Dr. Kate Lister: History of Sex & Sexuality
Podcast Transcript Season 3 Episode 46
Interviewer: Liz Goldwyn
Illustration BY Black Women Animate
The following is a transcript of the interview from the episode:
Dr. Kate Lister is a historian and author of A Curious History of Sex, a new book that covers her years of research into the history of sex and sexuality. She is also the brains behind the popular website and twitter account, Whores of Yore. In this week’s episode, Kate and Liz discuss their favorite historical slang; masturbating medieval gargoyles; and how the Victorians used bicycles to get off.
Liz Intro
Hello, and welcome to The Sex Ed podcast. I’m Liz Goldwyn, your host and the founder of The Sex Ed, your #1 source for sex, health, and consciousness education. On our website TheSexEd.com, you can read original essays written by our network of experts, watch live talks and videos, listen to past episodes of this podcast, and sign up for our weekly newsletter. You can also follow us on Instagram @TheSexEd.
The Sex Ed is postively orgasmique to be partnered with GUCCI for your listening pleasure on this season of this podcast. That’s right, oh yes, GUCCI baby! We’re so grateful to GUCCI for sponsoring this episode and helping us answer everything you wanted to know about sex, but were afraid to ask.
Today, my guest is one of my dear colleagues, the historian and author Dr. Kate Lister. Kate is the author of A CURIOUS HISTORY OF SEX, a new book that covers her years of research into the history of sex and sexuality. She is also the brains behind the popular website and twitter account, Whores of Yore. Kate and I discussed our favorite historical slang; masturbating medieval gargoyles; and how the Victorians used bicycles to get off.
Liz Goldwyn:
Everybody who is stuck at home right now, there's a great book to read, because I know everyone is sex starved. A Curious History of Sex, by my guest today, Dr. Kate Lister. One of the big takeaways is that the act of sex is not that much different centuries ago. That human beings have been having sex since the dawn of time. It's really only the technology that changes.
Dr. Kate Lister:
Yeah. Absolutely. I mean obviously human beings have been having sex since the dawn of time, but I think that's something that people ... We don't think, it's they've been having kinky sex since the dawn of time as well. They've been enjoying sex, and they've been perverted and weird and hung up and into it and horny and crazed, and all the things that we are today about it. That often surprises a lot of people. I suppose when you think about people in the past, if you've ever given it much thought at all, people think that maybe sex was just kind of functionary, or it was just to make babies. The idea that somebody in ancient Rome or ancient Greece would have a foot fetish or like to be flogged or anything like that.
Dr. Kate Lister:
But yeah. People have always been kinky. We always have.
Liz Goldwyn:
I know, I think that we like to think that we've invented the wheel. But in fact, we haven't. We've just maybe dressed it up differently, put different language around it as well. Because you go into, in great detail in the book, the historical slang versus contemporary history. You have a lot of caveats as well. Like for example, when describing sex workers, we now use the term sex workers. But that's a relatively recent term. It was called prostitution for years and years and years.
Dr. Kate Lister:
It was. I mean, the words prostitute and prostitution actually turn up ... They come into widespread use in the 19th century, actually. The term that kind of goes right back to the 12th century is whore and whoring, or lewd woman, or common woman was something that was used quite widely.
Liz Goldwyn:
Or bawd.
Dr. Kate Lister:
But yeah, the word-
Liz Goldwyn:
B-A-W-D.
Dr. Kate Lister:
Bawd, yeah, for a madam. Of course, there's all manner of slang terminology as well that goes right back to ... Well, as long as we've written down words to try and find these slang expressions. But yeah, the word prostitute, that gained widespread use in the 19th century, and now that's being challenged again. And rightly so, because you know, we often don't stop to pause on a word for a while and try and unpack it. We might use a word like prostitute with a kind of clinical indifference about it, but when we actually stop and we ask ourselves, "What do we mean by that word? Is it describing all the people that we want it to, or is it a word that comes with a lot of cultural baggage and stigma with it as well?"
Dr. Kate Lister:
The way that language changes over the centuries is absolutely fascinating to me. Slang in particular, you can trace cultural attitudes around sex and how they've changed by how language is fluid and moves and means one thing and then changes again. There's got a whole chapter in there about the word cunt. Sorry, I will drop the C-bomb early on. But when you trace that back, and it's so old that we actually lose sight of it eventually. But in the medieval period, and something like the 11th, 12th centuries. The word cunt wasn't offensive at all. It turns up in medical dictionaries. It's just something that, it was just a describing word that meant vulva. It starts to become offensive as we move towards the early modern period, and Puritans take hold. Now we've ended up being one of the most offensive words in the English language. I think it says a lot about us.
Liz Goldwyn:
I remember exactly where I was when I heard the word cunt used for the first time. I was in middle school, and I remember my friend's older sister called her younger sister, "such a cunt," and I was just so shocked. It was the most horrible, nasty thing I could ever think of. But in your book, you actually describe the word cunt as deriving from the Proto-Indo-European root word meaning either woman, knowledge, creator, or queen.
Dr. Kate Lister:
Yes. There's a lot of words that they're just so old, that etymologists kind of lose sight of them eventually. In the mists of history, they just disappear. But as far back as we can trace it being written down is the 12th century, but it clearly existed before that. Etymologists have speculated that it's the "oo" sound that people are fascinated with, with the word cunt. It might be linked to the "gen" sound, which gives us genetics today, which means to create, the gen. Or gyn, so "cu," "gyn." You can kind of see this theory, and the "gyn" means woman.
