Provocative Non-fiction

Looking for provocative online pleasures? We recommend:

• For the Girls, the adult site designed especially for women
• I Feel Myself is a voyeurs delight

Pleasure Bound: Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism by Deborah Lutz
Norton, February 2011; ISBN-10: 0393068323

Review by Rob Hardy:  Any sort of pornography you might want to look at is available to you with a few mouse clicks, and support groups for, say, group sex or S & M games are easily available if you in a large enough community.  Things were different in Victorian England, but there were brothels, and assistants you could hire to whip or be whipped, and there was written pornography, and there was plenty of talk about sex.  It wasn’t as open; openly admitting oneself to be a homosexual, for instance, would have meant being shunned and perhaps being imprisoned.  We have come a long way in accepting sexual eccentricities and non-heterosexual behavior, but many of the Victorians who vigorously pursued outsider sexual interests were deliberately rebelling against the standards around them, in addition to making their artistic and literary endeavors.  In Pleasure Bound: Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism (Norton), Deborah Lutz, a scholar of Victorian literature and culture, has examined a group of independent Victorian artists and thinkers who forced others to think about sex differently (or to think about it at all, which they might have resisted in the first place).  Lutz has written with admiration towards these explorers, impressed with how arduous were their attempts at understanding their own selves and at changing the ideas of others.  Her book may refer in depth to pictures or writings with which the rest of us are not (yet) familiar, but her introduction to a big cast of characters, their times, and their often peculiar activities is an important contribution to the understanding of a step on the way to our current concepts of sexual behavior.

The first aspect of eroticism Lutz considers might be thought an incongruous pairing: death and sex.  Many of the rebels profiled here rejected societal views of God and any sort of afterlife.  The painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti had a high church upbringing, and never completely lost his belief, but he was to concentrate on the sacredness of sexuality and of earthly life.  His young wife died and was buried, and he consigned to her coffin his only copy of the poems he had written, inspired by her.  She had been interred seven years when he realized he could never have her back, but he could get the poems, and out from the grave they came.  Not only were art and love and death linked in this way, but Rossetti painted her repeatedly in glowing, melancholy pictures, the most famous of which was finished after her death and depicts the moment she died.  John Everett Millais had featured her for the model of his famous Ophelia wherein she is floating down the river, her face in ecstasy.  Lutz explains that not only are there many ties between death and sex (the French phrase ‘petite mort’ for one), both could be terrifying.  Sex outside of marriage, or masturbation, according to the religious thinking of the time, meant everlasting torment in hell.  Even considering not religion but only epidemiology, it was easy to contract gonorrhea and syphilis, and condoms were rarely used.  The link between death and romance was easy to see in the life of Queen Victoria, who (despite stories to the contrary) had a hearty sexual appetite but spent long decades in extended mourning for her dear Albert.

Rossetti enjoyed the talents of prostitutes, and in this he was no different from many of his contemporaries.  What was different was that he would make them models and take them home as companions.  He nourished the image of himself as a sexual experimenter and rebel: “Sexual promiscuity,” writes Lutz, “became part of the bohemian artist’s toolbox, another way to wear the badge of rebellion against middle-class morality.”  (The idea that artists, or pop stars, are expected to have scandalous sex lives has, of course, not left us.)  Rossetti had a reputation as a seducer of his friends’ lovers.  Indeed, he had a serious affair with Jane Morris, the wife of his best friend William Morris.  Rossetti, however, did not have the Victorian certainty that there was a binary male and female distinction.  His paintings of Jane show that he constructed an image of her as gradually more masculine, with a thickened neck and shoulders.  It wasn’t the way she really looked, and it was completely contrary to the angelic vision Victorians had of women.

Also making the waters of sexuality murky was Algernon Charles Swinburne, a poet of delicate frame and high soft voice who enjoyed having women whip him.  He may have caught the birching habit at Eton, floggings which he wrote about and fictionalized and sexualized.  Oscar Wilde thought that Swinburne merely pretended to be a homosexual, but Swinburne never married and his writings center on painfulness in love, and not just the birchings, though there are plenty of those.  This is not so surprising; Lutz says that about half the pornography written in the mid-nineteenth century had to do with flogging, like the book Sublime of Flagellation in Letters from Lady Termagant Flaybum, of Birch-Grove, to Lady Harriet Tickletail, of Bumfiddle-Hall.  Part of the reason Swinburne’s poems caused a furor is that birching was an accepted part of a gentleman’s education, but he insisted on writing about the sensual aspects of the practice.  An ode on Eton runs, “Lad by lad, whether good or bad: alas for those who at nine o’clock / Seek the room of disgraceful doom, to smart like fun on the flogging-block.” 

