A Curious History of Sex

Conclusion

So here we are, at the end of our journey together. This is the point where we both roll over, light a cigarette and ask, ‘so how was it for you?’ I do hope you have enjoyed reading this book. Although, like a well-posed Tinder profile picture, I fear the title may have promised more than could be delivered. This could never have been a comprehensive history of sex. I’m not sure that such a thing could ever be produced, because there is not one history of sex – there are legion.

The history of sex is a notoriously difficult subject to research. Police and court records, medical texts and pornography are generally the ‘go to’ resources of the sex historian, but these sources always load the dice. What is almost totally absent is the unbiased testimony of everyday folk to tell us how they felt about and experienced sex. Take, for example, the history of sex work. It is quite easy to find sources that will tell us what doctors, moralisers and the media have thought of the sex trade, but trying to find the voices of sex workers themselves is almost impossible. They are always just out of reach, filtered through the pens of men who had their own agenda, sensationalised to titillate, or heavily dictated by circumstance.

For example, when Isabel Barker stood trial on 24 May 1683 for keeping a brothel in Morc-Lane, London, the court records show that she swore blind she ‘used honest industry for her living’ – despite several women testifying that they had caught their husbands sneaking out of her house late at night.^{1} Isabel was eventually found not guilty after managing to find a number of people to provide her with a good character witness. But, given that the penalty for running a brothel in seventeenth-century London was a hefty fine, imprisonment and some time in the pillory, we can perhaps understand why Isabel might not have been completely honest in her claims that she knew absolutely nothing about ‘licentious people’ or ‘carnal wickedness’. Such records tell us a great deal about the law and the sex trade, but what they can’t reveal is who Isabel really was, or how she truly felt about her accusation, beyond the fact that she denied it. Nor can it tell us anything about the men and ‘lewd women’ who were caught by irate wives in Isabel’s boarding house, what their background was, or how they felt about Isabel and indeed the law. The lived experiences of everyday people remain frustratingly just out of sight. Like trying to peer through a dirty window, we can glimpse shape, colour and movement within, but we can never quite see the whole picture clearly.

While unbiased individual testimony may be rare, what we do have in abundance is evidence of the structures that frame people’s experience of sex. Throughout this book I have traced the various threads of religion, the media, law, politics and economy in an attempt to reveal some of the rich tapestry of human sexuality. But I’ll finish by asking what kind of picture we are currently weaving for future historians to unpick.

Current attitudes to sexuality around the globe vary dramatically. Countries such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Somalia have all outlawed adultery. Common punishments include fines, imprisonment, flogging and even the death penalty. Being gay is still illegal in seventy countries, and punishable by death in Mauritania, Sudan, Northern Nigeria and Southern Somalia. Although Western attitudes can be comparatively progressive, they are by no means uniform. For every sex positive, polyamorous, pansexual there is a monogamous heterosexual who believes homosexuality is wrong. For every unrepentant nymphomaniac, there is an asexual wondering what the hell all the fuss is about. And for every placard-touting ‘me too’ feminist, there is a confused and indignant Hooray Henry who can’t understand why he isn’t allowed to slap female interns on the ass any more. As anyone who has ever spent more than two minutes on social media can tell you, modern debates around sexuality and gender can be fierce, and often toxic.

But at least people are talking and can talk about their sexuality with a freedom we’ve never had before. Of course, there is still a long way to go before, as a culture, we are comfortable with sex, but we have never been more inclusive, permissive and tolerant than we are right now. I say that in the full knowledge that this is a privilege that many around the world do not have, but the simple fact that many of us are free to talk about and express our sexuality is remarkable. We have never been more willing to talk, listen and respect one another’s viewpoints and experiences. And although there is still considerable prejudice, stigma and sexual ignorance around the world, voices are being heard and ground is being gained.

Perhaps what our own time will be remembered for is our scrutiny of sexual consent. Debates around sexual consent are nothing new – almost every culture in history outlawed sexual violence and understood rape as morally wrong. But what constituted rape varied considerably from culture to culture. In Ancient Rome, for example, rape was illegal, but only if the victim was a freeborn Roman citizen. Slaves weren’t recognised as citizens, so as far as the Romans were concerned, it was impossible to rape a slave because they did not have the right to say no.^{2}

Likewise, the Anglo-Saxons outlawed rape, but viewed the seriousness of the crime as dependent on the victim’s status, rather than the attacker’s actions. Some of the earliest extant Anglo-Saxon laws covering the punishment for rape are those of King Æthelberht of Kent (AD 560–616). Æthelberht’s laws cover abduction, adultery and assault, but also sexual assault, specifically the sexual assault of freeborn, virgin women. The law reads: ‘If anyone carries off a virgin by force, [he has to pay] to the owner 50 shillings, and afterwards buy from the owner his consent [to the marriage]’.^{3} To the Anglo-Saxon mind, this all made perfect financial sense. A woman’s virginity was highly prized on the marriage market, and the loss of virginity effectively lowered her stock. If a woman could no longer marry, her family (owner) would have to continue to keep her, hence the compensation paid. That the victim is forced to marry her rapist is barbaric, but again, made financial sense to the Anglo-Saxons, who viewed rape as criminal damage; if you break it, you buy it. As far as the Anglo-Saxons were concerned, the injury inflicted was not bodily or emotional, it was financial.

