Authors: John Naish
Put What Where? (21 page)
The award for sanest pre-war advice must go to the husband-and-wife team, Hannah and Abraham Stone, for their soberly titled,
A Marriage Manual.
It oozed sensibleness, disguising its quietly progressive opinions behind an authoritative black cover. The Stones had worked with Margaret Sanger to popularize birth control, but firmly rejected her beloved idea of compulsory sterilization for so-called defectives, calling it ‘a dangerous social policy’. Nevertheless such sterilization was actually permitted or even ordered at the time in 30 American states.
The pair set up America’s first official marriage-consultation service and pioneered ways of working with couples and groups – an approach which
became increasingly popular in the wake of the Second World War, when vast numbers of servicemen’s marriages threatened to disintegrate after years of enforced separation. Their book was written using a similar approach, as a dialogue between a doctor and a young couple about to be married, echoing once again the Q&A format of humankind’s very first written advice.
The
Marriage Manual
was widely lauded by critics for its practical and down-to-earth advice. The public loved it, and the text was reprinted 22 times between its publication in 1935 and 1952. It introduced the practice of scattering health texts with ‘pertinent facts’ ... did you know that, apparently, the clitoris was first named by a man called Columbus (albeit not Christopher)? Other sex facts were backed by the Stones’ own research, such as measuring the distance from vagina to clitoris in a sample of patients (results: from 0.5in to 2.5in). Given the times and political climes in which they worked, the Stones were paragons of reason. But not completely: they rejected normal intercourse from the rear, saying it was unromantic and used ‘only among certain primitive peoples’.
Hannah died young, at 46, after which Abraham, a short, dark Russian-born man with a moustache, continued their work promoting contraception and marital therapy. After he retired, he spent his last years raising cows and chickens on a farm in New Jersey and ice-skating.
Beware of Celibacy
Boils and ulcers
Fang-nei-pu-l
(
Healthy Sex Life
), by the Taoist physician Sun Szu-mo (
AD
601–682)
Man’s passion naturally has its periods of great abundance. Therefore even superior men cannot bear a protracted abstention from sexual intercourse. If a man abstains too long from emitting semen, he will develop boils and ulcers. But if a strong man of over 60 feels that his thoughts are still composed after not having copulated with a woman for one month or so, then he can afford not to engage in sexual intercourse any longer.
As a rule, forcible suppression of the urge is difficult to attain and easy to lose again. It will cause a man to suffer from involuntary emissions and turgid urine, finally leading to his being haunted by incubi. One emission of semen will then equal the loss caused by a hundred emissions of a man who leads a normal sex life.
Overwork
Havelock Ellis,
Psychology of Sex: a manual for students
(1933)
The difficulties of sexual abstinence, even though they do not involve any great risk to life or to sanity, are still very real to many healthy and active persons. It is apt to cause minor disturbances of physical wellbeing,
and on the psychic side much mental worry and a constantly recurring struggle with erotic obsessions, an unwholesome sexual hyperesthesia which, especially in women, often takes on the form of prudery.
A student, for instance, who lives chastely, who is ambitious, who wishes to put all his best energies into his studies, may endure great anxiety and mental depression from this struggle. Many young women, also, actively engaged in various kinds of work, suffer similarly and are sometimes stimulated to a feverish activity in work and physical exercise which usually brings no relief.
Nerves and fibroids
Marie Stopes,
Married Love
(1918)
The medical man can produce an imposing list of diseases more or less directly caused by abstinence both in men and women. These diseases range from neuralgia and ‘nerves’ (in women) to fibroid growths. And it is well worthy of remark that these diseases may be present when the patient (as in many unmarried women) has no idea that the sex-impulse exists unmastered.
Evil spinster syndrome
George Riley Scott,
Your Sex Questions Answered
(1947)
Sex is a biological need in a woman’s life as it is in a man’s. It is a fact so noteworthy as to rank almost as a platitude that the middle-aged spinster is unhappy,
bad-tempered and so psychologically abnormal that she is difficult to live with ... the reason for the evolution of this type of mind is sex repression.
How to cure a celibate woman
Havelock Ellis,
Psychology of Sex: a manual for students
(1933)
The main part of the task of curing sexual anaesthesia in a woman must usually rest with her husband. He is by no means always equipped for this treatment. One fears that there is still too much truth in Balzac’s saying that in this matter the husband is sometimes like an orang-utang with a violin.
It must be admitted that the husband’s task is often difficult. The difficulty is increased by the late age at which in civilisation a woman enters the state of marriage after a long period of years in which she has presumably been leading a life of chastity.
During those long years there has been, we know, a constant generation of sexual energy which must be consumed along some channel or other. The woman has acquired habits and fallen into routines. Her whole nervous system has been moulded and hardened. Even on the physical side of sex, the organs are by no means always so ready to respond normally to the exercise of their natural functions.