Swinburne was changing the way people could view flagellation as some sort of sexual or sensual high.  Rossetti manifested gender confusion which called for new definitions of sexuality.  Others here, like William Morris, may have encouraged sexual changes as part of a broader social or political change.   The overwhelming personality detailed here is Richard Burton, the explorer, linguist, anthropologist, libertine, and sex reformer.  Burton was a  troublemaker, eager to make a storm by his openness in his books.  He did not shy away from sexual topics in his popular books about travel, and he would not cut sexual stories from his translation of The Arabian Nights.  His famous terminal essay to the book had to do with homosexuality; it was part of his pugnacious insistence that the English learn about and accept their sexual bodies.  He was not an advocate for women’s suffrage, but Lutz says that his insistence that men ought to recognize and foster the female orgasm was a political act.  He had a half-baked geographic theory about homosexuality, and though he was ambivalent about homosexuality itself, his theory was a remarkable step toward understanding that homosexuality is something that simply occurs as a natural phenomenon. 

Sometimes these lights got together within the Cannibal Club or the Aesthetes, or sometimes within Rossetti’s Tudor House in London.  They might, as part of their camaraderie, iconoclasm, and sense of happy scandal, write pornography together.  When things did not go well, there was still hilarity, at least for those of us who read about it more than a century later.  Lutz describes the doings at Tudor House one night: “Trouble developed with [author George] Meredith whose wit was a little too cutting for Rossetti’s fragile ego.  When Meredith made fun of Rossetti’s paintings in front of patrons and friends, Rossetti fumed.  He splashed a glass of milk in Meredith’s face after being called a fool.  Meredith also got a poached egg thrown at him by Swinburne, when he dared jest about Victor Hugo...”  Thus go the revolutionaries.  They were, however, arduous in finding sexual satisfaction and understanding in a time and a society known for being straight-laced.  “The people discussed here,” writes Lutz, “had few patterns to follow; they had to make their ardent way with only the courage of their desires.”  Not only were there no organizations to promote understanding of, say, homosexuality or flagellation, the idea was new that one’s sexual identity might be an important part of one’s being.  Lutz’s account, a model of clarity, wit, and understanding, illustrates an important episode in societal sexual history.
Available at:  Amazon | Amazon UK

American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee by Karen Abbott
Random House, December 2010; ISBN-10: 1400066913

Review by Rob Hardy:  In 1959 came to Broadway one of the best musicals ever, Gypsy: A Musical Fable.  It was indeed a fable, a musicalized version of the memoir by Gypsy Rose Lee, a memoir which was itself highly fictional.  Gypsy had become the most famous stripper in the world.  She was careful what she revealed onstage and in her memoir, because her upbringing had been a horror story.  In American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee (Random House), Karen Abbott has done her best to fill in the missing bits.  It had to be a tough assignment; not only was Gypsy closed-mouthed about details of her life, the story is often distressing.  Abbot has chosen a cinematic, nonchronological style that lurches back and forth between Gypsy’s horrendous upbringing, her successes on the runway and in print, and her failures in most other spheres.  It’s a good reflection of a fragmented self.  There will always be the film of Gypsy and repeated revivals, but they barely hint at how difficult the life was.  Abbott’s book is a great reminder of how tenacious and willful Gypsy had to be throughout her life to make a creation out of herself that the entertainment world is never going to forget.

Gypsy had no father to speak of; her life was all her mother’s, and most of Abbott’s book concentrates on the long-lasting nurturing destruction of the mother-daughter relationship.  Gypsy’s real name was Rose Louise Hovick; she ditched it when she started stripping, but never got rid of Rose in the name or Rose the mother, Rose Thompson Hovick, the stage mother from hell.  Gypsy and her younger sister, June Havoc, were Rose Louise and Baby June on the vaudeville circuit.  Rose was able easily to see talent within June, who could toe-dance at the age of two and a half.  Rose refused to see Louise as anything but an also-ran, an addition to supplement June’s act.  Louise would feel this neglect all her life.  The three of them had a hardscrabble existence traveling on vaudeville circuits, with Rose pushing the children, pushing stagehands, pushing unpaid boys to pep up the act, and literally pushing a hotel manager out of a window and killing him.  She got away with a claim of self-defense, and may well have been involved in one or two other murders, but she got no convictions.  June had a breakdown at age twelve due probably to simple overwork, upon which Rose insisted she get right back up on stage.  There is nothing good to be said about Rose; she was greedy, mean, demanding, and amoral.  June fled at age fifteen and got married; she was to try the marathon dance circuit before becoming an actress in her own right.  Abbott was able to interview June for this book before her recent death.

