Put What Where? (12 page)

The first sex manual to hit American shores was most probably Aristotle’s
Masterpiece
, which was initially imported from Britain in the early 1700s.

The first American edition was printed in 1766, as a ‘pack book’ to be sold by peddlers. Around 50 editions followed and its popularity in the United States stretched from colonial times to the twentieth century. Masturbation paranoia was an early invader, too. Marten’s
Onania
travelled to the American colonies in 1724 and Samuel-Auguste Tissot’s
L’Onanisme
followed a few decades after. Fear of sex – and in particular, self-abuse – steadily grew into an all-American bogeyman. From around 1830 onwards, books and pamphlets describing the terrible effects of sexual indulgence became more common and increasingly strident.

A legion of nineteenth-century quacks and amateurs joined this crusade to keep the American Dream dry. Among the curious cohort was the former clergyman Sylvester Graham, whose lust-defeating wholewheat flour produced the original
Graham Cracker. In 1834, his
Lecture to Young Men on Chastity
declared that sex leads to insanity and that every ejaculation shortens life expectancy – the latter idea being a strange echo of the ‘sexual cultivation’ practices promoted by ancient Chinese texts. Graham added that excessive carnal exercise would cause indigestion, headache, feebleness of circulation, consumption, spinal disease, epilepsy, insanity and early death of offspring, among other things. He thought men should remain virgins until aged 30 and subsequently should make love only once a month – and not at all if they were sickly.

To control the evils of lust, Graham prescribed a special vegetarian diet, the centrepiece of which was Graham bread, made from wholewheat flour. Graham Crackers, which he invented in 1829, were another manifestation of his campaign for un-stimulating food. In his 1849
Lectures on the Science of Human Life
, he warned that pastries, with the exception of fruit pies, were ‘among the most pernicious articles of human ailment’. Graham attracted a fair number of followers, who opened Graham boarding houses in New York and Boston where his diet was strictly observed. But most people regarded him as a nut. He was assaulted by mobs on at least three occasions, once by butchers and bakers who thought he was going to drive them out of business. Predictably perhaps, he ended up going crackers, becoming increasingly strange and aloof and alienating even his closest admirers. He gave up lecturing in 1839 and his life ended in obscurity.

Far more popular was the Seventh-day Adventist prophet Ellen G. White. In 1864, she devoted her first book on health reform,
Appeal to Mothers
, entirely to warning Adventist parents of the dire consequences of self-abuse. But what would White, a poorly educated farmer’s daughter, know about medical science? In the book, she claimed her knowledge came from visions sent to her from heaven: ‘The state of our world was presented before me, and my attention was especially called to the youth of our time. Everywhere I looked, I saw imbecility, dwarfed forms, crippled limbs, misshapen heads, and deformity of every description. Sins and crimes, and the violation of nature’s laws, were shown me as the causes of this accumulation of human woe and suffering. I saw such degradation and vile practices.’ Critics claimed, however, that she had merely copied out swathes of work from other contemporary anti-masturbatory books.

Not all American advice was quite so negative. One of the most popular lecturers and authors of the time was Frederick Hollick, a self-appointed expert from Philadelphia who in 1844 began lecturing in New York City and soon toured around much of America, attracting large crowds. Why so popular? It helped that his talks were tinged with pornography. His cannabis aphrodisiacs can’t have hindered business
either. Hollick’s sexual medicine shows could not use naked women, so he used the next best thing, papier-mâché anatomical models which were allegedly made in Paris. These he used to present risqué titbits under the guise of scientific edification. The models were so natural they caused a sensation and inspired many imitators.

Hollick, naturally enough, had also climbed aboard the anti-onanist bandwagon. And why not? By now it was clear that masturbation was the one burning guilt common to all clean-living, Calvinist soul-searching Americans. He started publishing his lectures in 1845, and in his early book,
The Male Generative Organs in Health and Disease, from Infancy to Old Age
, used figures from annual reports of the Massachusetts State Lunatic Asylum to ‘prove’ that white-collar work causes self-abuse far more than healthy outdoor labour. Hollick recognized that women should orgasm – but only with men. Persistent female onanists might need their clitorises removed, he said.

