Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire (43 page)

BEASTS BURDENED

Intimate relations between people and animals (especially goats) were, as we have seen, traditionally condemned as sodomy and associated with devil worship. As the animals involved were considered evil in themselves, they were executed too, often before their human partners’ eyes. With the abatement of the witchcraft craze at the end of the seventeenth century, however, a more lenient view toward bestiality emerged. Centuries of cruel punishment had done nothing to dissuade people, especially farmers, from loving their animals. City dwellers had fewer opportunities for such sex, but they nevertheless showed their interest by fuelling the market for bestial pornography. Somewhere along the line, sex with animals became less radioactive. It was seen as just one category of sex crime among many others.

When, in 1642, young William Hackett was caught in Massachusetts inserting his member in a cow, he told the court that such things were perfectly normal back home in rural England. This defense did not save Hackett from punishment—or the cow, for that matter, who was burned before Hackett’s eyes—but it did show a certain nonchalance about the subject that could not have been his alone. When the Prussian king Frederick the Great was told that one of his knights had sodomized a mare, the monarch’s reaction was more bemused than horrified: “That fellow is a pig; he must be placed in the infantry.”

Animal abusers were still burned at the stake, but less frequently than before. Some courts even started to judge the animals on their own merits. In a 1750 French case, Jacques Ferron was caught making love to a female ass. Ferron was sentenced to death, and while the ass would normally have been condemned as well, this one was acquitted on the grounds that she had been a victim of violence and had unwillingly submitted to Ferron’s desires. The court was influenced by a group of religious and civil officials who had signed a petition stating that the ass “is in word and deed and in all her habits of life a most honest creature.”

By the close of the seventeenth century, most penalties against human beings for using animals sexually had been reduced, by formal changes either in the law or in practice. Shorter jail terms replaced life imprisonment and execution. In 1791, an English tailor who took liberties with a cow was imprisoned for only two years. The French civil code after the Revolution ignored the subject completely, as did the laws of other countries that fell under French influence. By 1813, the offense would be decriminalized even in such conservative Catholic states as Bavaria.

At the same time, anyone caught in a compromising position with an animal could still count on his or her reputation being destroyed, especially if the offender lived in a city. Rather than take chances, many animal aficionados satisfied their desires with pornography. In 1710, Edmund Curll published a report of a seventy-year-old trial he titled
The Case of John Atherton, Bishop of Waterford in Ireland, Who Was Convicted for the Sin of Uncleanliness with a Cow and Other Creatures, for Which He Was Hang’d at Dublin.
Curll charged a shilling for the four-page pamphlet—an admittedly “very high” price, but one he was confident “would not fail of alluring buyers at any rate.” Pornographers also discovered that men enjoyed fantasizing about women and beasts together, especially with household cats and dogs. Whether women ever did the things described in the books is anyone’s guess, but there was no shortage of men who liked to think about it.

Tender intimacies with pets held no interest for the Marquis de Sade, whose treatment of animals in his books was nothing less than horrifying. In
The 120 Days of Sodom
, for example, he describes a libertine with a special passion for turkeys. At one point, the man puts his penis in a bird whose neck is held between the thighs of a girl lying facedown. At the same time, another man joins the scene to bugger the man violating the turkey. As the pleasure builds to a climax, the turkey lover cuts the bird’s throat. Sade was not personally prosecuted for this scene or, for that matter, the book’s passages involving baby rape, torture, and bloodsucking. He was already imprisoned in the Bastille when he composed the work, and never intended for it to be published. It would not be until the 1960s that his works would be published without censorship, by which time intellectuals, such as Geoffrey Gorer, had already hailed him as a revolutionary genius and
Sodom
as “one of the finest works of morals one could hope for.”
¹⁴

DIRTY BOOKS AND SPILLED SEED

It was during the French Revolution that the French word
pornographie
assumed its modern definition as a category of “immoral” sex books, but outside the courtroom no one needed a formal explanation. People knew what pornography was when they saw it, and they saw it everywhere. By the end of the century the publication of sexually explicit materials began to resemble the sprawling industry it is today, catering to all tastes and using all available media. Governments tried to repress it, but those efforts usually failed. Many French pornographers charged large sums for not publishing sexual attacks on royals and aristocrats. Never before or since has sexual material packed the political and social wallop it wielded in the eighteenth century. Pornography weakened the French ruling class, especially its kings and queens. It also normalized sex outside the marriage bed and guided the masses out of centuries-old Christian taboos. More than anything, it made some people a lot of money.

