You Could Look It Up (30 page)

CHAPTER
12

EROTIC RECREATIONS

Sex Manuals

Erotic writing has a very long history—love poems, seduction narratives, tales of courtly love, and outright pornography can be found in many ancient literatures. Even the Bible contains a frankly erotic work, a poem variously known as the
Song of Songs
, the
Song of Solomon
, and the
Canticles
. For centuries, theologians scrambled to interpret the
Song
metaphorically or symbolically, eager to show that the eroticism is not
really
eroticism—the beloved has been turned into the Church, the lover into the believer. If a few of the comparisons seem far-fetched to modern sensibilities—“thou hast doves’ eyes within thy locks: thy hair is as a flock of goats … Thy teeth are like a flock of sheep … Thy neck is like the tower of David builded for an armoury … Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies”
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—well, they probably were racy in their original context.

Classical Western literature is also rich in eroticism, and sometimes it takes a form that gets strangely close to that of a reference book. The Roman poet Ovid wrote an
Ars amatoria
—usually translated as
The Art of Love
—an instructional poem that treats courtship and sex as an “art” in the Latin sense of a technique, even a craft. Ovid inspired a series of manuals of various sorts on love, such as Andreas Capellanus’s
De arte honeste amandi
(
The Art of Courtly Love
) in the twelfth century. But the East was far ahead of the West in this respect. European literature after the fall of Rome can seem sexually frigid compared to what was going on in India and Persia. Probably the most famous, or infamous, sexy
reference book of all time is the
Kama Sutra
, ancient India’s guide to the erotic arts. Its origins are mysterious. Writer Vatsyayana Mallanaga has long been associated with it, though that attribution poses some chronological problems. The only thing we know about Vatsyayana is that he probably lived sometime between the fourth and sixth centuries
C.E.
But most scholars date the
Kama Sutra
between the fourth century
B.C.E.
and the late second century
C.E.
, too early for Vatsyayana. Still the attribution sticks, for lack of a better candidate.

The
Kama Sutra
was probably composed in north or northwest India. It is written mostly in prose, though short bits of verse appear throughout. Although it is known as a sex book, only a small part of it deals directly with sex; it is really a book on virtuous living. A happy and virtuous life, though, included sexual pleasure. The Sanskrit word
kāma
means sensual desire or pleasure, which includes sexual pleasure. And
sutra
, one critic says, “means something like a thread or string of aphorisms, little bits of knowledge that are easily passed on… . I … see the sutras as kind of an early form of Wikipedia.”
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Some of this erotic literature was accorded a position of great dignity in the culture that produced it; some was hidden, passed around in samizdat copies. Reference works, though, bring respectability to everything they touch. For a long time, these two worlds—the erotic and the encyclopedic, the sweaty wantonness and the dusty authority—seemed incompatible, at least in the West. Beginning in the seventeenth century, though, encyclopedias of sex began appearing. Some of them offered genuinely useful medical and scientific information about reproduction; others served no purpose other than titillation.

Edward Phillips, a minor writer, is remembered by historians for two things: first, he was the nephew of the poet John Milton; second, he published a significant English dictionary,
The New World of Words
, in 1671. Earlier, in 1658, he wrote a book called
The Mysteries of Love & Eloquence
, with its preface dedicated to “the Youthful Gentry” and a dedicatory epistle “To those Cruel Fair ones, that triumph over the distresses of their loyal Lovers, the Author wisheth more Clemency; and to their afflicted Servants, more magnanimity and Roman Fortitude.”
3
A
reader not clued in to seventeenth-century London might find the title comparatively tame, as in the promise to discuss “The Arts of Wooing and Complementing; as They Are Manag’d in the Spring Garden, Hide Park; the New Exchange, and Other Eminent Places.” But Spring Garden (later renamed Vauxhall), Hyde Park (a royal park, open to the public since 1637), and the New Exchange (a bazaar near the stock market on the Strand) were notorious haunts of prostitutes.

The most notorious seventeenth-century sex manual in the English-speaking world, though, bore the strange title
Aristotle’s Master-Piece
. The supposed author’s name is bogus—the Greek philosopher had nothing to do with it, and the work was credited to him only to lend it some scrap of respectability. The name game was not original; pseudo-Aristotelian books had been appearing in England since the late sixteenth century. And it didn’t work this time, either:
Aristotle’s Master-Piece
was banned in Britain until the 1960s. But the prohibition did not keep it from circulating; in fact its popularity makes it difficult to study today. We are not even certain when the first edition was printed; few copies of the early editions survive, since most of them were read (and otherwise used) until they fell apart.

Much of the information in the book was lifted from Jacob Rüff’s
De conceptu et generatione hominis
(
On Conception and Generation
, 1554) and Levinus Lemnius’s
Secret Miracles of Nature
(1564).
Aristotle’s Master-Piece
promised to cover a wide range of subjects, and the subtitle insisted the whole thing was “Very Necessary for All Midwives, Nurses, and Young-Married Women.” But the long title page gives little idea of the real contents. The promised “pictures of several monstruous births” did offer a prurient glance at gruesome birth defects, but the book was notorious for other reasons. In real life it was marketed neither to midwives nor to “nurses and young-married women.” Much of the book was pornography, pure and simple.

