Kate Lister

A CURIOUS HISTORY OF SEX

For SWOP NSW

For my family (sorry!)

INTRODUCTION

Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.

Sigmund Freud

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} 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} 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} 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} 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} 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} 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} 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} 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.

A note on the use of language. As far as offensive language goes, you are now entering a hard hat area. This is a book that uncovers historical attitudes to sex and gender. Our ancestors had little understanding of gender fluidity and understood gender as binary and biologically determined. As a result, much of the historical material in this book defines women as having vulvas and men as having penises. For example, in the chapter on the history of the word ‘cunt’, ‘cunt’ is understood to be the genitals of a woman. Today, we know that some women have cunts and some do not, just as some men do and some do not. But our ancestors did not view gender or biology in such terms – they understood ‘cunt’ as being a woman’s genitals. While this may be offensive to modern ears, understanding historical attitudes to gender identity and sexual morphology is essential if we are to fully appreciate how heteronormativity and constructs of the binary of masculine and feminine came to dominate cultural narratives today.

The slang used throughout this book is all genuine historical slang and is followed by the date it was first recorded. My primary source for the historical slang is Jonathon Green’s Dictionary of Slang, which I cannot recommend enough if you want to learn more.

SEX AND WORDS

’Tis Pity She’s a Whore

^{The ‘Whore’ in Whores of Yore}

Language is an important battleground in the fight for social equality. As the linguist Daniel Chandler succinctly put it, ‘language constitutes our world, it doesn’t just record it or label it’.^{1} Language is fluid and malleable; it drives social attitudes, rather than simply expressing them. To see the evolution of language we only have to look at what was once everyday terminology to describe people of colour: ‘half caste’ was once perfectly acceptable for a person of mixed race, just as ‘coloured’ was an accepted term for a black person. Such words were not thought of as offensive, merely descriptive, and can occasionally still be heard in usage, though thankfully less often. But when we break down the power structures implicit in such phrases, we can begin to understand how words do reinforce and create our reality. A person who is ‘half caste’ is, by definition, half of something; they are half formed, half made, half a person rather than a whole person in their own right. A person who is ‘coloured’ has been metaphorically coloured in, which suggests an original state of not being coloured in (or, white); it reinforces difference and tacitly suggests racial hierarchy. We might not immediately recognise the implications of such phrases, but describing someone as half formed simply reinforces racial attitudes; as Chandler argued, it makes our reality, it does not record it.

Language that reflects the humanity of the person or people being described is a constantly evolving process, and while political correctness frequently comes in for scorn, we cannot and will not achieve social equality if the language we use to describe marginalised groups only reinforces stigma. Language informs much of the debate around LGBTQ rights, body issues, ageism and, of course, gender.

The reclamation of terms of abuse is a linguistic minefield where no one has written down the rules, but we all know there are rules. ‘Fag’, ‘ho’, ‘bitch’, etc., can function as terms of inclusion and even affection when used within specific groups. As a straight, white woman, I cannot call a gay man a ‘queer’, but I can call my female friend a ‘bitch’, whereas a straight man cannot – though a gay man might be able to (minefield, indeed). When a term of abuse is reclaimed and owned by the people it once stigmatised, it is a defiant action, one that takes the power away from the oppressor, galvanises an identity within the formerly oppressed, and sticks two politically incorrect fingers up at the establishment. Of course, many argue that such words, used in any context, only serve to reinforce a prejudice as such words are never shaken free of historical baggage; they create reality, rather than recording it. The word ‘whore’ is also in a state of reclamation among certain groups of the sex work community (others reject it entirely).

^{The Whore of Babylon from the Luther Bible, 1534 edition.}

The truth is that I should not have used ‘whore’ in the Whores of Yore website; it’s not my word, and if you’re not a sex worker, it’s not yours either. It’s a term of abuse that sex workers hear every day by those seeking to devalue and shame them, and I had not fully appreciated that. I used ‘whore’ to refer to transgressive sexuality, like ‘slut’ or ‘slag’, rather than a woman who sells sex. I’ve always considered the word to be far bigger than that. I have had feedback from many sex workers questioning my use of the term, and for a while I gave serious consideration to changing it. But the history of that word is an important one, and one that I want to emphasise. Debate around what ‘whore’ actually means is a conversation worth having.