Sexually titillating material lurked in unlikely places. While Tissot’s
L’Onanisme
denounced pornography’s prime objective, masturbation, in the harshest terms—the good doctor said it made people insane, idiotic, hemorrhoidal, impotent, and short-lived—a substantial percentage of his readers used the book itself as an aid to masturbation. In 1835, the American clergyman John Todd published a key passage of his guide to moral behavior,
The Student’s Manual
, in Latin, in order not to excite the minds of the very young. The passage warns against the “frequency and constancy” of “the practice of pouring out by hand.” Todd also instructs his readers to talk sternly to their hands when they become tempted to touch themselves. (The young men were to say: “Hand—stay your lasciviousness!”) The use of Latin probably made the book that much more titillating, if not amusing, to his readers, and surely contributed to the book’s success: It ran to at least twenty-four editions and sold one hundred thousand copies in Europe. No less useful as masturbation aids were sex and marriage guidebooks such as
Aristotle’s Masterpiece
and Venette’s
Secrets of Conjugal Love
. One young man named John Cannon wrote in his memoirs that he regularly masturbated to a midwifery manual until his mother took it away.

The popular press was a major source of pornography, with many of its “reports” concerning divorce and adultery trials. Anyone interested in, say, an illustrated account of a duke’s impotence or his wife’s infidelity had a variety of choices. There were “sessions papers,” reports of sex trials at London’s Old Bailey, for example, or the writings of a prison chaplain who took the confessions of sex criminals, collected as
The Ordinary of Newgate, His Account of the Behaviour, Confession, and Dying Words of the Malefactors Who Were Executed at Tyburn
. Yet these publications were often outdone by newspapers and the hacks of Grub Street, a London lane that housed low-end booksellers and impoverished writers. (“Grub Street” soon became synonymous with the disreputable end of the publishing industry.) On Grub Street, printers stole others’ material, embellished trial reports with spicy details, and slapped misleading, sexy titles on their products. It was all fair game.

The dean of Grub Street and the father of the modern English pornography publishing business was the aforementioned Edmund Curll. Tall, ungainly, goggle-eyed, and described by Thomas Amory, one of his contemporaries, as a “debauchee to the last degree,” Curll noticed that the buying public was more interested in sex than in just about anything else. He also found new, creative ways to take his customers’ money. One of his early successes was a 1708 book,
The Charitable Surgeon
, which celebrated a new cure for “venereal distemper.” The concoction the book promoted, as well as the equipment for administering it, was on sale at Curll’s bookshop.

In 1714, Curll found a gold mine: a two-volume edition of “reports” about a French trial in which an aristocratic wife sought divorce on the grounds of her husband’s persistent impotence. The books were larded with detailed “physician’s accounts” and special sections on virginity, “artificial maidenheads,” and “Examples of some remarkable Cases of natural Impotence.” Curll built on this success with a collection of English trial reports about impotence and perversion, including a reprint of court materials about the notorious seventeenth-century bugger and rapist, the second Earl of Castlehaven (see Chapter Five). Curll’s success was well noted by his contemporaries, and before long there was no end of books and pamphlets covering polygamy, adultery, and rape cases. One account told of the 1729 rape trial of Colonel Francis Charteris, who was charged with raping his servant, Ann Bond. The cross-examination of Bond was reprinted in full:

Being asked whether the Prisoner [Charteris] had his clothes on? She [Bond] reply’d, he was in his night gown. Being asked whether she had not her petticoats on? She reply’d yes; but he took them up, and held her down on the couch. Being asked, whether she was sure, and how she knew he had carnal knowledge of her? She reply’d, she was sure she had, and that he laid himself down upon her, and entered her body. She was asked how it was afterwards? She reply’d that there was a great deal of wet . . .

