A Curious History of Sex

Don’t Hold Your Breath ^{Sex and Smells in the Middle Ages}

Although sight is our primary sense, when it comes to sex, it’s all about smell. Obviously, looks are important in attracting a mate, but even the hottest of the hot can be undone if they also have ripe BO, bad breath, or cheesy feet. Not being attracted to someone’s physical appearance won’t make you gag like the sour stink of unwashed genitals. But smelling pleasant goes way beyond improving your chances of getting laid. Our sense of smell motivates human behaviour in truly profound ways. Research has identified a ‘behavioural immune system’ in humans, meaning we are hardwired to identify and then strongly resist anything that triggers our disgust response. Bad smells trigger an avoidant reaction as a defence mechanism to protect us from health hazards.^{1} This may sound obvious, but the behavioural immune system is incredibly powerful and can easily override other instincts, such as sexual attraction or hunger. Research published in Neuroscience and Behavioural Review in 2017 revealed that physical disgust, commonly triggered by smell and taste, and moral disgust are inextricably linked in our brains, meaning that if someone smells bad, on one level we are also morally offended by them.^{2} So powerful is this response, scientists have actually linked the 2016 election of Donald Trump to our ‘body odour disgust sensitivity’. It sounds incredible, but a paper published in the Royal Society Open Science journal in 2018 found that right-wing political authoritarians (in this case, Donald Trump), often promote an avoidance of ethnic and sexual minorities by triggering their audience’s primitive disgust reaction. The same primitive reaction to foul odours is triggered by racist rants that present various social groups as a threat to the well-being of others.

When it comes to sexy time, we unconsciously use our sense of smell to assess how healthy our partner is. In 2013, Michael N. Pham theorised humans perform oral sex on each other to secure mating privileges and to try and detect infidelity. He suggested when a man goes down on a woman he is using smell and taste to try and detect foreign sperm.^{4} Yum.

In 1989, David Strachan proposed what became known as the ‘hygiene hypothesis’.^{5} Strachan suggested that in an effort to do away with anything that could trigger our disgust response, we have now killed off bugs we need to develop a resistance to, and collectively weakened our immunity. Strachan’s work suggested we need a little muck to be at our best; or as a wise woman once said, if you’re not dirty, then you are not here to party. The hygiene hypothesis has been challenged over recent years, but one thing is true: despite Ms Aguilera’s protestations, we have never been less dirty, and more aware of cleanliness, hygiene and bacteria than we are today.[28]

From face wash for faces to special soaps for your ‘special places’, almost every part of our bodies has its own specialist cleaning product. Our homes are scrubbed, our clothes are washed, our streets are swept, our air is ‘freshened’, our odours are eaten, and our food and drink are manufactured within government-specified guidelines. A 2014 UK study conducted by researchers at the universities of Manchester, Edinburgh, Lancaster and Southampton showed that three-quarters of respondents had at least one shower or bath a day.^{6} Even if you are reading this sat in the same clothes you’ve worn for the last two days, with cornflakes in your hair and spaghetti stains on your tits, rest assured: as a society, we have never been so clean.

Which is why if I could transport you back to medieval Europe, the first thing that you would notice would be the smell. The Middle Ages have something of a reputation for being filthy, and this is not without merit. Take almost any fourteenth-century European city at random and you would have to sniff your way through an olfactory assault course of open sewers, mud, animal waste, stagnant water, rotting food, refuse, unwashed bodies and collected filth. In 1332, King Edward III wrote a letter to the mayor of York demanding the city be thoroughly cleaned before he held a parliament meeting there.

It is true that the medieval world was far less sanitised than our own, but its people were not unaware of bad smells. Of course, they would have grown accustomed to niffs that would strip the enamel off our teeth, but they feared bad smells. Medieval medicine taught that disease was spread through foul-smelling airs, or ‘miasma’. Miasmic theorists were right about the source of bad smells often being a threat to health, but they also believed sweet smells could cure or ward off disease. Comparatively pungent they may have been, but medieval people were just as self-conscious of smelling bad as we are today.[29]

In his Canterbury Tales, written in the fourteenth century, Chaucer gives us visceral portraits of his characters and smell is a key indicator of a pilgrim’s moral state. Like many medieval authors, Chaucer links physical ugliness with spiritual ugliness, and he uses foul smells to signify a wrong ’un. The morally bankrupt Summoner’s breath smells of onions, garlic and leeks; and Chaucer’s cook, a lazy, corrupt thief, is described as a ‘stynkyng swyn’ whose breath and festering sores are revolting.^{8} The hapless fop and forerunner of the metrosexual, Absolon, is heavily perfumed, ‘squeamish’ about farting, and chews cardamom and liquorice to keep his breath sweet.^{9} Absolon souses himself in the medieval equivalent of Lynx Africa because smelling good was a sign of a higher social status. In Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (1485), the poor Sir Gareth is cruelly told to ‘stay out of the wind’ by the Lady Lynette because he smells of kitchens and ‘bawdy clothes’.^{10} However, being aware of smelling like the privy on a tuna boat is quite a different thing from being able to do something about it. Bathing requires, at the very least, a river, but, more often than not, it requires bathing facilities and the means to clean yourself and your clothes regularly.