The German dramatist Georg Büchner (1813–1837) once wrote that ‘freedom and whores are the most cosmopolitan items under the sun’.^{2} But what does the word ‘whore’ actually mean? Where has it come from, and what does someone have to do to earn that particular title? Why was Joan of Arc, who died a virgin, called the ‘French Whore’? And why was Elizabeth I, the ‘Virgin Queen’, attacked as the ‘English Whore’ by her Catholic enemies? French revolutionaries called Marie Antoinette the ‘Austrian Whore’; Anne Boleyn was the ‘Great Whore’, and in the 2016 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton was repeatedly attacked by Trump supporters as a ‘whore’.^{3} Perhaps we think we know perfectly well what we mean should we ever choose to drop the W-bomb, but the word is historically and culturally complex. This simple monosyllable is loaded with over a thousand years of attempting to control and shame women by stigmatising their sexuality.

The word is so old that its precise origins are lost in the mists of time, but it can be traced to the Old Norse hora (adulteress). Hora has multiple derivatives, such as the Danish hore, the Swedish hora, the Dutch hoer, and the Old High German huora. Going back even further to the Proto-Indo-European language (the common ancestor of the Indo-European languages), whore has roots in qār, meaning ‘to like, desire.’ Qār is a base that has produced words in other languages for ‘lover’, such as the Latin carus, the Old Irish cara and the Old Persian kama (meaning ‘to desire’).^{4} ‘Whore’ is not a universal word; the indigenous Aborigines, First Nation people and native Hawaiians have no word for ‘whore’, or indeed for prostitution.

From the twelfth century, whore was a term of abuse for a sexually unchaste woman, but it did not specifically mean a sex worker. Thomas of Chobham’s thirteenth-century definition of a whore was any woman who had sex outside marriage (hands up all those who have just learned they are a thirteenth-century whore).^{5} Shakespeare used ‘whore’ nearly a hundred times in his plays, including Othello, Hamlet and King Lear; but in these plays it doesn’t mean someone who sells sex, it means a promiscuous woman. John Webster’s The White Devil (1612) explores narratives around badly behaved women. In one memorable scene Monticelso defines what a whore is:

Monticelso doesn’t admit it, but what is driving this rant is a fear of women, fear that they can wield power over men; they can ‘teach man wherein he is imperfect’. Here, a whore is not a sex worker, she is a woman who has authority over a man and must be shamed into silence at all costs.

Historically, ‘whore’ has been used to attack those who have upset the status quo and asserted themselves, usually in an attempt to reassert sexual control and dominance over her. But unlike the word ‘prostitute’, whore is not tied to a profession but to a perceived moral state. Which is why many powerful women, with no connection to the sex trade, have been attacked as ‘whores’; Mary Wollstonecraft, Phulan Devi, even Margaret Thatcher were all labelled whores. The word is an attempt to shame, humiliate and ultimately subdue its target, and your average woman on the street is just as likely to be called a whore as a world leader, perhaps even more so.

‘Whore’ is a nasty insult today, but calling someone a whore in the early modern period was regarded as such a serious defamation of character that you could be taken to court for slander.[1] By far the most frequent insult cited in these cases where a woman has been slandered is ‘whore’ and myriad creative variants thereon: ‘stinking whore’, ‘ticket-buying whore’, ‘drunken piss-pot whore’, ‘lace petticoat whore’ and ‘dog and bitch whore’ have all been recorded.^{7}

In 1664, Anne Blagge claimed that Anne Knutsford had called her a ‘poxy-arsed whore’.^{8} Poor Isabel Yaxley complained of a neighbour alleging that she was a ‘whore’ who could be ‘fucked for a pennyworth of fish’ in 1667.^{9} In 1695, Susan Town of London accused Jane Adams of shouting to ‘come out you whore, and scratch your mangy arse as I do’.^{10} In 1699, Isabel Stone of York brought a suit against John Newbald for calling her ‘a whore, a common whore and a piss-arsed whore… a Bitch and a piss-arsed Bitch’.^{11} And in 1663, Robert Heyward was hauled before the Cheshire courts for calling Elizabeth Young a ‘salt bitch’ and a ‘sordid whore’. In court he claimed he could prove Elizabeth was a whore and she should just go home and ‘wash the stains out of thy coat’.^{12}

^{Examples of ‘unfeminine language’ from New Art of Mystery of Gossipping, 1770.}

