Ten Historical Sex Hang-ups

you think you have problems? our forefathers thought up so many ways to avoid enjoying sex, it's a wonder we're here

As Times Change, so do our notions of sexual propriety. Nowadays, it is less a question of whether or not a girl kisses on the first date than of whether or not she gives head. The only moral issue--is it better to give than to receive?--is more a matter of technique and timing than of ethics. In the area of affairs, it is not just love with the proper stranger but how many of them. At Plato's Retreat, it is permitted--yea, even applauded--to make it with a crowd. Ah, progress.

Many people think that the sexual revolution has been fought and won in the past few decades. They are wrong. The battle has been going on for centuries. The weapons have improved (who would have imagined vibrators 70 years ago? Certainly not Jules Verne) and the victory celebrations are a lot more fun than they used to be. But lest we forget just how far we have come, let us examine some of the sexual hang-ups of antiquity. It turns out that however good the good old days were, the good old nights weren't. Here's why:

1. The fear of enjoying sex: In the early centuries of Christianity, the Church fathers were dead set against sex in all its forms save one. They had to admit that sex was sinless within marriage--but only if it wasn't fun. In the Third Century, Clement of Alexandria stated that married lovemaking was blameless only if delight were confined and pleasure minimized. Somewhat later, Saint Jerome laid down the law: A man who too ardently loved his own wife was as sinful as an adulterer. Jerome went further: Sexual pleasure was so impure, even in marriage, that prayer was impossible for some time after each episode. Priests passed this along to their congregations and even ordered the married to abstain from intercourse for three full days before taking Communion, lest they come to the sacrament befouled in spirit. Couples looked forward to death and a reunion in a sexless heaven. One Tertullian of Carthage wrote to his wife: "There will be on that day no resumption of voluptuous disgrace between us." Some heaven.

2. Misogyny, or woman hating: Our forefathers carried their fear of sex to its logical conclusion. Blame it on the accomplice, or the tools of the trade. They possessed a vivid loathing for women, or, more specifically, for the sex organs of women. (If women reciprocated this loathing, we don't know about it, since they did not write or keep diaries.) Lucretius, the Epicurean philosopher, held that ungoverned sexual passion produced foolish behavior and wasted one's substance; therefore, if the rational man should feel intense desire for a woman, he should view his passion as a disease and combat it. How? By concentrating on her defects. He should observe that her breasts sag and that she is not perfectly clean. He should tell himself that she sweats, moves her bowels and has body odors. And, lo, he is cured. Lucretius was a mere amateur at disgust compared with some of the early Christians. Around 370 A.D., when Saint John Chrysostom learned that his friend Theodore was in love with a young woman and planned to marry her, he wrote Theodore these helpful words:

"The groundwork of her bodily beauty is nothing but phlegm and blood and yellow bile and black bile, and the fluid of masticated food.... When you see a rag with mucus or spittle on it, you cannot bear to touch it even with your finger tips; are you then in a flutter of excitement about the storehouse and repository of these things?"

Theodore canceled the wedding and took a celibacy vow. He also blew lunch.

Fear and loathing of the fair sex reached their finest expression in Saint Augustine's epigram about the female generative system--"We are born between feces and urine"--and in the philosopher Boethius' succinct summary of the female nature: "Woman is a temple built upon a sewer." Disgust, though it failed to eradicate sexual activity, contaminated it for many centuries.

3. Prudery and purity: In 19th Century England and America, middle-class people no longer thought of married sex as sinful--but rather as lowly, animallike and the expression of base impulses. Only in men, however; women were too pure and good to have such impulses. Or to talk about sex, or even to imply by word or gesture that they knew sexual organs existed. A decent woman, when she saw the doctor, would point out on a doll where she had a pain, so as not to point to her own body in an immodest fashion. Sex was never spoken of between husband and wife, and preferably not even seen: They coupled in inky darkness, usually with night clothes on but pushed up halfway. Even those celebrated Victorian lovers Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning are said never to have seen each other totally nude.

In the 1880s, Dr. William Hammond, an expert on sexual matters, stated flatly that nine tenths of the time, decent women felt not the slightest pleasure in intercourse. An eminent gynecologist added that sexual pleasure in young women was pathological.

The Victorians believed what they were told. In the typical sex act, the husband wordlessly relieved himself upon his wife as quickly as possible, while she submitted because it was her conjugal duty to do so. If, by chance, she felt any pleasure, she did her best to still and show nothing, so as not to disgrace herself in her husband's eyes.