Louise was left to endure alone Rose’s tyranny, but she was tough.  Rose continued to boost Louise along the vaudeville circuit, but radio and the movies were killing vaudeville.  In 1930, the nineteen-year-old Louise and her mother were running out of options.  They were in Kansas City, booked at the Gayety Theater.  Rose was glad to get the booking, but dismayed when she saw a sign advertising “Burlesque” outside the theater.  Like any respectable vaudevillian, she felt herself (and her daughter) above burlesque, and said she’d rather starve first.  Louise said, “I’m tired of starving to death.  That’s all we’ve been doing for years... There is no more vaudeville.” 

As Gypsy Rose Lee, at $300 a week, a fine salary for the time, she was perfectly willing to go into Burlesque, and she performed in a style no one had seen before.  She came on stage and performed like an intelligent, stylish lady who hadn’t expected to wind up there, and was even more surprised to be losing one garment after another in front of a crowd of strangers.  She liked to think of the performances as comedy rather than sexual spectacle, but her increasing nakedness made her jokes funnier, and her jokes increased her sexiness.  She would peek out from the curtains toward the end of the performance and purr, “Darlings, please don’t ask me to take off any more.  I’ll catch cold.  No, please, I’m embarrassed.  No, honestly, I can’t.  I’m almost shivering now.”  The crowds loved the protests, and of course she gave in to the audience enthusiasm just before all the lights went out and the act ended.  She was adept at handling publicity.  After she was once arrested for an indecent performance, she made a quip which became famous: “I wasn’t naked.  I was completely covered by a blue spotlight.”  And then in an acknowledgement of the biggest influence in her life, she added, “Just ask my mother, who is always with me.”  She became a household name, and the more famous she became, the less she had to do any striptease.  It was abundantly clear that this was not just a bimbo on the runway; she turned her talents to other arenas.  Her peripatetic early life had prevented any formal education, but she loved reading, and wrote a couple of mystery novels, as well as a play and several articles for The New Yorker.  She had parties at which friends like Carson McCullers, Peggy Guggenheim, Clare Boothe Luce, and Max Ernst might attend. 

Gypsy had her problems with men, with three unsatisfactory marriages and a torch for Mike Todd who would go on to marry Elizabeth Taylor instead.  Ironically, the great sex symbol seems not to have had much of an interest in sex, but she used it for a career, for protection, and for power.  When at age 33 she decided she wanted to have a child, she was looking for a sire that was “the toughest, meanest son of a bitch that I can find, somebody who’s ruthless, and my child will rule the world.”  She thus slept with Otto Preminger exactly one time, and made him promise never to have anything to do with the son thus produced.  When he grew up, Erik wanted to know why she would not tell him who his father was.  “Because it’s none of your business,” she replied. 

Abbott’s account of Gypsy’s life is full of this sort of anecdote, and gives as close a portrait of the subject as we are likely to get, given that Gypsy always knew how much to reveal and was careful how she showed it.  The book is valuable also, however, because of its pictures of vaudeville and burlesque, especially its portrait of the career of Billy Minsky.  Minsky and his brothers had New York music halls which introduced (from Paris) the runway for strippers.  In the audience you might find the nattily-dressed quipster Mayor Jimmy Walker or bohemians or gangsters.  Besides Gypsy, there are other burlesque performers profiled here, including the Minsky discovery Mademoiselle Fifi, his star import from France.  Business owners around his burlesque house got perfumed letters supposedly from the mademoiselle herself, and the crowds thronged to see her, little suspecting that she was actually the daughter of a cop from Pennsylvania.  It was Minsky who brought Gypsy to New York and made her a star.  There are funny and risqué tales aplenty here, but the portrait of the relationship between Gypsy and her mother is frightening and sad.  Abbott enables us to wonder with admiration at the titanic self-control that enabled Gypsy to make herself not merely into a star but into a historic entertainment phenomenon.  
Available at: Amazon | Amazon UK

Heaven's Bride: The Unprintable Life of Ida C. Craddock ... by Leigh Eric Schmidt
Basic Books, December 2010; ISBN-10: 0465002986

Review by Rob Hardy:  I think I know plenty of the sexual players and taboo-breakers of American history, but I had never heard of Ida C. Craddock until I read the new biography by Leigh Eric Schmidt, Heaven’s Bride: The Unprintable Life of Ida C. Craddock, American Mystic, Scholar, Sexologist, Martyr, and Madwoman (Basic Books).  As the list in the subtitle implies, she is someone worth knowing about; Schmidt calls her “a distinct American visionary whose story sweeps across a vast cultural and religious terrain.”  She wasn’t greatly influential beyond her times, and plenty of her ideas were deeply weird, and plenty of her sexual attitudes, advanced though they may have been in their times, were deeply silly.  But she was curious and earnest, and she bothered the prigs while she inspired those who were thinking of sexuality in new ways and who feared the imposition of church doctrines upon government.  Schmidt has done her good service in a penetrating book that examines Craddock’s sexual and religious times as well as her ideas.