The Romans were famous for bathing. They established lavish bathhouses across the empire, as well as the infrastructure to support them. Public bathing remained popular across Europe after the collapse of the Roman Empire (c. AD 476). But the early Christian Church quickly pulled the plug on the communal soak. As the Christian faith clamped down on sexual freedoms, attitudes to bathing in the buff changed considerably. Not only did public bathing involve nudity, but heat was believed to inflame lustful senses. Theologians like St Jerome (c. 340–420) had anti-sex agendas that would make the pontiff himself look like a member of Guns N’ Roses. Jerome advocated virginity as the supreme moral state, and urged women (in particular) to cultivate ‘deliberate squalor’ to ‘spoil her natural good looks’.^{11}

Many monks, hermits and saints saw washing as a sign of vanity and sexual corruption; filth was synonymous with piety and humility. Early Christian militants emphasised spiritual cleanliness over physical cleanliness, even viewing the two as inversely proportional; you could literally stink to high heaven. St Godric (c. 1065–1170), for example, walked from England to Jerusalem without ever washing or changing his clothes. Benedictine monks were only permitted to bathe three times a year, at Christmas, Easter and Pentecost. Archbishop of Canterbury, Lanfranc (1005–1089), laid down very precise instructions for monks when bathing. The monks had to gather in the cloister, where a senior monk would guide them one by one to the bathhouse. The monks had to bathe in silence, and on their own. ‘When he has sufficiently washed, he shall not stay for pleasure, but shall rise, dress and return to the cloister.’^{12} Of course, just because a saintly squad of hardcore soap dodgers shunned the shower, does not mean that every medieval citizen felt the same; but whatever the early medieval washing rota was, by the ninth century, the Roman bath infrastructure had fallen to rack and ruin throughout Christendom.

While the Christians were busy working up a stench that could be weaponised, bathing rituals were widely practised among Jews, Muslims and Buddhists, who believed a holy body was a clean body. Medieval Arab doctors were far more advanced than those in the West and understood the importance of cleanliness and hygiene. The medieval cities of Mecca, Marrakech, Cairo and Istanbul all had their water and bathhouses supplied by well-maintained aqueducts. The Kitab at-Tasrif (c. 1000) by Al-Zahrawi is a medical encyclopaedia that devotes entire chapters to cosmetics and cleanliness; Al-Zahrawi gives recipes for soap, deodorants, facial creams and hair dyes.^{13} In the Muslim world, it was important to smell good and they had the skills to produce perfumes, scented oils and incense. The first recorded perfumer is a woman named Tapputi who lived in Mesopotamia in the second century BC. A cuneiform tablet records that Tapputi made scented oils from flowers, calamus and aromatic spices.^{14}

Bathing for ceremonial purposes was widely practised throughout medieval India, especially in sacred rivers that were believed to have healing powers. Buddhist cleansing rituals soon spread to Tibet, Turkestan, China and Japan. The ancient Chinese text Liji (Record of Rites) believed to have been originally composed by Confucius (551–479 BC), contained detailed bathing instructions:

It was the crusaders who brought the habit of bathing back to medieval Europe. Conversely, for all their ‘spiritual purity’, the crusaders stank. The medieval Arabian author of A Thousand and One Nights was one of many writers appalled at Christian hygiene: ‘They never wash, for, at their birth, ugly men in black garments pour water over their heads, and this ablution, accompanied by strange gestures, frees them from the obligation of washing for the rest of their lives.’^{16} Happily, the Muslim habit of regular bathing seemed to rub off on the marauding crusaders, and as bathhouses became popular again in medieval Europe once more, bathing became a serious business.

But it wasn’t just the habit of social soaking the crusaders brought back from the Holy Lands, they had also learned about the art of perfume. The medieval Europeans had always valued a nice-smelling plant, but oils, soap, colognes and exotic bases for perfume, like civet and musk, were wholly new. Medieval perfumes weren’t alcohol-based like modern perfume but were made from oils infused with ingredients such as violet, rose, lavender, rosemary, ambergris, amber or camphor.^{17} Rose water, in particular, was the Chanel No. 5 of the Middle Ages. It was regarded as a sacred scent in the Muslim world: it has been argued that mosques were built with rose water mixed into their mortar.^{18} In Europe, wealthy hosts would offer guests a bowl of rose water to wash their hands before dinner. Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy was reported to have owned a statue of a child that peed rose water.^{19}

By the thirteenth century there were thirty-two bathhouses in Paris and eighteen in London; even the smaller towns had bathhouses. ‘Medicinal’ baths were regarded as being very beneficial to health. John Russell’s fifteenth-century Book of Nurture advises scenting a bath with ‘flowers and sweet green herbs’, breweswort, chamomile, mallow, fennel and (of course) rose water, to cure all manner of ailments.^{20} If you had the money, you could pay for servants to heat water and fill a wooden tub for one, but most people used the public baths.

Historically, wherever you have had public bathing, sex has been working up a lather at the soapy heart of it. This is still the case today, and although all-night saunas can be found in most cities a quick Google of the venue is advised before turning up clutching your soap on a rope. So closely associated are sex and bathing, numerous slang phrases for sex and sex work are derived from bathing: ‘lather’, as in ‘to lather up’ was sixteenth-century slang for ejaculation. The word ‘bagnio’, meaning a brothel, derives from the Latin balneum, meaning ‘bath’. Likewise, a medieval word for a brothel was a ‘stew’, which also derives from the bathhouses, where you could literally stew yourself in the hot water and steam. Sex work and saunas were closely associated, and the word ‘stew’ became synonymous with both.

