A Curious History of Sex

by Kate Lister

20 John Whitaker, Molly Malone (London: Phipps, 1805), p. 1.

  21 Charles Lever, Charles O’Malley, The Irish Dragoon (Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1848), p. 108.

  22 Giacomo Casanova, The Complete Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt, trans. by Arthur Machen (SMK Book, 2014), Kindle edition, location 17545.

  23 Ibid., location 61336.

  24 Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers (London: Createspace, 2017), p. 238.

  25 Jonathan Swift, A Complete Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation (London: Printed for B. Motte, and C. Bathurst, at the Middle Temple-Gate in Fleet-Street, 1738), p. 120.

  26 Trebor Healey, A Horse Named Sorrow (Madison, WI: Terrace Books, 2012), p. 40.

  Turning Down the Heat

  A History of the Anaphrodisiac

  An aphrodisiac is defined as any food, drink or drug that increases libido, and/or improves sexual pleasure and performance.1 Aphrodisiacs are recorded in every culture throughout history, ranging from rhinoceros horn in Chinese culture to the West Indian ‘love stone’ and the highly toxic European ‘Spanish Fly’, made from crushed beetles.2 One of the earliest references to treating impotence is found in the ancient Hindu medical text the Sushruta Samhita, composed around 600 BC.

  Powders of sesame, Masha pulse, and S’ali rice should be mixed with Saindhava salt and pasted with a copious quantity of the expressed juice of the sugar cane. It should then be mixed with hog’s lard and cooked with clarified butter. By using this Utkarika a man would be able to visit a hundred women.3

  Having spent many an evening gorging on fat, sugar and salt, I have to say that it has never endowed me with energy for anything other than experiencing an intense and greasy remorse, but maybe that’s just me.

  The history of the aphrodisiac has been well mapped. But what of the anaphrodisiac? An anaphrodisiac is the opposite of an aphrodisiac and is intended to suppress libido and impair sexual function – the culinary equivalent of a cold shower. But why would anyone want to suppress their sexual urges, I hear you cry? Just ask yourself how much trouble your libido has landed you in and you may have the answer. Not to mention how much more productive working from home could be if we could stop ‘procrasturbation’. The Greek poet Sophocles is quoted as saying he welcomed old age as it had freed him from his libido: ‘I feel as if I had escaped from a frantic and savage master.’4 This is the history of trying to escape that master.

  Lizzat Al-Nisa (Pleasures of Women) by Ziya’ al-Din Nakhshabi, a fourteenth-century Persian physician, is derived from the Sanskrit treatise Ratirahasya (Secrets of Love), and covers topics such as sex, foods and aphrodisiacs. This image comes from an 1824 manuscript held by the Wellcome Library, London.

  Before the advent of chemical castration, anaphrodisiacs generally fell into three categories: cooling the body, starving the body and sedating the body. Sedating the body could be accomplished through drugs such as opium, fasting and rigorous exercise. Fasting is still practised within many religious communities today (opium less so), and is often linked with subduing lustful desires. Just google ‘fasting and sexual desire’ and you will be greeted with hundreds of religious websites that discuss how fasting can help to subdue lustful thoughts. This is a method that has been used throughout history. Early Christian saints, such as St Jerome (c. AD 347–419), regularly fasted to purify the body and cleanse lustful thoughts. Medieval monks would also starve themselves for long periods of time to gain mastery over food and sexual hunger.5 And there may well be method in the madness. In 2015, a research team from Qatar found that men who fasted during the holy month of Ramadan experienced a significant decrease in follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH), the hormone responsible for stimulating the gonads.6

  Exercise was thought to exhaust both the body and the libido. When Victorian doctors pondered how to cure women of nymphomania, the one thing that is almost universally prescribed is exercise and plenty of fresh air. Henry Newell Guernsey was one of many doctors who battled the urge with ‘Out-door exercise … taken daily during favourable weather’.7 Unfortunately for Victorian women, we now know that exercise actually increases the sex drive. In 2012, researchers from the University of Austin found that regular exercise not only increases the sex drive in pre-menopausal women, but that it can actually reverse the anaphrodisiac effect of antidepressants.8

  A seventeenth-century work on the benefits of fasting. John Reynolds, Nevill Simmons and Dorman Newman, A Discourse Upon Prodigious Abstinence: Occasioned by the Twelve Moneths Fasting of Martha Taylor, the Famed Derbyshire Damosell: Proving that Without Any Miracle, the Texture of Humane Bodies May be so Altered, That Life May Be Long Continued Without the Supplies of Meat & Drink. With an Account of the Heart, and How Far it is Interested in the Business of Fermentation.

