Pleasure's All Mine A History of Perverse Sex

t he p l e a sur e’s al l mine
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The Pleasure’s All Mine
A History of Perverse Sex
Julie Peakman
reaktion books
For Jad
Published by Reaktion Books Ltd

33 Great Sutton Street
London ec1v 0dx, uk
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk
First published 2013
Copyright © Julie Peakman 2013
All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior
permission of the publishers.
Printed and bound in China by Toppan Printing Co. Ltd.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
isbn 978 1 78023 185 3

CoNTeNTS
Introduction 7
one
Taking it Straight 13
two
From onanism to Spending 45
three
From Ganymedes to Gays 75
four
From Female Friendships to Lipstick Lesbians 109
five
From Transvestites to Transsexuals 145
six
A Man’s Best Friend: Bestiality 179
seven
The Ties that Bind: Sadomasochism 209
eight
Loving the Dead 239
nine
Too Close for Comfort: Incest 271
ten
Child Love or Paedophilia? 295
eleven
The Games People Play 329
twelve
on Body Parts: Fellatio, Fetishism,
Infibulations and Fisting 365
epilogue: A Limit to Tolerance? 397
References 403
Bibliography 439
Acknowledgements 455
Photo Acknowledgements 457
Index 460
Introduction
o ne person’s perversion is another’s normality. If we strip sex back

to basics, we will find that most sexual acts have been deemed
abnormal by someone at one time or another, while conversely, at
different times those same sexual behaviours have been deemed
acceptable by other groups of people. Previously unacceptable acts
(what were thought of as the worst sexual behaviour imaginable) –
such ‘perversions’ as incest, pederasty, sadomasochism and homo-
sexuality – are now acceptable to many people. Nearly every sexual
activity that we are aware of today can be traced historically, although
there are some decidedly modern types of sexual activity which have
arisen as a result of new technology – phone sex, cyber sex and
video porn, to name a few.
The Pleasure’s All Mine examines the gamut of sexual activity
that has been considered strange, abnormal or deviant over the last
2,000 years, and puts it into its cultural context, culminating with
the modern-day understanding of sex. It shows how different sex-
ual behaviours were constructed as perverse – by religion and society,
in law and medicine – and argues that sexual behaviour is not in
itself perverse, but only becomes so when perceived as such by cer-
tain groups in society, and that this perception changes over time.
People from different periods – ancient Greece, ancient Rome,
medieval, Renaissance and enlightenment europe through to
Victorian and twentieth-century england – all had different atti-
tudes to sex. People from each time period had different ways of
discussing, defining and codifying sex. Heterosexuality, homosex-
uality, lesbianism, bestiality, necrophilia and paedophilia had
different meanings (or sometimes no meaning at all) for people in
other times. That said – and although many historians have argued
7
the pleasure’s all mine
that people from the past had a completely different viewpoint or

world view – many of the ideas around sex were also remarkably
similar to those current today. It is the continuity, as well as the
differences, which make human experiences so compelling in his-
tory. After all, sex is the one act we all share, even in its absence
(for example, choosing chastity, being identified as a nun or a monk).
Sex and sexuality are at the core of all human existence, and have been
part of all human institutions and conventions – religious, med-
ical, political, societal and artistic.
My intention here then is to find sexual ‘perversion’ before it
was ‘discovered’ by sexologists, before its labelling and phraseology,
and to trace its development. I use the word ‘perversions’ here in
quotes because not all people agree on which acts are perverted,
or have ever been perversions at all. When we look at terminology
we step into a quagmire of phrases. Sexual perversions have been
termed ‘deviant acts’, ‘abnormal behaviour’, ‘acts against nature’,
‘unnatural acts’, ‘abominable vices’ and so on. There have been
countless expressions for sexual acts that certain groups find unpalat-
able. At any one time, a particular phrase or word might be more
commonly used to describe these various acts. As far as possible,
in order to try to contextualize sexual behaviour within its own
time, I use the specific words as they would then have been used –
the reason being that certain phrases carry historically specific
nuances which need to be explained – differences which may be
difficult for us always to grasp. But I will also be using the term
‘perversion’ as we use it now, and propose that the time has come
for a change – perhaps even an end to applying the word to any
sexual behaviours (except in its historical context of nineteenth-
century sexology, that is), since many of our past sexual perversions
have become our present sexual normality.
Sexual perversions began to be categorized in depth by the sex-
ologists only in the second half of the nineteenth century. Among
them were Richard von Krafft-ebing, Havelock ellis, Albert Moll,
Alfred Binet, Iwan Bloch, Magnus Hirschfeld, Sigmund Freud and
many others. All contributed to the making of modern sexual per-
versity and realigned the division between the normal and the
abnormal. This involved the labelling of the acts of ‘sexual perver-
sion’ – and it was sexologists who were responsible for giving us
our current-day identification of the acts (although attitudes about
8
introduction
them have since shifted). However, many of these sexual behav-

