A Curious History of Sex
Page 7
1 Viz, Roger’s Profanisaurus (London: John Brown, 1998), pp. 7, 10, 17, 30, 81.
2 Graham Dury and others, Hail Sweary (London: Dennis Publishing, 2013), pp. 19, 40, 127.
3 H. C. T. Hamilton, The Geography of Strabo (London: Bell and Sons, 1903), 17.2.5.
4 Galen and Margaret Tallmadge May, Galen on the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body (New York: Classics of Medicine Library, 1996). Other medical writers from the Ancient World to discuss the anatomy of the ‘nymph’ were Caelius Aurelianus, Albucasis and Avicenna.
5 Soranus and Owsei Temkin, Soranus’ Gynecology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1994), p. 16.
6 Soranos d’Éphèse, Sorani Gynaeciorum Libri IV. De Signis Fracturarum. De Fasciis. Vita Hippocratis Secundum Soranum, ed. by Ioannes Ilberg (Lipsiae: Teubneri, 1927). (4.9), p. 370.
7 Cited in Mary Knight, ‘Curing Cut or Ritual Mutilation? Some Remarks on the Practice of Female and Male Circumcision in Graeco-Roman Egypt’, Isis, 92.2 (2001), pp. 327–8.
8 John G. Younger, Sex in the Ancient World from A to Z (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 36.
9 Aristophanes and Alan Herbert Sommerstein, Knights (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1990), pp. 1284–5.
10 Cicero and D. R. Shackleton Bailey, Epistulae ad Familiares (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 9.
11 Cited in Jacqueline Fabre-Serris and Alison Keith, Women and War in Antiquity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), p. 264; Melissa Mohr, Holy Sh*T: A Brief History of Swearing (Corby: Oxford Academic Publishing Ltd, 2013), p. 26.
12 Martial, Epigrams, trans. by Gideon Nisbet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 1.90., p. 27.
13 Mohr, Holy Sh*T, p. 28.
14 Samuel Arbesman, The Half Life of Facts – Why Everything We Know Has An Expiration Date (London: Penguin, 2004).
15 Geoffrey Chaucer, V. A. Kolve and Glending Olson, The Canterbury Tales (New York, N.Y.: Norton & Company, 2005), lines 430–35.
16 M. S. Spink and L. G. Lewis, Albucasis on Surgery and Instruments. A Definitive Edition of the Arabic Text with English Translation and Commentary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), p. 456.
17 Avicenna, Liber Canonis (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1964), p. 377.
18 Danielle Jacquart and Claude Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Polity, 1988).
19 See Karma Lochrie, Heterosyncrasies: Female Sexuality When Normal Wasn’t (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).
20 Thomas Wright and Richard Paul Wülker, Anglo-Saxon and Old English Vocabularies (London: Trubner & Co., 1883), p. 549.
21 Ibid. Also see Mohr, Holy Sh*T, p. 98.
22 Gabriele Falloppio, Observationes Anatomicae (Modena: STEM Mucchi, 1964), p. 193.
23 Realdo Colombo, De re Anatomica, trans. by Nicolae Beuilacquae (Venice: Bruxelles, 1969), Book XI, pp. 242–3, Book XV, pp. 262–9.
24 Falloppio, Observationes Anatomicae, p. 193.
25 Colombo, De re Anatomica, pp. 242–3.
26 Vincent Di Marino and Hubert Lepidi, Anatomic Study of the Clitoris and the Bulbo-Clitoral Organ (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2014), p. 8.
27 Thomas Bartholin and Michael Lyser, The Anatomical History of Thomas Bartholinus (London: Printed by Francis Leach for Octavian Pulleyn, 1653), p. 77. For further discussion on lesbianism and large clitorises in the early modern period, see Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
28 Nicolas Venette, Conjugal Love; Or, The Pleasures of the Marriage Bed, 20th edn (London, 1750), p. 71.
29 Charles Slackville, ‘A Faithful Catalogue of Our Most Eminent Ninnies’, in Poems on Affairs of State: Augustan Satirical Verse, 1660–1714 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), iv, p. 195.
30 Jane Sharp, The Midwives Book, Or, The Whole Art of Midwifry Discovered, ed. by Elaine Hobby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 39.