  Cooling the body to cool desire made perfect sense as heat was (and still is) associated with sex. Sex is ‘hot’, and abstinence is literally ‘frigid’ (from the Latin frigere, meaning to be cold). We still talk about taking a ‘cold shower’ to try and rid ourselves of the ‘horn’ (1695), and the effects of cooling the body were well known in the Ancient World too. As well as cold baths, Aristotle recommended going barefoot to suppress lust. He believed that the bareness of the feet ‘causes dryness and cold … it is either difficult or impossible to have sexual intercourse when the feet are not warm’.9 Pliny the Elder went one better and recommended placing lead plates on the genitals to cool them down and ‘restrain venereal passions, and put an end to libidinous dreams at night, attended with spontaneous emissions, and assuming all the form of a disease’.10 Oversexed Victorian ladies could find themselves on the wrong end of an ice-cold vaginal douche or submerged in a bath of freezing water as doctors battled to control their lusts. ‘The cold bath, the shower bath, the douche, and cold applications to the region of the uterus, have been employed with great advantage.’11

  Spicy, hot food was thought to inflame the senses, so conversely cooling, bland foods were thought to cool things off. Cucumbers are both bland and cool, and despite their shape, they have long been considered an anaphrodisiac. One Ancient Greek proverb was ‘eat the cucumber, O woman, and weave your cloak’.12 Meaning, calm yourself down, and get on with your work.

  The French writer and physician François Rabelais (1494–1553) recommended a number of foods to cool down a lustful body.

  The fervency of lust is abated by certain drugs, plants herbs and roots, which make the taker cold, maleficiated, unfit for, and unable to perform the act of generation; as hath often been experimented by the water-lily, Heraclea, Agnus-Castus, willow-twigs, hemp-stalks, woodbine, honeysuckle, tamarisk, chastetree, mandrake, bennet keebugloss, the skin of a hippopotamus, and many other such…13

  I’ve never tried it, but I imagine that eating hemp-stalks and hippopotamus skin would indeed kibosh a night of passion. Although Rabelais was likely poking fun at medical quackery, most of the items on his list really were prescribed as anaphrodisiacs. As late as 1869, John Davenport was writing about medicines called ‘refrigerants’ that provided the iceberg to sink the SS Libido.

  The most favourite of these are infusions from the leaves or flowers of the white water-lily (nymphea alba), sorrel, lettuce, perhaps also from mallows, violets, and endive (cichorium), oily seeds, and waters distilled from lettuce, water lily, cucumbers, purslain, and endives. In equal esteem are the syrups of orgeat, lemons, and vinegar, to which may be added cherry-laurel water, when given in proper and gradually-increasing doses. Hemlock, camphor, and agnus-castus, have likewise been much recommended as moderators of the sexual appetite.14

  As well as eating foods to cool down the body, foods that were thought to ‘dry out’ the body were also recommended. This treatment is rooted in the Ancient Greek theory of the four humours. Hippocrates (460–375 BC) taught that human health is dictated by the balancing of four bodily humours: blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm. Galen (AD 130–210) then expanded on humoral theory by combining them with four temperaments: hot, cold, wet and dry
. Greek humoral theory dominated Western medicine until the early nineteenth century. Women were thought to be guided by the wet and hot humours, which made them less controlled and more lustful than men, who were believed to be cold and dry in comparison.15 Therefore to regain control over a lustful nature, one should try to ‘dry out’ the excess of the juicy humours.

  Despite its stimulating effects, coffee has been accused of drying out a chap’s beans since it was first introduced to Europe in the seventeenth century. In 1695, physicians at the Ecole de Médecine in Paris warned that drinking coffee every day ‘deprived both man and woman of the generative power’.16 In 1674, a remarkable petition was published in London, alleged to be from the ‘buxom’ wives of men who had taken to drinking coffee and were now useless in bed.