iours existed long before their nametags. each century had its own
peculiarities, but sexual deviation is rooted in its historical climate.
Within the book, I look backwards to examine each so-called per-
version from when it was first visible in history, through to its
interpretation by sexologists, to see how it is viewed today. I have
focused on europe and the West, as there is simply too much infor-
mation to include in a worldwide examination of sexual perversion.
In any case, sexual perversions of the east bring in an entirely new
dimension worthy of another book. even with this restriction, there
is a limited amount of information that can be included, and
inevitably some topics have had to be covered broadly or simply
not at all. I have attempted to include a wide enough range of exam-
ples to make my case. Through the examination of court records,
personal letters, travelogues, medical advice literature, medical and
criminal reportage, newspaper accounts, novels, erotica and films,
I will reveal exactly how complicated our sexual behaviour is.
Sexual behaviour is difficult enough to trace in any circum-
stances. Much of it is carried out in private and therefore hidden from
view. Where acts were deemed perverse, people were even more
keen that their activities should not be known. Their activities were
also often also deemed criminal – and people did not want to suf-
fer the consequences, particularly if being caught meant ostracization,
flogging or death. each source comes with its own limitations: court
records only show us cases which came to trial; for every one of
those, there may have been countless incidents which went unheed-
ed or unexposed. They are also not recorded verbatim but reported
through a third party, placing a further barrier between us and the
witness or victim. Some deviant acts, such as lesbianism in medieval
england, were not considered important enough to bring before
the authorities so leave hardly any traces behind, although the ones
we have are invaluable. Personal accounts, while offering more
depth of feeling and opinion than court records, might not give us
the popular viewpoint. Also, people don’t tend to record all their
sexual activities in journals. When they do, such as in the diaries
of Anne Lister and Samuel Pepys, they are golden nuggets for his-
torians. even then, the parts of diaries that record sexual experiences
were often written in code and have taken years of patient cryp-
tography to decipher.
9
Because the source material is patchy, we know more about

some periods than others. on ancient Greece and Rome, remnants
have to be pinned together from written or visual forms such as
stelae, plays, poems and ceramics. Sometimes we are lucky enough
to find whole cities under lava, such as Pompeii and Herculaneum.
Some of the texts are coloured with satire or political invective.
Unpopular rulers were accused of all sorts of unseemly behaviour –
incest with mothers, sisters or daughters, as well as prostitution
and buggery – but exactly how true these rumours were is not always
obvious. Similarly, much of our knowledge about sex in the early
medieval period is also limited and mainly comes from religious
works – penitentials, church records, reports of the meetings of
religious councils – which gives a skewed viewpoint. These books
made delineations between ‘good’ or ‘bad’ sex. But this does not
necessarily tell us about what people were actually doing in practice.
What was really happening was simply not written about by a
mostly illiterate population. The Renaissance provides us with a
little more information from court and inquisition records. The
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries began to fill in the gaps with
personal diaries, newspaper reports and pamphlets. By the time we
get to the twentieth century, we are awash with information about
sexual behaviour.
Nowadays, the difference between ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’
behaviour is classified by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders (dsm) published by the American Psychiatric
Association (apa). This book is considered the medical bible of
classification of sexual disorders and other psychological problems.
Many so-called ‘perversions’ were classed as paraphilias and people
committing them were classified as mentally ill. The book redefined
sexual deviance as ‘a symptom of a dysfunction in the individual’. The
medical reference bible of europe is the International Statistical
Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (most com-
monly known by the abbreviation icd). The responsibility for the
publication of the icd was first undertaken by the World Health
organization in 1948; it was intended as a world classification of
diseases – including their symptoms, complaints, social influences
and other external causes. The chapters on mental disorders are
essentially the parts which cover ‘perversions’, and were added to the
icd-6 in 1949. According to the most recent version, icd-10, sexual
10
introduction
deviation is called ‘Disorders of Sexual Preference’ (dsp) and given

the code f65, which covers ‘paraphilias’. Paraphilia is a sexual
arousal in relation to a certain object, situation or individual which
is not regarded as part of normative stimuli. Any one so-called ‘per-
version’ or ‘paraphilia’ is not necessarily to be found alone, and
these behaviours may be found in multiplicities in any one person
(or indeed, in groups). The icd-10 states, ‘Sometimes more than
one abnormal sexual preference occurs in one person and there is
none of first rank. The most common combination is fetishism,
transvestism and sadomasochism.’ every situational case of a par-
ticular predilection has gradations of other variants: for instance,
bestiality might include sadistic behaviour, paedophilia might
include incest, homosexuality might include gerontophilia, sado-
masochistic behaviour might include a whole host of different
fetishisms and so on. Both reference books have had various versions
over the years. They have been updated, with some paraphilias (or
‘deviations’) added and others erased. But there are problems with
relying so heavily on these books, and such ‘authorities’ on sexual
perversion are open to question.
In the 1990s, according to the apa, paraphilias were confirmed
when they were described as recurrent, intense, sexually arousing
fantasies, sexual urges or behaviour generally involving, first, non-
human objects; second, the suffering or humiliation of oneself or
one’s partner; or third, children or other non-consenting persons.
They must occur over a period of at least six months, and the ‘behav-
ior, sexual urges, or fantasies cause clinically significant distress or
impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of
functioning’.1 There has been much criticism of the dsm in terms
of both its diagnostic criteria and its vagueness; for instance, the
requirement that there be observable practice of the paraphilia for
a period of six months has no obvious basis. In cases where the
patient is having fantasies (for example, regarding paedophilia) but
is not in distress, nor has acted on his or her urges, he or she would
avoid diagnosis.
Furthermore, these reference books are written by a group of
people who claim to be experts in their field. In the case of the dsm,
it means that the American Psychiatric Association decide which
sexual behaviours are ‘abnormal’ (through working committees and
a vote by its membership) and to be considered mental illnesses.
11
But it is not merely a scientific diagnosis – personal, political and