31 Ibid., p. 40.
32 Ibid., pp. 41–42.
33 See, for example, Rosemary Guiley, The Encyclopaedia of Witches and Witchcraft (New York: Facts on File, 1989); Lana Thompson, The Wandering Womb (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1999); Jelto Drenth, The Origin of the World (London: Reaktion, 2008).
34 King James I, Daemonologie in Forme of a Dialogie (Robert Walde-graue, 1597), p. 70.
35 Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History (Hoboken: Routledge, 2012), p. 135.
36 Anon, The Wonderful Discoverie of the Witchcrafts of Magaret and Phillip Flower, Daughters of Joan Flower Neere Beur Castle: Executed at Lincolne, March II. 1618 (London, 1619), pp. 22–4.
37 H. F., A True and Exact Relation of the Several Informations, Examinations, and Confessions of the Late Witches, Arraigned and Executed in the County of Essex (London, 1664), p. 24.
38 Matthew Hale, A Tryal of Witches at Bury St Edmunds, 1664, p. 16.
39 Nicolas Chorier, A Dialogue between a Married Lady and a Maid (London, 1740), p. 13.
40 de Sade, The Marquis de Sade: The Complete Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings (New York: Grove Press, 1990), p. 205.
41 A New Description of Merryland (London: E Curll, 1741), p. 15.
42 M. D. T. de Bienville and Edward Wilmot, Nymphomania, Or, A Dissertation Concerning the Furor Uterinus (London: J. Bew, 1775), p. 36.
43 Alexandre Parent Du Châtelet, On Prostitution in The City of Paris (London: T. Burgess, 1837), p. 108.
44 Ibid., p. 109.
45 Robley Dunglison, Medical Lexicon: A Dictionary of Medical Science (Philadelphia: Blanchard & Lea, 1854), p. 214.
46 ‘Masturbation in the Female’, American Homeopathic Journal of Gynaecology and Obstetrics, 1.I (1885), pp. 338–340; p. 340.
47 Isaac Baker Brown, On the Curability of Certain Forms of Insanity, Epilepsy, Catalepsy, and Hysteria in Females (Robert Hardwicke: London, 1866), p. 84.
48 Ibid., p. 17.
49 ‘Obstetrical Society’s Charges and Mr Baker Brown’s Replies’, The Lancet, 1.92 (1867), pp. 427–41; p. 434.
50 Sigmund Freud, The Question of Lay Analysis (New York: Norton, 1989), p. 38.
51 Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (Mansfield: Martino Publishing, 2011), p. 87.
52 A.E. Narjani, ‘Considerations Sur Les Causes Anatomiques De La Frigidite Chez La Femme’, Bruxelles Medical, 27.4 (1924), 768–78.
53 Eduard Hitschmann and Edmund Bergler, Frigidity in Women: Its Characteristics and Treatment (Washington: Nervous and Mental Disease, 1936), p. 20.
54 William S. Kroger, ‘Psychosomatic Aspects of Frigidity’, Journal of The American Medical Association, 143.6 (1950), 526–32, p. 526.
55 Alfred C. Kinsey, Individual Variation Lecture, lecture 8, spring 1940 (28 February, 1940), Alfred C. Kinsey Collection.
56 ‘Clitoral Hood: Size, Appearance, Effect on Orgasm, Reduction, and More’, Healthline, 2018
57 Donna Mazloomdoost and Rachel N. Pauls, ‘A Comprehensive Review of the Clitoris and Its Role in Female Sexual Function’, Sexual Medicine Reviews, 3.4 (2015), pp. 245–63.
58 Pierre Foldes and Odile Buisson, ‘The Clitoral Complex: A Dynamic Sonographic Study’, Journal of Sexual Medicine, 2009, 1223–31.
59 Odile Buisson and others, ‘Coitus as Revealed by Ultrasound in One Volunteer Couple’, The Journal of Sexual Medicine, 7.8 (2010), 2750–4.