  The Women’s Petition Against Coffee is likely to be satirical, but it does reveal how the ‘base, black, thick, nasty, bitter, stinking, nauseous Puddle-water’ was believed to wither sexual potency.17 The ‘wives’ accuse coffee of ‘drying up’ their husbands’ ‘radical moisture’, leaving them ‘as Impotent as Age, and as unfruitful as those Desarts [sic] whence that unhappy Berry is said to be brought’.18 The depletion of vital juices has left their men with ‘nothing moist but their snotty Noses, nothing stiffe but their Joints, nor standing but their Ears’.19

  Title page for The Women’s Petition Against Coffee, an anonymous pamphlet published in London in 1674.

  In the Physical Directory (1649), Nicholas Culpeper recommended waterlilies to ‘dry’ the body out and suppress lust.20 In The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Robert Burton recommended men rub camphor on their genitals to dry out lust, and to carry some with them in their breeches to keep the penis flaccid.21 French scholar Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540–1609) claimed that monks regularly smelled and chewed camphor to try and keep their urges at bay.22 In the nineteenth century, camphor was being used for its sedative effect, often in conjunction with ice-water enemas.

  Various medicines have been recommended as anti-aphrodisiacs… iced-water, ices taken internally, and nitre alone, or combined with camphor. The sedative effect of camphor, in large doses, on the generative organs, as in painful erections in gonorrhoea, proves it to be an efficient remedy.23

  As well as drying food, bland food and plain diets were thought to calm the body and prevent heat building up in the first place. Davenport recommends taming the beast by eating ‘less nutritious food’, and avoiding ‘all dishes peculiarly stimulating to the palate ... as well as the use of wine and other spirituous liquors’.24 The Diagnosis, Pathology and Treatment of Diseases of Women (1868) recommends a ‘plain and simple but nourishing diet’, the ‘avoidance of mental excitement or effort’, and regular dips in a cold bath.25

  But if you’re looking for the ultimate bland, dry and boring food to derail your desire, then look no further than the humble cornflake. As we covered in ‘Sex and the Penis’, Dr John Harvey Kellogg (1852–1943) was an American health crusader, nutritionist and the director of the Battle Creek Sanatorium in Michigan. He was an advocate of abstinence, viewed masturbation as the root of all evil, and believed that diet was a vital weapon in the war on ‘wanking’ (1970). In Plain Facts for Old and Young (1887), Kellogg devotes whole chapters to discussing the importance of diet in preserving chastity. He recommends never overeating, eating only twice a day (and not after 3 p.m.), and avoiding all hot drinks. All ‘stimulating foods’ are to be avoided, including ‘spices, pepper, ginger, mustard, cinnamon, cloves, essences, all condiments, pickles, etc., together with flesh food in any but moderate quantities’. Instead, Kellogg advises eating ‘fruits, grains, milk, and vegetables. There is a rich variety of these kinds of food, and they are wholesome and unstimulating. Graham flour, oatmeal, and ripe fruit are the indispensables of a dietary for those who are suffering from sexual excesses.’26 The Graham flour Kellogg endorses was inspired by the Reverend Sylvester Graham (1794–1851), who was a major influence on Kellogg’s own work.

  John Harvey Kellogg (1852–1943), co-founder of the Kellogg Company.

  The Reverend Sylvester Graham was a dietary reformer and leader of the American temperance movement. He advocated plain, simple food (bread mostly), to prevent the youth of America falling into ill health and sin. He also saw a clear link between rich food and masturbation. In A Lecture to Young Men on Chastity (1848) he warned that steak and wine would ‘increase the concupiscent excitability … of the genital organs’, and lead to all manner of ‘sexual excesses’, as well as affecting the ‘moral facilities’.27 His work on plain diets inspired Graham crackers, Graham flour and Graham bread – all designed to bore the libido into submission.

  Graham’s work was concerned with more than ‘self-pollution’; he also wanted to tackle ill health and general moral decay. But Kellogg was obsessed with ‘diddling’ (1938), and the cornflake was designed to suppress lust and cure serial masturbators. Kellogg and his brother William Kellogg designed bland foods to treat the patients at their sanatorium. It was here the cornflake was born. It was everything Kellogg prescribed to stifle sexual desire: bland, plain, meat-free and made of corn. The original cornflake was patented by Kellogg in 1894, and he prescribed them to all his patients, who could also look forward to daily yogurt enemas, cold-water baths and douches, lots of fresh air and daily exercise regimes.28 Despite humoral theory having been discredited by the time Kellogg was filling his patients full of yogurt at one end and cornflakes at the other, it is remarkable just how similar his treatments were to those offered in the Middle Ages.

