Authors: John Naish
Put What Where? (9 page)
MANUAL MARTYRS
Despite Carlile and Drysdale’s best efforts, the moral tide continued to pull towards a new era of superficial primness: Victorianism.
The plain-speaking sexuality of Venette’s
Mysteries of Conjugal Love Reveald
and the
Masterpiece
steadily became watered down through the second half of the 1800s to the point where new editions no longer discussed sex openly or explained the anatomy of the genitals. Instead, words of warning were added.
The moral clampdown began to claim victims. Charles Knowlton’s
The Fruits of Philosophy
had for 40 years been openly sold as a mainstay of contraceptive advice on both sides of the Atlantic when, in the 1870s, a Bristol printer was sentenced to two years’ prison with hard labour for selling it. In response, a pair of freethinkers, Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant, decided to resist, by setting up the Free Thought Publishing Company to provoke a test case. In 1877 they republished the book in a new, cheap edition, and told the police what they were doing. To provide some sort of moral context, the age of consent in Britain at the time was 13 and was only
raised to 16 in 1885 – and then after fierce resistance. Incest was only made illegal in Britain in 1908.
The case of
Regina v Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant
proved a lengthy business. They were charged with publishing material that was ‘likely to deprave or corrupt those whose minds are open to immoral influences’ and were initially sentenced to six months’ imprisonment. The pair won their appeal against conviction in the High Court, but the greater victory was the PR coup that the pair had managed to pull off: their case threw birth control ‘on to the breakfast tables of the English middle classes’, said one observer.
Sales of
The Fruits of Philosophy
shot up from fewer than 1,000 a year to more than 100,000 in the three months preceding the trial and they remained high afterwards. Besant became a contraceptive celebrity and wrote her own book,
The Law of Population.
Besant had personal reasons to publicize birth control – she had been brought up poor and married young, at 19, to an Anglican clergyman. By 23, she was the mother of two and feeling trapped. She’d had enough of her husband’s preaching and refused to go to communion, so he threw her out of the marital home. Then she joined the anti-Church National Secular Society, met Bradlaugh and they began an affair. Early editions of her book followed Carlile’s example and recommended the sponge; later ones promoted two new methods – the Dutch cap and soluble pessaries. The manufacture of spermicides, condoms and caps grew rapidly.
But even after the Bradlaugh trial, prosecutions continued against contraceptive guides. In 1878, Edward Truelove, a 67-year-old rationalist publisher, got four months’ jail for publishing Robert Dale Owen’s
Moral Physiology.
And in 1892, a Newcastle phrenologist received a sentence of one month’s hard labour for selling H.H. Allbutt’s 1886
The Wife’s Handbook: how a woman should order herself during pregnancy with hints on other matters of importance, necessary to be known by married women.
The work, a big hit in America, contained a four-page review of contraceptive methods, including: ‘coughing (unreliable), coitus interruptus (hurtful to the nervous system in many persons) and condoms (a very certain check)’. Dr Allbutt had been struck off from the British medical register in 1887 – for selling the book at ‘such a low price’, rather than for writing abject nonsense.
Both Bradlaugh and Besant later moved into politics – Bradlaugh was elected Britain’s first freethinker MP in 1880 but steadfastly refused to take the Commons’ Christian oath and so was repeatedly expelled. Besant helped the match-girls at Bryant & May to organize a union to fight against their dreadful working conditions. Subsequently she became a religious mystic, joining Madame Blavatsky’s Eastern-occult based Theosophist movement and moving to India in 1880. There, she met 13-year-old Jiddu Krishnamurti, whom she decided was the reincarnation of Buddha, and took him on a two-year tour of England and America to proclaim him to the world as a new messiah. Krishnamurti later
said it was a case of mistaken identity. Besant also collaborated with Indian independence agitators, became president of the Indian Home Rule League and was interned by the British during the First World War. She died in India in 1933, but her name lives on – one of Bombay’s main thoroughfares is called after her.
Honeymoon Bliss
It’s an investment
Eustace Chesser,
Love Without Fear
(1942)
The groom who is considerate and patient on his wedding night will be repaid a thousand times in years to come.
Control your propensities
John Harvey Kellogg,
Plain Facts for Old and Young
(1877)
Bear this fact in mind, young man. Curb your passions. Control your propensities, and years hence you will look back upon your conduct with a satisfaction which will increase your self-respect. The brutal conduct of husbands, even on the first night of marriage, not infrequently entails upon their wives a lifetime of suffering. Such individuals are quite unworthy the name of men. They are fit only to be classed with the rakes who violate defenseless virgins, and treat women as though they were made for no other purpose than the gratification of the beastly propensities of brutal men.
Steer clear of spice and sleep on the floor
Kama Sutra
of Vatsyayana (3rd century), translated by Sir Richard Burton and F.F. Arbuthnot (1883)
For the first three days after marriage, the girl and her husband should sleep on the floor, abstain from sexual pleasures, and eat their food without seasoning.
Some say that the husband should play it cool and not speak to her for three days, but others believe that the girl may be discouraged by seeing him spiritless like a pillar, and, becoming dejected, she may begin to despise him as a eunuch.
For the next seven days they should bathe amidst the sounds of auspicious musical instruments, should decorate themselves, dine together, and welcome their relatives as well as to those who may have come to witness their marriage.