60 ‘Female Genital Mutilation’, World Health Organization, 2018
Colonising the Cunt
A History of Racial Fetishization
Sir Mix-a-Lot’s 1992 smash-hit ‘Baby Got Back’ hit the airwaves as a tongue-in-cheek celebration of black women’s bodies – an auditory fuck you to the super-thin, white women that dominated Western beauty narratives. The video opens with two white girls criticising
a black woman’s appearance and likening her to a ‘prostitute’.1 Although ‘Baby Got Back’ has often been dismissed as novelty rap, it succeeded in raising numerous issues around race, sexuality and women that remain unresolved twenty-six years later: the whitewashing of the beauty industry, the marginalisation of the black voice and the hyper-sexualisation of women of colour, particularly black women.
The main focus of this chapter is on the historic sexualisation of black women by white colonisers. I am a white woman and I am in no position to speak for the black woman’s experience. I do not know what it is like to be a black woman in a world that fetishises black bodies. But I am a historian, and I see parallels in the language white colonisers historically used to talk about – and disempower – women of colour, and modern ‘bootylicious’ narratives. This is not a chapter that further fetishises women of colour, or offers any kind of comment on black culture. This is a history of how white people have viewed, talked about and claimed ownership over black women’s bodies, specifically their genitals.
When Europeans first arrived in Africa, they encountered a culture vastly different from their own in almost every single way. But something that immediately struck the sexually repressed Roman Catholic explorers was that Africans did not share their doctrine of ‘thou shalt not’.
When Prince Henry the Navigator (1394–1460) arrived at the coast of West Africa from Portugal in 1441, he came from a deeply repressive culture where women could be put to death if their husbands accused them of adultery.2 By comparison, African women danced, wore clothes that exposed their bodies and were not shamed sexually. To the buttoned-down Europeans, this could only mean that they were highly sexed. Black women were not only heavily eroticised, but also held up as sexually savage and therefore in need of controlling – presumably by white men. In A New Voyage to Guinea (1744), William Smith described African women as being ‘hot constitution’d Ladies’: ‘They miss no Opportunity and are continually contriving Stratagems how to gain a Lover. If they meet with a Man they immediately strip his lower Parts, and throw themselves upon him, protesting if he will not gratify their desires they will accuse him to their husbands’.3 A British report on the African slave trade dated 1789 blamed the poor fertility rates of black women on the ‘prostitution of all the women in the young part of their lives, going from one estate to another during the night, and thereby contracting disorders…’4 Such texts understood black women as being promiscuous by nature, and their very bodies seemed to offer all the evidence that was required for white colonisers to accept this as a scientific fact.
The sad case of Sarah (Sara, or Saartje) Baartman (1789–1815) has come to represent the epitome of the white West’s obsession with, and ultimate commodification of, the black female erotic body.5 Baartman was a South African Khoikhoi woman who was taken to London in 1810 by William Dunlop, a Scottish military surgeon, and her employer Hendrik Cesars, and exhibited in sideshows as a ‘Hottentot Venus’.* Baartman was one of several Khoikhoi women put on display around Europe for white audiences to gawk at, though she would become the most well known. As late as 1840 a black Englishwoman by the name of Elizabeth Magnas was exhibited at Leeds as a ‘Hottentot Venus’ for six years before she died of chronic alcoholism.
Sartjee the Hottentot Venus, 1810.
What was it that white Europeans found so fascinating about these women? It was their bodies, specifically their buttocks and genitals. Steatopygia is a genetic characteristic frequently found among the Khoisan of southern Africa, whereby substantial levels of fat build around the buttocks and thighs. To white European eyes, women like Sarah Baartman and Elizabeth Magnas had excessively large buttocks, and this was enough to warrant placing them in a freakshow.