In the fifteenth century, the city of London officially recognised the Southwark area as a red-light district; it was no coincidence that this was also the area of the city with the highest concentration of bathhouses. One bathhouse in fifteenth-century Avignon was so concerned it might be mistaken for a brothel that they felt it necessary to announce their opening with a clear statement defining themselves as an ‘honest’ establishment:

Sanitation was patchy, and Beyoncé’s Heat may have been a few centuries off, but the Middle Ages were quite discerning about a sexy smell. In the fourteenth-century Decameron, for example, Boccaccio clearly links sex and smell together.

The medieval guidebook Le Ménagier de Paris (1393) is full of helpful advice on smelling attractive: sage water is recommended, along with ‘chamomile, marjoram, or rosemary boiled with orange peel’.^{23} William Langham’s Garden of Health (1579) recommends adding rosemary to a bath: ‘Seethe much Rosemary, and bathe therein to make thee lusty, lively, joyfull, likeing and youngly.’^{24} Delights for Ladies (1609) suggests distilling water with cloves, orris powder, nutmeg and cinnamon. And in a medieval forerunner of the Lynx effect, the civet effect meant musk harvested from the glands of the civet cat became highly desirable, along with castor from the anal glands of a beaver and whale vomit (ambergris), but these were luxury items. If you really want to know the smell of illicit medieval sex, it’s lavender.

The word lavender comes from the latin word lavare, which means to wash. It has been used for thousands of years for its sweet smell. Unlike the more exotic and expensive perfumes, lavender grows all over Europe and is both cheap and readily available. Lavender was widely used in washing clothes, and washerwomen became known as ‘lavenders’; in fact, the word ‘launder’ derives from lavender. As historian Ruth Mazo Karras identified, one medieval profession that was especially connected to sex work was the washerwoman.^{25} Medieval laundresses were very poor, and had a reputation for making ends meet by ‘dollymopping’ (1859) (subsidising their income with sex work). Chaucer translates Dante’s meretrice (harlot) as ‘lavender’ in The Legend of the Good Woman (c. 1380), metaphorically drawing on the double meaning of being at once both dirty and clean.

Walter of Hemingburgh tells a story of King John, who thought he was seducing a married noblewoman, but instead had been sent ‘a horrid whore and laundress’.^{27} The sixteenth-century poem ‘Ship of Fools’ includes the following lines:

Given lavender’s rather conservative and somewhat old-fashioned reputation today, I take great delight in knowing that elderly women and aromatherapists the world over actually smell like a medieval strumpet.

But the fun was not to last. Public bathhouses went into steep decline across Europe in the sixteenth century. New medical advice suggested bathing weakened the body, and that cleaning the skin left it open to infection. Periodic outbreaks of plague and the arrival of syphilis in the fifteenth century certainly burst the bath bubble. As people became cautious about bathing, washing the body was replaced with washing your shirt instead. Linen, in particular, was thought to draw out and absorb sweat. Therefore, one only needed to swap shirts to be clean. This method of ‘bathing’ became so popular that French mansions were designed without bathrooms. Bathing would not come back into vogue in Europe until the eighteenth century, with the rise of the spa.

When Monty Python sent up preconceptions about the Middle Ages in Holy Grail (1975), the dead collector correctly identifies Arthur as the king, because he is the one who ‘hasn’t got shit all over him’.^{29} In 2004, beloved Python Terry Jones published his Medieval Lives, where he set about redeeming the Middle Ages from unjust stigmas such as smelling of shit. Far from living in a ditch, eating twigs and rubbing themselves with sewage, the citizens of the Middle Ages actually smelled quite good; certainly better than the people of the Renaissance, who believed bathing would make them ill. Medieval lovers valued clean bodies, sweet breath, regular scrubbing and an array of perfumes. They also knew the aphrodisiacal qualities of various scents, oils and plants. They enjoyed mixed-sex communal bathing and invested in bathing infrastructure. Sex was very much a part of the culture of communal bathing: at worst it was tolerated, at best it was fully embraced and enjoyed. The medieval period was undeniably grubbier than our own, but they embraced cleanliness as fully as they could, and their harlots smelled of lavender.

Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow ^{A History of Pubic Hair}

One of the best and scariest things about Twitter is the instant feedback. I have posted all kinds of historical titbits, which have led to some fairly heated debates in the Twittersphere. But no subject causes the reaction that pubic hair does. Whenever I post an image of a woman with a full ‘bush’ (1600), inevitably an argument ensues. Interestingly, for as long as I have been tweeting them, no one has ever commented on the state of a gentleman’s manscape, but a woman’s knicker ‘whiskers’ (1942) will upset someone every time. A criticism that comes up and again and again is cleanliness. Somehow, a full ‘thatch’ (1833) has become associated with being dirty and unhygienic.

