Put What Where? (13 page)

In 1905, he used the very latest technology to preach his dictum, ‘No boy can toy with exposed portions of his reproductive system without finally suffering very serious consequences.’ He marketed one of the first ever talking books. It could be purchased as a set of 24 wax cylinders. In them Sylvanus gives ‘little Harry’ a series of sermonizing lectures guaranteed to screw him up for the rest of his life. And there must have been plenty of poor little Harrys out there. Stall’s work featured numerous endorsements from prominent Americans and went into scores of editions and many languages.

It is Stall’s solemn duty to warn against the dangers, once again, of solitary vice – a pleasurable sensation boys discover at a very early age by climbing trees, riding on horseback, having itchy genitals or, once again, sliding down banisters. Or some boys’ nurses might, says Dr Stall, have given them a quick helping hand ‘for the purpose of diverting
their thoughts, so that they will not cry, or in order that they may be quieted when put to bed and soon fall asleep’. What made him think that? Stall also relates a tale of onanistic mischief which of course ends badly, with the poor young victim suffering ‘a spasm of the nerves, terminating for the time all pleasure, and leaving the nerves as wasted and depleted as the body of a person whose entire physical system has been brought under the influence of a spasm’.

And in case one spasm were not enough to put you off, Stall warns: ‘If such shocks are repeated, or long continued, the entire nervous system will eventually become shattered and ruined beyond all hope of complete recovery. The health gradually declines. The eyes lose their lustre. The skin becomes sallow. The muscles become flabby. There is an unnatural languor. Every little effort is followed by weariness. There is a great indifference to exertion. Work becomes distasteful and irksome. He complains of pain in the back; of headache and dizziness. The hands become cold and clammy. The digestion becomes poor, and appetite fitful. The heart palpitates. He sits in a stooping position, becomes hollow-chested, and the entire body, instead of enlarging into a strong, manly frame, becomes wasted, and many signs give promise of early decline and death.’

A product of the great outdoors, Alice Stockham wanted sex to last for ever, as an American pioneer of tantric sex.

Over the past century, tantra has become, like the
Kama Sutra
, a Western byword for convoluted Oriental practices – weird sex practised by mystic Easterners and the occasional Western rock star anxious to reassure the world of their continued virility. In its native India, tantra covers a gamut of sexual yoga practices, but in the West it has come to mean having sex for hours, if not days, without the man ejaculating – a sort of penile self-anaesthetic that is claimed to transport practitioners to spiritual ecstasy. Once again, we hear an echo of those first Chinese love guides.

The practice only became widely known in the West during the 19th century, with a sudden and apparently coincidental burst of interest from several esoteric writers. Perhaps it was sexual synchronicity: each pioneer was sure that they had discovered it by themselves. And each gave it their own title, such as ‘Male Continence’, ‘Magnetation’,
The Better Way’ and ‘Zugassent’s Discovery’. Alice Bunker Stockham, however, was the only one to travel to India to study Hindu tantric sex for herself. In 1896, she published her own feminist version of orgasmless sex and called it ‘karezza’ – Italian for caress.

Stockham’s background could qualify her to be the Calamity Jane of strange contraception. She was born in 1833 in the old Wild West of Michigan, where home was a log cabin and the neighbours were Native American tribespeople. She grew up a Quaker and paid her way through high school with manual labour. At the age of 20, she got into Cincinnati’s Eclectic College to study medicine and was among the first five women in America to qualify as a medical doctor. She specialized in obstetrics and gynaecology and became an activist in women’s and children’s rights. She was also a homoeopath, a suffragette and a trance medium. When the first tantra books were translated into English, Stockham wanted to know more and travelled to Southern India, visiting a hereditary female caste of warriors on the Malabar Coast. The Nayar women were wise, educated, and all property descended through them. They ran businesses, chose their own (multiple) husbands, and were tagged the ‘free women of India’. They also knew a few things about spiritual sex.

Classic Indian tantra casts women as vessels for men to use to generate their spiritual energy. But Stockham’s female-friendly version claimed that both men and women could benefit from conserving
and exchanging their sexual essences. By holding it all back, the couple could rev themselves up into sexually charged spiritual dynamos whose healthful vigour could drive creative and spiritual achievements that would change the world, such as great inventions and beautiful works of art.

What’s more, the system could also sort out your domestic life: ‘Men who are borne down with sorrow because their wives are nervous, feeble and irritable, have it in their power, through karezza, to restore the radiant hue of health to the faces of their loved ones, strength and elasticity to their steps and harmonious action to every part of their bodies,’ promised Stockham. ‘By manifestation of tenderness and endearment, the husband may develop a response in the wife through her love nature, which thrills every fibre into action and radiates tonic to every nerve ... The common daily sarcasms of married people are at an end, the unseemly quarrels have no beginnings and the divorce courts are cheated of their records.’ Some upside. And the downside of indulging in regular coital orgasms is, she warned, ‘deleterious both physically and spiritually, and is frequently a cause of estrangement and separation’.

In 1883 Stockham self-published a natural-childbirth book,
Tokology
(Greek for obstetrics), that was translated into French, Finnish, German and Russian – the latter had a foreword written by Leo Tolstoy. She used it to set up a sexual precursor to the
Big Issue
, giving copies to penniless women and former prostitutes to sell door-to-door. In a further
entrepreneurial twist, each copy included a gift voucher for a free gynaecological exam at her clinic. The book might have been about childbirth, but it also promoted her new passion – karezza. Others latched on to the idea at the same time: A.E. Newton wrote
The Better Way;
and Paschal Beverly Randolph published
Eulis! ... or the Anseiratic mysteries.
Stockham herself published George N. Miller’s novel
Strike of a Sex
, in which he described the fictional but karezza-like ‘Zugassent’s Discovery’.