SEXUALITY
From Philosopedia
SEXUALITY
Jerome Beadle and Bruce Falton, mindful that organized religion’s stand on sex has always stood in the way of people’s enjoyment of sex, have compiled the following instances. For their complete listings, see People’s Almanac #2.
• 14 CE. Emperor Tiberius of Rome forbade the execution of virgins, whereby virgins were deflowered by the executioner before the sentence was carried out.
• c. 875. The Scottish King Ewen III established the rights of “the First Night”: “Wives of common men shall be free to the nobles; and the Lord of the ground shall have the maidenheads of all the virgins dwelling in the same.” The practice may have continued up to the beginning of the Middle Ages.
• 1072. Pietro Damiana, an Italian reformer who was son of a prostitute, preached inside brothels that virginity should be preserved and that girls should abstain from sex.
• 1191. When King Richard the Lion-Hearted arrived at Marseilles in his first holy crusade against the infidels, he was horrified to discover that his advance party of trusty Christian knights had spent all the campaign funds on prostitutes.
• 1274. St. Thomas Aquinas, who called sex “lust,” preached that any sexual activity other than that intended for procreation was a sin against nature. His four other offending categories were, in descending order: (a) bestiality; (b) homosexuality; (c) using any position other than face to face, with the woman on her back; and (d) masturbation, which he considered effeminate in men.
• 1275. Angela de Labarthe of Toulouse was burned at the stake for having sexual intercourse with the Devil. Reportedly, she had given birth to a child with a wolf’s head and a snake’s tail.
• 1300. The Lothardi sect in Russia believed in Christian morality so long as members were twenty-seven inches below ground; hence, their meetings were held in subterranean caves and featured riotous orgies.
• 1382. Sex made its first appearance in a John Wycliffe translation of the Bible: “Of alle thing is havynge sowle of ony flesh, two thow shalt brynge into the ark, that maal sex and femaal lyven with thee.”
• 1415. [The original] Pope John XXIII was deposed for “notorious incest, adultery, defilement, homicide, and atheism.” While still a chamberlain, he had openly kept his brother’s wife as a mistress. While a cardinal in Bologna, “two hundred maids, matrons, and widows, including a few nuns, fell victim to his brutal lust.” (John was the original Pope John XXIII, but of the Pisan Line. At the same time, Pope Gregory XII was pope but of the Roman Line. Meanwhile, a third pope, Pope Benedict XIII, was pope but of the Avignon Line. This was during the Great Schism, 1378-1417.)
• 1484. Pope Innocent VIII was nicknamed “the Honest,” because he was the first pope to acknowledge his illegitimate children publicly.
• 1529. During Cardinal Thomas Wolsey’s trial for treason, he was accused of giving Henry VIII syphilis by whispering in the king’s ear.
• 1535. Father Valdelamar, a priest in Toledo, Spain, was found guilty of rape, blasphemy, consorting with prostitutes, and extorting the favors of a young woman in exchange for absolution. He was sentenced to a mere thirty-day house arrest and a fine of two ducats.
• 1542. Andrew Boorde in his Dyetary of Helth warned solemnly that eating lettuce killed sexual desire. Later, and upon becoming Bishop of Chichester, he was publicly defrocked for keeping three prostitutes in his chambers.
• 1555. Pope Paul IV, who organized the Inquisition which had been set up by Paul III, ordered the removal of Michelangelo’s paintings from the Sistine Chapel on the grounds that they were obscene. Michelangelo’s pupil, Daniele da Volterra, was ordered to add clothes to all the naked figures (including all the angels and the Virgin Mary) in The Last Judgment, after which de Volterra was nicknamed “the Breeches Maker.”
• 1559. Pope Paul IV began compiling the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the list of books deemed to have blasphemous or profane content. Over 4,000 titles, including the total output of Balzac, Dumas, Stendhal, and Alberto Moravia, were included. In 1966, the Catholic Church stopped publishing the Index.
• 1565. Mass-scale erotic convulsions swept the Convent of Nazareth in Cologne. A German doctor De Weier found that the nuns were throwing themselves on their backs, shutting their eyes, raising their abdomens erotically, and thrusting forward their pudenda.
• 1585. St. Mary Magdalene de Pazzi ran madly about the convent, masochistically rolling around on thorns and burrs, whipping herself, and begging other nuns to hurl globules of hot wax at her. She was canonized in 1671.
• 1611. Two unmarried women found to be pregnant upon arrival in Virginia were returned to England in an attempt to stamp out the risk of promiscuity in the colony.
• 1624. Richard Cornish was hanged for forcing a young man into “unnatural” sexual relations. Two who complained were later pilloried and had their ears sliced off for protesting this first homosexual hanging in America and for alleging that Cornish “was put to death through a scurvie boys meanes & no other came against him.”