Let’s be clear about one thing: this chapter is not pushing you to cultivate a full bush, nor am I going to recommend fashioning yourself after an eel and marinating in a bathtub of Veet. Whatever the hell you want to do to your own body hair is entirely your choice: wax the lot off and decorate your bald pubis with macaroni pasta and sparkles, or weave dreadlocks and have them hanging down your leg. It’s your hair and I fully support whatever you want to do with it. But this is what I do want you to think about: when did our own body hair become alien to us? How have we arrived at the conclusion that pubic hair is ‘disgusting’ or ‘gross’? Because this is always the cause of the arguments: someone recoils in horror at the sight of a woman with pubic hair you could wipe your feet on, and voices this online. Having a ‘type’ is one thing, but this voicing usually goes well beyond expressing a personal preference, and marches straight into outright revulsion at the prospect of a lady ‘garden’ (1966) gone to seed.

When did this happen? When did our body hair, hair we have all got, hair that is supposed to be there, start to elicit the same levels of disgust as a matted hairball bunging up the plughole? It gets even stranger when you consider that a mere two foot north of the offending ‘silent beard’ (1702) is another crop of hair that we collectively devote billions of pounds every year to styling. A cursory glance at any hairstyle magazine reveals adjectives such as ‘glamorous’, ‘sultry’, ‘flowing’ and ‘luxurious’ being used to describe a mop that tops and tails another barnet capable of making adults wince. Again, I am not trying to convince you to allow your ‘pubes’ (1721) to go feral, but I do want to pause and ask why are we so anti-fuzz? Because that’s where we currently are: our own bodies revolt us, and we shame people for having hair that we have too.

So where did all this start?

Many have pinned our plucking obsession on the Sex and the City phenomenon, and there may indeed be some truth to this, but removing body hair goes back much further than Carrie Bradshaw discussing Brazilians over cocktails with the girls. The earliest solid evidence we have of hair removal comes from ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. I say solid, because it has been speculated that prehistoric man would have managed his beard and hair – but without unearthing a neolithic Gillette Mach Three we are unlikely to be able to confirm this.

The removal of pubic hair is an ancient Islamic tradition and is done for hygiene, as well as religious reasons. Although the Quran doesn’t mention body hair, Abu Hurayra (AD 603–681), a companion of Muhammad, once said ‘five things are fitra: circumcision, shaving pubic hair with a razor, trimming the moustache, paring one’s nails and plucking the hair from one’s armpits’.^{1} The Niǯde Archaeological Museum in Turkey and the Museum of Anatolian Civilisations in Ankara both hold examples of obsidian razors dating to 6500 BC, which are the oldest known examples of hair removal in the world.^{2} Removing pubic hair is still a widely observed practice in Islam today.

According to the Encyclopaedia of Hair, copper razors dating back to 3000 BC were found among ruins in Egypt and Mesopotamia; tweezers and pumice stones have been found in Egyptian tombs.^{3} This was done for aesthetic but also for religious reasons: Ancient Egyptian priests shaved or depilated all over daily, so as to present a ‘pure’ body before the gods.

Evidence of pubic hair removal becomes less patchy (if you’ll excuse the pun) in Ancient Greece and Rome. The Greek playwright Aristophanes (446–386 BC) wrote: if women ‘pluck and trim [their] doorways like good spiders; the flies come strolling in’.^{4} The very wealthy Romans could even employ a ‘picatrix’, a young female slave whose job was to style her mistress’s pubic hair.^{5} But we also have evidence that not everyone in the Ancient World favoured the shaven haven. Written on the walls of the Roman city of Pompeii are the immortal lines: ‘A hairy cunt is fucked much better than one which is smooth; it holds in the steam and wants cock.’^{6} What this charming sentiment shouted from AD 79 tells us, is that beneath the toga some women were smooth and some were hairy, and some were steaming (apparently).

Of course, the Greeks and Romans were public bathers, so pubic hairstyling was of some consequence, but the coiffured cunt seems to have fallen out of favour in the Middle Ages. The supreme beauty for the medieval women (in Europe, at least) was pale, smooth, slightly plump, with a high forehead and a shiny face; nowhere are a lady’s ‘tail feathers’ (1890) mentioned.^{7} But, frustratingly, references to removing hair to achieve this ideal are very rare in medieval texts. A notable exception is Trotula de Ruggiero’s eleventh-century treatise De Ornatu Mulierum (About Women’s Cosmetics), which includes this entry: ‘In order permanently to remove hair. Take ants’ eggs, red orpiment, and gum of ivy, mix with vinegar, and rub the areas.’^{8} As concepts of sexual sin changed, attitudes to pubic preening also changed, and hair removal came to be considered vain, and therefore sinful. In the medieval Confessionale, clergymen are encouraged to ask those who came to confession: ‘If she has plucked hair from her neck, or brows or beard for lasciviousness or to please men… This is a mortal sin unless she does so to remedy severe disfigurement or so as not to be looked down on by her husband.’^{9}

One of the most famous references to pubic hair in medieval literature comes from Chaucer’s ‘The Miller’s Tale’ (1400). A love-struck but simpering parish clerk, Absolon, is in love with the miller’s young wife, Alison (but she is having it away with her lodger, Nicolas). Absolon sings outside her window late at night and begs for a kiss. Intensely frustrated with his wooing, Alison sticks her ‘naked ers’ (arse) out the window, where, in the darkness, Absolon kisses ‘her hole’, believing it to be her mouth; he then jumps back, having ‘felte a thyng al rough and long’. Disgusted, Absolon then begins to shout that ‘womman hath no berd’ (beard), and Alison and Nicolas fall about laughing ‘A berd! A berd!’ For Alison’s Brazilian blowout to be described as ‘rough and long’, like a ‘beard’, suggests this sex kitten does not favour the razor.^{10}