Craddock was born in 1857, the daughter of a peddler of cure-alls who died of tuberculosis (his ads said his nostrums could cure it) when she was an infant.  The greatest familial force in her life was necessarily her mother, and the force was not for the good.   The mother was scandalized that the daughter would have interest in what the mother called “the slimy subject of sex,” and refused to let Craddock study or write on the subject any time she was at home.  The mother simply thought her daughter was insane, and tried, sometimes successfully, to have her locked up in an asylum.  “Poor Mother!” Craddock once wrote, “It must be awfully hard for her, I feel sure.  She would so like to have me conventional, and I can’t be, in the way she wishes.”

She had a conventional Protestant upbringing and spent her summers at a Methodist beach community in New Jersey.  Here she sang a hymn she remembered ever afterwards, “Jesus, Lover of my Soul, Let me to thy Bosom fly!”  She admired the insight of the preacher into human nature when he called young women “to aspire to the Divine through the symbolism of earthly affection,” and she watched as one girl after another rose to give herself publicly to Christ.  She herself self-consciously refused to come to the altar.  She was enrolled in a Quaker day school.  Even at a young age, she was marked as having an intense curiosity and intelligence, and confidence to pursue whatever interested her.  She sometimes exasperated her teachers who wanted to rush through the lessons and did not appreciate the vast amount of information she would absorb on her own.  She had all the makings of an scholar who would take her place in academia, except that she was a woman.  She was unable to overcome the University of Pennsylvania’s ban on women students; she passed the entrance examinations satisfactorily (five days of written and oral examinations including composition in Greek and Latin grammar and verse).  The trustees, however, didn’t approve of her attempt, and though she protested, wrote letters, met with faculty, and otherwise refused to be ignored, she got nowhere.

It was the first great lost battle of many in her life, and it meant that she could only take jobs of low wage and status; she worked as a stenographer and taught others the skill.  She also took civic work with organizations like the American Secular Union, which preached the complete separation of church and state.  She had found the liberal teachings of the Unitarian Church to her liking; she was never interested in crippling any church but insisted upon the liberty of believers of different sects and unbelievers as well.  She was drawn to spiritualism (yes, she was introduced to the spirit world by the Ouija board), and spiritualism colored her religious thoughts all her life.  She refused, however, to take on the passive role of the medium who become merely a mouthpiece for those on the other side. 

Craddock wrote as an amateur scholar on wildly diverse subjects, like lunar myths, totem poles, or phallic worship.  Most of what she wrote never was published, but she first came to public attention when she lectured and published an article on, of all things, belly-dancing, or the danse du ventre.  The scandalous dance came to the US via the Columbian Exposition in Chicago.  Craddock was enthusiastic about it.  Americans had plenty to learn from heathen nations about eroticism and spirituality, both of which she saw as part of belly-dancing; the fusion of religion and sexuality was to be a continuing theme in her life.  Not only this, but she advocated belly-dancing as a “pre-nuptial educator of our young people.”  Not everyone agreed with this assessment, and it brought her into her first battles with the famous prig Anthony Comstock, founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice.  Where Craddock saw religious and sexual enlightenment, Comstock saw shameless women in crazy dances of debauchery.  One of his inspectors wrote, “I would sooner lay my two boys in their graves than that they should look upon the sights I saw.”  Craddock would go on to be a thorn in Comstock’s side as she sold sexual advice manuals like “Helps to Happy Husbands” or “Right Marital Living.”  She referred to him and his deputies as “the Holy Fathers of the American Inquisition.”  He personally led a raid upon her Manhattan apartment in 1902, removing hundreds of publications which offended him and swiping her typewriter.  In Comstock’s view, any publication that suggested improvements for marital relations or contraception was obscene, and Craddock did spend time in prison for sending such things through the mails.  After Comstock’s raid on her place, she again declared, “I am taking my stand on the First Amendment,” and was again convicted.  She feared being imprisoned again, and before she could be sentenced, she slit her wrist.  She left a heartbreaking note for her mother: “Some day you will not be ashamed of me or my work. Some day you’ll be proud of me.”  That day never came.

