Put What Where? (16 page)
Authors: John Naish
ELLIS, THE IMPOTENT ICON
One of Britain’s most eminent marital writers never got far beyond foreplay – and strange games of foreplay at that.
It’s a hotly fought contest, but Havelock Ellis has a strong case for being the most messed up sex advisor ever published.
Ellis, a doctor, was born near London in 1859 and made a career as an author, with sex his main subject. Why? In his book,
Sex and Marriage
, he claims he dedicated his professional life to fighting the institutional ignorance and denial he grew up with. On the other hand, the most obvious explanation is also the most probable – he was trying to compensate for his deep sexual inadequacies. His series of books, called
Studies in the Psychology of Sex
, ran to seven volumes and was published between 1897 and 1928 – but only the first, about homosexuality, titled
Sexual Inversion
(which claimed that being gay was genetic), was published in Britain in his lifetime. It was promptly banned. The bookseller responsible pleaded guilty to a charge of obscene publication in 1898 and the judge
called the text a ‘pretence and a sham’. Ellis had to publish the rest of the series in America.
Physically, Ellis stood tall, solemn and gentle, with a high, squeaky voice. His ideas were heavily influenced by James Hinton, who founded the first Victorian sex cult and argued that women should get fun from sex. And while Ellis scandalized late-Victorian England by suggesting that sexual expression was a normal, healthy human function, many would argue that his own sex life was quite the opposite. He was attracted to women, but for most of his life could only manage solo and mutual masturbation. His biggest thrill was to watch his lover urinate, a function that he considered mystical in its beauty. As for heterosexual intercourse, Ellis’s fears are exposed in his 1933 book,
Psychology of Marriage
, in which he warns young men that, after their first bout of sex, they are in danger of fainting, vomiting, involuntary urination, defecation, epileptic fits and ‘lesions of various organs, even rupture of the spleen’. Older men, he says, are in peril of dropping dead.
Where his own sexuality led, his work followed, charting the strange, the odd and the distasteful – things no decent Victorian or Edwardian publicly acknowledged. It is all standard fare for today’s fetish mags and websites, but Ellis’s subjects’ stories came as a Richter-sized shock. One example was a government official whose obsession with squeaky footwear was sparked by his first sexual experience, on a staircase with a woman who had a creaking shoe. There was also a lecturer who derived sexual
pleasure from burning his skin with hot wires. Part of the shock was caused by the fact that his deviants were frequently middle-class professionals. But then Ellis thought society was rather messed up. He wrote that the high rate of suicide in civilization ‘means that the population is winding up its nervous and intellectual system to the utmost point of tension and that sometimes it snaps’.
His solution sounds straight out of a modern pop-psychology book: just accept that whatever floats your boat is cool: ‘It is important always to bear in mind that whatever gives satisfaction and relief to both parties is good and right, and even in the best sense normal, provided – as is not likely to happen in sound and healthy persons – no injury is effected,’ he wrote. Shame it didn’t work for Ellis. His long romantic and intellectual connection with the South African novelist Olive Schreiner started when he wrote her fan mail. They first met after a long exchange of letters. He was swept away. Schreiner wept with disappointment. She found him insufficiently virile. In fact, he proved physically unable to consummate the relationship. He had the same trouble with other women. Schreiner, on the other hand, suffered at the hands of a powerful libido: she used to take large doses of potassium bromide to try to reduce her sex drive. Ellis subsequently married Edith Lees, in 1891. She was an English writer with strong lesbian preferences who apparently resembled Dylan Thomas. He was still a virgin, and at the end of the honeymoon returned to his bachelor rooms in Paddington. They hoped to
find companionship and freedom in a ‘rational’ union (as if such things exist) and Ellis seemed happy to let her find satisfaction outside marriage. He chose homosexuality for his first book partly because of his curiosity about his wife’s lesbianism. She was his case history number 38.
Despite his impotence, Ellis was a magnet for highly sexed women. American ladies sent him intimate letters about their sex problems, along with nude photographs of themselves. Many visited him and were smitten, only to be disappointed by their sex guru’s physical incapacity. But when Ellis fell in love with the American birth-control campaigner Margaret Sanger (see
page 217
), Edith attempted suicide several times and declined into madness and death. Ellis was distraught, but carried on his affair anyway. He died in 1939, which might be considered fortunate as he had become enthralled by the idea of Nazi eugenic breeding programmes that could wipe out the ‘unfit’ and create a genetically elite technocracy who would apply scientific panaceas to Britain’s social sickness. The outcome of the Second World War might well have proved a disappointment to him.
Vintage Viagra
First, extract the king’s teeth ...
Ratimanjari of Jayadeva
(
The Posy of Love
) (India, c. 16th century)
A woman wets immediately if she is sprinkled with powder made from two teeth of a king, mixed with the two wings of a bee, powdered, and a petal blown by the wind from a funeral wreath.