non-scientific judgements are part of these definitions. This means
that some diagnoses can be subject to challenge. In fact, even within
the Association there are continual changes being made to their
assessment. There have been many revisions of the dsm since the
original was first published in 1952, gradually including more men-
tal disorders, although some have been removed and are no longer
considered as such, most notably homosexuality. Here, we see one
relatively small section of the community acting as ‘experts’ decid-
ing what perversion is, while other sections of society think quite
differently. After much campaigning by lobbying groups, the deci-
sion was made by the apa to remove homosexuality as a psychiatric
disorder from the dsm, although it was replaced by ‘ego-dystonic
homosexuality’ for the dsm-3, and removed altogether only in 1987.
Pressure groups from the outside had finally managed to obtain a
change in the definition of perversion. The dsm-5 was brought out
in May 2013. It had been suggested that a new category of ‘hypersex-
ual disorder’ be inserted but this was ultimately rejected. each time
a new ‘disorder’ is added or omitted, it brings with it yet another set
of questions about what to include or omit, and why. Thus there
are obviously shortfalls when relying on particular books or elite
groups for definitions of what is sexual perversion and what is not.
However, dsm-5 states, there is now ‘a subtle but crucial differ-
ence that makes it possible for an individual to engage in consenual
atypical sexual behaviour without being labelled with a mental dis-
order’. This new approach destigmatizes unusual sexual practices and
behaviours.
My final questions on perversion are connected to intolerance,
and why people were – and remain – intolerant of other people’s
sexual preferences. I also want to look at why individuals commit-
ted certain types of acts thought to be abnormal. More importantly,
I want to examine the reason for societies’ reactions to these acts (from
considering them grave transgressions to not finding them serious
at all) and the reasons for the changes in these reactions through-
out the ages. I want to look at the perceived ‘problems’ to understand
them in their social and cultural contexts; to ascertain why certain
behaviour is seen as a problem.
12
one
Taking it Straight
Males [and females] do not represent two discrete populations,
heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided
into sheep and goats. It is a fundamental of taxonomy that
nature rarely deals with discrete categories . . . The living world
is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects.
Alfred Kinsey et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948)
M ost people believe they have an understanding of what

heterosexual sex is – it is usually taken to mean sex between a
man and a woman. Generally, this means vaginal penetrative inter-
course. The term ‘straight’ is a substitute for ‘heterosexual’, and is
taken to mean non-gay or non-lesbian. More conservatively, it
might be described as the ‘missionary’ position or ‘vanilla’ sex – sex
with no frills. More worryingly, the concept of heterosexuality has
become synonymous with that which society considers ‘normal’ as
contrasted with its opposite, ‘abnormal’. In other words, hetero-
sexuality as been held aloft as the ideal, set against all other sexual
practices, which are regarded as perverted. However, throughout
history, the understanding of what was normal or usual in a society
has shifted, and what was regarded as normal in the past was not
necessarily heterosexuality.1
For the ancient Greeks and Romans, a ‘normal’ sex life, if it was
considered at all, would have included a wide variety of experiences.
It was a man’s world; men had different women for every aspect of
their lives. They kept prostitutes for sex, mistresses for intellectual
conversation (as well as sex and affection) and wives in order to legiti-
mize their children and carry on the family line. As Apollodorus is
famously supposed to have said, ‘We have courtesans for pleasure,
concubines to attend to our daily bodily needs, and wives to bear
our children.’2 The world was divided between men and women, and
each had their respective role in life. A list of determinate and oppos-
ing characteristics ensured these roles: men were strong, women
were weak; men were intelligent, women were cunning; men were
13
The Pleasure’s all Mine
Face-to-face sex. Detail from a red-figure cup by Triptolemos Painter,

c. 470 bc.
sturdy, reliable and masters of self-control, while women were fickle,