Dr. Kate Lister:
Another, it's not really a theory, it's fact. But cunt and cunning, they come from the same place. And cunning originally, it didn't mean sneaky. It meant wise and knowing. If you were a cunning person or a cunning folk, cunning woman, it meant that you were wise and you knew things. The word cunt and cunning come from the same place, so it means wise.
Liz Goldwyn:
I do believe that both you and I in that regard, that our pussies are very wise.
Dr. Kate Lister:
Very wise.
Liz Goldwyn:
We have cunning cunts.
Dr. Kate Lister:
And sneaky. Yeah. That's where cunt comes from, it means woman, create, wisdom, all of those things. When you actually break it down, you've got to ask, how did it become this offensive? When it starts off from such high praise, and now it's a word that when you hear it, it can actually physically shock you. What does that say about it, that the word still has that much power? If you really think about it, why would the most offensive word in the English language be a word that just means vulva? Does that not also tacitly say that vulvas are the most offensive thing in the English language? I just find it-
Liz Goldwyn:
When do we see these kinds of words being reclaimed?
Dr. Kate Lister:
Oh. It's used throughout ... The medieval people, they were using it as ... It becomes slightly bawdy around about the 14th century. Then the 15th and 16th century, by this point it's gaining, it's becoming very very obscene. Sex is heavily repressed, with the Puritans. The Victorians used it very freely in their pornography, but it's definitely an obscene word, and they're using it because it's so obscene.
Dr. Kate Lister:
Then we get to the 20th century. I suppose one of the landmark points in the history of cunt was the obscenity trial of the book, Lady Chatterley's Lover, by D. H. Lawrence. He uses the word several times in there, and he uses the word fuck as well, and the book was banned because it was considered so obscene. So it had to go on trial, and it's really interesting, the way that he uses cunt and fuck. Because on face value, I suppose you could look at it and say, he's just being obscene for the sake of being obscene. But the story is actually, it's about Lady Constance Chatterley, all the airs and graces, proper Downton Abbey stuff, and she has an affair. She starts shagging the gamekeeper, the gardener, the guy that trims the hedges. He's using this language-
Liz Goldwyn:
He's trimming her hedges.
Dr. Kate Lister:
He's definitely trimming, there are a couple of scenes where he's definitely trimming her hedges.
Liz Goldwyn:
I do love that book, actually. I read it in high school for the dirty bits.
Dr. Kate Lister:
It is, it's for ... Everyone loves the dirty bits. Everyone just reads it, and then they read the dirty bits and they go, "Was that it? That's not that dirty." But the way he uses cunt and fuck is, he's using it like it's a real leveler. Because it doesn't matter that Lady Constance Chatterley has got titles and airs and graces and servants and a mansion. She's got a cunt, and she's horny, and he's horny, you know. That's how he's using it, and I really love that.
Dr. Kate Lister:
But I suppose the actual reclamation of cunt, or at least people trying to do it, was in the '70s. The 1970s, with feminist art movements, like Judy Chicago the artist. She did a thing called reclaiming cunt, and she used the word a lot. But it's never been really let off the naughty step, has it? It's still pretty naughty.
Liz Goldwyn:
Speaking of Lady Chatterley's Lover and pornography, smut through the ages. You go, and someone else who got into a lot of trouble and got locked up was the Marquis de Sade.
Dr. Kate Lister:
Oh, yeah.
Liz Goldwyn:
Who many credit with popularizing sadism, or sadomasochism.
Dr. Kate Lister:
It's definitely where we get the word from. Sade, sadistic. Sade, Marquis de Sade. If you've ever read his books, I'm sure that you have but if anyone listening hasn't read his books. If you're in quarantine and you wanted something to do, just have a look. Most of them are available online now, and I regularly tell my students this, because I teach the history of sexuality. It's always funny, because I try and give them a warning before they go to it, and say that, "This is actually, it's really quite intense. This isn't just vanilla, this isn't Jane Austen, ha ha ha, isn't it really funny." And they honestly, they come back the next week, and they're just shocked by it. Even today, even young people today, because it's absolutely obscene and filthy.
Dr. Kate Lister:
This is somebody that, he was writing from a lunatic asylum most of his time. He must just be sitting there thinking, "What is the worst thing that I could possibly come up with to write about?"
Dr. Kate Lister:
There's people vomiting, and he's got scenes of people eating crusty bits of skin and dirt from out of each other's toes. It's just honestly, it's really just not ... It's the most extreme, violent literary pornography that you can conceive of. And it still shocks people today. He must have just been sitting there in his cell in the lunatic asylum, which is where he wrote most of his work, just thinking, "What's the worst thing that I could possibly say? What could I say today that's just that grotesque?"
Liz Goldwyn:
That can cement my reputation for centuries to come.
Dr. Kate Lister:
Yeah, right? But yeah, a lot of his work is sadistic. It's about torture, and rape-
Liz Goldwyn:
Cruelty.
Dr. Kate Lister:
Cruelty. All of those things. They locked him in an insane asylum for writing it, and as you can imagine, it was an absolute bestseller. Of course it [crosstalk 00:11:44]
Liz Goldwyn:
Sex sells.