By the sixteenth century, texts that combined medical treatments with beauty treatments became increasingly popular. A 1532 beauty manual gives this recipe for a homemade depilatory cream: ‘Boil together a solution of one pint of arsenic and eighth of a pint of quicklime. Go to a baths or a hot room and smear medicine over the area to be depilated. When the skin feels hot, wash quickly with hot water so the flesh doesn’t come off.’^{11} There is no detail on this concoction being used on the pubic area, but we all hope it was not. Francisco Delicado’s La Lozana Andaluza (1528) is about a Roman sex worker, Lozana. She talks about whores ‘who pluck their eyebrows and others who shave their private parts’. She also recounts how she accidentally ‘burned off all the hair from the private parts of a lady from Bologna’ and healed it by salving it with butter.^{12} While some women were obviously willing to souse their ‘trouser sprouts’ (2000) in acid, pubic hair was seen by many Europeans as the must-have sexual accessory. Slang terms for pubic hair from the Renaissance are overwhelmingly positive and include ‘feathers’, ‘fleece’, ‘flush’, ‘moss’, ‘plush’, ‘plume’ and the ‘admired abode’.

Shakespeare makes a number of bawdy pubic hair double entendres in his work, suggesting ‘muff’ (1655) was de rigueur. In his Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare writes about ‘Sweet bottom-grass’ that lies between ‘Round rising hillocks’;^{13} in Much Ado About Nothing, Cupid is wryly referred to as a ‘good Hare finder’,^{14} and many have argued that the ‘black wires’ that grow upon the speaker’s mistress in ‘Sonnet 130’ is a reference to pubic hair.^{15} But more than just being the norm, an abundance of pubic hair was a sign of health, youth and sexual vitality. The hero of Richard Head’s The English Rogue (1665) complains that an elderly woman he sleeps with had no pubic hair: ‘I apprehended my danger the greater because I found no rushes growing there, which is an observation of the people; judging the bog passable which hath such things growing there on.’^{16} The Renaissance Brit, in particular, favoured a Hairy Potter. Spenser, in Strange and True Conference (1660), wonders at ‘the Spanish mode of shaving off all the wenches’ hairs off their commodities’.^{17} And the Earl of Rochester declared, ‘My prick no more to bald cunt shall resort.’^{18}

One reason for removing hair was pubic lice, which could only be got rid of by shaving, but an even more unpleasant reason for malting muffs was syphilis. Syphilis was first recorded in Naples in 1495, and one of the many unpleasant symptoms of secondary-stage syphilis is hair loss (head hair, eyebrows and pubic hair). Even though this is a rare symptom, the treatment for syphilis was mercury, which most certainly does cause hair loss. As a result, patchy pubes came to be regarded as a sign of disease. Whereas we may view a snatch patch as ‘disgusting’, your Elizabethan lover would have viewed a ‘bald eagle’ (1987) in very much the same way. In Thomas Middleton’s Trick to Catch the Old One (1605), a character called Audrey is attacked as an ‘unfeathered, cremitoried quean, you cullisance of scabiosity’.^{19} In Westminster Whore (1610), one ‘lascivious bitch’ is cursed to have ‘a cunt without hair and ten thousand poxes’.^{20} And in Night Searches (1640), Mill describes whores who are ‘out of date, some tattered; some want a fleece, some a nose’.^{21} One ‘Loose Song’ from 1650 tells of a man who refuses to have sex with a pubeless woman as ‘her stuff rustles like buff leather jerkin’.^{22}

If a lady had got to the point that a comb-over was no longer disguising her tufty ‘tuppence’ (1987), she could always go for a pubic wig (merkin). The Oxford Companion to the Body points to 1450 as the year ‘malkin’ – from which the name for a pubic hair wig derives – first appeared.^{23} Rochester complains the ‘Merkins rub off and spoil the sport’.^{24} Mentions of the merkin appears in numerous slang dictionaries from 1600s until the nineteenth century. The merkin is also mentioned in Alexander Smith’s A Complete History of the Lives and Robberies of the Most Notorious Highwaymen (1714) in a bizarre story of a highwayman selling a cardinal a harlot’s merkin and telling him it’s St Peter’s beard: ‘This put a strange Whim in his Head; which was to get the hairy circle of [a] prostitute’s Merkin… this he dry’d well, and comb’d out, and then return’d to the Cardinal, telling him he had brought St Peter’s Beard.’^{25}

Though some ladies may have been wigging it, throughout the eighteenth century bush was most certainly meant to be lush. Despite the introduction of Jean-Jacques Perret’s safety razor in 1770, pubic hair was still associated with rude health. Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies 1757–95, an almanac of sex workers available in London, is extremely positive about ‘the mossy grot’. Miss Devenport is described as being well thatched, ‘though not yet bushy, might truly be stiled Black Heath’; Miss Betsy has ‘ebony tendrils that play in wanton ringlets round the grot’, and Madam D—sl—z’s ‘lower tendrils, which sport on her alabaster mount of Venus, are formed to give delight’.^{26} Cleland’s heroine, Fanny Hill (1749), describes the ‘mossy mounts’ of her ‘soft laboratory of love’, and ‘the curling hair that overspread’.^{27} Fanny also admires her lover Phoebe, who ‘played and strove to twine in the young tendrils of that moss, which nature has contrived at once for use and ornament’.^{28}

Victorian erotica is also full of praise for the ‘happy trail’ (2003), in some cases describing a ‘tuzy-muzy’ (1672) that, frankly, could scour a greasy pot clean. In Romance of Lust (1875), the hero Charlie Roberts describes many furry lovers and finds body hair a turn-on.