inconstant and unreliable; men stood for culture, women for nature.
All these aspects of a person dominated how other people saw them.
This world view was handed down from classical Greece and Rome
where men were the leaders of wars and women were stalwarts of
the hearth and home. Men might seek sexual pleasures outside the
home while respectable women were expected to marry, be faithful,
keep house and bear children. Women were allowed no freedom
for sexual relationships outside their marriage. Such stereotypes
lasted in the West through the ages, the roles only properly shifting
within the last few decades.
Because of these views, women were economically dependent,
legally disabled and politically disenfranchised, which inevitably had
a knock-on effect on their sexual status; as one nineteenth-century
historian put it, ‘women were regarded as a lower order of beings, neg-
lected by nature in comparison with man, both in point of intellect
and heart; incapable of taking part in public life, naturally prone to
14
Ta k i n g i T sT r a i g h T
evil, and fitted only for propagating the species and gratifying the
sensual appetites of the men.’3 To put it bluntly, women were thought
of as ‘secondary’ and inferior beings – at least in law – and therefore
had less say in their own sex lives, be they wives, mothers, daughters,
prostitutes or slaves. Women were expected to remain virgins until
they married, while men might have sex with as many women as
they wanted. Marriage did not entail faithfulness except on behalf
of the wife. Virgins were prized, and no self-respecting woman would
consent to sex before her wedding day. But not everyone prized
virgins. The first-century geographer and historian Strabo revealed
his dislike: ‘A virgin has no control of her sphincter, lacks erotic tech-
nique, has no natural scent to her skin. She has no gently rousing
talk and lacks the ingenuous look. Novices are even worse, they are
all frigid at the rear, and that is not, at this stage, the place where the
hand should wander.’4
In ancient Greece a man could have anal intercourse with citi-
zen youths if he wanted without losing his reputation. However, a
man must not allow himself to be anally penetrated. Since these
Sex sitting in a lap. Detail from a red-figure jug by Shuvalov Painter,

5th century bc.
15
relationships were usually between older male mentors and their

younger lovers, the youth was expected to bow to the experience of
his elders and be the passive partner. This was considered within
the range of a normal sexual experience and often part of both a
married and a single man’s life. Most men were expected to marry
and had only one wife in ancient Greece and Rome, but for some
richer men in parts of the Mediterranean world, polygamy was pos-
sible.5 Penetrative vaginal sex was not commonly depicted with
the partners facing each other lying down – although it was under-
taken, this position was rare. Sex was more usually depicted as
rear-entry (the man entering the woman’s vagina from behind) or the
woman sitting in the lap of the man. Natural penetration therefore
included entrance into a woman’s vagina, a man’s anus or between a
youth’s thighs).6
Sex from behind depicted in a fresco at Pompeii, 1st century ad.

16
Sex sitting in a lap; painting from the House of the Centenary at Pompeii,
1st century ad.
Part of the Greek mythology, however, included sexual activities

that crossed boundaries and created an uncertain world full of lust-
ful and fickle gods and goddesses. These heavenly beings copulated
with cows and bulls; they changed their form and might appear as
animals (swans, bulls, cows, snakes) or elements (sea, rain, air, earth,
fire). The gods frequently interfered with ordinary mortals and dis-
rupted their lives, impregnated them, conjured up storms and
shipwrecked their boats. They created monsters that turned men
into stone at a glance. This was a time when a gifted physician might
make magical potions to use on an admired young man, and instil
passion where there had previously been none. Flaccid penises
17
François Boucher, Hercules and Omphale, 1735.
might become erect, a women’s blood be brought to flow and a

pregnancy terminated, all undertaken with special herbs and
magical spells.
It is therefore impossible to talk about ‘straight’ or heterosexual
sex in the ancient Grecian or Roman world – there was simply a con-
cept of sex for pleasure (with slaves, courtesans or youths) and sex
for reproduction (with a wife). Examining its opposite, however, there
was a concept from the classical period until the end of the nine-
teenth century of ‘unnatural acts’, the closest we can get to ‘sexual
perversions’. What was meant by these terms was sometimes quite
different from our current understanding.
18
Sex, Health and the Body in the Ancient World

Hippocrates (c. 460–c. 370 bc), Aristotle (384–322 bc) and Galen
(c. ad 129–c. 210) were the main arbitrators of what was ‘good’ or
‘bad’ sex in the ancient world. In essence, good sex meant healthy and
reproductive sex. Hippocrates’ treatises aimed to achieve a woman’s
pregnancy, for ‘if they become pregnant, they will be healthy’.7
Marriage, sex and conception were the way to this achievement. If not,
a woman may suffer physical problems. In On the Diseases of Women
he declared, ‘I say that a woman who has not had a child suffers
more severely and more quickly from menstruation than one who has
given birth.’8 Advice was therefore focused on procreation, a process
physicians called ‘generation’. In his book Generation of Animals,
Aristotle declared: ‘the male contributes to the principle of the move-
ment, the female, the material.’9 In other words, the woman was
responsible for providing the raw materials for creating a foetus, but
the man was responsible for sparking them into life. Within this
process, man’s role was thereby seen as the primary one, the woman’s
subsidiary. Women were seen as inside-out versions of men and Galen
believed that ‘women had all those parts belonging to Generation
which men have’.10
Reproduction was an important aim in a person’s sexual life, and
ancient sex manuals were full of directions on how to conceive.
Aristotle’s views, along with other ancient philosophies and sug-
gestions, were rehashed and reprinted right into the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. They advised on all manner of things
from what position a couple should use, to what time of month was
best time for conception. It was thought that disorders of the body
might arise if a regular sex life was not maintained. The four humours
of the body – black bile (melancholic), yellow bile (choleric), phlegm
(phlegmatic) and blood (sanguine) – were related to the elements
– earth, fire, water, and air – which, in turn, related to the different
body parts of the spleen, gall bladder, brain, lungs and liver. If they
were not kept balanced and regulated, the body would be thrown
into disorder. Paul of Aegina (ad 625–690) in his Seven Books of
Medicine advised partaking in ‘sexual enjoyments’, which would
relieve blood, promote growth and generally make the body more
masculine, as it was believed that the male body was the one closest
to perfection. He assured the reader that ‘the best possible remedy
19
for melancholia is coition’. Luckily for women, many people believed