Dr. Kate Lister:
Of course it was.
Liz Goldwyn:
And anything that's controversial or banned sells even better, right?
Dr. Kate Lister:
Absolutely. When they finally released Lady Chatterley's Lover and it was allowed in bookshops, there's footage of people queuing around the street to buy this book. It doesn't actually help anything to try and censor it and push it up, it just makes people more interesting. But yeah, Marquis de Sade. If anyone is in quarantine boredom, look up his work. Don't say that we didn't warn you.
Liz Goldwyn:
Another sort of interesting chapter in your book, and that you and I have actually ... We did a talk in London in 2018, which you can see on thesexed.com, where we talked about this average exercise equipment, which many people use, that wouldn't think had sexual connotations, is the bicycle.
Dr. Kate Lister:
The bicycle.
Liz Goldwyn:
Which was once seen as a tool of female empowerment and freedom.
Dr. Kate Lister:
Yes. Yeah, you wouldn't think that, would you? Just the humble bicycle. But I suppose we have to try and imagine ourselves. Because the bicycle's been around for a few centuries now, but it was really only usable for people in the 1890s. They invented the first safety bikes, so bikes that had suspension and pneumatic tires. You know, one that you can ride safely. And women could ride it for the first time, because they couldn't ride penny farthings or things like that because they had these ridiculous pleated petticoats waving out behind them. It was very difficult to cycle like that.
Dr. Kate Lister:
But if you imagine what a bike is, and what a bike does, and what it allows. I mean, I don't know if you drive, but do you remember when you first got your first car? That sense of freedom, of just, oh my God. I could just get in my car, and I could just go somewhere. Well, the bicycle is a lot like that. All right, you can't go as far. But for women who really ... Housebound, especially middle to upper class women. They were expected just to pretty much stay inside, and then suddenly there was this machine that meant that they could just go somewhere. They didn't have to be chaperoned, they could go travel distances to meet each other. It played a huge part in the emancipation of women.
Dr. Kate Lister:
Of course, anything that brings that level of freedom will unsettle things. There was this real scientific concern that a bicycle would corrupt female morality. That it would lead to inappropriate sexual behavior, and that the saddle between your legs and vibrating away would damage the, as one doctor called them, the matrimonial organs of necessity. There was this real concern that the bicycle is going to make women indecent, and then combined with that, a lot of women stopped wearing these skirts and the petticoats, and started wearing what we call knickerbockers, sort of rudimentary trousers. Of course, they couldn't wear a really tight laced corset, so they took those off and just started free boobing it.
Dr. Kate Lister:
This was really really shocking for the Victorians.
Liz Goldwyn:
The Victorians really feared female orgasm, you know. They were telling people not to read romance novels for fear of excessive blood rushing to the nether regions. Sex was only for procreation when it came to being a woman, but actually prostitution was legalized in many many different countries at this time too. It's a very strict double standard.
Dr. Kate Lister:
Very very strict double standards. They very much, it was viewed that men have urges, natural urges, and the regulation of the sex trade was regarded as ... It wasn't done in kind of an emancipatory way. We want to protect the workers. It was done to facilitate men's desires. That was the whole aim of it. In America and across Europe, at the same time women were cycling all over the place, many places had state regulated prostitution. That's not like, it's decriminalized and safe or anything like that. It meant that women were subject to mandatory venereal checks every two weeks to check for signs of disease. If they wouldn't submit to that, they were often imprisoned. And no one was checking the men, no one was checking the clients. So it was a really flawed system. But bicycles.
Liz Goldwyn:
Still is a flawed system.
Dr. Kate Lister:
Isn't it?
Liz Goldwyn:
But it's interesting, because around this time in the Victorian era, from what I have uncovered and you and I have discussed previously, this idea of chastity belts, which supposedly were invented in the Middle Ages to keep a lock on your woman while you went off to fight the Crusades, to stop her from having sex or becoming a prisoner of war, were these chastity belts. Which apparently were actually created as a hoax in the Victorian period, is that correct?
Dr. Kate Lister:
Yeah. It's true, and if you speak to any medievalist or anyone that studies medieval history, if you mention the Victorians to them, they'll get very angry and they'll roll their eyes and they get very cross. That's because the Victorians did a hell of a PR job on the Middle Ages. They were really obsessed with everything medieval in the Victorian period. It was just their bag, they loved it, and in America as well, not just in Britain. Everyone was medieval crazy, and it was ...
Dr. Kate Lister:
But it's not real medieval. It was the charging knights, the damsel in distress, King Arthur and Merlin and magic and dragons and all of that stuff.
Liz Goldwyn:
And torture devices, right?
Dr. Kate Lister:
Yeah, but what they did was they kind of rewrote medieval history to suit their own agenda. This idea that medieval women were really virtuous and chaste and put in a chastity belt is actually a reflection of Victorian middle class values. It doesn't actually have any basis in history at all, there's absolutely no evidence whatsoever that any medieval woman was subjected to a chastity belt. I mean, we may discover one in years to come, and we'll have to rethink that. But medieval people were actually a lot more sexually liberated than we might think they are. It's the Victorians who did this really damaging job with their reputation, and printed them all as really virtuous prudes, basically. Which isn't true at all, no.
Liz Goldwyn:
Yeah. I know you were telling me before about some of the stonework on medieval buildings had gargoyles masturbating, is that right?
