Put What Where? (22 page)
Authors: John Naish
SAUCY SIXTIES
The early Sixties were anything but uniformly swinging.
The 1964
Newnes Manual of Marriage
, for example, firmly slapped down any thoughts of pre-marital sex or even an exploratory fondle, declaring: ‘It can be said with confidence that any manipulation of the genital organs is overstepping the mark and these might well be thought to include the breasts.’ But social progress began steadily to head in one direction. Consumerist opinion-leaders, particularly the big Madison Avenue advertising agencies, discovered that they could sell many more products by encouraging people to think of themselves as rebellious individuals, rather than convention-hugging nice guys. The surge in self-awareness this fostered resulted neatly in people wanting to buy more goods that expressed their ‘unique identity’ and sense of freedom. These new approaches inevitably washed into the world of sex, too.
The radical change in attitudes was helped by a technological breakthrough – the Pill, which was licensed by America’s Food and Drug Administration
in 1960. It gave women a greater sense of sexual freedom than any previous contraceptive, thus helping plenty of men to get laid more often. In Britain and America, D.H. Lawrence’s classic 1926 sex story
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
was finally legalized after winning showpiece trials on both sides of the Atlantic. This encouraged publishers to blow the dust off other long-banned old texts, including Sir Richard Burton’s translation of the
Kama Sutra.
And in 1961, an English expert in elderly people’s medicine produced a scholarly translation of another Indian sex manual, the medieval
Koka Shastra.
Its publication date of 1963 was, for the poet Philip Larkin, the year in which sexual intercourse began, betwixt ‘the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP’.
The nudge-nudge notoriety of anything Oriental that mentioned sex ensured the
Koka Shastra
sold well in Britain. This gave ample encouragement to its translator, a certain Dr Alex Comfort, who was soon to become the seventies’ hippy humping guru with his book
The Joy of Sex.
The
Koka Shastra’s
twelfth-century text, ironically, was a backlash against the free-sex attitudes of the earlier
Kama Sutra.
Medieval India had witnessed a moral clampdown. Instead of encouraging readers to have multiple partners, the
Koka Shastra
said its sex advice was an aid to monogamy: ‘The husband, by varying the enjoyment of his wife, may live with her as with 32 different women, ever varying the enjoyment of her and rendering satiety impossible.’
Comfort wrote a long academic introduction to the book, but closed it with a plea from the heart. ‘Dare one hope that the next echelon of sex-advice literature, with the advantages behind it of science, biology, psychology, experience and, most important of all, a civilized and guilt-free view of sexuality as pleasure and fulfilment, may come eventually from our own culture? It seems quite possible, if the present weather holds.’
The weather did more than hold. It began to brew a sex-manual storm. In 1962, Helen Gurley Brown published
Sex and the Single girl: the unmarried woman’s guide to men, careers, the apartment, diet, fashion, money and men.
The title itself would have been unthinkable a decade earlier, and so would the advice: readers shouldn’t feel guilty about having sex, they would be lunatics not to bed-test potential husbands and, in the absence of eligible bachelors, married men would sometimes have to do. By April 1963, it had sold 150,000 hardcover copies. When Gurley Brown took over the editorship of
Cosmopolitan
in 1965, she effectively turned the magazine into a monthly glossy lifestyle manual that either empowered readers or left them feeling sorely inadequate. Many other magazines followed suit.
There was much more to come. In 1969, Joan Garrity, identifying herself only as ‘J’, wrote
The Way to Become the Sensuous Woman
, complete with tongue exercises and masturbation tips. The book was written on a publisher’s whim after Garrity had written a cut-price guide to New York and was
working as a publicist at their office. The chapter on self-pleasure caused the biggest stir: ‘To awaken your body and make it perform well, you must train like an athlete for the act of love,’ she wrote. Seventeen years later, Garrity remembered, ‘In those days, women wanted to have orgasms and never knew how. I put it in the first person so it could be cozy. And I wrote it in very simple language, so all women could understand it.’
The formula worked: in its first year in print it attracted 13 million readers and earned $1 million. In 1971, however, things turned sour when Garrity sued her publisher, claiming unpaid royalties, and in 1984 she co-authored the
Story of ‘J’: the author of
The sensuous woman
tells the bitter price of her crazy success.
In 1988 she turned up in a Palm Beach suburb, an insomniac overweight gardening fan who hosted a morning phone-in show for a local radio station.
1969 also saw the appearance of the psychiatrist Dr David Reuben’s book
Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex (but were afraid to ask).
Around 100 million people have now read it, but initially the book failed to find a publisher. His original proposal for a humorous sex manual titled,
Beyond the Birds and Bees
was rejected more than 20 times. One publisher sent him a note saying, ‘Funny books about sex close on Saturday night.’ But it finally got printed – and the marketing proved brilliant. The publisher had chosen the new title, with just the right level of wit. The book’s brave, bright-yellow cover appealed to booksellers, and its
timing was excellent. And although the book’s sexual descriptions were highly detailed, it did not feature explicit images. Booksellers weren’t quite ready for that yet.