The Victorians also intensely debated sexual consent and fretted over what was assault and what was simply ‘banter’. One case that forced a national debate around the difference between ‘top bants’ and assault occurred on 26 December 1837, in the Artichoke public house in the London district of Holborn when Caroline Newton bit the left nostril off one Thomas Saviland, who had tried to kiss her without asking first. According to various reports she then either ‘absolutely swallowed the flesh’, or ‘was seen to spit it out of her mouth upon the ground’.^{4} After spending several weeks recovering, Thomas pressed charges for assault.

But what made this case so famous was not the assault itself, but the court chairman’s (Sargent Adams) ruling of it. Having reviewed all the evidence, Adams told Thomas Saviland that although he was truly sorry for the loss of his nose, ‘if he would play with cats, he will get scratched’. Adams then told the jury, ‘Gentlemen, my opinion is, if a man attempts to kiss a woman against her will, she has a perfect right to bite his nose off, if she has a fancy for doing so.’^{5} This ruling was widely reported in the press as ‘The Law of Kissing’ and set a legal precedent for assault in the nineteenth century.

The ‘law of kissing’ ruling genuinely unsettled nineteenth-century Britain, and the idea that a woman had a ‘right’ to bite off an attacker’s nose was criticised and ridiculed in equal measure. Mocking poems were published, like the one in The Pilot.

Clearly, the threat of punishment for kissing a woman led to some anxiety amongst the menfolk about what was acceptable behaviour between the sexes. In 1901, Kristoffer Nyrop published The Kiss and Its History, in which he not only tries to trace the history of the kiss, but also its legal status. Nyrop cites the 1837 case and uses it to illustrate the great difficulty men have in fully understanding when they should not kiss women and why: ‘it is a matter of general knowledge that a woman’s “No” is not always to be taken seriously. The refusal may, you know, be merely feigned.’ He continues to warn his male readers that if they ‘take the girl’s feigned “No” seriously, she will only laugh at him afterwards – such is woman’s nature’.^{6}

What makes our own time and culture historically unique is our understanding that no really does mean no, and that everyone has the right to say no, at any point, under any circumstances, and that must be respected. It’s important to acknowledge here that sexual assault remains a major issue today, and there are still far too many people who haven’t got the message about ongoing sexual consent. This can’t be emphasised strongly enough. But when we look back, we can see just how far we’ve come.

We are slowly moving towards a place where we understand that there are no mitigating circumstances when it comes to consent. It does not matter what a victim is wearing, drinking, or who else they have had sex with. It doesn’t matter if the attacker is a good swimmer, a Supreme Court judge or the president of the United States. It doesn’t matter if the attacker thought it was all jolly japes and ‘banter’ – assault is assault.

We are not there yet. We still live in a world where a victim’s underwear can be submitted as evidence of consent in a rape trial, as happened in Ireland in 2018. A twenty-seven-year-old man was acquitted of raping a seventeen-year-old girl in Cork after his lawyer told the jury, ‘You have to look at the way she was dressed. She was wearing a thong with a lace front.’^{7} This kind of victim blaming, shaming and proclaiming of sexual entitlement can be seen all throughout history, but what happened next is new. The case caused global outrage. Hundreds marched in Cork, Dublin, Limerick and Belfast to protest against the ruling and the absurd idea that underwear can give consent. The hashtag #ThisIsNotConsent trended on social media as women across the world posted pictures of their underwear.^{8} Irish MP Ruth Coppinger held up a lace thong in the Dáil (Irish parliament) shortly after the ruling and said ‘it might seem embarrassing to show a pair of thongs here… how do you think a rape victim or a woman feels at the incongruous setting of her underwear being shown in a court?’ She also told supporters that compulsory training on consent should be introduced for judges and jurors.^{9} While misogynistic court rulings and weary narratives around consent and clothing are not new, they are now being challenged and called out on a global scale.

So, we must keep talking about sex. We must keep educating children about sex, and not just about what happens when a sperm gets its hands on an egg. We must talk about consent, pleasure, masturbation, pornography, love, relationships and our own bodies. Because the only way we will dispel shame is to drag sex out in the open and have a good long look at it. History has shown us how damaging shaming sexual practices, in all their myriad forms, can be. Let’s learn the lesson.