Dr. Kate Lister:
Yeah. That is. That's true. One of my favorite things to do is to talk to a really really serious medieval scholar. Usually a man and a little bit older, and just keep trying to get him to explain the grotesque gargoyles. Because I love it, I love watching people try to explain them, because they can't. No one really knows why they're there, it doesn't make any sense at all. We have in particular these little carvings on early medieval churches in Britain and Ireland and in Brittany, and they're called sheela na gigs. They're just these kind of grotesque little bald figures, but they've got a really prominent vulva, usually, and they're holding it open. You've got these really exaggerated, grotesque little figurines, just carved into a church. No one's quite sure why they're there.
Dr. Kate Lister:
There's obviously something that's lost in translation, some cultural reference that we're missing that would explain them, of why would you make these little obscene carvings? But then if you look into minsters, and York Minster, which is near to where I live in the UK. High up in the rafters, once you've got past all the pictures of the angels and the saints and the crosses, there's these little carvings of monkeys masturbating, and having anal sex with each other, and nobody knows what they're doing there, at all. Was it just a carpenter having a bit of a giggle? Was this the medieval equivalent of just drawing a dick on a piece of paper whenever you get a chance? Nobody's quite sure, but they're absolutely fascinating. These obscene little doodles and drawings that turn up all throughout medieval art. I love them.
Liz Goldwyn:
Speaking of masturbation, and a little bit about these devices. We know chastity belts, which also would supposedly prevent you from masturbating, are a historical hoax. I was just doing a precursory Google search this morning, and there's lots of people selling fake chastity belts. New chastity belts, that are for sex play, but also they're selling fake medieval chastity belts on Ebay and Etsy. If someone is trying to sell you a chastity belt, and they're claiming for it to be legitimate-
Dr. Kate Lister:
It is not.
Liz Goldwyn:
Report the seller, baby, or just say ...
Dr. Kate Lister:
Absolutely. Absolutely. Always buy your chastity belts from a reputable seller.\
Liz Goldwyn:
But what they did have in the 19th century, is they did have anti-masturbation devices for penis owners. These 19th century urethral rings, right? That were ... They sound very grotesque.
Dr. Kate Lister:
They did. Yes. Well, they're as horrendous as they sound, to be honest. This all stems from a medical belief that emerged ... Well, it's been kicking around since the ancient world, but it really got going in the 18th century. This idea that if you lose too much semen, that you will become quite weak. That it's physically damaging. This idea maybe that you've got a finite reserve of semen, in the same way that if you lost too much blood, that'd be really bad for you. This idea-
Liz Goldwyn:
This comes from Taoist beliefs of holding on to the orgasm as life force?
Dr. Kate Lister:
I can't find a point in history where I can say that exactly this comes from that. But we can say that this is the same in ancient Taoist beliefs, is the idea that you don't ejaculate. You can have sex, but you don't ejaculate, and that this stokes up energy in the body. We still see this today.
Dr. Kate Lister:
Athletes perhaps before a big race, or boxers before a fight, will say that they won't have sex the night before, because it'll impact their performance negatively. It's the same idea, that having sex will somehow drain your energy. This idea crops up in Europe in the 18th century, they really start building on it. This medical fear and paranoia comes around, this illness that they called spermatorrhea, which is just gibberish. It's complete nonsense. But it was the idea that if you lost too much of your seed, it'd be really really damaging to health.
Dr. Kate Lister:
That kicked off this whole anxiety about what they called ... It's masturbation, or what they called nocturnal emissions, which is a wet dream basically. If you genuinely think that having a wet dream in the middle of the night could make you go blind, that it could be that serious, you're going to put things in place to try and stop that. That's what these spermatozoa and spermatorrhea rings were, and they were as horrendous as they sound. They basically, if you haven't seen pictures of these. They were basically rings but with jagged teeth on the inside. You would put them around the penis before you went to sleep, the theory being that if you got an erection in the middle of the night, it would suddenly wake you up and prevent the nocturnal emission.
Dr. Kate Lister:
They're horrendous things. They have other ones that are electric. You can shock the penis. It's just absolutely dreadful.
Liz Goldwyn:
Ugh.
Dr. Kate Lister:
Yeah. And John Harvey Kellogg, of Kellogg's fame, American-
Liz Goldwyn:
I was about to get to the Kellogg.
Dr. Kate Lister:
Going to get to him.
Liz Goldwyn:
Kellogg and Raisin Bran cereal.
Dr. Kate Lister:
It's such a weird history, isn't it? But yeah, he was a big proponent of this anti masturbation league. In fact, he was just anti sex completely. He was really proud of the fact he never consummated his marriage with his wife. They adopted all of their children. He believed that too much sex and losing your seed was very bad for you, and he recommended circumcision without anesthetic, to stop people masturbating. Or burning the clitoris with carbolic acid was another one of his suggestions. But cornflakes were actually invented because he believed that spicy foods or anything that was exciting to eat would stir up the passions, so he wanted to invent something as bland as possible to stop people masturbating and having urges. That's what cornflakes are.
Liz Goldwyn:
This is why I don't support any of the Kellogg's brands, personally.
Dr. Kate Lister:
Lucky Charms, all the way.
Liz Goldwyn:
Frosted Flakes for me. I don't know if Frosted Flakes is the Kellogg's brand, I actually wasn't really allowed to eat sugar cereal, it was just every once in a while when my dad would sneak it to us.
