Put What Where? (11 page)
Authors: John Naish
MR SEX IN SANDALS
Until this point in modern history, gay sex was the ultimate unspeakable where love manuals were concerned.
It took a wealthy Cambridge graduate turned anarcho-socialist sandal-maker to break the taboo, and even then he had a false start.
Edward Carpenter has been called the gay godfather of the British left, and in 1929 was grovellingly described by the Labour MP Fenner Brockway as having ‘head and features of extraordinary beauty, his face a chiselled statue’. Brockway added, ‘One admired him and loved him at once.’ Carpenter’s vision of an ideal socialist life provided an inspiration for the founders of the Independent Labour Party. He foresaw a world where men and women would be bound together by the force of love, rather than by work or economics. He was an active Victorian politician who spent much of his time giving public lectures, but nevertheless he found it surprisingly easy to live in an open gay relationship with his lover, George Merrill, an unemployed man he met on a train in 1889.
When Carpenter wrote his marriage guide,
Love’s Coming of Age
, it included the first chapter positively to approve of gay sex in a post-Classical manual: even the revolutionary likes of Drysdale and Carlile had condemned homosexuality as obscene. But the chapter was taken out before the book was typeset in 1896. He and his publishers got cold feet, which was perfectly understandable given that the trial of Oscar Wilde the previous year had once again cast the jailer’s shadow over open gay expression. It was another ten years before the gay chapter was added, by which time the book had become a highly influential guide to sexual conduct.
Carpenter was virulently opposed to conventional marriage, saying it turned women into serfs and men into cheats. Instead he argued for more open, or at least ‘less prettily exclusive’, relationships. At the same time, however, he criticized promiscuity. Not only were his ethics a bit confused, but his predictions that humankind would adopt Karezza (a form of Tantric sex, see
page 142
) as contraception, and that a communist society would liberate women from housework, were rather wide of the mark.
Ultimately, Carpenter and his beardy-weirdy good intentions fell victim to a purge by Labour modernizers. His advanced ideas clashed with the responsible fit-to-govern image that the Labour Party wanted to foster between the two world wars, and he was quietly dropped from favour. George Orwell apparently had Carpenter in mind in
The Road to Wigan Pier
when he condemned the idiot socialist cliché of a ‘fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal wearer and sex maniac’.
Corporal Funishment
Mutual repulsion and hatred ‘quite normal’
Theodoor Hendrik Van de Velde,
Ideal Marriage, Its Physiology and Technique
(1928)
Love bites can be given out of concentrated sexual hatred: not out of any degree of sexual love. Only a very superficial observer can miss the primitive repulsion and antagonism between the sexes which is as real as and more permanent than the attraction. The attraction may, and often does, prevail for a time; but the antipathy is there and its expression is much wider and often quite as vigorous.
Underneath love there always lies in wait hatred. And surely this is one of the profoundest causes of the tragedy of humanity. It is the possibility that gives such a sinister suggestion to the love-bite – and to the triumphant slap with the open hand on the buttocks which many a man either gives his partner, or feels an impulse to give her, at the conclusion of coitus. For these manifestations are quite ‘normal’.
How to hit someone – and how to say ouch!
Kama Sutra
of Vatsyayana (3rd century), translated by Sir Richard F. Burton and F.F. Arbuthnot (1883)
Sex can be compared to a quarrel, on account of the contrarieties of love and its tendency to cause rows. The place of striking with passion is the body, and on the body the special places are:
The shoulders
The head
The space between the breasts
The back
The middle part of the body
The sides
Four kinds of strike:
With the back of the hand
With the fingers a little contracted
With the fist
With the open palm of the hand
Eight types of yelp:
On account of its causing pain, striking gives rise to the hissing sound, which is of various kinds, and to the eight kinds of crying:
The sound Hin
The thundering sound
The cooing sound
The weeping sound
The sound Phut
The sound Phât
The sound Sût
The sound Plât
Blows with the fist should be given on the back of the woman while she is sitting on the lap of the man, and she should give blows in return, abusing the man as if she were angry, and making the cooing and the
weeping sounds. While the woman is engaged in congress the space between the breasts should be struck with the back of the hand, slowly at first, and then proportionately to the increasing excitement, until the end.
At this time the sounds Hin and others may be made, alternately or optionally, according to habit. When the man, making the sound Phât, strikes the woman on the head, with the fingers of his hand a little contracted, it is called Prasritaka, which means striking with the fingers of the hand a little contracted. In this case the appropriate sounds are the cooing sound, the sound Phât and the sound Phut in the interior of the mouth, and at the end of congress the sighing and weeping sounds.
