A Curious History of Sex

Staff of Life ^{Sex and Bread}

There’s no denying it: food and sex are two pleasures intimately connected in the human psyche. Admittedly, literally mixing the two (or ‘sploshing’, to use the vernacular) can lead to a steep dry-cleaning bill and a lifetime ban from the salad bar at Pizza Hut, but the point remains: food is sexy. Countless eating metaphors can be employed to describe sex acts: ‘eating’ pussy, ‘sucking’ dick, ‘tasting’ or wanting to ‘devour’ a lover, for example. Every Valentine’s Day, sweethearts gift each other with taste sensations (chocolates, wine, oysters, etc.), and sex goddess Nigella Lawson made her name fellating buttered parsnips.

We employ many of the same senses when we eat as we do when we have sex: sight, smell, taste, touch, etc. Both can bring feelings of comfort and love, as well as guilt and shame. Both over- and under-eating have been linked to sexual frustration and sexual trauma.^{1} And, of course, both eating and sex are pleasurable activities that can be shared, or indulged in alone. As it says in Proverbs 9:17: ‘Stolen waters are sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant.’^{2}

Some foods are sexier than others. Champagne and caviar are decidedly more seductive than Um Bongo and a can of Spam, though you may disagree. Bread might not immediately strike you as erotic, but the staff of life has some surprisingly kinky secrets in its larder. For a start, the bread-making process is laden with innuendo. After it has been firmly kneaded, bread is put into a hot oven where it swells and rises, and then it’s all finished off with a sticky glaze. The suggestive links between rising bread and rising penises, and hot ovens and hot vulvas, can be found back in AD 79, in the Roman town of Pompeii. During an excavation of the ancient city, a terracotta plaque with a projecting penis was discovered above the oven of a bakery, bearing the inscription hic habitat felicitas (‘here dwells happiness’).^{3}

The potential for doughy double entendres was not lost on the Anglo-Saxons either. The Exeter Book was compiled by clerics sometime in the tenth century and it contains a number of gloriously smutty riddles, like ‘Riddle 45’:

The answer is, of course, bread dough (wink, wink, nudge, nudge). As well as providing ample material for such risqué jokes, bread can be fashioned into all kinds of rude shapes. In his epigrams, the Roman satirist Martial (AD 40–104) joked about bread dildos, claiming that sexual urges could be placated by nibbling on penis-shaped bread instead of the real thing. ‘If you want to satisfy your hunger you can eat my Priapus; you may gnaw his very appendage, yet you will be undefiled.’^{5} Whether or not anyone has actually pleasured themselves with a loaf, fertility festivals have been celebrated with phallic- and yonic-shaped breads for thousands of years.

The Greco-Egyptian author Athenaeus of Naucratis (AD 170–223) described how the harvest goddess Demeter was worshipped in Sicily with a sweet bread called mulloi that was shaped like a vulva.^{6} There is also evidence that genital-shaped breads were baked to celebrate Easter throughout the Middle Ages and into the early modern period. Writing in 1825, French historian Jacques-Antoine Dulaure (1755–1835) quotes from a sixteenth-century book by Johannes Bruerinus Campegius that details ‘the degeneracy of manners, when Christians themselves can delight in obscenities and immodest things even among their articles of food’. Dulaure goes on to describe how penis breads were still being baked to celebrate Easter in the lower Limousin and Brive areas of France, whereas the citizens of Clermont in Avignon celebrated Christ’s resurrection with a vulva-shaped bread.^{7} Writing in 1865, Thomas Wright claimed that phallus breads were still being baked in Saintonge ‘as offerings at Easter, and are carried and presented from house to house’.^{8} It is entirely possible that the Easter tradition of hot cross buns may descended from the ancient custom of celebrating fertility and the spring with knob bread.