Dr. Kate Lister:
Oh yeah.
Liz Goldwyn:
But it's funny to think of these sort of everyday things that we never consider the history behind.
Dr. Kate Lister:
Yeah, right?
Liz Goldwyn:
I know also around this time, we think of testicular transplants and virility ... Or Viagra, impotence, being a more 20th century thing. But this was all happening back in the day as well, right?
Dr. Kate Lister:
Oh God, yeah. I mean, it was a real worry for people. When Viagra took hold of the market, when it was released, you can't underestimate just what a game changer that was, and how it revolutionized the sex lives of people all around the world. Apparently at one point, when Viagra was made available, doctors actually had to start getting rubber stamps to stamp the prescriptions, because they couldn't keep up just writing it by hand.
Dr. Kate Lister:
That fear, and that worry, has been with us all the time. What do you do if you have erectile dysfunction, or if you can't maintain an erection? It's a real concern, all throughout history. In fact, in the Middle Ages, a woman could have her marriage annulled on the grounds that her husband was impotent. That was grounds for divorce, because in the medieval church, if you can't get an erection you can't have sex, and then there's no children. So there's no point in the marriage. But the small print of this particular thing was that you had to prove it. You had to prove that he couldn't get an erection.
Liz Goldwyn:
How would you prove it?
Dr. Kate Lister:
This necessitated a group of wise women, women who know these things, matrons, who would subject this poor guy ... It's just referred to as intense examination, to try and get an erection out of him. And then they'd-
Liz Goldwyn:
Would they ... Was it like a group orgy scene?
Dr. Kate Lister:
It was like ... Orgy I think is a nice way of describing this. This was some poor guy stripped buck naked and being molested by four women appointed by the church to try and prove whether or not he could get an erection. Then, this is in lots of court and church records, going right back. There was one poor bugger called Walter [Dafont 00:27:07], I think he was 13th century. After examining his penis for several hours, a group of these matrons returned and then ruled that it was utterly useless. So she was allowed to have the marriage annulled.
Liz Goldwyn:
Oh my goodness. I feel kind of bad for him-
Dr. Kate Lister:
I know.
Liz Goldwyn:
But then at the same time, there's so much gruesome history when it comes to something like the speculum. When it comes to the way that women were examined, the way that gynecological exams went down back in the day.
Dr. Kate Lister:
Oh, God. God, yes. I mean, the history ... There's speculums that go right back to ancient Rome that have been excavated. The actual shape of them has remained ... I mean, they all look horrific, but they've been fairly constant since day dot. But they really came into their own in the 19th century with an American gynecologist. But what makes this history particularly troubling is that he was experimenting on enslaved women. It's what makes it particularly difficult for us to understand. He's often hailed as the father of modern gynecology, but his experiments were carried out on enslaved women, and without ... I mean, anesthetic wasn't available at the time, but it was carried out without anesthetic. So that's particularly, yeah, it's a really nasty history.
Liz Goldwyn:
I mean, sometimes we think we've come so far.
Dr. Kate Lister:
Yeah.
Liz Goldwyn:
Some things that we think of as totally contemporary, like sex dolls, for example. Those aren't new either, right? Those go back hundreds of years as well.
Dr. Kate Lister:
No. Like you said earlier, the only thing that changes around sex is technology. As soon as we had the technology to make dolls, or rubber dolls, or blow up dolls, we make them. As soon as we had the technology to make robots, we make the robots. What they lacked wasn't the urge to have sex with an inanimate object, it was that they didn't have the ability to build dolls that we'd recognize today. However, there's still references going right back to ancient Greece and Rome about men wanting to have sex with a statue of Aphrodite. Aphrodite of Knossos, I think it was, and that men kept getting caught masturbating in front of her.
Dr. Kate Lister:
There's the Pygmalion story. When a woman is kind of ... It's the origin of the Stepford Wife myth, where a woman is turned into the perfect doll-like being, it's not a real person, it's a doll. That's been with us, and there's even references in the 17th and 18th centuries to sailors aboard a ship having sex with what's effectively a pile of rags, but they call it a doll.
Liz Goldwyn:
A rag doll, is that where that comes from?
Dr. Kate Lister:
I don't think it's quite where it came from, but yeah. A doll, kind of like a strange doll thing that they would have sex with. But there are references to actual sex dolls, proper sex dolls that you would recognize today, in the 19th century. Some of the early sexologists write about them. I think it was Iwan Bloch or Havelock Ellis. He talks about how there's dolls that were available mainly in Paris, that are very realistic, that you need a specialist to go and make some for you. But yeah, they were there. People were just having sex with dolls, definitely.
Liz Goldwyn:
What about vibrators? When do vibrators first make an appearance in your research?
Dr. Kate Lister:
Well, dildoes obviously, you know, the un-vibrating one, are as old as ... I think the oldest phallus, I can't say it's a dildo because we don't know. But the oldest stone phallus, that looks a lot like a dildo but might not be a dildo, is about 27,000 years old, 28,000 years old. Very very old.
Liz Goldwyn:
The pre-Columbians in the Moche civilization, they have amazing collections of-
Dr. Kate Lister:
Oh yeah, absolutely. You know, they knew what they were doing.