The ideas Craddock advocated will strike current readers as peculiar and quaint.  Like many authors of the time, she saw Christianity as tied up with phallic worship and thus a tool for suppressing women.  She favored a spirituality based upon the worship of female characteristics, a worship that in her view had preceded the phallic.  She insisted that sexual and religious fulfillment went hand in hand; reverent and spiritual couplings between husbands and wives were her ideal as the married would become one in flesh and spirit.  She counseled couples personally, and liked counseling women individually about their sexual activities.  The men she counseled often were there only to get off on talking about sex to a women; then there was the guy who had obvious excitement over her anatomical charts.  The only right couplings, Craddock taught, were a husband’s penis into a wife’s vagina.  She never advocated free love, and she forbid any foreplay that involved anything as exotic as the manual stimulation of genitals: “There is but one lawful finger of love with which to approach her sexual organs for purposes of excitation - the erectile organ of the male.”  How did she learn all this?  Much of it was from her own husband, but it turns out that Craddock led a celibate life unless you include the husband whom she described as located “... in the world beyond the grave, and has been for many years previous to our union, which took place in October, 1892.”  Craddock was not the type to keep private this peculiar marriage, and it was a target of ridicule against her all her life.

Craddock’s death, and her suicide note which ridiculed Comstock as a sadist and a lecher, became rallying points for freethinkers and social innovators.  Comstock would go on attempting to keep married people from getting advice on their bedroom activities until his death in 1915, but negative publicity from his hounding of Craddock cut into his political influence.  He never had previously to face a backlash like from the Episcopal priest who wrote him, “I would not like to have to answer to God for what you have done.”  Even though many of Craddock’s ideas seem goofy now, we have largely evaded the mental shackles that Comstock wanted, and we have no fear that advising people on sex or contraception will land you in jail.  “I have only tried,” Craddock said in plea in her last trial, “to put forth plain facts, which every person ought to know.  I am not ashamed myself to speak plain truths plainly.”  What Craddock saw as plain and as true may not be seen as plain and true by the rest of us, but Schmidt has usefully placed her in the pantheon of heroes who helped us on the way to frank and useful discussion of sexual topics.
Available at: Amazon | Amazon UK

Have Him at Hello: Confessions from 1000 Guys About What Makes Them Fall in Love…Or Never Call Back by Rachel Greenwald
Three Rivers Press, August 2010; ISBN-10: 0307406547

Review by Donna George Storey:  It might seem a departure from the usual to review a dating guide here at ERWA.  Some readers may indeed be curious to get the lowdown from a professional dating coach and Harvard MBA as to why a man calls—or more often doesn’t—after that tricky first date.  Yet Have Him at Hello can also be a valuable resource for any writer who wants to dig deeper into the drama of finding a mate, long-term or otherwise.

Erotica writers find our material everywhere, from our own pasts, from careful observation, by filching friends’ adventures.  My happily monogamous status precludes personal research into the dating scene for my characters’ sake.  However, Rachel Greenwald’s profiles of the types of women men flee from or flock to, humorously fleshed out with details from extensive “morning-after” conversations with both parties, put me in the role of confidante to hundreds of single straight women and men of a wide variety of ages and personalities.  Talk about material!

To counter arguments that her book encourages women to be grinning dolls, ultimately misleading their dates about their true selves, Greenwald’s stated goal is rather to allow her educated reader to do the rejecting from a wide pool of smitten suitors, and avoid a situation where a man dismisses her for a “flaw” he’d gladly accept once he knows her better.  Greenwald explains that in the new online dating world, people have limitless options, higher expectations, and the option of rejection with the click of a send button.  She takes us through the top ten date-breakers, such as coming across as too controlling, too passive, too high-maintenance, and so on, with suggestions on how to avoid these “misperceptions.”

I’ll admit there’s sometimes a distressingly retro quality to the nuggets of wisdom the author has collected.  For example, for a good percentage of the men interviewed, “schoolteacher” is the ideal female profession as it suggests caring, ease with children, and intelligence without danger of too much competition.  Online dating has left some aspects of male-female relations unchanged, apparently.

On the other hand, knowledge is power, and Have Him at Hello, offers a provocative discussion of the desires, motivations, and disappointments of people seeking to couple up in the twenty-first century.  Even a stodgy married writer might find inspiration for timely tales and realistic characters to woo her readers back for a second date between the pages!
Available at:  Amazon | Amazon UK

Sex: Vice and Love from Antiquity to Modernity by Alastair J. L. Blanshard
Wiley-Blackwell, May 2010; ISBN-10: 1405122919

Review by Rob Hardy:  “When it comes to the topic of sex, the combination of illicit thrills, prurient fascination, and a desire for the personal and the private means that critical faculties get all too often thrown out the window and we find ourselves unable to resist a juicy story, no matter how improbably.”  Thus writes Alastair J. L. Blanshard, who has maintained his critical faculties sufficiently to bring out an unlikely sex book about the role that sex played in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, and what we have been making of those Greeks and Romans ever since.  Sex: Vice and Love from Antiquity to Modernity (Wiley - Blackwell) is fun because of all the juicy stories, and Blanshard, a senior lecturer in Classics & Ancient History at the University of Sydney, has latched onto a topic that those who have otherwise no interest in classical history might find themselves enjoying.  One of his themes here is that for their own purposes, people have changed and misinterpreted the legends about ancient sexuality, and his book is an engaging corrective.