By the 1770s, the genre had reached full flower, especially in its use of pictures. A luridly illustrated set of volumes called
Trials for Adultery: Or, the History of Divorces. Being Select Trials at Doctors Commons, for Adultery, Fornication, Cruelty, Impotence, etc.
promised on its cover to provide a “complete history of the Private Life, Intrigues, and Amours of the many Characters in the most elevated sphere: every Scene and Transaction, however ridiculous, whimsical, or extraordinary, being fairly represented, as becomes the faithful historian, who is fully determined not to sacrifice the Truth at the Shrine of Guilt and Folly.”
¹⁵

The next decade saw dozens more of such accounts, one of the most widely distributed being of Sir Richard Worseley’s £20,000 suit against one of his wife’s lovers, George M. Bisset. Worseley technically won the case, but the jury had no love for him—he was awarded just one shilling. The evidence showed that he had enjoyed showing off his wife to friends when she was undressed. On one occasion, while she was taking a bath, Worseley raised Bisset on his shoulders to let him take a peek at her through a crack in the wall. “On coming out . . . [the wife] joined the Gentlemen; and they all went off together in a hearty laugh.” The popular accounts of this scene were, of course, graphically illustrated.

Curll not only helped create a new platform for pornography, he was also the key player in the lawsuit that set England’s legal standard for obscenity—a precedent that lasted until 1959. His trial reports were mostly safe from legal challenge because they focused on the foibles of real people in real courts, but that was not all he produced. He also put out the
Treatise on the Use of Flogging
; tracts dealing with masturbation, hermaphroditism, and sodomy; and collections of sexy poems such as
The Peer and the Maidenhead
. In 1724, he released an English translation of the French book
Venus in the Cloister, or the Nun in Her Smock
, which purported to describe certain “goings on” in French convents. The book went into two editions before Curll was taken into custody and brought to court on a charge of publishing “lewd and infamous books.”

The trial concerned both
Venus in the Cloister
and the flogging treatise
,
but it was the former that most concerned the court. With its descriptions of bed-hopping, masturbating, bisexual nuns, this book was as lewd as any Curll had published. To his advantage, English law at the time had no clear standard for determining which kinds of books were too bawdy to sell. In fact, what law did exist on the subject seemed to favor Curll. In a 1708 case concerning the book
The Fifteen Plagues of a Maidenhead
, a court ruled that obscenity cases should be dealt with by the church courts, as no secular law forbade material of a sexual nature, even if it “tends to the corruption of good manners.” If the courts had refused to punish
Maidenhead
, argued Curll’s lawyer, they should let Curll off as well.

The government’s attorney disagreed, arguing that Curll’s book corrupted the morals of the king’s subjects and disturbed the peace. If the courts had any interest in guarding the realm’s good order and general morality, he told the court, it was their obligation to take the situation in hand. Meanwhile, Curll did everything he could to exacerbate the situation. While he was out on bail, as the court was trying to figure out what course to take, he published
The Case of Seduction . . . The Late Proceedings at Paris against the Rev. Abbé des Rues for Committing Rapes upon 133 Virgins
, and also put out the memoirs of a notorious spy. After these works appeared, he lost his case. The court agreed with the government’s attorney that if a book “tends to disturb the civil order of society ... it is a temporal offense.” Interestingly, in its ruling the court was influenced by an earlier case (discussed in Chapter Five) concerning Sir Charles Sedley, who was fined for disturbing public order after he defecated out the window of a tavern. Sedley had soiled the realm with excrement; Curll was staining England with words about oversexed French nuns.