To twenty-first-century sensibilities, seventeenth-century pornography does not seem very pornographic.
4
Aristotle’s Master-Piece
sometimes reads more like a sermon than a sex guide. “It plainly appears in Holy Writ,” the book declared, “that this glorious Vniverse, bespangled with gaudy Fires, and every where adorned with wonderful objects, proclaiming the
Wisdom
and
Omnipotence
of the Great
Work-Master
,
who in Six Days Erected all Things for his Pleasure.” Maybe
erected
is a dirty pun, but the sentiment is wholesome enough, and the point is that God created sex for humanity’s pleasure—no heretical belief, but one embraced by the Puritans themselves in seventeenth-century England. “That Marriage is an Honourable State,” wrote the author, “ordained by God in Paradice, and since Confirmed by our Blessed Saviour, who wrought his first Miracle at a Wedding, I hope none will deny; therefore it is convenient that Parents well take care of their Daughters Chastity.”
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No need to blush there.

Once the book gets going, though, there is little doubt that it should be categorized as what Jean-Jacques Rousseau called a
“livre à lire d’une seule main
,” a book to be read with one hand. It is telling that the description of the female sex organs is far more expansive than that of the male. The gynecological details are exceedingly frank for an age in which such information was usually suppressed in print:

The parts that offer themselves to view, without any deduction, at the bottom of the Belly, are the
Fissura Magna
or the Great Chink, with its
Labia
or Lips, the
Mons Veneris
and the Hair, These parts
are called by the General Name of
Pudenda
, because when they are bared they bring
Pudor
or Shame upon a woman… . The Clytoris is a substance in the upper part of the Division, where the two Wings concur and is the Seat of Venereal pleasure.
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And when, in the first few pages, the author promises “to Vnravel the Mystery of Generation, and divers other Mysteries,”
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we can assume many readers’ pulses raced.

The book stressed that the reason for sexuality is reproduction: the author knew that “a young likely Couple” may well be “desirous of Mutual Enjoyment,” but he (she?) insisted that it was “for Generation-sake, which is the chief End for which Wedlock was ordain’d.” The book offers no information about contraception, only pragmatic advice for promoting pregnancy—warning, for instance, against withdrawal too soon after “they have done what nature requires,” so that they do not lose “the fruit of the labour.” There is a great deal of advice on promoting fertility: be sure “to Copulate at distance of time, not too often, nor yet too seldom, for both these hurt Fruitfulness alike; for to eject immoderately, weakens a Man, and wastes his Spirits, and too often causes the Seed by long continuance to be ineffectual, and not manly enough.” Sometimes, of course, the advice was distinctly prescientific: “Now the fittest time (they say) for the Procreation of Male Children, is when the Sun is in
Leo
, and the Moons Sign is
Virgo
,
Scorpio
, or
Sagitarius
.”
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Still, even though procreation is the goal, a surprising amount is said in favor of sexual pleasure—and, unusually for the age (or almost any age), in favor of sexual pleasure for both men and women. Men, in the author’s opinion, are more strongly driven by lust—“GOD has firmly impressed [sexual desire] in all Creatures … Male and Female; but more especially on Man”—and this “unruly” energy requires constraint: God “has thought it convenient to prescribe him Bounds, and confine him to the Vse of the Matrimonial Bed; that so they might not defile themselves with wandring Lust.” But women, too, are sexual beings, as the author revealed in the title to chapter 1: “Of Marriage, and at what Age Virgins and Youths are Capable of the Marriage-Bed, and the Reasons that prompts [
sic
] them to desire it.”
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When nudged, female desire can be every bit as unruly as men’s, particularly when, “the Spirits being brisk, and in a manner inflam’d when they arrive at this Age, if they eat salt sharp things, Spices,
&c.
whereby the Body becomes still more heated, then the irritation and proneness to Venereal Embraces, is very great, nay some times almost insuperable.” While male and female desires have different motivations—“The Venereal Appetite … proceeds from different causes for in men it proceeds from a desire of Emission, and in women from a desire of Completion”—at least the author acknowledged female desire. Women needed to have sex, because prolonged virginity was bad for their health: “if a woman do not use Copulation to eject her Seed, she oftentimes falls into strange Diseases.” Thus the grand anatomical analogy: “The Action of the
Clytoris
in women is like that of the
Penis
in men… . And as the
Glans
in man is the Seat of the greatest pleasure in Copulation, so is this in Women.”
10
Aristotle’s Master-Piece
even suggested that pregnancy is impossible without the female orgasm—though this enlightened regard for women’s pleasure tended to be removed from editions printed in the nineteenth century.
11

Aristotle’s Master-Piece
had an astonishingly long afterlife. Bibliographers have counted more than 250 separate editions, but all of them survive only in tiny numbers of copies—libraries did not consider them worthy of preservation. Nonetheless, over the course of a full century, more than half the popular books on reproduction were versions of
Aristotle’s Master-Piece
: “No other single text or group of texts came anywhere near such renown.”
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It was popular in colonial and republican America: in 1744, the preacher Jonathan Edwards scolded young men in Massachusetts for reading it.
13
Early in the nineteenth century it was mentioned in Sir Walter Scott’s novel
Woodstock
, and it makes several appearances in James Joyce’s
Ulysses
, where “Mr Bloom turned over idly pages of
The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk
, then of Aristotle’s
Masterpiece
. Crooked botched print. Plates: infants cuddled in a ball in bloodred wombs like livers of slaughtered cows. Lots of them like that at this moment all over the world. All butting with their skulls to get out of it. Child born every minute somewhere.” Later in the book Molly Bloom gets the name wrong: “should we tell them even if its the truth they dont believe you then tucked up in bed like those babies in the
Aristocrats Masterpiece he brought me another time as if we hadnt enough of that in real life without some old Aristocrat or whatever his name is disgusting you more with those rotten pictures children with two heads and no legs thats the kind of villainy theyre always dreaming about.”
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Evelyn Waugh’s
Vile Bodies
tips its cap to the book as well: a suspicious customs officer sorts through luggage and pulls out a printed list of books containing “Aristotle, Works of (Illustrated).” It could still be found in sex shops in Soho in the 1930s.
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