As if to justify claims that black women were promiscuous, travel writers such as François Le Vaillant (1753–1824) and Sir John Barrow (1764–1848) described African women as having large buttocks and hypertrophied, protruding labia, which they called ‘the Hottentot apron’. François Le Vaillant wrote at length about his efforts to persuade South African women to show him their genitals: ‘confused, abashed and trembling, she covered her face with both her hands, suffered her apron [tablier] to be untied, and permitted me to contemplate at leisure what my readers will see themselves in the exact representation which I drew of it’.6 In his Travels into the Interior of Southern Africa (1806), Barrow described a Khoisan woman’s buttocks and thighs as being a ‘protuberance consist[ing] of fat, and, when the woman walked, had the most ridiculous appearance imaginable, every step being accompanied with a quivering and tremulous motion as if two masses of jelly were attached behind’.7
It was to audiences like this that Sarah Baartman was exhibited. Onstage, Sarah wore tight, flesh-coloured clothing, necklaces of beads and feathers, and smoked a pipe. In 1810, The Times recorded that ‘she is dressed in a colour as nearly resembling her skin as possible. The dress is contrived to exhibit the entire frame of her body, and the spectators are even invited to examine the peculiarities of her form.’8 Even at the time, the prospect of a woman being exhibited for her buttocks caused an outrage, and many petitioned for Sarah’s freedom. Anti-slavery activist Zachary Macaulay (1768–1838) and the African Association succeeded in taking Sarah’s case to court in 1810, where she was cross-examined for several hours by an attorney to ascertain if she consented to her treatment. William Dunlop was allowed to remain in the court as Sarah testified, and even produced a contract signed by himself and Sarah agreeing to her working conditions.9 We will never know if his presence prohibited Sarah from saying otherwise, but she told the court she was ‘under no restraint’ and was ‘happy in England’.10 The case was dismissed.
Sarah was never exhibited naked, nor did she allow French surgeons to examine her genitals when she was sold to be shown at the Palais Royal, in 1814. But after she died of alcoholism in 1816, aged just twenty-six, Georges-Frédéric Cuvier (1773–1838) dissected Sarah’s body and published a detailed account of her anatomy. His report is well known, as is his lengthy, voyeuristic description of Sarah’s vulva, buttocks and brain – which he likened to that of a monkey.11
Cuvier preserved her brain and skeleton, and put her genitalia in a specimen jar. Several body casts of Sarah were made, as was a wax mould of her vulva, which were put on display at the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle until 1974. In 2002, the president of South Africa, Nelson Mandela, secured the repatriation of Baartman’s body and the various plaster casts from France to South Africa, and she was finally laid to rest in Hankey, in the Eastern Cape province.
The nineteenth century was the golden age of physiognomy, a thankfully debunked practice of ‘reading’ a person’s character through their physical appearance. Early criminologists such as Cesare Lombroso ( 1835–1909) theorised criminal tendencies could be predicted by studying physical features. One ‘criminal’ trait that physiognomists believed they could read in a person’s body was prostitution. Considerable research was undertaken by scientists such as Adrian Charpy (1848–1902) to examine the genitals of sex workers, which were directly compared to those of black women to deduce a highly sexed woman.12 Charpy claimed that both the prostitute and the ‘Hottentot’ had hypertrophied labia, which signified a base sexuality. In his 1893 book La donna Delinquente, Lombroso directly compared images of the body of the black woman with that of the prostitute in order to ‘prove’ the deviant, animalistic nature of both.13
Belfast Commercial Chronicle, Monday 15 January 1816.
Although this chapter is primarily concerned with the colonising of black women’s genitals, it’s important to acknowledge that Europeans were equally fascinated with, and threatened by, black men’s genitals. The mythology of the ‘big black cock’, or ‘BBC’ as it is categorised on porn sites today, also finds its roots in earliest colonial propaganda that black men are sexually savage, animalistic and dangerous.** Just as the black woman’s genitals and buttocks were read as ‘evidence’ of her promiscuity, the black man’s penis was also
considered proof of a hypersexual, bestial nature. In 1904, Dr William Lee Howard published ‘The Negro as a Distinct Ethnic Factor in Civilization’ in the journal Medicine. Here, Howard claimed that the ‘large size of the African’s penis’ would prevent him from ever being ‘civilised’ or ‘moral’ like the white man. Howard suggested that the black man’s cerebral development stopped at puberty, and that ‘genetic instincts [become] the controlling factor of his life … He will walk the alleys late at night with a penis swollen from disease, and infects his bride-to-be with the same nonchalance that he will an hour later exhibit when cohabiting with the lowest of his race.’14
Large buttocks and pronounced labia were linked to promiscuity and racial inferiority in this nineteenth-century Italian study of the female criminal.
The effect of this pseudoscientific racism was far reaching and served to justify the brutalisation and sexual exploitation of black men and women well into the twentieth century. Military propaganda campaigns of the 1920s and 1930s actively drew on entrenched sexual stereotypes of women in the colonies in an attempt to lure European men into the colonial armies.