Francisco Goya’s The Nude Maja (1797) is considered to be the first European painting to show a female subject’s pubic hair, but women continued to be depicted with featureless genitals in high art throughout the nineteenth century.

Indeed, it has been suggested that one of the reasons the famous art critic John Ruskin was unable to consummate his marriage to Euphemia Gray was because he was horrified to find that, unlike works of art, women have pubic hair. Their marriage was never consummated and was eventually annulled, and the only clue we have as to why is in a letter written by Euphemia in 1848.

Despite Ruskin’s anxieties, some Victorian women did practise hair removal, as shown on the next two pages; we can even see some of the first ‘landing strips’ (2014).

The absence of the merkin suggests that a mowed lawn was coming back into fashion once more, or at least it was no longer regarded as a symptom of disease. It seems likely that the retreat of pubic hair in the Western world is linked to the emergence of photography and pornography. It is certainly linked to being ‘seen’. Roman and Greek women plucked their pudendum because nudity was commonplace, but as bodies were covered up and were called ‘sinful’, there were far fewer pussies on parade. With the advent of photography and film, genitals were once again seen. Of course, you can look at your own unmentionables, maybe even your friends’, but there’s nothing quite like looking at a sexualised image of a stranger to have you doubting your own sexual appeal. Fashion has certainly played its part: the removal of underarm hair is directly linked to the new fashion for sleeveless dresses in the 1920s, and a cunning advertising campaign that told women they smelled bad. Leg shaving increased as skirt length decreased, and as underwear shrank to something you could floss with (hello G-string), pubic hair disappeared too.

I’ve heard many times that the heyday of the bush was the 1960s and 1970s, which simply isn’t true. But it was at this time that porn started to become mainstream. It was not that the ‘rug’ (1939) was back in fashion – it had never been out of fashion – it’s simply that we saw more of it. And, of course, the women were splendidly bewhiskered; no one had told them not to be. Pubic hair appeared for the first time in Penthouse in 1970. In 1974, Hustler published the first ‘pink shots’ of labial flesh, but hair was still very much on the menu. By the mid-seventies Playboy’s circulation surpassed 7 million. That pussy pelt has gone AWOL in recent years is often linked directly to pornography becoming mainstream, but perhaps we should cast our nets a little wider than that. Yes, porn is far more accessible, but we are living in an image-saturated society that constantly reinforces what is ‘normal’. But it is not just porn that cue-balls its women: toys, fashion magazines, newspapers, film, television, advertising, music videos, etc., will not show you a single trouser tendril (unless it’s in an arty, subversive manner). It’s like looking for a pube in a haystack. The reason people react so strongly to women with pubic hair is that they are not used to seeing it; it’s not their normal. The less we see it, the ‘weirder’ it looks when we do.

One of the slightly more disturbing associations with pubic hair removal is hygiene. I hear that all the time; it’s just ‘cleaner’. Research carried out by University of California found that more than half of 3,000 women surveyed who groomed their pubic hair did so for hygiene reasons, despite evidence that shaving pubic hair can make the vagina more vulnerable to irritation and infection.^{31} So, I’ll say this only once: if the hair on your head doesn’t make your scalp stink, pubic hair will not make your vulva ‘dirty’.

In recent years, there have been rumblings that the bush is on its way back. In 2014, American Apparel displayed mannequins with merkins in their New York flagship store. In 2016, society bible Tatler announced the ‘bush is back’. Caitlin Moran has declared that all women should have a ‘big, hairy muff’. Gwyneth Paltrow revealed that she ‘works a seventies vibe’. I suspect that as more and more celebrities ‘normalise’ the mighty muff, it will become acceptable once more. Pubic hair is frequently placed on the frontline of feminism; growing a new band member for ZZ Top in your pants is often seen as a fuzzy fuck you to a patriarchy that leaves you literally tearing your hair out. However, more broadly I hope this chapter has shown that fretting about the quality and quantity of your ‘sporran’ (1890) has a long, tangled history, and so too do the many painful and dangerous methods of hair removal that we’ve invented. But for most of our collective history, pubic hair was not only normal, but regarded as sexy, healthy and luscious. So whatever you want to do to yours, I promise, it’s all been done before.

Filthy Fannies ^{A History of Douching}

Have you ever wondered why the vulva has specialised cleaning products when the penis can happily make do with a flannel? Your ‘pipkin’ (1654) is entirely self-cleaning and does not require you to go at it with a scrubbing brush and a bottle of ‘Twinkle-Twat’ to be happy and healthy. Trust me, it knows what it’s doing. But clearly, we do not trust ‘Mrs Laycock’ (1756) to keep a clean shop. The human body has numerous crevices that can get a bit whiffy from time to time, but this is rarely anything that regular bathing can’t keep at bay. While everyone is on the sniff for any kind of body odour, smells coming from ‘south of the border’ (1945) seem to hold a particular terror for those in possession of a vulva. We would much rather it smelled like an alpine forest than like a healthy human ‘madge’ (1785).