Not only has bread been fashioned into sexually suggestive shapes throughout history, it has also been used in love spells. Throughout the Middle Ages, various church authorities were thoughtful enough to print books for priests listing the appropriate penance for various sins that parishioners would confess to; these books are known as ‘penitentials’. The earliest date to the sixth century in Ireland and they are a gold mine for anyone studying medieval sexuality, as the Church was nothing if not thorough (and imaginative) when it came to indexing sexual sin. One of the best known penitentials is Decretum by Bishop Burchard of Worms (c. 950–1025). Here, the good bishop lists numerous penances for sexual sin that involve ingesting bodily fluid, ranging from swallowing semen (seven years’ penance on fast days), through to wives tricking their husbands into drinking their menstrual blood (five years’ penance on fast days).^{9} Burchard is particularly concerned with women rubbing different types of food on their bodies to cast spells over men. These spells could be designed to kill their husbands, like this one:

Or, they can be love/lust spells, like this one:

Before you kick off your knickers and head to the nearest koi pond, let’s take a moment to think of the science at work here. To the medieval mind this made perfect sense. Touch and transference were very important to both medieval medicine and superstition. Many medieval aphrodisiacs attempt to transfer sexual potency from source to subject via ingestion. For example, sparrows were once considered to be symbols of lust. When Chaucer wants to describe one of the pilgrims in the Canterbury Tales (the Summoner) as being oversexed, he describes him as being as ‘hot and lecherous as a sparrow’.^{12} So medieval physicians believed that by eating lustful sparrows, patients with a flagging libido could absorb some of this lust themselves.^{13} The vulva was obviously associated with lust, so it stood to reason that being spiked with a fish that had died in the ‘glory hole’ (1930) would inflame a man’s senses.

Burchard of Worms was also concerned about women baking bread with their little chefs, and he has a penance for this too:

You might be forgiven for thinking that all this is the product of an overactive imagination and a night on the communion wine, but you’d be wrong. Kneading bread with your naughty bits is recorded again almost six hundred years later, only by this time it’s called ‘Cocklebread’, and has a song and a dance to go with it. George Peele’s 1595 play The Old Wives’ Tale contains these lines:

In A Jovial Crew (1641), Richard Brome also refers to young women who ‘mould cocklebread’, dance ‘clatterdepouch’, and ‘hannykin booby’.^{16} But it is the author John Aubrey (1626–97) who gives the most detailed account of how cocklebread was prepared. Aubrey writes of young women and their ‘wanton sport’, the ‘moulding of Cocklebread’. Aubrey describes how ‘young wenches’ would ‘get upon a Tableboard, and as they gather-up their knees and their Coates with their hands as high as they can, and then they wabble to and fro with the Buttocks as if they were kneading the Dough with their Arses’. While doing their wabbling, the women would sing:

Once baked, the bread would be delivered to that special someone and left to inflame their lust (or at least their lower intestines). Aubrey calls this a ‘relique of natural magik’ and goes on to suggest that ‘cockle’ derives from an Anglo-Saxon word meaning ‘arse’, which is supported by the sixteenth-century term ‘hot cockles’ – meaning to have sex.^{17} Think about that the next time you’re ‘warming the cockles of your heart’. Cocklebread turns up again in Victorian texts, only by then it’s a children’s game, divorced from all naughtiness (and bread), where you squat on your haunches and rock to and fro singing a song about your granny. If only they’d known.

In 2015, pussy loafs made a brief but memorable comeback when feminist blogger Zoe Stavri used the yeast of her thrush infection to bake sourdough.^{18} Unlike the ‘wanton wenches’ Aubrey wrote about, this was not done to try and seduce someone, but to make a statement about cultural attitudes towards the vulva. It would be fair to say that Stavri’s bread strongly divided opinions, and despite widespread coverage online, the recipe never really caught on.

Despite such gallant efforts, genital-based cooking techniques have witnessed a noticeable decline since the seventeenth century, though if you ask me a revival is due. Perhaps Delia Smith or Mary Berry could lead the way in reviving these old traditions. But I imagine health and safety would frown on confectionery moulded from genitalia and would mandate some kind of hair net be used. It does seem safer to stick to a box of Milk Tray. Although should a lover ever approach you carrying an oddly squashed farmhouse loaf, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

The Food of Love ^{A History of Oysters}

Possibly the most well known and enduring of all the aphrodisiacs, the oyster has occupied a special place in our hearts and stomachs for a millennium. Quite why this fishy, lumpy mollusc, swimming in its own fluids and resembling something one might clear from the back of the throat during flu season, came to be the go-to love food is a matter of some debate. Did you know that oysters have eyes? Eyes! But first things first – do they work as an aphrodisiac?

