It would seem that sex is once again a popular subject for popular writing. Allow me to share with you four pieces that I've been enjoying mostly for their metaridiculousness:
The Curse of Self Abuse is a brief article about the book Onania, first published in 1712 and a classic of the self-help is for suckers genre: it identified a horrible problem no one knew he had, and then described the cure in details, which you could buy from the apothecary for only 10 shillings! The problem was childhood masturbation. The cure, it seems, was overpriced, marked-up opium to knock the poor darlings out at bedtime.
The book is full of soft-core descriptions of comely village maidens discovering the pleasures of self-abuse at age 14 and then dead by 19. Depictions of attractive girls pleasuring themselves into self-destruction apparently propelled the book to superstardom.
As a writer, the very idea that at one time the "unbridled imaginations of children" was considered a destructive force destined to wreck the world, seems fascinating to me.
The Reclining Nude is a painting by Gustave Corbet in 1862, and is considered "an erotic masterpiece." The linked article describes the history of the painting, from its controversial airing to its disappearance for fifty years. I'm keeping this article mostly for the scene in the beginning where Ottoman diplomat Kahlil Bey, who owned the even more controversial Corbet painting "Origin of the World," a close-up of a vulva, lost it all while gambling. I've encountered Bey before while researching my fin de siecle catboy novel, and this is just a lovely addition to that body of research.
John Holbo points us to Justus Moser's On the Diminished Disgrace of Whores and Their Children in Our Day, one of the world's truly seminal wingnuts. In 1772, it was illegal for guilds to hire bastards; the idea was that if women knew their children would be unemployable they would be discouraged from having sex out of wedlock. Humanitarians (the liberals of their day) were agitating to have the guilds revise their law and allow anyone to ascend through the guilds based on merit and regardless of their birth status. Radical, eh? For Moser (and, it seems, most of Germany), it was. You just have to read the essay to get the full gist of it, but here are the highlights: (1) Prostitutes would drown their infants to avoid the shame of bastardy, and if caught would be put to death, usually by drowning. Since they would stop killing their own kids and being killed in turn, the legislature would be forced to come up with much harsher penalties for prostitution itself rather than the infanticide, and this would lead to greater misery for the prostitutes and their now motherless undrowned children. (2) Seniority and birth status were to be preferred over merit. If merit became the sole source of reward then the act of promotion is an act of humilating one's peers, and the unpromoted would live with public calumny and shame. Holbo adds:
So cute! Mount Si High School has a Gay-Straight Alliance club, and their club poster shows silhouetted couples gazing into one another's eyes. Local frothing-at-the-jowls paster Ken Hutchinson calls the poster "an advertisement for a sex club" and demands that the school take down the posters and forbid kids from taking part in the Day of Silence.
The Curse of Self Abuse is a brief article about the book Onania, first published in 1712 and a classic of the self-help is for suckers genre: it identified a horrible problem no one knew he had, and then described the cure in details, which you could buy from the apothecary for only 10 shillings! The problem was childhood masturbation. The cure, it seems, was overpriced, marked-up opium to knock the poor darlings out at bedtime.
The book is full of soft-core descriptions of comely village maidens discovering the pleasures of self-abuse at age 14 and then dead by 19. Depictions of attractive girls pleasuring themselves into self-destruction apparently propelled the book to superstardom.
As a writer, the very idea that at one time the "unbridled imaginations of children" was considered a destructive force destined to wreck the world, seems fascinating to me.
The Reclining Nude is a painting by Gustave Corbet in 1862, and is considered "an erotic masterpiece." The linked article describes the history of the painting, from its controversial airing to its disappearance for fifty years. I'm keeping this article mostly for the scene in the beginning where Ottoman diplomat Kahlil Bey, who owned the even more controversial Corbet painting "Origin of the World," a close-up of a vulva, lost it all while gambling. I've encountered Bey before while researching my fin de siecle catboy novel, and this is just a lovely addition to that body of research.
John Holbo points us to Justus Moser's On the Diminished Disgrace of Whores and Their Children in Our Day, one of the world's truly seminal wingnuts. In 1772, it was illegal for guilds to hire bastards; the idea was that if women knew their children would be unemployable they would be discouraged from having sex out of wedlock. Humanitarians (the liberals of their day) were agitating to have the guilds revise their law and allow anyone to ascend through the guilds based on merit and regardless of their birth status. Radical, eh? For Moser (and, it seems, most of Germany), it was. You just have to read the essay to get the full gist of it, but here are the highlights: (1) Prostitutes would drown their infants to avoid the shame of bastardy, and if caught would be put to death, usually by drowning. Since they would stop killing their own kids and being killed in turn, the legislature would be forced to come up with much harsher penalties for prostitution itself rather than the infanticide, and this would lead to greater misery for the prostitutes and their now motherless undrowned children. (2) Seniority and birth status were to be preferred over merit. If merit became the sole source of reward then the act of promotion is an act of humilating one's peers, and the unpromoted would live with public calumny and shame. Holbo adds:
Apparently none of this is tongue-in-cheek. Although it is whimsical in tone. Very odd. Like if it turned out, after all, that Swift really had it in for the Irish to an unusual degree.Like Holbo, I've now become a huge Justus Moser fan; his worldview is so wildly different from my own that trying to write in his world would be a true scholarly challenge.
So cute! Mount Si High School has a Gay-Straight Alliance club, and their club poster shows silhouetted couples gazing into one another's eyes. Local frothing-at-the-jowls paster Ken Hutchinson calls the poster "an advertisement for a sex club" and demands that the school take down the posters and forbid kids from taking part in the Day of Silence.
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