Anyone who grows up with a vulva soon learns it is a dirty place. No one ever sits us down at school and tells us this, but it’s a message that comes through loud and clear when we first trudge through the lexical fields of meat, seafood and general putrescence that characterises vulva slang. When we realise tampons and sanitary pads are sold as ‘feminine hygiene products’, we learn that periods are unhygienic. We overhear fish jokes, stinky finger jibes and watch people wince at the word ‘period’ and start to panic about our own bodies. Vaginal deodorants, magazine articles that recommend eating pineapple to ‘taste better’, and panty pads that will help you ‘stay fresh’ all tacitly reinforce the message that the ‘bearded oyster’ (1916) is some kind of a swamp that requires careful maintenance. Little wonder that the ‘vaginal odour’ business is booming and is projected to expand by 5 per cent every year from 2018 to 2022.^{1} But the fear of smelling bad has consequences far more serious than the occasional purchase of specialised lady wipes. Research carried out by Jo’s Cervical Cancer Trust in 2018 surveyed over 2,000 women and found that 38 per cent of their respondents didn’t attend their smear test because they had ‘concerns over smelling “normally”’.^{2} The shame around not having a vulva that smells like a bag of bon-bons is now so great that people are putting their lives at risk.

It’s a shame we have been so desperate to make pussy smell like potpourri, because all the research shows that the natural smell of your ‘flue’ (1620) is actually pretty important. Research published back in the 1970s found that on average a vulva contains 21,000 ‘odoriferous effluents’. The research concluded that ‘the olfactory signature of an individual is complex, highly individual and composed of many “mini odours”’.^{3} In other words, every vulva has its own signature scent that is completely unique to its owner. Other studies carried out on primates, rats and hamsters found that the odour in vaginal secretions causes a spike in testosterone in a nearby male, which plays a significant role in sexual arousal.^{4} Human vulvas produce and secrete a mixture of five fatty acids called ‘copulins’ – not to be confused with the northern chain of bakeries, Cooplands – which also smell pretty good. Copulin research is still quite new, but studies have already shown that men exposed to copulins experienced an increase in testosterone and after a whiff will rate themselves as more sexually attractive than men in the placebo group. What’s more, men exposed to copulins will rate women’s faces as being more attractive than men not exposed to copulins do.^{5} Why on earth would anyone want to wash this mind-melding superpower away? But sadly, water-boarding one’s ‘whim-wham’ (1602) in order to eliminate anything close to a smell has a very long history indeed.

Vaginal deodorants, soaps and wipes are quite late arrivals at the paranoid pussy party. The oldest method of swabbing the decks is douching. A douche is a device that squirts water into the vaginal cavity – or the anal cavity, if you prefer. At its most basic, a showerhead can be used as a douche, but more elaborate contraptions that come equipped with baking soda or alum to add to the water are readily available online. Despite evidence proving that vaginal douching is linked to ovarian and cervical cancer, pelvic inflammatory disease, ectopic pregnancy, bacterial vaginosis, infertility and thrush, as many as one in five women are regularly douching their vaginas for ‘hygiene’ reasons.^{6}

Although douching can be traced back to the Ancient World, it really came into its own in the nineteenth century, when doctors sanctioned it as a reliable method of birth control.[30]

The douche was the first form of birth control widely advocated by physicians and embraced by women from all races and socioeconomic backgrounds, but this wasn’t just about preventing pregnancy. Douching has always been caught up in paranoid narratives about the dirty ‘daisy’ (1834).

In 1832, Charles Knowlton, a physician from New England, published a medical treatise advocating an antiseptic douche after sex as being ‘conducive to cleanliness’ and preventing pregnancy.^{7} This must have come as welcome news as Victorian doctors were already hell-bent on scrubbing out ‘cunny court’ (1604) for reasons of hygiene. In 1829, an article in The Lancet suggested women wash out their vaginas ‘six or eight times in the course of the day’ by syringing in tepid water to keep everything in tip-top condition.^{8} This kind of advice persisted throughout the nineteenth century. In 1880, for example, Dr Wing announced that ‘a woman should have a clean vagina as well as clean face and hands’ and recommended regular ‘vaginal injections’ of hot water and carbolic acid.^{9} In 1889, the Massachusetts Medical Society recommended douching women in labour so ‘that the woman may start with a clean vagina, not solely for the benefit of the woman but also for the benefit of the child’.^{10} And in 1895, The International Encyclopaedia of Surgery recommended a vaginal ‘injection, night and morning, of one gallon of hot water (110°F), followed by two quarts of a solution of bichloride of Mercury’ to treat venereal disease.^{11}

The Victorians took their douches very seriously, and in 1843 Parisian doctor Maurice Eguisier (1813–1851) unveiled the Irrigateur Eguisier, a pressure-controlled cylindrical pump and hose made from metal and porcelain. The Irrigateur Eguisier was produced in a variety of sizes and designs. Many were beautifully painted with delicate scenes of flora and fauna, which must have been something of a comfort as you squirted cold water and carbolic acid up your chuff.