  Today, we don’t have to resort to walking barefoot or eating cucumbers to suppress the sex drive. Chemical castration is controversially used around the world to ‘treat’ sex offenders and provide an alternative to incarceration.29 Anti-androgen drugs are administered to block the effects of androgens, such as testosterone. Although reversible, this is an extreme option if all you’re looking to do is get more work done at home or to resist that 3 a.m. booty call.

  One final option you might want to try before resorting to opiates and ice douches is mathematics. One man who knew a thing or two about uncontrolled libido was the Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). In his Confessions he records desperately lusting over a young woman who sharply told him to ‘give up the ladies, and study mathematics’.30 John Davenport also recommends studying maths to rid yourself of lustful thoughts. He reasoned that:

  It will, indeed, be found that, in all ages, mathematicians have been but little disposed or addicted to love, and the most celebrated among them, Sir Isaac Newton, is reputed to have lived without ever having had sexual intercourse. The intense mental application required by philosophical abstraction forcibly determines the nervous fluid towards the intellectual organs, and hinders it from being directed towards those of reproduction.31

  Or, perhaps you would just prefer to sit in a cold bath with a bowl of cornflakes.

  * * *

  1 Javed Ali, Shahid H. Ansari and Sabna Kotta, ‘Exploring Scientifically Proven Herbal Aphrodisiacs’, Pharmacognosy Reviews, 7.1 (2013), p. 1 .

  2 Paola Sandroni, ‘Aphrodisiacs Past and Present: a Historical Review’, Clinical Autonomic Research, 11.5 (2001), 303–7 .

  3 J. Shah, ‘Erectile Dysfunction Through the Ages’, BJU International, 90.4 (2002), 433–41, p. 433 .

  4 Plato, The Republic of Plato, trans. by John Llewelyn Davies and David James Vaughan (Cambridge: Macmillan, 1852), p. 4.

  5 Sharman Apt Russell, Hunger: An Unnatural History (New York: Basic Books, 2008).

  6 R. A. Talib et al., ‘The Effect of Fasting on Erectile Function and Sexual Desire on Men in the Month of Ramadan’, Urology Journal, 12.2 (2015), 2099–102.

  7 Henry Newell Guernsey, The Application of the Principles and Practice of Homoeopathy to Obstetrics, 2nd edition (London: Turner, 1878), p. 459.

  8 Tierney A. Lorenz and
Cindy M. Meston, ‘Acute Exercise Improves Physical Sexual Arousal in Women Taking Antidepressants’, Annals of Behavioral Medicine, 43.3 (2012), 352–61 .

  9 Aristotle, ed. by Jonathan Barnes, Complete Works of Aristotle, Volume 2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), p. 1352.

  10 Pliny the Elder, Delphi Complete Works of Pliny the Elder, trans. by John Bostock (Hastings: Delphi Classics, 2015), Kindle edition, location 38731.

  11 Alexander Morison, The Physiognomy of Mental Diseases (London: Longman, 1843), page numbers unavailable.

  12 Athenaeus, Delphi Complete Works of Athenaeus, trans. by C. D. Yonge (Hastings: Delphi Classics, 2017), Kindle edition, location 2327.

  13 François Rabelais, Gargantua And Pantagruel (New York: AMS Press, 1967), p. 162.

  14 John Davenport and John Camden Hotten, Aphrodisiacs and Anti-Aphrodisiacs (London: Privately printed, 1869), p. 133.

  15 Agnieszka Raubo, ‘The Concept of Temperament and the Theory of Humours in the Renaissance’, Ruch Literacki, 57.4 (2016), 408–25 .

  16 Ibid.

  17 The Women’s Petition Against Coffee Representing to Publick Consideration the Grand Inconveniencies Accruing to their Sex from the Excessive Use of that Drying, Enfeebling Liquor (London, 1674), p. 4.

  18 Ibid., p. 2.

  19 Ibid., p. 3.

  20 Nicholas Culpeper, A Physicall Directory; or, A Translation of The London Dispensatory Made by the Colledge of Physicians in London (London: Peter Cole, 1649), p. 6.

  21 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (Oxford: John Lichfield and James Short, for Henry Cripps, 1624), pp. 630–31.

  22 Davenport and Hotten, Aphrodisiacs and Anti-Aphrodisiacs, p. 133.