that female orgasm was thought necessary for conception, therefore
a woman’s pleasure was of importance. The regular evacuation of
‘seed’, which both men and women were thought to possess (men
in their sperm, women in their vaginal juices), was equally essential
for a healthy body. For those living in the ancient world, this was
normal sexuality.
Even when a person tried to maintain a healthy sex life, events
or circumstances could overtake them. Unexpected disorders could
flare up, such as love sickness, which physicians described as a
sort of melancholia associated with a build-up of black bile. Manic
depression would set in where the patient oscillated between fits of
excitement and terrible grief. The sight of a loved one would create
violent palpations and raise pulses and love songs would cause those
smitten to weep uncontrollably. If the disease remained untreated,
symptoms would develop and overtake the personality of its owner.
Zodiac man, illustra-

tion from Paracelsus,
Astronomia magna
(1537).
20
Frontispiece from the 1753 edition of Aristotle’s Masterpiece (1684).
They would suffer from dramatic rages, sleeplessness, irritability and

a pallid complexion. In Canon of Medicine (1025), Avicenna advised
that if a patient could not get hold of a lover or wife, a physician should
obtain a female slave and force her to have sex to cure his lovesick-
ness. According to the Persian physician Al-Razi (865–925), love
sickness changed the appearance of the sufferer, who might have
weakened eyesight, hollow eyes, a dry tongue and skin pustules.
Dog-like bites may appear on the skin of the face, neck and back.
An afflicted man might even turn into a werewolf at night and roam
through cemeteries. Madness or death could overtake a person. In Lily
of Medicine (1305), Christian physician Bernard of Gordon, Professor
of Medicine in Montpellier, wrote that an authority figure must coun-
sel the victim of lovesickness as it left the soul in danger of eternal
torment. If that did not work, the patient should be beaten ‘until he
begins to rot’.11 Most physicians did not take such a tough line and
advised the rebalancing of the humours through regulation of diet
and exercise – nothing more than lots of fresh air, walking, rest and
21
sleep. However, sexual intercourse seems to have been the favoured

method of ridding people of lovesickness.
Since ‘normal’ sex was seen to involved penetrative intercourse
with a woman, if a man was impotent, remedies were recommended
to ensure his speedy recovery. Herbal medicines such as thyme,
pepper, pine, iris root, oil of violets, juices of sage, wormwood and
others were all thought to assist, as were baths, listening to music,
talking with friends, reciting poetry or going for walks.12 More seri-
ous cases of impotence might need flagellation with a stiff birch,
stinging nettles applied to the penis or a red-hot pepper stuffed into
the anus. It was hoped that all would restore a man’s virility and
point him back on course to a healthy sex life.
Sex and the Church

By the time of the first century of the first millennium, the old views
were being superseded with the new religion of Christianity. Adam
and Eve were seen as the father and mother of humans, and as the
quintessential original couple (complete with all their failings).
People’s perception of the world at large was based around their
comprehension of the natural order of the things. The structure
of the world around them was ordained by God and any act which
upset this order was deemed ‘unnatural’ – deviant acts were seen to
be against God’s will and regarded with suspicion. As the word of
Christianity spread, so did new ideas on what was considered ‘correct’
sex and what was forbidden. Monogamy and sexual fidelity became
important, while sex outside marriage was deemed fornication.
The Bible became the law of the Christian people, with Leviticus
and Deuteronomy acting as the two main books to decree which
sexual acts were permitted and which prohibited, though other parts
of the Bible reinforced other rules. The Jews knew the first five books
of the Bible as the Torah, the ‘Teaching’. The Fathers of the new
Christian Church added what they deemed appropriate, but the main
focus was to establish a code on licit sex. Chastity was the ideal state.
In First Corinthians (7:1) Saint Paul the Apostle advised, ‘It is good
for a man not to touch a woman’, implying that if a person could
abstain from sex altogether, all the better. Martyrs to chastity were
hailed as exemplars for all good Christians: St Juliana of Nicomedia
(d. 304) was a prime example of a woman who achieved sainthood
22
Lucas Cranach the Elder, Adam and Eve, 1526.
because of her successful attempts to thwart potential suitors. For her