Life
magazine and the
New York Times
both gave it good reviews and sales began to soar. To a post-war generation that would never believe that Van de Velde’s Edwardian manual or Kellogg’s Victorian anti-masturbation rant could ever have been bestsellers, it looked like the Age of Aquarius had chalked up another revolution. In fact, it simply meant that sex books were back on top again, and were just as odd as ever.
Reuben neatly updated the ancient Chinese sex manuals’ question-and-answer format to cover questions such as ‘What is the average penis size?’ and ‘When does someone actually get too old for sex?’ It was a number-one hit in 51 countries, despite the fact that Reuben’s jovial writing style was neither elegant nor entirely accurate. Some of the advice was seriously awry – ‘orgasm usually brings on a lapse of consciousness’ ... ‘LSD is an aphrodisiac’ ... and preferring oral sex to intercourse is ‘a probable sign of an emotional problem’. Reuben recommended Coca-Cola as ‘the best douche available’. Doctors warned it was so dangerous it could cause peritonitis. In 1972, a
Playboy
article pointed out a hundred errors.
The book inspired Woody Allen to direct a 1972 film of the same name, in which each sketch is derived from one of Reuben’s questions: do aphrodisiacs work? what is sodomy? and why do some women have trouble reaching orgasm? But Reuben’s
text became increasingly derided for its inveterate squareness: cross-dressing and pornography were perversions, and while heterosexual sadomasochists were ‘like timid children playing games’, gay sadomasochists were ‘among the cruellest people who walk this earth’. The homophobia was rabid. Reuben wrote that gay men are condemned to a miserable life of questing for something they cannot have. He added that the vast majority of homosexual encounters are impersonal, ‘No feeling, no sentiment, no nothing ... a masturbation machine might do it better.’ In a massively revised 1999 reprint he added an ‘Important note’ that effectively retracted these statements, but he had received a massive rebuttal only three years after the book first came out – in the form of Alex Comfort’s
The Joy of Sex.
You’ll go blind – or worse . . .
Masturbation: the causes
Stanley G. Hall,
Adolescence
(1911)
Springtime, warm climates, improper clothes, rich food, indigestion, mental overwork, nervousness, habits of defective cleanliness, especially of a local kind, prolonged sitting or standing, too monotonous walking, sitting cross-legged, spanking, late rising, petting and indulgence, corsets that produce stagnation or hyperaemia of blood in the lower part of the body and too great straining of the memory.
Blame it on the banisters
Sylvanus Stall,
What Young Boys Ought to Know
(1905)
Many pure-minded and innocent boys have learned the habit in very innocent ways, and in the beginning not even mistrusting that the habit was either wicked or injurious. Many boys at a very early age have discovered the sensation by sliding down the banisters, or at a little later period in life by climbing and descending trees, by riding on horse-back, and some because of uncleanness of the sexual member have experienced an itching of these parts, and when relief has been sought by chafing or rubbing, the child has been introduced to the habit of self-pollution.
And white-collar work
Dr Frederick Hollick,
The Male Generative Organs in Health and Disease, from Infancy to Old Age
(c 1845)
Figures from the annual reports of the Massachusetts State Lunatic Asylum show that ...
Light sedentary employments very much favour the formation of solitary vice, and on the contrary, active out-of-door occupation has the contrary effect. Thus among merchants, printers, students and shoemakers, 50 per cent of the insanity arises from masturbation, and only 12 per cent from intemperance; while among carpenters, blacksmiths and others who are actively employed, 35 per cent of the insanity arises from intemperance and only 13 per cent from masturbation ... These facts should be duly weighed by parents when choosing employment for their sons.
Single-handed victims
John Marten,
Treatise of all the Symptoms of the Venereal Disease
(1709)
With meagre jaws and pale looks, seldom without scabs and blotches, those loathsome relicts of their odious vices, with limber hams, and legs without calves, feeble at mature years, as rickety children, weak and consumptive, when they should by nature be most hail and vigorous; rotten before they are full ripe, and fit for nothing in the prime of their years but to be lodged in an hospital.