Why girls get cold feet
Aristotle’s Works, Containing the Masterpiece. Directions for midwives, counsel and advice to childbearing women, with various useful remedies
(London, c. 1860)
The natural end of man and women’s being is to propagate. Now in the act of conception, there must be an agent and patient; for if they be both every way of one constitution they cannot propagate: man therefore is hot and dry, woman cold and moist; he is the agent, she the patient or weaker vessel, that she should be subject to the office of the man.
It is necessary the woman should be of a cold constitution, because in her is required a redundancy of nature for the infant depending up on her; for otherwise, if there were not a surplus of nourishment for the child, more than is convenient for the mother, then would the infant detract and weaken the principal parts of the mother, and like unto the viper, the generating of the infant would be the destruction of the parent.
FRIGID FIFTIES
The march of sexual liberation rather stubbed its toe on the post-war years.
The trauma of mass wartime destruction and displacement in Europe was followed by years of grim austerity, where food, shelter and normality took priority over free love. By contrast, America’s industrial boom showered its folk with unprecedented material riches, creating a society paralysed by the rictus grin of its own apparent success: happy husbands, permed wives and Stepford sex.
After the Second World War, popular manuals tended to give priority to men’s pleasure. This is what passed as sex advice in
Esquire
magazine: ‘First date: Camellias. They’re less usual than gardenias. First surprise: sewing machine or a wash tub. If she’s bright, she’ll catch on.’ If women wanted a happy marriage, they were expected to ensure that marital sex appeared successful. Even if they didn’t actually enjoy the experience, they could still lie back and think of kitchen appliances. Women who refused to fake it found themselves described as emotionally and psychologically deficient, suffering
from frigidity, prudishness and neurosis. Eustace Chesser’s
Love Without Fear
, which was first published in 1941 and beat an American censorship attempt the following year, proved highly popular through the 1950s and promoted the idea that good marital sex should involve both parties orgasming – but it also suggested if the woman didn’t come she might be better off looking as though she had.
Joan Malleson put her finger on the problem in 1950 when she published
Any Wife or Any Husband
, saying ‘Many wives are aware that the full use of the outer clitoral area will alone bring them satisfaction, yet they are too afraid to ask their husbands to touch this part of their body in the proper way.’ Perhaps these wives were afraid that they might receive a response inspired by Edward Podolsky’s contemporary
Sex Technique for Husband and Wife
, in which he declared ‘The clitoris, while important, is not nearly as important as many of us have been taught or led to believe.’
Podolsky typified the prevailing approach: women should be compliant, grateful – and, in particular, undemanding. He even created a new disorder – ‘exaggerated sexual craving’ – to describe wives who fancied intercourse more often than their husbands did. Podolsky’s 1942
Modern Sex Manual
warned that this morbid condition had become a curse that doctors faced helplessly every day: ‘Mental treatment, or psychotherapy, has been tried, but the results are negligible. Simply telling a woman to exert some willpower to control her abnormal sex craving is not enough,’ he warned.
Oddly enough, these unreasonable sexual demands seemed to go hand-in-hand with the woman patients becoming overweight and post-menopausal – and thus very possibly less desirable. We can guess, too, that this might coincide with hubby’s own libido flagging. Wifey wanting sex was suddenly a medical terror.
Fortunately, Podolsky had the answer: With startling advances in female hormonology, this problem is well on the way toward solution. The new remedy is the male sex hormone, testosterone,’ he wrote. ‘It is injected once every two days and relief is obtained. In some there is a recurrence of the morbid sex craving.’ Exactly what testosterone did to these women is open to question. Perhaps they grew moustaches, developed an interest in beer, fast cars and baseball – and left their husbands alone. Horny women became an official medical problem: in 1951, nymphomania was defined as a sexual deviation in America’s first formal attempt to categorize psychiatric illness: the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
Three years later, the idea of female sexuality became a literary problem, too. Gustave Flaubert’s 1857 novel
Madame Bovary
was placed on the blacklist of the U.S. National Organization of Decent Literature for depicting a woman driven by sexual desire. The character Emma is married to a small-town doctor but takes a rich landowner and a legal clerk as lovers. Flaubert’s doctor obviously hadn’t heard of testosterone.
The gates of progress had not warped completely shut, however. Alfred Kinsey’s anecdotally based
reports on ordinary Americans’ sex lives offered some opportunity to discuss the matter openly – though much of that discussion consisted of vitriolic attacks on Kinsey. (Much the same happened in 1966 when William Masters and Virginia Johnson described their laboratory observations of what happens when you put a naked man on top of a naked woman. They were inundated by hate mail, which outnumbered supportive letters by nine to one.)