In 1846 he faced criminal charges of obscene libel. Prosecutors argued that his lectures were salacious rather than informative and contained very little science. But Hollick had the people behind him: his loyal listeners and readers mobilized through the letters pages of daily newspapers to accuse the medical profession of trying to build a monopoly of health information. They also demanded the right to learn about sex and contraception. Hollick beat the rap.

His other achievement was to help America to get stoned, as part of his mail-order business that also
offered a ‘superior’ brand of condoms for $9 and a syphilis preventative for $10. He grew the grass himself and sold it as a love potion, claiming that his research revealed the central ingredient in all known aphrodisiacs and exhilarants was good old cannabis. In one advert, he told potential customers: ‘The true aphrodisiac, as I compound it, acts upon the brain and nervous system, not as a stimulant, but as a tonic and nutritive agent, thus sustaining its power and the power of the sexual organs also, which is entirely dependent upon the nervous power.’ He added, ‘A gentleman can keep it in his vest pocket without any fear of detection from smell, or appearance. It will go anywhere by post, with perfect safety, and in such a form that no one through whose hands it passes would ever suspect its nature, or that it is anything peculiar.’ How very handy.

Didn’t anyone notice anything peculiar about
Sammy Tubbs, the Boy Doctor, and Sponsie, the Troublesome Monkey?
Because ironically, this voluminous children’s book turned out to be one of the most explicit sex guides of the era, diagrams and all – and featured in its 1,200 pages a taboo-breaking bout of interracial love as well.

Sammy Tubbs
was written in 1874 and starred Tubbs, 12-year-old son of freed slaves and his sidekick monkey called Sponsie. It featured the world’s
first anatomically explicit sex education published for pre-adolescent children. The hero, Tubbs, is the protégé of a Manhattan doctor Samuel Hubbs, who moulds the young black boy into a fully qualified medic. Together, through four volumes, they explore the ins and outs of the human body – muscles, circulation, digestion and the nervous system. To keep things entertaining, Sponsie acts the troublesome monkey. But in volume five, things take a distinctly gynaecological tone – literally in the case of one illustration, which oddly shows a vagina with a tiny musical note peeping out. The volume’s cover carries the warning: ‘Book for Private Reading’. This sex-education section succeeded in being both forthright and graphic, drawing and describing everything a child might want to know – and perhaps more. The author had thoughtfully provided an escape route for parents who found it all too much: one set of particularly strong pictures is printed on page ‘180 and a half’ – so that sensitive mums and dads could tear out the drawings without their children ever noticing anything was missing.

Sammy Tubbs’s
author was the health crusader, mail-order magnate, newspaper publisher and Unitarian agnostic Dr Edward Bliss Foote. He was a typical Victorian health-maniac, and his book contains many of contemporary America’s obsessions – lectures against tight-fitting clothes, tobacco and alcohol, and passages promoting phrenology and animal magnetism. He had been an early contraceptive entrepreneur and manufactured a one-size-fits-all womb veil, a sort of Dutch cap, in
the 1860s and sold it for $6 at clinics and through mail order, until the ultra-repressive Comstock Laws banned the manufacture and sale of contraceptives and the sending of contraceptive information through the post.

Foote fell foul of the federal Comstock Law in 1874, and was fined $3,500 for mailing an educational pamphlet advocating the right of families to limit their size through ‘contracepties’, called
Confidential Pamphlet for the Married; words in pearl for married people only.
(Comstock’s other high-profile victims, Ida Craddock and Margaret Sanger, feature on pages 146 and 217.) But Foote had better luck with his
Medical Common Sense
, which sold a quarter of a million copies despite including information on using douching as a contraceptive method.

He was a race campaigner as well. Tubbs would now be labelled a ‘positive racial role model’; in the story he becomes a local medical practitioner and health lecturer, addressing halls packed with black and white women. And Tubbs has a white girlfriend, Julia, who, just to nail the message firmly home, is the daughter of a cotton broker. Foote advocated interracial relationships on the eugenic grounds of avoiding racial inbreeding. Such were his convictions that he even included a picture of Sammy and Julia kissing – possibly the first positive illustration of an interracial kiss in 19th-century American fiction.