Is your child guilty? Danger signs
John Harvey Kellogg,
Plain Facts for Old and Young
(1877)
General debility
Early symptoms of tuberculosis
Premature and defective development
Lassitude
Sleeplessness
Failure of mental capacity
Fickleness
Untrustworthiness
Love of solitude
Bashfulness
Unnatural boldness
Mock piety
Timidity
Round shoulders and stooping posture
Weak backs and pains in the limbs and stiffness of the joints
Paralysis of the lower extremities
Strange gait
Lack of development in the breasts of females
Capricious appetite
The use of tobacco
Acne or pimples
Biting the fingernails – very common in girls
An habitually cold, moist hand
Hysteria in females
Epileptic fits
Wetting the bed
Is your child an Onanist? The signs (again)
Stanley G. Hall,
Adolescence
(1911)
Optical cramps, goitre, intensification of the patellar reflex, weak sluggishness of heart action and circulation, cold extremities, purple and dry skin, lassitude and flaccidity, clammy hands, anaemic complexion, dry cough and many digestive perversions, listlessness and frigidity, a predisposition to convulsions, early signs of decrepitude and senescence. Gray hairs and especially baldness, a stooping and enfeebled gait.
More signs of self-sex
Dr Henry Guernsey,
Plain Talks on Avoided Subjects
(1882)
Look at the habitual masturbator! See how thin, pale and haggard he appears; how his eyes are sunken; how long and cadaverous is his cast of countenance; how irritable he is and how sluggish, mentally and physically; how afraid he is to meet the eye of his fellow, feel his damp and chilling hand, so characteristic of great vital exhaustion.
It kills women
Fang Nei Chi
(
Records of the Bedchamber
), Sui Dynasty (
AD
590–618)
Some women are fond of masturbating by inserting a small pouch filled with grain or an ivory rod into their vaginas. All such instruments for artificial satisfaction are robbers of life. They will cause a woman to grow old quickly and die before her time.
Turns boys into mouth-rotted idiots
Robert Baden-Powell,
Scouting for Boys
(uncut, 1908)
The practice is called self abuse and the result is that the boy after time becomes weak and nervous and shy. He gets headaches and probably palpitation of the heart, and if he still carries it on too far he very often goes out of his mind and becomes an idiot ... Remember too that several awful diseases come from indulgence – one especially that rots away the inside of men’s mouths, their noses and eyes.
Paraphymosis? Don’t ask
Onania, or the heinous sin of self-pollution, and all its frightful consequences, in both sexes, considered: with spiritual and physical advice to those who have already injured themselves by this abominable practice
(1712)
Self-pollution manifestly hinders the growth, both in girls and boys, and few of either sex that in their youth commit this sin to excess for any considerable time, come ever to that robustness or strength which they would have arrived to without it. In men, as well as boys, the first attempt of it has often occasioned a Phymosis in some, and a Paraphymosis in others: I shall not explain these terms any further; let it suffice, that they are accidents which are very painful and troublesome.
Menstrual derangement
Our Family Physician: a manual for home usage; allopathic, hydropathic, eclectic, & herbal
(1871)
Some of the consequences of masturbation are epilepsy, apoplexy, paralysis, premature old age, involuntary discharge of seminal fluid, which generally occurs during sleep, or after urinating, or when evacuating the bowels. Among females, besides these other consequences, we have hysteria, menstrual derangement, catalepsy and strange nervous symptoms.
Head decay?
Appeal to Mothers
(1864), by the Seventh Day Adventist prophet Ellen G. White
Masturbators will suffer: affection of the liver and lungs, neuralgia, rheumatism, affection of the spine, diseased kidneys, and cancerous humours, catarrh, dropsy, headache, loss of memory and sight, great weakness in the back and loins, affections of the spine, the head often decays inwardly. The mind is often utterly ruined, and insanity takes place.
... and finally suicide
Onania, or the heinous sin of self-pollution, and all its frightful consequences, in both sexes, considered: with spiritual and physical advice to those who have already injured themselves by this abominable practice
(1712)
Disturbances of the stomach and digestion, loss of appetite or ravenous hunger, vomiting, nausea, weakening of the organs of breathing, coughing, hoarseness, paralysis, weakening of the organ of generation to the point of impotence, lack of libido, back pain, disorders of the eye and ear, total diminution of bodily powers, paleness, thinness, pimples on the face, decline of intellectual powers, loss of memory, attacks of rage, madness, idiocy, epilepsy, fever and finally suicide.
A cure! (maybe)
Sylvanus Stall,
What Young Boys Ought to Know
(1905)
Boys often have to be put in a ‘straltjacket’, sometimes have their hands fastened behind their backs, sometimes their hands are tied to the posts of the bed, or fastened by ropes or chains to rings in the wall; and in various other ways extreme measures have to be resorted to in the effort to save the person from total mental and physical self-destruction. And I am sorry to say that even these extreme measures are not always successful in restraining them or effecting a cure.
Or worse ...
John Harvey Kellogg,
Plain Facts for Old and Young
(1877)
A remedy for masturbation which is almost always successful in small boys is circumcision. The operation should be performed by a surgeon without administering an anaesthetic, as the brief pain attending the operation will have a salutary effect upon the mind, especially if it be connected with the idea of punishment. In females, the author has found the application of pure carbolic acid to the clitoris an excellent means of allaying the abnormal excitement.