Drink wasps
Mawangdui medical manuscripts (200–300
BC
)
Collect swarming beetle larvae in the fifth month on the full-moon day. Put them in a bamboo tube. Set it in a slotted steaming pot and cook. You may need to take this medicine several times.
Or-
Take 20 wasp larvae and place them in one cup of sweet liquor and drink it at midday. The tonic is good for ten bouts of sex.
Or-
Dry in the dark snails removed from the shell and crush them. If you want 20 bouts of sex, use seven pinches; if you want ten, use three pinches – and one cup of liquor.
Perk it up with pistachios
Dr Leonardo Fioravanti,
La Cirugia
(Venice, 1570)
You will need:
20 chestnuts
4oz pistachios
ragwort
cinnamon
cubebs
sugar
Take the lot and boil it all down to an elixir. Then drink. Sorted.
Parsnips or bruised acorns?
Aristotle’s Works, Containing the Masterpiece. Directions for midwives, counsel and advice to childbearing women, with various useful remedies
(London, c 1860)
Erection is chiefly caused by eringoes [the candied roots of sea-holly], cresses, parsnips, artichokes, turnips, asparagus, candied ginger, acorns bruised to powder and drank in muscadel, scallion [green onions], sea shellfish, etc.
Camel fat
Perfumed Garden
of Sheik Nefzaoui (16th century), translated into English by Sir Richard F. Burton
A man who would wish to acquire vigour for coition may melt down fat from the hump of a camel, and rub his member with it just before the act; it will then perform wonders, and the woman will praise it for its work
- or overdose on eggs
A man who wishes to copulate during a whole night, and whose desire, having come on suddenly, will not allow him to prepare himself and follow the regimen just mentioned, may have recourse to the following recipe. He must get a great number of eggs, so that he may eat to surfeit, and fry them with fresh fat and butter; when done he immerses them in honey, working the whole mass well together. He must then eat of them as much as possible with a little bread, and he may be certain that for the whole night his member will not give him any rest.
Try potatoes
Nicholas Venette,
The Mysteries of Conjugal Love Reveald
(1703)
There are certain meats by which the seed is increased, as radishes, pullets, pigs, veal, new-laid eggs and the like. There are some meats that provoke lust, as oysters, crabs, prawns, potatoes, sweet wine, and some sorts of electuaries [medicinal pastes made from powdered herbs].
Or simply get bored
Giovanni Sinibaldi,
Rare Verities, the Cabinet of Venus Unlock’d
(1658)
The best aphrodisiacs are rest, boredom, sleep and red meat – followed by wine, prosperity, fun, music and pleasant surroundings.
Then get plastered
Smarakridalaksana
(
The Art of Love Play
) (Bali, 19th century)
Obtain the penis of a wild boar, then roast it until it’s done.
Eat it with galangal, garlic, seven black pepper corns, and sea salt.
Then chant this mantra:
‘Om. I become the God of love, with a penis like the penis of a boar.
My penis is vigorous, entering the pure hole of a virgin woman.
If the boar’s penis is defeated by earth, my penis will be sexually defeated by her vagina in sex.
If the boar’s penis is not defeated by earth, my penis will not be defeated by her vagina.
It is untiring, it is untiring, it is untiring.’
Then, after eating the roasted boar’s penis, drink aged rice wine until you are drunk.
And chill out
Frederick Hollick,
The Male Generative Organs in Health and Disease
(1848)
There is one drug brought from the East Indies, the Cannabis Indica, which is the most regular in its action and produces the most constant beneficial effects of anything yet tried. It appears to act as a special nervous stimulant, exciting that part of the brain which influences the sexual organs, so that they feel directly an increase of power ... I do not hesitate to say that I have seen more restoration to sexual power and more cures of sterility in both sexes from the use of this preparation than from any other means and I do not hesitate to pronounce it, in certain cases, an infallible remedy.
One for the ladies ...
Giovanni Marinello,
Medicine Pertinent to the Infirmities of Women
(Italy, 1563)
Find 90 of the little grubs that live in plants that give off milk, such as the thistle. Throw them in a litre of old olive oil. Leave in the sun for seven days. Rub it on your loins and between your backside and penis.
This will give her a great experience she will really appreciate.
SCOUTING FOR BOYS: UNCUT
There were some who advocated manly alternatives to sex such as Britain’s legendary espionage agent, hero of the siege of Mafeking and founder of the Boy Scout movement, Lord Baden-Powell.
He pointed out in
Rovering to Success
, a life guide for adolescent lads published in 1922, ‘Sex is not everything in life and other energies take the place of sex and relieve the strain. The energy that the primitive male animal puts almost solely into sex, in the human, is turned into all sorts of other activities such as art, science and a hundred and one other things. Now you can see how Rovering comes in. Instead of aimless loafing and smutty talks you will find lots to do in the way of hiking and enjoyment of the out-of-door manly activities. Without knowing it you are putting something in the place of sex.’