efforts, she was hanged by her hair, covered in molten lead and then
taken out to be set alight on a bonfire. As the flames began to flicker,
they were miraculously doused by an angel from Heaven. If this were
not enough, a vat of boiling tar awaited her, but when she was placed
inside, it miraculously cooled to the temperature of a bath. She was
finally beheaded. Such resilience proved beyond doubt that it was
better to remain a virgin than to marry; in the service of this ideal, female
saints had their own masochistic hagiography, with holy women suf-
fering all manner of atrocities in the battle to retain their virginity.13
Marriage was an acceptable compromise. Sexual connection
should only take place with the opposite sex and then only for the
purpose of procreation. For single people, St Paul said, ‘If they can-
not exercise self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry
than to burn.’ If a person must go through with it, sexual interaction
should be penetrative intercourse between a man and a woman,
with the woman on her back and the man on top (now known as
the ‘missionary position’). Men should no longer keep mistresses or
visit prostitutes, but remain faithful to their wives. Men were encour-
aged to curtail their sexual appetites and bear the burden of bringing
up children rather than squandering their appetites on a few moments
of pleasure. The Church saw anything outside the realms of marital
reproductive sex as sinful and therefore abnormal, though ‘aber-
rations’ did take place and were graded according to their closeness
or distance from their potential for reproduction. St Augustine
(354–430) railed against men’s infidelities and believed that reasons
for marriage should ‘not merely to be on account of the begetting
of children, but also on account of the natural association between
the two sexes’.14 He thought friendship and companionship between
a man and a woman were also important, his ideas perhaps based
on his experience of living with a concubine for thirteen years prior
to his conversion. For St Jerome (347–420), women were depicted
as insatiable creatures, always on the prowl for sex, always tempting
men into evil. He warned, ‘It is not the harlot, or the adulteress who is
spoke of, but woman’s love in general is accused of being insatiable;
put it out, it bursts into flames.’15 Women thereby removed men from
the rational world of the mind.
From around the sixth century, penitentials were produced as
advice books and provided a lengthy list of rules and regulations
24
regarding sins and suitable penances for unruly flock. Originally,

these books were intended as guidance for monastic authorities
but soon spread to be used by local priests (although use in the con-
fessional would not become a regular practice until the thirteenth
century). The best-known penitential was that of the Bishop of Worms
(d. 1025) who divided his list into natural and unnatural sins. But it
was Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) who is responsible for many of
the ideas on morality and immorality in Christian sex, seen in his
summations on what made for ‘good’ and ‘bad’ sex. He believed that
everything that was ‘good’ revolved around nature and reason. The
‘natural’ laws of God were those which involved a hierarchy with man
at the apex, women only secondary creatures, and where sex resulted
in children. All other sexual activities were either against reason
(adultery, rape, seduction, fornication) or worse still, against ‘nature’
(masturbation, sodomy, bestiality).16 In Aquinas’s categorization,
sex between a married man and his wife was not necessarily licit.
Oral and anal sex, for example, even when they took place between
a married couple, were considered worse than rape as they were not
penile–vaginal penetration and would not result in conception.
Using a hand, an anus or a mouth – ‘using the wrong vessels’, as he
put it – was worse than using the ‘correct’ vessel of the vagina, even
if the act was consenting and between a married couple. How far
these restrictions imposed by the Church actually impeded sexual
bliss is impossible to tell, but what we do know is that the Church
was responsible for laying down the laws of what was permissible
sex and what was not. This was to influence attitudes about sex for
centuries to come.
Medieval Marriage
Marriage was the key to a good Christian sex life; all sex outside
marriage (adultery or pre-marital sex) was classed as fornication. It
was therefore marriage that was the ‘normalizing’ barometer of sex
in the Middle Ages, rather than heterosexuality. This was ratified
when in 1215 at the Fourth Lateran Council marriage was declared
a sacrament of the Church. However, while the Church warned of
the dangers of pre-marital sex, poets contrarily extolled the virtues
of romantic love. Romance literature, it seems, met the needs and
desires of the reading public and was a repository for Western ideas
25
on masculinity and femininity. It depicted men and women in situ-