4. Noncompletion of the sex act: But what would you say of people who could reach orgasm during lovemaking but who voluntarily denied themselves that sum-mum desideratum of sexual activity? The inhabitants of the Oneida Community, the mate-swapping religious commune that lasted for 30 years in Upstate New York in the 19th Century, based a society on just such a hang-up. At Oneida, coitus reservatus was the rule except when pregnancy was desired: The man stayed inside the woman as long as he could--up to an hour, at times--without ejaculating then or later, though the woman was permitted to have orgasm. This was called male continence and was highly thought of; those oafs who could not contain themselves were scorned and women avoided them. The founder of Oneida, John Humphrey Noyes, had sought a way to distinguish between social sex and procreative sex: he hit upon male continence and found it "a great deliverance."

Deliver us, O Lord, from such deliverance.

But at least the women of Oneida completed the act. A more bizarre sexual practice, known as amor purus (pure love), was favored by the lords and ladies of certain medieval courts. A lord and a lady, each married to someone else, would carry on a protracted romance in which he sought her favors by knightly service and gallantry, while she played haughty and hard to get. It might take years before she let him kiss her, months more before he embraced her. Finally, she would grant him amor purus--prolonged sexplay. unclothed and in bed, but without actual intercourse. And that was considered nobler and finer than consummated sex; its exponents condemned intercourse as false love, while exalting the true love of kissing, fondling and lying together nude.

5. The spiritual union, or abstinence is next to godliness: In the latter part of the Third Century, certain devout Christians yearned to be chaste but had to marry for social reasons. Ammon. a wealthy youth of Alexandria, faced this dilemma and hit upon a solution: He read to his fiancée Saint Paul's exhortation to chastity (I Corinthians 7: 1--7), and shortly after their wedding they astounded friends and relatives by taking vows of celibacy. Throughout their marriage, they lived an ascetic life, as brother and sister, in two rude huts in the Egyptian desert. The fame of this continent marriage spread rapidly and, according to Church historians, countless couples, over the next several centuries, emulated them. Some outdid Ammon and his wife by living in the same house and even sleeping in the same bed. Admirable--but risky; indeed, Saint Jerome himself wrote sternly to one Rusticus, who had sunk back into wedded indulgence.

Not to be outdone by laymen, many clergymen in that same period practiced unconsummated marriage: They took virgins into their homes as spiritual wives, living with them and sleeping together in chastity. Indeed, they felt all the more spiritual for undergoing constant temptation. But some leaders of the Church doubted that they constantly resisted it. Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, angrily pointed out that the claim of chastity could be a fraud, since even if a midwife found the spiritual wife to be a virgin, "she may have sinned in some other part of her body." No fool, he.

6. Love at a remove: The ultimate step in the purification of love was taken by Dante. He first saw Beatrice when he was only nine, but he precociously fell in love and began his lifelong worship of her. It was a pure and inspiring love, but a thoroughly disembodied one. He never spoke to her, made no effort ever to meet her and caught sight of her only at rare intervals. Nor did he desire more, for she was goddesslike and unattainable in his eyes. She never knew of his love for her or of the sublime poetry he wrote under her spell. What he said about his feelings was taken as a model of true love by poets, philosophers and romantics for generations to come: Many tried to follow his lead; some succeeded.

In case you were wondering about his sex life, Dante had a wife and, over the years, several mistresses. In his writing, he said almost nothing about them; he may have been grateful for their services, but it never occurred to him to love them.

7. The struggle against lust: Over the centuries, innumerable men and women in religious orders have taken vows of celibacy and undergone intense suffering in their efforts to master their sexual desires. You may or may not regard this as a hang-up, depending on your own religious beliefs, but certainly some of the pioneers of celibacy behaved as if they were deranged.

Consider Origen. When this Biblical scholar was a young man in Alexandria, he put an end to his own sufferings by taking literally the words of Christ, "There be eunuchs which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake." Secretly, and without help, Origen castrated himself. Alas. The secret got out, word spread, and over the succeeding decades, thousands of his admirers mutilated themselves similarly to conquer their own lusts.

The Church eventually forbade this practice. After all, what merit is there in celibacy if one makes it effortless? What nobility is there in self-control when self-indulgence is impossible? Much more admirable were those celibates who burned with lust but mortified their flesh in order to counteract the evil impulse. Simeon Stylites spent 35 years on top of a 60-foot pillar. A nameless monk, when practical jokers sent a prostitute to his cell one night, held a finger in the flame of the lamp to distract himself; by morning, all his fingers were gone, but he was still pure. Millions of others have since slept on stone floors, worn hair shirts and kneeled in prayer for hours to quench the flames of desire, without, like Origen, getting rid of the fuel.