In 2005, it was widely reported in the press that ‘science’ had finally proven that the oyster is an aphrodisiac.^{1} However, this is not quite true. Professor George Fisher and a group of researchers from the US and Italy presented their research on the aphrodisiacal properties of marine bivalves to the American Chemical Society. Two years earlier, the same team had published research that suggested D-aspartic acid (D-Asp) and N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) stimulate the release of sex hormones (e.g. progesterone and testosterone) in rats.^{2} The 2005 research detected the presence of D-Asp and NMDA in some molluscs, namely mussels and clams. From this, the team theorised that this could produce an aphrodisiacal effect in humans when eaten.^{3} Crucially, the research did not cover oysters, and there were no human studies conducted to back this up – it is all theoretical. But a good story is a good story and the press leapt on these findings, proclaiming ‘raw oysters really are aphrodisiacs, say scientists!’^{4} Except they didn’t. There is no scientific evidence at all that oysters raise anything other than your toilet seat should you get a bad one. Having said that, oysters are incredibly good for you. Not only are they ridiculously low in calories, they are a powerhouse of zinc, copper, vitamin B12, vitamin C and lean protein. Interestingly, a man loses between one and three milligrams of zinc every time he cracks his oysters (so to speak), so the famed molluscs are an ideal snack to replenish sperm reserves.^{5} Oysters may well be very good for you, but a marine Viagra they are not.

Oysters are a very old food, and their shells have been found at multiple Palaeolithic sites around the world. Tools for opening oysters and oyster shells that were found within a fossil reef at the Red Sea coast of Eritrea were dated to around 125,000 years old.^{6} There are many different types of oyster, and they are found throughout the world’s oceans. Oysters are ancient, plentiful and may be the original fast food. But why are they sexy?

A likely reason is that oysters came to be associated with the Greek goddess of love, Aphrodite (and later, Venus). Aphrodite was supposedly born from the sea. According to the Greek poet Hesiod (c. 700 BC), Aphrodite rose up out of the waves, fully formed, after Uranus’s testicles were thrown into the sea by Cronus.^{7} Hesiod doesn’t mention molluscs in this story, but in Renaissance paintings such as Botticelli’s Birth of Venus (c. 1486), Aphrodite is shown standing atop a scallop shell, and this may be where shellfish acquired a sexy reputation – and it’s not just molluscs.

Sparrows were also associated with Aphrodite, and like oysters, they came to be regarded as a potent aphrodisiac in the Classical world. Even the Kama Sutra gives a number of recipes to inflame the passions that use sparrow eggs.

The belief in the stimulating effects of sparrow brains persisted for hundreds of years. According to Culpeper’s The Complete Herbal (1653) ‘The brain of Sparrows when eaten provokes the lust exceedingly’ – but back to oysters.^{9}

It’s not clear if the ancient Greeks and Romans regarded oysters as an aphrodisiac, but they certainly thought of them as a luxury item. The Emperor Clodius Albinus was allegedly capable of sinking four hundred of the slippery blighters at one sitting.^{10} Pliny the Elder writes about oysters being served up covered in snow at the most opulent banquets.^{11} The Romans thought oysters were good for a number of ailments (ranging from indigestion to skin complaints), but there’s little mention of their sexual benefits. For that, we have to jump forward to the early modern period, because it’s here that oysters really come into their own as the culinary come-on food.