In 1866, the Obstetric Society of London held an exhibition of historical gynaecological instruments. The event was hugely successful, and the Obstetric Society published a catalogue describing all the instruments that had been on show, as well as the most up-to-date instruments used in obstetrics at the time – including douches.^{12} Viewing the other contraptions on offer, one can see why Maurice Eguisier’s lightweight and portable Irrigateur Eguisier proved to be so popular. One of the most cumbersome douches in the catalogue was designed by John Wiess and looks like a table, holding a large rubber balloon of water. The user would sit down on the balloon, forcing the water into the attached pipe and hose. J. Lazarewitch from Russia, meanwhile, had designed a clunky cylindrical metal douche, which had a sieve at the bottom to prevent anything undesirable entering the vagina (beyond an enormous Russian douche shaped like a fire hydrant, that is).^{13}

Douching with water is damaging enough, but in order to prevent pregnancy, doctors started adding all manner of chemicals to douche water in order to kill off the sperm. Charles Knowlton, for example, recommended douching with ‘a solution of sulphate of zinc, of alum, pearl-ash, or any salt that acts chemically on the semen’.^{14} In 1898, the Monthly Retrospect of Medicine & Pharmacy lists the following ‘fluids to be used for vaginal douching’ to prevent conception: alum, acetate of lead, chloride, boracic acid, carbolic acid, iodine, mercury, zinc and Lysol disinfectant.^{15}

Lysol brand disinfectant was introduced in 1889 to control a severe cholera epidemic in Germany.^{16} But its antiseptic qualities were soon put to other uses, and by the 1920s Lysol was being aggressively marketed as a vaginal douching agent. Birth control was a highly controversial issue in the 1920s and certainly not something to be openly advertised. By focusing on the issue of ‘feminine hygiene’ within marriage in their advertising campaign, Lysol could raise the subject of sex and intimacy without ever having to use the word ‘sex’. Soon, a product that was used to scrub out bins, drains and toilets was being used to clean vulvas as well. One advert featured in Ladies’ Home Journal in November 1920 recommended using Lysol to sanitise ‘toilets, closets, cuspidors, garbage cans, and places where flies gather’, and goes on to point out that ‘women find Lysol Disinfectant also invaluable for personal hygiene’. The suggestion that a cleaning product used to clear blocked drains was needed to douche out the ‘nether eye’ (1902) can have left the public in no doubt: vulvas stink.

Lysol douche adverts are not shy in informing women that vulvas stink, and usually feature a young wife whose husband is on the verge of walking out because she has neglected her ‘personal feminine hygiene’. A distraught and humiliated woman is shown left alone and tearful because her husband couldn’t stand the smell of her ‘old lady’ (1885). Homes lie in ruins, children are left fatherless and the poor woman will now die alone, and all because she failed to disinfect her ‘grumble’ (1938). It’s an unbelievably cruel campaign.[31]

Because Lysol could not advertise itself openly as a form of contraception, they had to subtly hint at its spermicidal properties. Many of the adverts mention how effective Lysol is at destroying ‘organic matter’, which is a coded reference to sperm.

Not only is douching with toilet disinfectant not a reliable method of contraception, but it is also extremely dangerous. In the first half of the twentieth century, drinking Lysol was a common method of suicide and newspapers are crammed full of such tragic cases. Despite repeated claims that Lysol was gentle and would not damage delicate tissue, by 1911 doctors had recorded 193 women who had been poisoned with Lysol douches, and five deaths from ‘uterine irrigation’.^{17} Despite never admitting liability, Lysol changed their formula in 1952 to be a quarter as toxic as before.

Eventually, contraceptive douching was replaced by the Pill and latex condoms (things that actually work). But this just meant that marketers redoubled their efforts to convince women they smelled bad and only their product could cure this.

Whole-page adverts pushing flavoured douches were common in the 1970s. In 1971, Essence Magazine ran an article called ‘Beauty Wonders: No Smell So Sweet’, which asked women if ‘you’re getting more attention in a crowd than usual, or if your ole’ man turns off the instant you come near, then it’s about time to check out why. Could be, your hygiene-thing isn’t as up-tight as it should be… and that’s inexcusable, my dears.’^{18} The article then recommends all manner of wipes, soaps and deodorants to make sure women could walk down the street without people passing out in their wake. The blunt and offensive nature of vintage adverts may shock you, but the vaginal deodorant business continues to boom today. The marketing may have softened its approach since warning young women their husbands will leave them if they haven’t scoured themselves raw and installed an air freshener, but these products still make their money by convincing customers their vulvas require a specialist cleaning kit, that it needs extra cleaning that only they can provide – and that stinks.

A word that crops up again and again in vintage douche adverts is ‘dainty’. Women must douche to maintain their ‘dainty feminine allure’, to ‘stay dainty’, and ‘safeguard your daintiness’. The idea that one must remove all vaginal odour in order to be ‘feminine’ and ‘dainty’ is telling. There is nothing sexy about dainty. Vulvas aren’t dainty. They can eat a penis and push out a baby. They are bloody, sweaty, sticky, hairy, seats of awesome pleasure, and their natural odour is immediately linked to sex. I suspect this is what we have been trying to wash away. A ‘dainty’ woman is not a sexual woman. Her pussy won’t smell of sex, it will smell of furniture polish, or a fondant fancy. The desperation to have germ-free, smell-free genitals stems from a fear of being sexual or being thought of as sexual. A vulva does not need drain cleaner to be healthy. Nor does it require being water-cannoned before it is safe for you to leave the house. Make peace with your smells, they know what they’re doing.[32]