general uselessness, much of this advice remained in circulation in one form or another in China until the sixteenth century, when it was suppressed by the new regime of Confucianist emperors. They found all this sex stuff generally unspeakable and censored it so efficiently that subsequent Chinese writers never knew that it had even existed.

When to Have Sex

Never after a meal

Perfumed Garden of Sheik Nefzaoui (16th century), translated into English by Sir Richard F. Burton

If you wish for sex, you should not have your stomach loaded with food and drink. If your stomach is full, only harm can come of it to both of you; you will have symptoms of apoplexy and gout, and the least evil that will be the consequence of it will be the inability of passing your urine, or weakness of sight.

And not before lunch

Ancestor Peng, in the introduction to Yinshu (The Pulling Book), c. 186 BC

Morning is not the recommended time for men to practise sex.

Daytime – all day

R.T. Trail, Sexual Physiology: a scientific and popular exposition of the fundamental problems in sociology (1867)

If children are to be begotten ... the sexual embrace should be had in the light of day. It is only then that the magnetic forces and the nervous system are in their highest condition of functional activity and the body, refreshed by sleep, is in its most vigorous condition. But it should not be the hurried act of the early morning, like a hasty meal before a day’s work ... Surely, if sexual intercourse is worth doing at all, it is worth doing well And it would not exalt its importance one iota above its real merits if certain days were set apart, consecrated, to the conjugal embrace. It might be one day in seven, or one day in twenty, or more or less.

Seasonal sex

Giovanni Marinello, Medicine Pertinent to the Infirmities of Women (Italy, 1563)

Least harmful: spring and winter

Use sparingly: summer

Use even more sparingly: autumn

Spring for men, autumn for women

Nicholas Venette, The Mysteries of Conjugal Love Reveald (1703)

Men are most apt for the company of women in winter and in spring; women most desirous of commerce with man in summer and autumn; and this proceeds from the contrary complexion, in respect both to the times and persons, which complexion is nothing else than the different mixtures of warmth with cold, and moisture with dryness ...

In my opinion, copulation is more seasonable in spring and winter; it may be used in the time of autumn, but in the heads of summer it should be carefully avoided, when the ordinary discharges of the body are so great...

We ought to embrace when our belly is moderately filled, for at such a junction we feel a strange desire to be meddling.

Cheek the zodiac, and never after war ...

Ananga Ranga of Kalyanamalla (Stage of the Love God), by the Indian poet Kalyan Mall (16th century)

Hot weather

Cold weather

Any time, in fact that’s not springtime or the rains

Daytime – unless it’s your woman’s favourite time

When ill with fever

When tired from travel

When observing a religious rite

At the new moon

When the sun or a planet passes from one side of the zodiac to another

In the evening

When tired from warfare

Geddinthere! (Times she might be in the mood)

Koka Shastra (The Scripture of Koka), by the Indian poet Kokkoka (12th century)

When tired from travel

Convalescing from a fever

Weary from dancing

The sixth month of pregnancy

A month after giving birth

Etiquette: when to introduce a new mistress to your wives

Chinese householder’s notebook (c. 16th century)

Recently I heard about a certain official who took unto him a new concubine. He locked himself in with her behind double doors and did not appear for three days. All his wives and concubines were highly incensed at this behaviour. This is indeed the wrong way.

The right method is for the man to control his desire and, for the time being not approaching the newcomer, concentrate his attention on the others. Every time he has sexual intercourse with his other women, he should make the newcomer stand at attention by the side of the ivory couch. Then, after four or five nights of this, he may for the first time copulate with the newcomer, but only with his principal wife and the other concubines present. This is the fundamental principle of harmony and happiness in one’s women’s quarters.

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