In 1566, Alain Chartier asked ‘why were Oysters consecrated by the auncient to Venus? Bycause Oysters doe prouoke lecherie’.^{12} Indeed, by the Renaissance, oysters are frequently turning up in medical texts as an aid to ardour. For example, Felix Platter’s A Golden Practice of Physick (1664) recommends oysters to cure a ‘Want of Copulation’, when ‘there is none or small pleasure in the act’, and Humphrey Mills describes pickled oysters being served to customers in brothels in 1646.^{13}

But perhaps the most obvious reason for the oyster’s association with sex is its resemblance to the vulva. The soft folds of pink salty flesh and nestling pearls made for an obvious comparison, and ‘oyster’ has been slang for the vulva since the sixteenth century. John Marston made bawdy jokes about ‘yawning Oystars’ in 1598.^{14} In The Parson’s Wedding (1641), Thomas Killigrew writes ‘he that opens her stinking Oyster is worthy of the Pearl’,^{15} and that debauched scamp, Rochester, penned the following lines in 1673:

Given the dual meaning, it is little wonder the figure of the ‘oyster-girl’, selling her wares on the street, became a figure associated with sex workers and general naughtiness. Throughout the eighteenth century, bawdy songs about oyster girls were common. M. Randall’s ‘The Eating of Oysters’ (1794), for example, begins like this:

The Irish folk heroine Molly Malone, who sells ‘cockles and mussels, alive, alive, oh’, was immortalised in verse in 1876 and attributed to James Yorkston. The song tells of the beautiful Molly Malone who sells her wares throughout Dublin, and that ‘she died of a fever’.^{18} Since then, the song has become the unofficial anthem of Dublin, and a busty bronze statue of Molly was erected in the Georgian Quarter of the city in 1988. Dubliners affectionately call the statue ‘the tart with the cart’, and over the years repeated gropings have buffed her cleavage to a high shine.

In 2010, a text unknown to modern literary scholars, Apollo’s Medley (1790), was discovered and contains an earlier version of the Molly Malone song. Here, ‘Sweet Molly Malone’ is not quite the wholesome young woman depicted a century later. The narrator sings,

In 1805, the song was republished and put to music by John Whitaker, who attests to its popularity and calls this bawdy version a ‘favourite song’.^{20} ‘The Widow Malone’, dating to the early nineteenth century, casts Molly as a very wealthy and very horny widow.

Although Sweet Molly Malone wasn’t given her wheelbarrow full of cockles and mussels until much later, it seems she has long had a reputation for promiscuity, and her casting as an oyster girl is very much a part of this.

Perhaps the most famous devotee of the oyster aphrodisiac was the legendary lover, Giacomo Casanova (1725–1789). It’s often reported that Casanova ate fifty raw oysters for breakfast each day, but this isn’t quite true – though he certainly ate a lot of them. On several occasions Casanova records sharing plates of fifty oysters with his guests, and there’s no doubt he believed in their stimulating effects. One of his favourite seduction techniques was teaching his lovers to eat oysters properly. ‘We sucked them in, one by one, after placing them on the other’s tongue. Voluptuous reader, try it, and tell me whether it is not the nectar of the gods!’^{22} He writes about the ‘oyster game’ he used to seduce two friends, Armelline and Emilie.

His diary records that they played this ‘game’ twice. The second time, Casanova ‘accidentally’ spills his oyster down Armelline’s cleavage and undresses her in order to retrieve it with his teeth. You may want to try this move the next time you successfully swipe right – if you fancy fishing lumps of dead molluscs out from between a lady’s tits, that is.

By the nineteenth century, the oyster industries were booming. Oysters were so plentiful they came to be dietary staples of poor and working-class neighbourhoods. In The Pickwick Papers (1837) Dickens noted that ‘poverty and oysters always seem to go together’.^{24} But just because they were widely consumed didn’t mean that oysters shook off their sexy image. It’s no coincidence that two of Victorian London’s most famous underground erotic magazines were titled The Pearl and The Oyster.

Jonathan Swift once wrote ‘he was a bold man that first ate an oyster’, but I suspect the ritual around eating an oyster is another significant factor in its long association with sex.^{25} As Casanova observed, there is something undeniably sensual about freeing the plump oyster from his shell, and tipping the liquored, salty flesh into your mouth to be tongued and swallowed whole. Combine this with the fact that the oyster looks like a vulva (yonic) and has strong associations with Aphrodite/Venus, and it’s little wonder that this humble mollusc garnered a reputation as a decadent aphrodisiac. As Trebor Healey once wrote, ‘The world is your oyster, they say, so fill it with pearls of semen’.^{26}

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.

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.

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}

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.

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.

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}

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.

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.

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:

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