For instance, Blanshard sets out to examine why it is that there is such a strong certainty that those ancient Romans were up to such a high degree of naughtiness.  He says that “even the most cursory survey of catalogs of pornographic film titles will reveal no end of classically-themed erotica,” and his own cursory survey includes Serenity’s Roman Orgy (2001) and Caligula and His Boys (2003).  (Blanshard’s book is probably the only one I have read that jumbles references to porn titles on one hand and Suetonius, Aristotle, and so on, on the other.)  Tour guides in Pompeii never leave out the brothel with its little murals of sexual activity (perhaps a menu to the goods on sale), but some of them tell their charges that all the many phalluses on the walls and on floor mosaics are signs pointing which way to the brothel.  The Romans, however, were much more conservative about the display of naked bodies than were the ancient Greeks, who had a tradition of, say, exercising or competing in the nude.  (Blanshard points out that the acceptance of nudity among the Greeks is not well documented in, say, Homer.)  For the Romans, nudity was associated with poverty and servility; stripping criminals, for instance, was done before administering punishment to them.  The Romans did not have a tradition of nudity in art until they borrowed it under the guise of Greek fashions.  They seem to have adopted it happily, with nude statues of emperors and even naked emperors shown on coins.  There was a bias; showing heroes naked was a standard, but (and this was true of Greece, too) showing women naked was much more rare.

Blanshard’s chapter on orgies is an eye-opener.  Everyone knows how those Romans had orgies complete with grapes, and everyone is just wrong.  There is scant evidence that there was ever such a thing.  “The Romans never routinely engaged in sexual orgies and would have been appalled that we thought that they did.”  Any references to orgies indicate one-off affairs rather than patterns of behavior.  Sharing lovers communally would have been in conflict with the Roman pattern of the dominant male being the focus of satisfaction.  “Catullus may conjure up the image of the orgy when he derides Lesbia for embracing 300 men at the same time, but none of his male readers would have openly approved of such behavior or regretted not getting an invitation.”  The term “orgy” is derived from the Greek, but was only applied much later to sexual fests.  Orgies were pagan religious festivals, featuring sacrifices and magic more than licentiousness, and “orgy” might mean just ordinary and unspectacular religious rites.  Even when Caligula at parties fancied a senator’s wife, he’d make off with her to some private area.  So, how is it that we associate orgies with Rome?  Nowadays, people are curious about group sex, and many people deliberately schedule it, and even more enjoy its customary depiction in pornography.  We might not be so ready to criticize the ancients for their morals, but accusing them of committing orgies was a good way to criticize paganism.  It is amusing that Blanshard gives an example of how Marcus Minucius Felix in the third century AD shows how the pagans described orgy activities of those demented Christians.  When it came time for the Christians to take their revenge on the pagans, accusing them of orgies was just the thing, a concupiscent way of getting revenge and telling naughty stories, too.

The other main theme in Blanshard’s book is the difficulty of understanding homosexuality by trying to look at “Greek Love.”  It should be remembered that for all his outrageous activities, Oscar Wilde was a brilliant classicist.  When in the witness box, he explained the nature of “the love that dare not speak its name,” and naturally referred to it as something “such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy.”  In his situation in court, he might have hoped that such Greek love would be seen as chaste, a union of younger man to an older through beauty and intellect.  But Wilde was on trial for lack of chastity, and although he appealed to Hellenism to explain how wholesomely he had acted, his prosecutors attempted to show that Hellenism was suspect and was even a hallmark of his depravity.  The Greeks did have a tradition of discoursing about male - male relationships that would make such relationships seem a marker of Greek culture, but Blanshard says, “The notion that homosexuality was in some senses intrinsically Hellenic would have come as a surprise to the Greeks.”   The texts talk about intercrural and anal sex in at least some of the mentor / student relationships (oral sex of any type seems to have been a universal no-no to all the ancients), but the vase depictions are rare, compared to the displays of heterosexual congress.  In Rome and in Greece, there were severe penalties for the forced abuse of youths.  When such Christian pedagogues as Clement of Alexandria in the second century AD came to criticize pagan behavior, they were not in a mood to take the stories from Plato and ascribe them simply to intercultural differences.  Clement was horrified by the naughty behavior revealed in stories of the pagan gods, especially stories of pederastic desire (which had little to do with Greek love in any form of mentor / student ideal).  In the Phaedrus Plato wrote about Greek love, but warned that Eros had to be kept in check, and Clement agreed with this part at least.