• 1634. In France, Jeanne des Anges, a nun, suffered nightmarish erotic hallucinations and convulsions after being spurned by the Curé Grandier. The curé was put to death, providing the basis for Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudun (1952) and Ken Russell’s 1970 film,The Devils.
• 1634. Mary Mandame was charged in Plymouth, Massachusetts with “dallyance diverse tymes with Tinsin, an Indian” and “committing the act of uncleanse with him.” She was sentenced to be whipped and to wear at all times a badge of shame on her left sleeve. Tinsin was whipped at the pillory for “allurement & enticement.”
• 1653. An eighty-two-year-old man was executed in England for adultery.
• 1656. Captain Kemble of Boston was found guilty of “lewd and unseemly behavior,” having kissed his wife in public on the Sabbath after a three years’ sojourn at sea.
• 1658. Plymouth, Massachusetts, Puritans passed an adultery law which required a female offender not only to be whipped but to bear for the remainder of her life the letter A on her breast. Failure to comply made her liable to having the A branded on her face with a red-hot iron. The law was portrayed by Nathaniel Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter (1850).
• 1665. Condom first appeared in a work by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. The word may come from the Latin cunnus (the female pudenda) and dum (implying an inability to function), not from the legendary but mythical Dr. Condom; however, its origin is uncertain.
• 1672. Women shipped out of England to Virginia for the express purpose of helping to populate the new colonies were priced not in currency but in tobacco, sometimes being valued at 120 pounds of tobacco per female.
• 1680. Maiden Lane in downtown New York was so named, according to People’s Almanac, because so many maidens lost their maidenheads there.
• 1684. A sex manual published in London under the title Aristotle’s Masterpiece, or the Secrets of Generation Displayed in All Parts Thereof, advised extensive sexual foreplay and emphasized the value of clitoral massage, saying “blowing the coals of these amorous fires” pleased women.
• 1702. Lord Cornbury, a governor of New York and New Jersey, performed most of his official duties in women’s clothes. He was recalled in 1708 after landing in jail for debt.
• 1708. Edmund Curll was indicted for having sold Venus in the Cloister, or the Nun in Her Smock, a blasphemous tale of lesbian nuns first published in France in 1682.
• 1714. The Roman Catholic Church banned the confessional requirement that men name their partners in fornication when it was discovered that priests might be making carnal use of the information.
• 1723. In Montpellier, France, police raided a meeting of the Multiplicants, a sect in which twenty-four-hour-only marriages were consummated publicly on the altar, followed by orgies. Its leaders were hanged, and the women—after having their heads shaved—were placed in nunneries.
• 1729. Sir Francis Dashwood masqueraded as King Charles XII of Sweden, thereby seducing Empress Anne of Russia.
• 1750. John Cleland wrote the erotic novel, Fanny Hill, or the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, called by Anthony Comstock “the most obscene book ever written” but one which never made the Vatican’s Index.
• 1768. The Encyclopedia Britannica was first issued. The entry for “Woman” stated, “The female of man. See Homo.”
• 1770. Pope Clement XIV outlawed the 200-year-old practice of using castrati in papal choirs. Persons performing such operations on young boys were excommunicated, though the boys were made very welcome into the choirs thereafter.
• 1782. Dr. John Hunter, assisting a couple incapable of having children, got the man to masturbate, then took the semen in a warm syringe and injected it into the posterior part of the wife’s vagina. The result was a bouncing success, the first child of artificial insemination. Church officials expressed their outrage at such a perversion.
• 1798. The Bishop of Durham warned Britain’s House of Lords that France was trying to defeat England morally, not militarily, by smuggling in hordes of ballet dancers.
• 1821. The first American obscenity trial found printer Peter Holmes guilty of smut-peddling. He had published Fanny Hill.
• 1822. A statue of Achilles representing the invincibility of the Duke of Wellington, commissioned and paid for by the women of England, was unveiled in Hyde Park. At the unveiling, witnesses realized this was London’s first nude statue . . . and within a few days the statue miraculously grew a fig leaf.
• 1829. The British banned the Hindu practice of suttee in India and elsewhere throughout the Empire, although it continued until at least 1905. Suttee was the enforced immolation of a widow on her husband’s funeral pyre.
• 1834. Sylvester Graham (1794–1851), best remembered for inventing the graham cracker, wrote “A Lecture to Young Men on Chastity, Intended Also for the Serious Consideration of Parents and Guardians.” He warned that “high seasoned food, rich dishes, and the free use of flesh” led to insanity. He advised married couples that overdoing it sexually led to, among other problems, “chilliness, headache, melancholy, hypochondria, hysterics, feebleness of all the senses, impaired vision, loss of sight, weakness of the lungs, nervous cough, pulmonary consumption, disorders of the liver and kidneys, urinary difficulties, disorders of the genital organs, spinal diseases, weakness of the brain, loss of memory, epilepsy, insanity, apoplexy, abortions, premature births, and extreme feebleness, morbid predispositions, and an early death of offspring.” Further, he warned that every ejaculation lowered a male’s life expectancy.