ations that displayed their ‘proper’ roles, an ideal based around
courtly romance – most conspicuously, it showed men and women
how to ‘do’ heterosexuality. These masculine and feminine roles
were associated with dominance and resistance, men displaying their
affection and urging their attention on women, women withholding
and resisting. However, because of women’s perceived insatiability,
they were unable to resist for long.17
One prime example of romantic love is to be found in the story
of Héloïse d’Argenteuil (1101–1164) and Pierre Abélard (1079– 1142).
Abélard was a French philosopher who was engaged as Héloïse’s
teacher. Her uncle, Canon Fulbert, with whom she lived, was foolish
enough to allow the daily teaching to be undertaken unchaperoned,
leaving them alone together for long periods of time. Unfortunately
her education far exceeded what her uncle had planned for her, as the
couple fell in love and consummated their relationship. Abélard
later wrote about the situation to his friend Philintus: ‘As I was with
her one day, alone, Charming Héloïse, said I, blushing, if you know
yourself, you will not be surprised with what passion you have inspired
me with. Uncommon as it is, I can express it but with the common
terms; I love you, adorable Héloïse!’18 After the seduction, Héloïse
became pregnant and absconded from her uncle’s house to live with
Abélard’s sister. When Fulbert became aware of the couple’s relation-
ship, he was outraged. Abélard wrote: ‘Oh, how great was the uncle’s
grief when he learned the truth, and how bitter was the sorrow of the
lovers when we were forced to part!’
After giving birth to her son Astrolabe, at first Héloïse refused to
marry Abélard, but he insisted they do so to legitimize the relation-
ship and rescue the honour of her uncle. The marriage was conducted
in secret to save Abélard’s academic reputation, after which he forced
the reluctant Héloïse to retire to the privacy of a nunnery at Argenteuil.
Meanwhile, Fulbert plotted his revenge, incensed by what he regard-
ed as Abélard deception, hiring two thugs to undertake the task. After
bribing Abélard’s servants, the thugs hid in his room awaiting his
return; here they castrated him, thus ensuring his total humiliation.
Sometime later Abélard lamented, ‘they had vengeance on me with
a most cruel and most shameful punishment, such as astounded the
whole world; for they cut off those parts of my body with which I
had done that which was the cause of their sorrow.’ In response,
26
Héloïse wrote to him, ‘You know, beloved, as the whole world knows,
how much I have lost in you, how at one wretched stroke of fortune
that supreme act of flagrant treachery robbed me of my very self
in robbing me of you; and how my sorrow for my loss is nothing
compared with what I feel for the manner in which I lost you.’ The
only way for the lovers to redeem themselves was to revert to chas-
tity and join separate encloistered communities. Héloïse eventually
succeeded to the position of abbess in a nunnery, but her success
Héloïse and Abélard in the Roman de la rose, 14th century.

27
was gained as a result of her education rather than from any true
devotion to her vocation.
For the medieval reader, Abélard’s castration would have been
recognized not only as the destruction of his future ability to have
children but also as the eradication of Héloïse’s happiness. By emascu-
lating Abélard, Fulbert had essentially effeminized him, forcing him
to live outside the ‘normal’ life of a ‘proper’ man. All eunuchs were
regarded as lesser men, and Abélard would have been no exception.
This tale is not perhaps the love story it initially seems to be – although
it is often explained as a tale of passion, it can also be seen as a tale
of exploitation of a teacher over his pupil. Abélard abused not only
his position of power of his pupil, but also his position of trust in
Fulbert’s household. After ruining her reputation, Abélard was quite
willing to forswear Héloïse and leave her to her fate in the nunnery.
Literature provides an alterative eye-opening account of love,
fornication and marriage in the Middle Ages. Giovanni Boccaccio’s
fourteenth-century allegorical tales, the Decameron, are replete with
cuckolded men and cunning, lascivious women. One tale tells of a
gullible husband who allows a priest to have sex with his wife; and
another depicts a hermit monk whose spiritual resolve collapses
after spending too long in the close proximity of a beautiful maiden.
The book’s satire of the Church, and its mockery of its priests and
monks in general, conveys Boccaccio’s contempt for the ideas eman-
ating from religious quarters. Furthermore, his portrayal of promiscuous
and adulterous women reflects the contemporary views of women as
highly sexed and continually on the look out for lovers. Similarly, in
England at the end of the century, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury
Tales epitomized the lusty wench in the gap-toothed Wife of Bath,
with her ‘five churched husbands bringing joy and strife’, and conveyed
the avarice of the Church in the Monk with his fur-lined sleeves,
‘the finest in the land’, and his hood fastened with a pin of ‘good
wrought gold’. The religieux are lampooned as hypocrites, the depic-
tions an assumed shared opinion of the reader. This suggests that not
everyone agreed with the Church’s supposed strict sexual morality.
Indeed, the popularity of such literature illustrates just how far
people identified with the authors’ feelings about religion and sex.
The labouring poor often accepted pre-marital sex despite its
condemnation by the Church. A promise of marriage was often enough
for a woman to give up her virginity. Matilda Catte of Ingoldmells,
28
Margaret of
Flanders’s marriage
to Philip i, Duke
of Burgundy.
Miniature from
the manuscript
Chroniques de
France ou de St
Denis, 14th century.
Lincolnshire, was quite happy to have sex with her suitor Ralph Lamb
as they planned to marry in March 1319. But even though the wedding
ceremony took place, a type of fine called ‘leyrwite’ was demanded
of Matilda as an unmarried bondwoman (a sort of slave). Leyrwite
literally meant a ‘fine for lying down’ and was aimed mainly at poor
women. It began in the mid-thirteenth century and became increas-
ingly common towards the end of the century, all but disappearing
after the Black Death of 1348–50. These fines were commonly six-
pence. In manorial courts, only women seem to have been penalized
for succumbing to declarations of love and marriage. For many pleb-
eians though, pre-marital sex was not seen as problematic. Leaders
of the Church complained in the 1540s, ‘among many, it is counted no
sin at all, but rather a pastime, a dalliance, and but a touch of youth:
not rebuked, but winked at: not punished, but laughed at.’19 This
shows how great a disjunction there sometimes was between what
the Church held aloft as an ideal and what was really happening.
While chastity had been the focus of early Christianity and
dominated views about marriage, after the Reformation marriage
was considered a preferable way to spend one’s life. Martin Luther
(1483– 1546), Protestant leader of the Reformation, spearheaded the
campaign against celibacy and advocated marriage as the Christian
ideal. Luther himself had originally followed a monastic life of fasting,
29
pilgrimage and confession so he was well positioned to understand