Greek love was a cultural manifestation that we have difficulty in understanding, and can be interpreted in many ways.  Blanshard traces its historical interpretations.  There wasn’t much made of it in medieval times because people were busy talking about the horrors of sodomy, and that so settled the question that it silenced any other discussion of male - male sexual relations.  Blanshard traces how Plato’s teachings about Greek love were rediscovered in the Renaissance, with a vital discussion between two particular intellectuals highlighting them and bringing Plato’s other writings to the fore.  The vehemence of the discussion is amazing, with one side seeing Plato as the source of all Christian heresies.  In the Enlightenment, a stock figure for satire was the humanist teacher who uses instruction in the classics as a cover for seducing students, with pornographic novels showing masters giving hands-on instruction to demonstrate the Latin words for “underneath,” “backwards,” and so on.  Blanshard includes an account of Sapphic love, and the use of ideas about Sappho (about whom there is almost nothing known for certain) to denigrate Marie Antoinette, an example of male anxiety being assuaged by derogation.

Blanshard has given a broad picture of ideas of sexuality in the ancient world, but also a history of how those ideas have affected us even to the present; his epilogue has two professors arguing about Plato in a Colorado courtroom in 1993.  Blanshard’s book is obviously the production of an academic, but the heavily-referenced pages offer surprise, not stuffiness.  In a box about Ganymede, Blanshard explains that you can find a modern porn version of the erotic encounters of that desirable youth with Zeus, Hermes, Ares, and Apollo, with illustrations that “suggest that Ares would not have looked out of place in a San Francisco leather bar.”  Another box has an extended evaluation of the 1979 film Caligula, Penthouse’s $17 million entry into art porn, about which Blanshard sniffs, “There is a problem in equating ancient Rome with nothing but sex.”  There was more than sex going on in the ancient world, but the sex that was there, and the ideas about it, Blanshard shows, are still on our minds a couple of millennia later.
Available at: Amazon | Amazon UK

A Brief History of Nakedness by Philip Carr-Gomm
Reaktion Books, May 2010; ISBN-10: 1861896476

As one common story goes, Adam and Eve, the first man and woman, had no idea that there was any shame in their lack of clothes; they were perfectly confident in their birthday suits among the animals of the Garden of Eden. All was well until that day when they ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and went scrambling for fig leaves to cover their bodies. Since then, lucrative businesses have arisen to provide many stylish ways to cover our nakedness, for the naked human body now evokes powerful and often contradictory ideas—it thrills and revolts us, signifies innocence and sexual experience, and often marks the difference between nature and society. In A Brief History of Nakedness psychologist Philip Carr-Gomm traces our inescapable preoccupation with nudity.

A Brief History of Nakedness reveals the ways in which religious teachers, politicians, protesters, and cultural icons have used nudity to enlighten or empower themselves as well as entertain us. Among his many examples, Carr-Gomm discusses how advertisers and the media employ images of bare skin—or even simply the word “naked”—to garner our attention, how mystics have used nudity to get closer to God, and how political protesters have discovered that baring all is one of the most effective ways to gain publicity for their cause. Carr-Gomm investigates how this use of something as natural as nakedness actually gets under our skin and evokes complicated and complex emotional responses.

"Thoughtful and funny, here is a history book taking a unveiled look at varieties of a human universal.  Not only that, but the beautifully-produced book seldom goes three pages without an illustration, and the illustrations are consistently of naked people, not always handsome (although plenty are) but always using a lack of clothes to provoke, amuse, or enlighten.  So does Carr-Gomm’s book itself." —Rob Hardy, Erotica Readers & Writers Association
Available at:  Amazon | Amazon UK

Dirty Words: A Literary Encyclopedia of Sex by Ellen Sussman
Bloomsbury USA (June 10, 2008); ISBN-10: 1596914742

This witty reference steps in where time-honored discussions of the birds and the bees typically fall short. All of the 100-some entries are formally defined and further explained through reflective and ribald definitions, essays, and stories by some of today’s most exciting writers.

Everything from celibacy to promiscuity, hand jobs to sex toys is tackled by everyone’s favorite writers including Steve Almond, Patricia Marx, Phillip Lopate, and Antonya Nelson. From sexual relationships (monogamy, one-night stand, ménage à trois) to sexual positions (doggie style, 69), from age-old practices (prostitution) to contemporary twists (cybersex), this alphabetical encyclopedia includes everything you need to know about the language of love and more. A playful take on bedroom talk—a smart, funny encyclopedia with entries written by notable contemporary writers.
Available at: Amazon | Amazon UK

The Bald-Headed Hermit & The Artichoke: An Erotic Thesaurus by A. D. Peterkin
Arsenal Pulp Press (October 1999); ISBN-10: 155152063X

What do the terms "Master of Ceremonies," "Husbandman of Nature," "Old Faithless," and "My Body's Captain" refer to? How about "Cully-Shangy," Hogmagundy," or "Horizontal Refreshment"? Synonyms for these and other phrases can be found in The Bald-Headed Hermit & the Artichoke, a unique guide to the lingo of sex. Extensive historical research conducted by Peterkin led to the compilation of lists of phrases and words referring to all aspects of human sexuality, from breasts and testicles, to fetishes and paraphernalia. In conducting his research, Peterkin discovered that erotic words and phrases in the English-speaking world number well into the thousands; "penis" alone has over 1,500 modern synonyms.