Far less healthy back then was a name now associated with wakey-wakey sunshine breakfast-time – John Harvey Kellogg, MD, the originator of cornflakes and the author of the 1877 guide
Plain Facts about Sexual Life.

J.H. Kellogg was about as qualified to compose a sex guide as the Dalai Lama is to write books on hand-to-hand combat. Not only was Kellogg a virgin, but he believed sex was debilitating. He never consummated his own marriage and preferred instead to receive an enema from an orderly every morning after breakfast – which beats trying to clip a small plastic toy together. The radical advocate of vegetarianism spent his honeymoon writing his
Plain Facts
as a treatise on the evils of sexuality. Yet again, it obsessed about the potential dangers of self-abuse. The book proved highly popular in the late 1800s, scaring secret self-pleasurers with dire warnings of persistent headaches, indigestion, weakness of the back and knees, disturbed circulation, dimness of vision and loss of appetite – all ailments that could be developed psychosomatically, given with the right blend of guilt and fear.

Losing semen more than once a month – even in marital relations – should cause alarm, warned Kellogg. ‘The seminal fluid is the most vitalized of all the fluids of the body, and that its rapid production is at the expense of a lost exhaustive effort on the part of the vital forces, is well attested by all
physiologists.’ To save the world, he invented cornflakes as one part of a diet that he felt would lessen the sex drive. Like Graham, he thought that tasty food was the Devil’s work. ‘Exciting stimulants and condiments weaken and irritate nerves, and derange the circulation,’ he wrote in
Plain Facts.
‘Thus, indirectly they affect the sexual system, which suffers through sympathy with the other organs. But a more direct injury is done. Flesh, condiments, eggs, tea, coffee, chocolate, and all stimulants have a powerful influence directly upon the reproductive organs. They increase the local supply of blood; and through nervous sympathy with the brain, the passions are aroused.’

There were many other ways your mouth could get you into trouble, he wrote: ‘Overeating, eating between meals, hasty eating, eating indigestible articles of food, ices, late suppers, etc., react upon the sexual organs with the utmost certainty. Any disturbance of the digestive function deteriorates the quality of the blood. Poor blood, filled with crude, poorly digested food, is irritating to the nervous system, and especially to those extremely delicate nerves which govern the reproductive function. Irritation provokes congestion; congestion excites sexual desires; excited passions increase the local disturbance.’

Smoking was out, too: ‘The lecherous day-dreams in which many smokers indulge, are a species of fornication for which even a brute ought to blush, if such a crime were possible for a brute. The mental libertine does not confine himself to the women of
the town. In the foulness of his imagination, he invades the sanctity of virtue wherever his erotic fancy leads him.’ No wonder people find it so hard to give up.

Kellogg’s best-selling rant encouraged a further surge of anti-onanist propaganda, including
Dr Henry Guernsey’s Plain Talks on Avoided Subjects
, which was first published in 1882 and reprinted four times before a revised edition came out in 1915. The paranoia spread to ever younger ages: Guernsey warned parents to keep an eye on their children’s play, in case it accidentally prompted sexual impressions by ‘allowing them to repose playfully on their belly, to slide down banisters or to go too long without urinating’.

Banister-sliding is, he warned, particularly dangerous, as it can lead to ‘inveterate masturbation’, which in turn ‘is repeated time after time until the degrading and destructive (morally and physically so) habit is confirmed. As a result the boy grows thin, pale, morose and passionate; then weak, indolent and indifferent; his digestion becomes impaired, his sleep short, disturbed and broken; he sometimes becomes epileptic or falls into a state of marasmus; in any case he is in great danger of being totally ruined forever.’

Why stop at books when a new gadget is at hand? Sylvanus Stall was a Lutheran pastor, the associate editor of
The Lutheran Observer
and author of such hot reads as 1880’s
How to Pay Church Debts and How to Keep Churches Out of Debt.
He might have stuck with the episcopal-funding genre had he not hit on a way of using the power of America’s inventiveness to keep its children’s hands out of their pockets.