Don’t Overdo It
The ruin of thousands
Nicholas de Venette,
Tableau de I’amour conjugal
(1696)
Unbounded licentiousness in the conduct of the marriage bed is the ruin of many thousand couples. It is like bathing in cold water which, if sparingly exercised, recruits the strength, but if too often had recourse to, enervates and destroys it.
It borders on criminal
John Harvey Kellogg,
Plain Facts for Old And Young
(1877)
Many a man has, until his marriage, lived a most continent life; so has his wife. As soon as they are wedded, intercourse is indulged in night after night, neither party having any idea that these repeated sexual acts are excesses which the system of neither can bear, and which, to the man at least, are absolute ruin. The practice is continued till health is impaired, sometimes permanently; and when a patient is at last obliged to seek medical advice, he is thunderstruck at learning that his sufferings arise from excesses unwittingly committed. Till they are told of the danger, the idea never enters their heads that they are guilty of great and almost criminal excess.
It’s depressing
William Chidley,
The Answer
(1912)
The high degree of nervous excitement which the act of coition involves produces a depression of spirits to a corresponding amount, and the too frequent repetition of it is productive of consequences very injurious to the general health.
Women steal your strength
Albertus Magnus,
De Secretis Mulierum
(
The Secrets of Women
) (
c.
1478)
Too much ejaculation dries out the body because the sperm has the power of humidifying and heating. That is why men who copulate too much and too often do not live long.
The more women have sexual intercourse, the stronger they become, because they are made hot by the motion that the man makes during coitus. Further, male sperm is hot because it is of the same nature as air and when it is received by the woman it warms her entire body, so women are strengthened by this heat. On the other hand, men who have sex frequently are weakened by this act because they become exceedingly dried out.
Your skin will flake
Giovanni Marinello,
Medicine Pertinent to the Infirmities of Women
(Italy, 1563)
Symptoms of overindulgence:
General weakness
Loss of vision
Loss of memory
Pallid complexion
Flaky skin
Yellow or brown spots
You’ll become gullible ...
Nicholas Venette,
The Mysteries of Conjugal Love Reveald
(1703)
If a man too far indulges himself in these pleasures, and especially in his youth gives way to frequent coition, it will cross his present health, debilitate his generative faculties and entirely subvert his constitution ... he becomes slow in action, heavy in gait, dull in his conversation, stupid in his comprehension, unadvised in his labour and apt to believe everything; the hair of the head will fall off or grow quickly grey ... his life will be shortened two-thirds of its date.
- but strong wine up the nose will fix it
Let me advise those who have injured their health by the immoderate use of women to wash their nostrils, their wrists and the palms of their hands with the strongest-bodied wine they can get; which though a simple remedy, may be attended with very salutary effects.
No one loves an overweight nympho
Edward Podolsky,
Modern Sex Manual
(1942)
For many years the treatment and management of exaggerated sexual craving in women has been a problem which many physicians and psychiatrists have had to face in daily consultation. Typically, the problem arises during the menopause and is accompanied by a sudden increase in weight, which is directly related to the sexual craving. Frankly there was actually very little that could be done.
With startling advances in female hormonology this problem is well on the way toward solution. The new remedy is, strangely enough, the male sex hormone ... It is injected once every two days and relief is obtained. In some there is a recurrence of the morbid sex craving.
Do something creative instead
Marie Stopes,
Married Love
(1918)
Analysis of the chemical nature of the ejaculated fluid reveals among other things a remarkably high percentage of calcium and phosphoric acid – both precious substances in our organization. It is therefore the greatest mistake to imagine that semen is something to be got rid of frequently – all the vital energy and nerve-force involved in its ejaculation and the precious chemical substances which go to its composition can be better utilized by being transformed into other creative work on most days of the month.
Or be a boy scout
Robert Baden-Powell,
Rovering to Success
(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. So the more interests you have and the more you follow them with keenness, the less will primitive sex urges worry you ... 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.
Live to make love at 10
Nicholas Venette,
The Mysteries of Conjugal Love Reveald
(1703)
If moderation is of use in any thing, it ought, without doubt, to be so in the embraces of women ... an old man of seventy will be in a condition to caress a young woman and get children, if he has not taken too much liberty with the ladies during his youth.
When a man gives himself up to lust, he loses his plumpness and good air; his head grows bald, his eyes tarnished and livid and the fire which formerly was perceived is then vanished.
The brain, which is the principal organ of all faculties of the soul, cools and dries by the loss of humours we sustain in caresses of women. In some lascivious men it is no bigger than one’s fist. The eyes grow sad and hollow through the scarcity of the spirits, the cheeks thin, the forehead withered and callous, the hearing become hard, the breath stinking.