The terms in The Bald-Headed Hermit vary from the poetic and the medical to the macho, derogatory, and obscene; the lists offer varied and "imaginative" interpretations of human sexuality that are at times funny and shocking at others. They also provide unusual insight into how various societies view sexual pleasure.

In addition, the book shows how previously silent sexual communities, including gays & lesbians, the transgendered, and various fetishists and libertines, challenge attitudes towards sexuality and sexual expression, thereby changing the very language of sex.

The Bald-Headed Hermit includes fascinating explanations of sexual terms, as well as historical/archival line drawings illustrating various aspects of sexuality.

"The Erotic Thesaurus is a must for porn writers and journalists. . ."  The National Post (National Post )
Available at: Amazon | Amazon UK

Cunt: A Declaration of Independence by Inga Muscio
Seal Press; (October 2002) ISBN 1580050751

An ancient title of respect for women, the word "cunt" long ago veered off this noble path.  Inga Muscio traces the road from honor to expletive, giving women the motivation and tools to claim "cunt" as a positive and powerful force in their lives. 

In this fully revised edition, she explores, with candidness and humor, such traditional feminist issues as birth control, sexuality, jealousy between women, and prostitution with a fresh attitude for a new generation of women.  Sending out a call for every woman to be the Cuntlovin' Ruler of Her Sexual Universe, Muscio stands convention on its head by embracing all things cunt-related.  This edition is fully revised with updated resources, a new foreword from sexual pioneer Betty Dodson, and a new afterword by the author.

"Bright, sharp, empowering, long-lasting, useful, sexy...."—San Francisco Chronicle
Available at: Amazon | Amazon UK

Sex Machines: Photographs and Interviews by Timothy Archibald
Daniel 13/Process (October 22, 2005); ISBN: 0976082233

Through astonishing images and the surprisingly touching words of its subjects, Sex Machines: Photographs and Interviews explores the new sex machine underground in America and the homespun inventors and users who propel it.

After contacting an active but intensely private Internet community of sex machine inventors, photographer Timothy Archibald eventually won their trust and was invited into workshops and homes. The resulting book is a powerful document that is by turns thought provoking, humorous, and always fascinating.

Sex Machines celebrates the American spirit of invention while exploring the desires and confusions that exist between men and women in our changing culture. Many of the inventors seen within these pages are otherwise ordinary family men who were inspired to help repair strained relationships or simply enhance their wives' sexual pleasure. Some inventors have expanded their hobby into thriving cottage industries, selling their creations on eBay and adult stores online.

Archibald covers the broad spectrum of the makers-from the elusive creator of the Sybian, the forefather of sex machines, to lesser-known inventors like Paul Gaertner, who, laid off from his job in the high-tech industry, founded a new business by transforming a thrift store pasta maker into a high-powered sexual appliance. After receiving an apocalyptic vision of a future without men, Louis Walker constructs a sex machine prototype for the women survivors. Eric Reynolds credits his apparatus for saving his marriage, and Jon Traven uses his sex device as a form of Christian-based marriage counseling.

Like the work of Bill Owens, Studs Terkel, and Diane Arbus, Archibald's photographs and interviews find unexpected beauty and mystery among the lives of regular people-this time, as they engender a new form of "marriage enhancement" and sexual liberation in the suburbs and small towns across America.
Available at: Amazon | Amazon UK

A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis by David M. Friedman
Penguin Books (January 1, 2003); ISBN 0142002593

Setting out to "make intellectual and emotional sense of a man's relationship with his defining organ," David Friedman moves from highbrow to lowbrow in this lighthearted but substantive cultural history.

Successively viewed as a life source, a symbol of a sacred covenant with God, an emblem of shame, an instrument of domination, a mere prop for the pharmaceutical companies, and finally, as simply a means of penetration - the penis has always been at the core of Western man's (and woman's) cultural evolution. With such luminaries as Leonardo da Vinci, Sigmund Freud, Walt Whitman, and Norman Mailer marking their territory on the subject, A Mind of Its Own is an intelligent and often hilarious account of man's complicated bond with his closest friend.
Available at: Amazon | Amazon UK

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