The sound Phât is an imitation of the sound of a bamboo being split, while the sound Phut is like the sound made by something falling into water. At all times when kissing and such like things are begun, the woman should give a reply with a hissing sound. During the excitement when the woman is not accustomed to striking, she continually utters words expressive of prohibition, sufficiently, or desire of liberation, as well as the words ‘father’, ‘mother’, intermingled with the sighing, weeping and thundering sounds.
Towards the conclusion of the congress, the breasts, the middle parts, and sides of the woman should be pressed with the open palms of the hand, with some force, until the end of it, and then sounds like those of the quail or the goose should be made.
‘You’re killing me!’ And other shouts
Koka Shastra
(
The Scripture of Koka
), by the Indian poet Kokkoka (12th century)
Stop!
Harder!
Go on!
Don’t kill me!
No!
(Hope you’ve got thick party walls.)
Playful little smacks
Rennie MacAndrew,
Life Long Love: healthy sex and marriage
(1928)
No reasonable means of stimulation which leads up to and culminates in intercourse is a perversion, providing nothing other than the two bodies is used ... Of course the man who gets pleasure by beating his wife is deviating from normal, but mutual and playful little smacks could not be called abnormal.
How to scratch and bite
Kama Sutra
of Vatsyayana (3rd century), translated by Sir Richard F. Burton and F.F. Arbuthnot (1883)
Scratching school
Scratches are named after the marks they produce:
Half moon (simple curved nail indent on neck or breasts)
Circle (two indents together on neck or breasts)
Line (it’s a line)
Tiger’s nail or claw (curved line on breast)
Peacock’s foot (all five nails scratching the breast – ‘this requires great skill to do it properly’)
The jump of a hare (five marks with the nails are made close to one another near the nipple)
The leaf of a blue lotus (leaf-shaped mark on the breast or on the hips)
- and where to scratch:
The places that are to be pressed with the nails are as follows: the armpit, the throat, the breasts, the lips, the jaghana, or middle parts of the body, and the thighs. When the impetuosity of passion is excessive, the places need not be considered.
The love of a woman who sees the marks of nails on the private parts of her body, even though they are old and almost worn out, becomes again fresh and new. Even when a stranger sees at a distance a young woman with the marks of nails on her breast, he is filled with love and respect for her.
A man who carries the marks of nails and teeth on some parts of his body influences the mind of a woman. In short, nothing tends to increase love so much as the effects of marking with the nails, and biting.
How to bite (NB – avoid the eyes)
All the places that can be kissed are also the places that can be bitten, except the upper lip, the interior of the mouth, and the eyes.
The qualities of good teeth are as follows: they should be equal, possessed of a pleasing brightness, capable of being coloured, of proper proportions, unbroken, and with sharp ends.
The defects of teeth on the other hand are that they are blunt, protruding from the gums, rough, soft, large, and loosely set.
The following are the different kinds of biting:
The hidden bite
The swollen bite
The point
The line of points
The coral and the jewel
The line of jewels
The broken cloud
The biting of the boar
The biting, which is shown only by the excessive redness of the skin that is bitten, is called the ‘hidden bite’.
When the skin is pressed down on both sides, it is called the ‘swollen bite’.
When a small portion of the skin is bitten with two teeth only, it is called the ‘point’.
When such small portions of the skin are bitten with all the teeth, it is called the ‘line of points’.
The biting, which is done by bringing together the teeth and the lips, is called the ‘coral and the jewel’. The lip is the coral, and the teeth the jewel.
When biting is done with all the teeth, it is called the ‘line of jewels’.
The biting, which consists of unequal risings in a circle, and which comes from the space between the teeth, is called the ‘broken cloud’. This is impressed on the breasts.
The biting, which consists of many broad rows of marks near to one another, and with red intervals, is called the ‘biting of a boar’. This is impressed on the breasts and the shoulders; and these two last modes of biting are peculiar to persons of intense passion.
The lower lip is the place on which the ‘hidden bite’, the ‘swollen bite’, and the ‘point’ are made; again the ‘swollen bite’ and the ‘coral and the jewel’ bite are done on the cheek. Kissing, pressing with the nails, and biting are the ornaments of the left cheek, and when the word cheek is used it is to be understood as the left cheek.
Both the ‘line of points’ and the ‘line of jewels’ are to be impressed on the throat, the armpit, and the joints of the thighs; but the ‘Line of points’ alone is to be impressed on the forehead and the thighs.
The marking with the nails, and the biting of the following things – an ornament of the forehead, an ear ornament, a bunch of flowers, a betel leaf, or a tamala leaf, which are worn by, or belong to the woman that is beloved – are signs of the desire of enjoyment.
When a man bites a woman forcibly, she should angrily do the same to him with double force. Thus a ‘point’ should be returned with a ‘line of points’, and a ‘line of points’ with a ‘broken cloud’, and if she be excessively chafed, she should at once begin a love quarrel with him.
Have you got all that?
AMERICAN DUTY