In order to prove a case of slander, you would need a witness to the insult, to prove the accusation was untrue with a character witness, and to show how your reputation had been damaged by being called such names. The punishment for slander ranged from fines and being ordered to publicly apologise, through to excommunication (though this was rare). One example of punishment occurred in 1691, when William Halliwell was ordered to publicly apologise in church to Peter Leigh for defaming his character:

I William Halliwell forgetting my duty to walk in Love and Charity towards my neighbour have uttered spoken and published several scandalous defamatory and reproachful words of and against Peter Leigh… I do hereby recant revoke and recall the said words as altogether false scandalous and untrue… I am unfeignedly sorry and I hereby confess and acknowledge that I have much wronged and injured him.^{13}

The accusation of ‘whore’ was particularly damaging as it directly affected a woman’s value on the marriage market. So when Thomas Ellerton called Judith Glendering a ‘whore’ who went from ‘barn to barn’ and from ‘tinkers to fiddlers’ in 1685, he was doing more than being abusive, he was preventing her finding a husband.^{14} In 1652, Cicely Pedley alleged she had been called a ‘whore’ with the intention ‘to prevent her marriage with a person of good quality’.^{15} It could even affect business. In 1687, a Justice of the Peace decided that calling an innkeeper’s wife a ‘whore’ was actionable because it had affected trade.^{16}

There are numerous slander cases brought by a husband whose wife had been called a whore. Calling someone’s wife a whore was a particularly devastating insult as it not only insulted the wife, but also impugned the husband as a cuckold and questioned his ability to sexually satisfy the missus. In 1685, for example, Abraham Beaver was accused of ordering Richard Winnell to ‘get thee home thou cuckold thou will find Thomas Fox in Bed with thy Wife’.^{17}

Although cases of men alleging slander were less frequent, they too were often sexual in nature. In 1680, Elizabeth Aborne of London was taken to court by Thomas Richardson for saying that his penis was ‘rotten with the pox’.^{18} Men were also attacked as ‘whoremongers’, ‘cuckolds’, ‘bastard-getters’, ‘rogues’, and in one case a ‘jealous pated fool and ass’.^{19} Men brought cases against people who had called them thieves, beggars or drunkards. In 1699, for example, Thomas Hewetson was brought before the courts in York for calling Thomas Daniel a ‘mumper’ (beggar): ‘he was a mumper and went about the Country from door to door mumping’.^{20}

By the end of the seventeenth century, there was a notable decline in the number of slander cases brought before the Church courts. Historians have long debated why this may have been the case. It may be that as cities swelled and the population grew, the courts became more concerned with crimes other than women calling each other ‘hedge whores’ and ‘poxy-arsed whores’. It may just be that there was a shift in culture and taking your slagging matches before a judge became less the done thing. By 1817, UK law ruled that ‘calling a married woman or a single one a whore is not actionable, because fornication and adultery are subjects of spiritual not temporal censures’.^{21}

^{Google Ngram Viewer: frequency of the word ‘whore’ recorded in English literature from 1500 to 2008.}

As the above chart shows, since the seventeenth century there has been a notable decline in the use of the word ‘whore’. Until the end of the seventeenth century, ‘whore’ was still a legal term and turns up in no less than 163 trials at the Old Bailey from 1679 until 1800. Historians such as Rictor Norton have examined how ‘prostitute’ or ‘common prostitute’ came to replace ‘whore’ as the legal terminology for a person who sells sexual services.^{22} I suspect the sharp decline in the usage of ‘whore’ at the end of the seventeenth century is linked to the linguistic shift from legal terminology to a pure insult.

Today, ‘whore’ is largely confined to abusive and coarse speech. However, like the word ‘slut’, ‘whore’ is also in a state of reclamation and can be used to directly challenge the shame the word has carried for hundreds of years. ‘Whore’ may be a term of abuse, but it is one rooted in fear of female independence and sexual autonomy. Its progression from meaning a woman who desires, to an insult seeking to shame that desire, traces cultural attitudes around female sexuality. I do not use ‘whore’ to shame, I use it to recognise all those who rattled cultural sensibilities enough to be called a whore. I use it to deflate the shame within it. I use it to remember that our language shapes how we view each other, and it is constantly evolving. Historically, if you desire, you are a whore; if you have sex outside of marriage, you are a whore; if you transgress and threaten ‘the man’, you are a whore. We are all historical whores.