• 1843. Joseph Smith, founder of Mormonism, first exhorted his followers to practice polygamy.
• 1847. A British physician named Simpson angered churchmen when he administered the newly discovered chloroform to a woman in childbirth. The church claimed that the Bible commands that women should bring forth their children in sorrow.
• 1869. The term homosexuality was coined by Dr. Benkert, a Hungarian physician.
• 1873. The U.S. Congress passed the Comstock Act, banning obscene materials—including rubber prophylactics—from the mails. This caused George Bernard Shaw to coin the word comstockery.
• 1881. Henry James, in Washington Square: “He wanted to abuse somebody, and he began, cautiously—for he was always cautious—with himself.”
• 1882. Aletta Jacobs opened the world’s first birth-control clinic, in Holland. She popularized the diaphragm, which was known as the “Dutch cap.”
• 1895. Striptease shows began in Paris with Le Coucher d’Yvette showing a girl gradually removing her clothes as she vainly searched for a flea.
• 1900. Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams underscored the importance of repressed sexual desires in human behavior.
• 1913. The world’s first nude calendar was published, and it contained “September Morn,” a painting by French artist Paul Chabas (1869–1937). Antipornography crusader Anthony Comstock complained, “There’s too little morn and too much maid.”
• 1916. Margaret Sanger opened America’s first birth-control clinic (a phrase she coined) at 46 Amboy Street in Brooklyn, New York. After a policewoman posed as a patient to obtain evidence, the establishment was closed.
• 1924. André Gide in his autobiographical novel If It Die became the first important modern public figure to declare publicly that he was a homosexual.
• 1934. Upon reading Henry Miller’s The Tropic of Cancer, poet Ezra Pound remarked, “At last, an unprintable book that is fit to read.”
• 1938. The Roman Catholic-oriented National Organization for Decent Literature was founded. In the years to come it would condemn such works as C. S. Forester’s The African Queen, Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, James Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific, and Christopher Morley’s Kitty Foyle.
• 1946. Mahatma Gandhi, the Indian leader, publicly confessed that he had been taking naked girls to bed with him for many years—to test his mastery of celibacy.
• 1946. Massachusetts, charging Kathleen Winsor’s Forever Amber with being obscene, made an attempt to ban its sale because of the following: 70 references to sexual intercourse; 39 illegitimate pregnancies; 7 abortions; 10 descriptions of women dressing, undressing, or bathing in the presence of gentlemen; 5 references to incest; 13 references ridiculing marriage; and another 49 “miscellaneous objectionable passages.” Afterwards, a radio comedian was censured for suggesting that Miss Winsor should have called her book Forever Under.
• 1948. Dr. Alfred Kinsey and associates published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, to be followed five years later by Sexual Behavior in the Human Female.
• 1951. A nationwide census in India indicated there were nearly 3 million husbands and more than 6 million wives between 5 and 14 years old.
• 1952. Surgeon Christian Hamburger in Denmark performed successful sex-change surgery on ex-American soldier George Jorgensen. The fame achieved by then Christine Jorgensen led to the Danish surgeon’s being so swamped with applications for the operation that the Danish government had to restrict the operation to Danish patients only.
• 1953. Hugh Hefner published the first Playboy, which was undated because Hefner did not know whether there would be a second issue. The first playmate was Marilyn Monroe. The magazine infuriated leaders of organized religion, for it was aimed at “that select group of urbane fellows who were less concerned with hunting, fishing, and climbing mountains than with good food, drink, proper dress, and the pleasure of female company.”
• 1961. USSR leader Nikita Khruschev expressed his outrage upon visiting Hollywood and finding the “indecencies” of the film Can Can.
• 1966. William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson published Human Sexual Response, the first detailed description and analysis of the physiological aspects of sexual excitation and orgasm.
• 1967. I Am Curious (Yellow), a Swedish film, became one of the first popularly distributed movies in the U.S. to portray sex explicitly.
• 1971. The world’s first commercial sperm bank was opened in New York City.
• 1973. Robert A. Martin, a twenty-eight-year-old Quaker pacifist, was arrested during a peace march on the White House. Refusing to pay a $10 bond, he was moved to a District of Columbia jail where prisoners with records for violence were kept. In two days, he was raped 50 times.
• 1977. The first female-to-male transsexual operation was performed on a female University of Missouri student. Reported The New York Times, “The doctors said the penis contained a tiny hydraulic system that permitted a fluid to be pumped from a reservoir in the abdomen into the penis to cause erection. Investigation shows that the penis-erection device has been used in more than 200 operations in the country to date, most performed by the device’s inventor, Dr. F. Brantley Scott, a urologist affiliated with the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.”
(See entries for homosexuality and heterosexual sex acts.
{PA}