8. The heartbreak of self-abuse: As if it were not enough for the pure in heart to deal with their desires for intercourse, they have also fought desperately to deny themselves self-administered sexual pleasure. Ammon took a vow never to remove (concluded on page 190) Sex Hang-ups (continued from page 128) his clothing, since the sight of his own parts might tempt him; many followed his example. Those who needed outside help were given it by their confessors: By the Seventh Century, masturbation cost 40 days of penance, and Aquinas later reckoned it a worse sin than fornication. Since this did little more than make millions feel terrible--without eliminating the practice--physicians in the 18th and 19th centuries took another tack: They claimed that over 100 diseases, ranging from poor eyesight and epilepsy to heart murmurs and mental disorder, were caused by masturbation. This was effective, at least in spoiling the pleasure of masturbators. And who can say that the physicians were wrong? For, undoubtedly, some of those who were authoritatively told that they would develop physical and mental ailments if they masturbated did, indeed, develop such ailments out of fear and guilt.

9. Intercourse with spirits: In various eras, men and women who denied themselves even the mediocre solace of masturbation often dreamed, willy-nilly, of sexual delights. But since, consciously, they desired not to enjoy such pleasures, they transformed their yearnings in sleep into visitations by supernatural creatures--incubi and succubi, the Devil himself, and Christ.

Christ? Yes, even he. The cult of virginity, in which every nun or pious virgin is "the bride of Christ," dates back to the Fifth Century; in earlier days, it had distinctly erotic overtones. Saint Jerome himself, persuading one virgin to remain celibate, used curiously sexual imagery:

"Let the seclusion of your own chamber ever guard you; ever let the Bridegroom sport with you within. If you pray, you are speaking to your Spouse; if you read, He is speaking to you. When sleep falls on you, He will come behind the wall and will put His hand through the hole in the door and will touch your belly. And you will awake and rise up and cry: 'I am sick with love.' "

No one knows how many virgins sublimated their desires in this fashion, but some of those who achieved fame, and who left their memoirs, tell of such dreams or visions. Sometimes, though, they thinly concealed the truth from themselves behind transparent symbolism. Saint Theresa of Avila, the 16th Century Carmelite mystic, described her many transports and raptures, in some of which she saw a beautiful angel holding a long golden spear with a fiery tip; he would thrust this several times into her heart and a feeling of burning, divine love would descend into her bowels and fill her being.

Others weren't as fortunate. For many centuries, from the Middle Ages on, uncounted thousands of women (and some men) had the impression that at night they were sexually possessed by demons or by the Devil himself, which qualified them to become witches. They gave the most vivid details (when tortured by inquisitors) of their sexual union with the evil one: His penis was variously said to be made of ivory, shod with iron or covered with fish scales and, in any case, ice-cold. (Maybe the Devil just had an assortment of French ticklers and novelty condoms.) Some claimed that intercourse with him was excruciating but others said that it was marvelous. (As one Scottish witch said, "He is abler for us than any man can be.") Of special importance to them, or perhaps to him, was his anus: At Black Masses, those who reverently kissed this orifice received special powers. All of which might seem amusing, except that those who confessed were burned at the stake. In 1554, one inquisitor reported that at least 30,000 witches had been destroyed in a century and a half, and by the time the witchcraft frenzy died out, the number must have been far greater than that.

10. The need for pain in sexual pleasure: Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the novelist who liked his wife to beat him with a whip that had nails in it, was not so rare a bird. Although many experts have described women as often being masochistic in the sex act, and wanting to be forced or hurt a little, it is men who have more often required severe whippings, without which they could not achieve erection and orgasm. This condition was especially common in the sexually constipated 19th Century, most notably in England. Indeed, flagellation by a prostitute, at the man's own wish, was widely called le vice anglais. Many of London's Victorian brothels specialized in this service, and their clientele included men of distinction.

Some writers have linked le vice anglais to the English custom of birching pubescent schoolboys on their bare bottoms for their misdeeds. Perhaps--but that doesn't explain the phenomenon, mentioned by Havelock Ellis, of those men who went to Victorian brothels where they could be hanged from a padded cord. Hanged but not killed; the scholarly Ellis adds in a footnote that though hanged criminals sometimes have emissions, there "is no sexual pleasure in death by hanging, and persons who have been rescued at the last moment have experienced no voluptuous sensation."

Too bad. That would surely have been the ultimate hang-up.

"The Devil's penis was said to be made of ivory, shod with iron or covered with fish scales."