Liz Goldwyn:
They knew what they were doing. And I've seen some beautiful ... Peter the Great, I think I told you this before. But Peter the Great built this museum of oddities in St. Petersburg, that's a very local type of museum. I wouldn't say it's a huge tourist attraction. It is for people in Russia, but it's amazing. He has a huge collection of oddities preserved in formaldehyde, and he has a really great erotic collection, including tons of early Japanese books given to daughters upon their marriage, that was sort of to illustrate sexual positions, and beautifully carved ivory dildoes.
Liz Goldwyn:
No vibrators, though. Vibrators are coming in with electricity, obviously.
Dr. Kate Lister:
Yes. I mean, you know, well done Peter. Go big or go home, right? You want an ivory dildo. Well, not anymore, because that's bad. But yes, you're quite right. To have a vibrator, you have to have a power source. You have to have electricity. That starts to come about in the 19th century. There's this quite persistent myth that the Victorians invented the vibrator to masturbate women to orgasm, to cure them of their hysteria. But that's just not true, that's Hollywood. That's Hollywood films, and it's kind of seeped into public consciousness, and it's now trotted out as if it's truth.
Dr. Kate Lister:
But they weren't. They invented what they called a vibrator, or the vibrating cure, but it's not anything that you would recognize as a sex toy. It's certainly nothing that you would put near your genitals, ever. Not even for a bet. The first one that was invented, it kind of looks like a lead weight. Kind of bullet shaped, but it's on a string. It's not really, it's a chain, and it swings in a pendulum motion. The guy who invented it was called Granville, and he called it a percussor because it would just percuss. It would bang against the body, but he never intended it to be used for women. In fact, he was very clear in his work, he says you shouldn't ever use it on women.
Dr. Kate Lister:
It was just kind of something that, just like a little hammer head type of thing that banged against the body. That's not going to do much good. But they did invent vibrators, and they came in on this kind of wave of pseudoscientific nonsense, along with radium suppositories and all kinds of crazy crap. Magnets.
Liz Goldwyn:
Oh, radium suppositories. That sounds really, really toxic.
Dr. Kate Lister:
It's incredibly toxic. But when they first discovered radium, there was a little interim period between discovering it, and then realizing, oh fuck. It is really bad, really really bad. But in that little interim, because it glows and it's quite pretty looking, and it was all new. Everyone went nuts for it, and it was thought to cure all kinds of things. You got radium water, radium face cream, radium tablets that you could take, and radium suppositories. Which were actually prescribed for erectile dysfunction. I can't imagine [crosstalk 00:34:13]
Liz Goldwyn:
I mean, it's crazy when you think of some of the things that ... I mean, people even still are putting in their genitals. For example, this vogue for ... Or this idea that we need to be douching, which is insane. You do not need to be douching-
Dr. Kate Lister:
No.
Liz Goldwyn:
All these companies that are trying to sell you self cleansing vaginal fluids. This is perpetuating a myth that the vagina is unclean and it smells. And Lysol actually used to be used and advertised as a douching product, back in the day.
Dr. Kate Lister:
Yes. Yes, it did. I just, I get so angry with this crap. It's like, one of the things I want people to do with the book is to look at all the mad stuff that people used to do and think, "God, that's crazy, that's crazy." But I also want people to question what they do right now. We can look at the history of how people used to do things, but let's actually think about what we're doing to vulvas today. We still have this multi-billion dollar industry of vaginal hygiene products. This idea that your vulva needs its own specialist cleaning equipment. It has to be safely handled by the right chemicals, and all this nonsense. It needs to be steamed, or you need to put love eggs into it, or all the other nonsense.
Dr. Kate Lister:
No it doesn't. It's just fine the way it is. But this idea is really, really old, and it basically ... What it is is, it's just sublimated fears around the vulva and around female sexuality. It's about presenting the vulva, IE sexuality, as dirty. As something dirty and grotesque. The Victorians were really big on douching. They tended to prescribe it for all manner of things, but there's reference to it right back to the ancient world. But douching really started to take off as a contraceptive, in sort of the late 19th, early 20th century. Just disclaimer, it does not work as a contraceptive. Please don't do it, it's really stupid.
Dr. Kate Lister:
But in order to make that an even more effective contraceptive than just water, they started adding all kinds of crazy chemicals to it, and Lysol was one of those. And Lysol starts to be used as a vaginal douching agent, in the very very late 19th century, and then into the 20th century. Right up to the 1950s, it was being used. And if anyone's thinking, "Lysol, that sounds a lot like that floor disinfectant." Yes, it's exactly the same thing. It's a floor disinfectant, and women were being asked to wipe out their vulvas and swill out their genitals with disinfectant that should be used in the bins.
Dr. Kate Lister:
But what's particularly cruel about it was the advertising campaign that went with it. If anybody's going to Google, "Lysol douche advert," and have a look, because it's all these images of these wives in tears and it says, "She was a perfect wife apart from one neglect, feminine hygiene." Then it's a picture of her husband leaving her. It's just awful.
Liz Goldwyn:
I have a lot of those ads, and we will definitely be posting them on our-
Dr. Kate Lister:
Please!
Liz Goldwyn:
On our Instagram, when this episode comes out, so you can see what they are. I mean, it's-
Dr. Kate Lister:
[crosstalk 00:37:19] I should say at this point, though, because I did speak to Lysol when I was doing this research, and they were extremely lovely about it, and they were very very happy to talk to me. But also very very keen that I stressed that it is not the same company, it is not owned by the same people. They recognize that history but they've stressed, please nobody use it for any other way than it's supposed to be intended to use. I just wanted to put that one out there, because they were very very nice when I phoned them to speak to them about it.