On the night of the tenth day the man should begin in a secluded place with soft, winning words, and thus create confidence in the girl. But he should abstain at first from sexual pleasures.
Women, being of a tender nature, want tender beginnings, and when they are forcibly approached by men with whom they are but slightly acquainted, they sometimes suddenly become haters of sexual connection, and sometimes even haters of the male sex.
Do give her your hand ...
Helena Wright,
The Sex Factor in Marriage
(1930)
In the first days of marriage ... an orgasm induced by the husband’s hand, and entirely by way of clitoris sensation, may be a kind and gentle way of introducing a timid and perhaps frightened girl to a happy sex life.
Horrid shock for the bride
Ida Craddock,
The Wedding Night
(1900)
There is a wrong way and there is a right way to pass the wedding night. In the majority of cases, no genital union at all should be attempted, or even suggested, upon that night. To the average young girl, virtuously brought up, the experience of sharing her bedroom with a man is sufficient of a shock to her previous maidenly habits, without adding to her nervousness by insisting upon the close intimacies of genital contact.
And, incredible as it may sound to the average man, she is usually altogether without the sexual experience which every boy acquires in his dream-life. The average, typical girl does not have erotic dreams. In many cases, too, through the prudishness of parents – a prudishness which is positively criminal – she is not even told beforehand that genital union will be required of her.
If you will first thoroughly satisfy the primal passion of the woman, which is affectional and
maternal (for the typical woman mothers the man she loves), and if you will kiss and caress her in a gentle, delicate and reverent way, especially at the throat and bosom, you will find that, little by little (perhaps not the first night nor the second night, but eventually, as she grows accustomed to the strangeness of the intimacy), you will, by reflex action from the bosom to the genitals, successfully arouse within her a vague desire for the entwining of the lower limbs, with ever closer and closer contact, until you melt into one another’s embrace at the genitals in a perfectly natural and wholesome fashion.
As to the clitoris, this should be simply saluted, at most, in passing, and afterwards ignored as far as possible; for the reason that it is a rudimentary male organ, and an orgasm aroused there evokes a rudimentary male magnetism in the woman, which appears to pervert the act of intercourse, with the result of sensualizing and coarsening the woman.
Within the duller tract of the vagina, after a half-hour, or, still better, an hour of tender, gentle, self-restrained coition, the feminine, womanly, maternal sensibilities of the bride will be aroused, and the magnetism exchanged then will be healthful and satisfying to both parties. A woman’s orgasm is as important for her health as a man’s is for his. And the bridegroom who hastens through the act without giving the bride the necessary half-hour or hour to come to her own climax, is not only acting selfishly; he is also sowing the seeds of future ill-health and permanent invalidism in his wife.
As to the bride, I would say: bear in mind that it is part of your wifely duty to perform pelvic movements during the embrace, riding your husband’s organ gently, and, at times, passionately, with various movements, up and down, sideways, and with a semi-rotary movement, resembling the movement of the thread of a screw upon a screw. These movements will add greatly to your own passion and your own pleasure, but they should not be dwelt in thought for this purpose. They should be performed for the express purpose of conferring pleasure upon your husband, and you should carefully study the results of various movements, gently and tenderly performed, upon him.
How considerate
Dr Alex Comfort,
The Joy of Sex
(1972)
Most girls are now carefully stretched beforehand by their considerate boyfriends.
KAMA SUTRA
CHAMELEON
From India, thanks to an English adventurer straight out of
Ripping Yarns
, comes a book that has become a legend of complex Oriental couplings and non-stop priapic action.
The
Kama Sutra
is Britain’s best-known love manual, though relatively few people actually saw the book during its 80-year English publication ban or have bothered to read it since.
Sir Richard Burton, the Victorian explorer, linguist, ethnologist, diplomat and soldier (rather than the Welsh actor), is one of history’s most eminent and dedicated manual men. Among his great adventures, he co-discovered Lake Tanganyika, laid the groundwork for the discovery of the source of the Nile and was the first white man ever to penetrate the sacred Islamic inner sanctum of Mecca (he would have been torn apart had his disguise been rumbled). He also claimed to be a bastard descendant of Louis XIV. Burton and his literary sidekick, F.F. ‘Bunny’ Arbuthnot, translated some of India and Persia’s great sex texts into English, though their efforts were almost completely
banned during Burton’s lifetime. Their three most important works were the ancient
Kama Sutra
and the
Ananga Ranga
, both from India, and Persia’s
Perfumed Garden.
The greatest was the
Kama Sutra
, which Burton published privately in 1883, hoping that the book’s low profile and small controlled circulation would keep it below the censor’s sights. Two years later, he published his translation of the
Ananga Ranga
the same way. At the time, Burton was developing a heroic reputation as a great foreign adventurer, so why did he risk his good name on works that could be derided as smut? Primarily he was obsessed with Eastern culture, and not least its sexual mores. He also hoped that books would help to fund his lifestyle – he was a prolific author and publisher of travel memoirs. There was also a strong streak of sexual evangelism: in the notes to his translation of another Persian book,
The Thousand Nights and a Night
, Burton parodied Western attitudes with the story of a bridegroom who entered the bedchamber to find his bride chloroformed and a note stuck on her pillow: ‘Mamma says you’re to do what you like.’ Burton believed a dose of Eastern salts might help to clear Britain’s blockage.