Liz Goldwyn:
Well, here in the States, Lysol is a hot commodity right now, with everyone spraying down surfaces and wiping things.
Dr. Kate Lister:
Oh, God yeah, of course.
Liz Goldwyn:
But don't use it inside yourself, please. Don't use it in your mouth or in your genitals or in your anus.
Dr. Kate Lister:
Just behave.
Liz Goldwyn:
Yeah. In my last book, Sporting Guide, which takes place in the 1890s in LA, in the world of sex work, and is based on historical research. There's so many different recipes being passed around the brothels for homemade douching and contraceptives. Actually at that time, some of the brothels would have their own house condoms as well. Sometimes tied with a little ribbon on top, but with a stamp of the house, but these condoms back then, they were made of some pretty crazy materials.
Dr. Kate Lister:
Yeah. Yes, they were. Again, you have to put this into context. This wasn't just about preventing pregnancy, although that's a big enough motivator to use condoms and contraceptives. But this was ... I mean, we're very very privileged in the West, that we rarely have to face the horrors of venereal disease. If you are diagnosed with syphilis or gonorrhea, most times this will just require antibiotics and some awkward phone calls with people that you've been seeing.
Dr. Kate Lister:
But syphilis left unchecked, or gonorrhea left unchecked, are absolutely horrific illnesses. Especially syphilis, and it was so feared from when it first turned up in the late 15th century. I mean, it's like what happens ... First of all, you get a big sore that opens up at the site of infection, so that's normally in the genitals or possibly in the mouth, and you develop really intense flu-like symptoms, so you become extremely ill. A rash all over your body, really really poorly, and that will last for a couple of weeks. But then it will kind of die away, and people thought, "Well, I've got better, I'm okay." But it had just entered what's called the tertiary stage. It was still there, but it just wasn't as active on the appearance.
Dr. Kate Lister:
But then it starts to make, it could be up to 10 years before it starts to come back. But then it's attacking the nervous system, it's attacking the brain, it's attacking the soft tissue and bone. It literally eats away at the nose. It causes dementia, it can cause blindness, it can cause horrendous disfigurement. Again, if you Google "Victorian syphilis," you'll see photographs of poor buggers who were dealing with this.
Liz Goldwyn:
They would sometimes drink mercury during the Victorian period, as a cure for syphilis, and it caused teeth to fall out. Which is why Oscar Wilde, for example, and a lot of men would laugh while they were covering their mouth, which became sort of an affect. But it was really because they were like, "Ha ha ha." You can't see me right now, but imagine I'm covering my mouth. "Ha ha ha ha ha."
Dr. Kate Lister:
Covering their syphilis teeth.
Liz Goldwyn:
While they laugh, and it's really because they didn't want people to see their teeth had fallen out.
Dr. Kate Lister:
Yes. Absolutely. Mercury is ... I keep trying to ask people who really know this stuff about how mercury works. Would it have ever done anything to help syphilis? Because it was used from, well, about the 15th century onward. The Victorians would use it, like you said, they would drink it. But they would also rub it on the skin, they would also inject it into the urethra. There's also something called a mercury steam, where you'd kind of do like a Gwyneth Paltrow vulva steam, except you'd fling a load of mercury into the water as well.
Liz Goldwyn:
This sounds like something that the US president would recommend. He likes to recommend lots of-
Dr. Kate Lister:
Nonsense, he likes to recommend ... yes.
Liz Goldwyn:
... Cures [crosstalk 00:41:37] not a doctor.
Dr. Kate Lister:
Cures that have not been tested or tried on anybody, yes. He'd have been a good medieval quack.
Liz Goldwyn:
Definitely a medieval quack. But going back to condoms, at the time, they used to be made from animal gut membranes, and lamb and sheep intestines.
Dr. Kate Lister:
Yep. And they'd be reused, as well. As if that's not grotesque enough, that you'd be putting an animal gut tied with ribbon on the end of your penis. But the idea was that you would reuse them several times. Of course, they would dry out, as well. So when they dried out, you'd have this kind of really crispy dried bit of skin, and you'd have to soak it in water or in milk, if you had the money, to soften it up again before you could put it on the penis.
Dr. Kate Lister:
There's a British diarist called Boswell, in the 18th century, and he keeps journals. He is a bit of a lad about town to say the least, he puts it about. He describes using condoms, or what he calls them, "armor," several times. One really graphic description is when he picks up a young woman to have sex with against a wall near a river, and he's frantically dipping this condom, this dried up crispy condom into the river Thames, trying to get it to soften up before they can actually have sex.
Liz Goldwyn:
Ugh, and the river Thames must have been so polluted at that time, too.
Dr. Kate Lister:
I know. It's horrendous, isn't it? It's just ... Yeah. I mean, admirable that you'd want to try and have safe sex, but I think that if you're dipping your condom in the river Thames and reusing it, just no. I don't think that's going to work, and it didn't. He got gonorrhea like 14 times.
Liz Goldwyn:
Yeah, you couldn't go to the pharmacy the way we can today, and purchase a pack of condoms. They weren't being mass produced, so it was a lot of ... All of this stuff was sort of sold under the radar. It was obviously not ... It was not morally approved to be using contraception.\
Dr. Kate Lister:
No. No, usually you'd need to know somebody who knows somebody. I mean, there's sort of records of maybe you'd ask a waiter, or you'd ask somebody in a tavern perhaps, and they might be able to supply you. Obviously if you went to a brothel they'd probably be able to supply you. But there are some incidences of advertisements for shops. There was one in 18th century London, on I think it was Half Moon Street, and it's recorded that they sell wares of condoms or armor, that it's called. If you were in London in the 18th century, there was a shop that you would go to. They sold other things, because it was a chemist's, and an apothecary. But you knew that they sold those, so you'd go in and wink-wink, nudge-nudge, and then hope that they'd work out what you were talking about.
Liz Goldwyn:
There also was not a lot of widespread promotion of hygiene or grooming of the nether regions down there. So everyone had a full bush. Knicker whiskers, they called them, right?
Dr. Kate Lister:
Oh yeah. Yes. Yeah, that is what they called them, yeah. Yes, they do. Pubic hair removal, again there's evidence going right back to the ancient world, and certain in the Muslim world. In Islam, it's been practiced all throughout history. But in the Renaissance, in Europe, there's this ... A full bush, full pubic hair was regarded as something really quite luscious and sexy. I try and make people understand it as, if you saw a cat that came in and it was kind of bald, and there were sort of patches of fur on it, you wouldn't think that cat looked healthy. You'd think, ugh, it's horrible. So you'd want your cat to have a really lush, full fur.\
Dr. Kate Lister:
That's exactly how they thought about pubic hair. You find references in kind of bawdy literature to times, if you go to insult a woman, normally an older woman. You would call her a bald queen, or you'd say that she was an uncullioned wench, or something like that. Something to suggest that she doesn't have any pubic hair. It was quite an insult. It meant that you were kind of mangy and old, and possibly syphilitic, because mercury makes your hair fall out as well.
Liz Goldwyn:
Well, I think we're going to have a real return to the full bush in 2020.
Dr. Kate Lister:
Oh, my God, I know I am. I'm petitioning Parliament to have bikini waxers register as essential workers, but nobody's going for my suggestions at the moment.
Liz Goldwyn:
I want to know from you what you're still learning about sex.
Dr. Kate Lister:
Everything, you know? Every time, that's kind of what I love about the history of sex. What I'm really interested in is sexual behavior today, and now, and it'll be really interesting looking back about ... For future historians, maybe, about sex in 2020 quarantine.
Dr. Kate Lister:
That'll be interesting to look back, and when we're allowed out. What are we going to do? I've been doing a bit of research into sex in the time of the bubonic plague, and what happened. What happened for a lot of people was just this attitude of, "Well we're all going to die, sod it." There's reports of people having mass orgies in graveyards and in church property, because they really thought the apocalypse had come. So sex in times of pandemic, that's something that's really interesting me at the moment. Maybe it's because I'm not having any sex in this particular pandemic, that it's making me particularly interested in it. But yeah, I'm interested in that right now.
I'm also researching a little bit at the moment about, for a new book that'll be out in a year or so, about the transportation of women convicts from Europe to quote-unquote "the new world." To the Americas, and to Australia, and to parts of the Caribbean, and about who these women were and what their reputation was, because they were sort of [inaudible 00:50:59]. They were generally dismissed as being quote-unquote "whores, damned whores."
Dr. Kate Lister:
There was one child, she was a child. She was 11 years old and she was transported to Australia from Britain in 1789, I think she was. She was only 11, and most of the women that were onboard this convict ship arrived in Australia either pregnant or having already had a baby. The ship was the Lady Juliana, and it became known colloquially as the floating brothel. This little girl was aboard that ship. But she went, and you find her in the records, is that by the time she died in her 80s, she actually had five generations of family around her, and 300 living descendants when she died. And one of her descendants today is the former prime minister, Kevin Rudd.
Dr. Kate Lister:
I love that fact. That blew me away.
Liz Goldwyn:
That's why I love being in libraries. You just can get lost in these treasure hunts throughout history that really come alive, especially when you're dealing with sex.
Dr. Kate Lister:
Yeah. Just the one good thing about sex, is people are always interested in it. We're always going to be having it, there'll always be more to learn. Always.
Liz Goldwyn:
Thank you so much, Kate.
Dr. Kate Lister:
It was my pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Liz Outro
That was my conversation with Dr. Kate Lister. Her book, A Curious History of Sex, is available now to purchase from your favorite bookseller. You can follow Kate and her Whores of Yore project at www.TheWhoresOfYore.com, on twitter @WhoresofYore, and on instagram @more_whores_of_yore
Once again, a huge thank you to GUCCI for sponsoring this episode. You can find all things GUCCI via their website, GUCCI.com, and on instagram, @GUCCI.
Until next time, you can read exclusive content on TheSexEd.com, follow us on instagram @TheSexEd, and listen to past episodes anywhere podcasts are streamed. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate and review us wherever you listen to podcasts.
The Sex Ed is hosted by me, Liz Goldwyn. This episode was recorded and edited by Jeremy Emery and produced by Chloe Cassens. Lewis Lazar made all of our music, including the track you’re listening to right now.
As always, The Sex Ed remains dedicated to expanding your orgasmic health and sexual consciousness.