the temptations such a life had to offer. He had tried his best to avoid
sin, but had failed continually, suffering much in the process. He
finally decided on a new approach. Since he could not hold to the
Church’s rules, he decided it was better to invent a new set: he declared
that chastity was not important and began to vigorously promote
the virtues of marriage, in effect shifting his entire theological view-
point. He proclaimed, ‘priests, monks, and nuns are duty-bound to
forsake their vows whenever they find that God’s ordinance to pro-
duce seed and to multiply is powerful and strong within them.’20 His
declarations were to change people’s lives after the Reformation, as
a godly life within marriage became possible. Luther practised what he
preached and forsook the celibate life, eventually marrying former
nun Katherine von Bora, whom he had helped to escape from a con-
vent in Saxony.
Enlightened Sex
By the seventeenth century, attitudes about sex, love and marriage
were beginning to change. While marriage was still the recognized
harbour within which a ‘normal’ sexual relationship should take
place (in other words, between a man and a woman), men and women
were now more prone to marry for love than by arrangement. More
specifically, between 1660 and 1800 children were increasingly making
their own choice of marriage partners.21 Marriage, however, was not
always the harmonious union it purported to be. James Gillray’s
prints show us the deterioration from happy married bridal pair to
bickering adulterous couple.
If a couple made the wrong choice, it was virtually impossible
to divorce until 1857, when the Matrimonial Causes Act was intro-
duced. Until this time, only the very rich could afford the Act of
Parliament it took to obtain a divorce and even afterwards divorce was
not cheap. Instead, people took to separating and living apart, living
with another partner if they so chose. An unofficial ‘divorce’ or separ-
ation was sometimes made, though ‘wife sales’ were widely practised
– a man might put a halter on his wife, take her to market and sell her
to the highest bidder, but this did not always mean the wife was
unwilling. Sometimes a couple had already agreed to separate and that
the ‘wife’ would be sold to her new lover, using the transaction as a
30
James Gillray, Harmony Before Matrimony, 1805.
method of transferring from one partner to another. However, this

was unlikely to have been the case in Carlisle, when in 1832 a farmer
sold his wife to a pensioner for 20 shillings and a large Newfound-
land dog. He transferred the straw halter from his wife on to his
new acquisition, and took off to the nearest tavern.22 Another way
of getting round the divorce law was simply to commit bigamy,
though this was taken more seriously than wife sales; at Worcester-
shire Lent Assizes in 1805, John Enoch Murphy was condemned to
be transported for seven years. Yet a Mr Hadley in the same assizes
received only twelve months. The discrepancy in sentencing pre-
sumably depended on the nature and extent of the deception.
Certain depictions of plebeian sex, such as Love in a Tub and The
Happy Huntsman by Thomas Rowlandson, reflected popular feeling
about desire. How people really felt about sex can also be seen in
their personal recollections. The diaries of libertine men during the
same period – among them Samuel Pepys, James Boswell and William
Hickey – indicate that most of them had a preference for vaginal
penetrative sex. Pepys might well have enjoyed a grope with his maid,
but he still needed to ejaculate inside a woman for complete satisfac-
tion. Though Boswell was frightened to death of catching venereal
31
disease (he thought he had caught it at least fourteen times but

he probably never really got rid of it as there was no effective cure),
he could not resist finding a prostitute for release. Hickey was more
fun, and liked nothing more than to hang out with poor, pock-
marked prostitutes, then take them for a pie and a pint. While some
unusual activities might well have been practised and accepted, a
man like Hickey would only be content if the night ended with ‘the
last grand one’, as he put it. Even in erotic books where fantasies were
explored, men’s main pleasures seem to have been obtained through
straight sexual intercourse resulting in ejaculation.23 Unfortunately,
few women wrote about their own desires and practices so we have
less knowledge of how they felt about sex, but those who did write on
the subject tended to be employed in the courtesan business. For
them, the focus was on love, relationships and security rather than
sex, at least in their writings. While men gave gritty details of ejac-
ulations and the actual act of sexual intercourse, women shied away
from the lurid and concentrated on their flirtations and courtships.24
Although it would take more than another century before a distinc-
tion was made between ‘heterosexual’ and all other sorts of sex, there
seems to have been a concentration on straight sex as opposed to
alternative methods for those who wrote about it.
James Gillray, Matrimonial Harmonics, 1805.

32
The Making of the Heterosexual

In the second half of the nineteenth century, sexologists invented
the idea of the ‘heterosexual’. Both the terms ‘heterosexuality’ and
‘homosexuality’ were first used by Austro-Hungarian poet and trans-
lator Karl Maria Kertbeny in 1869, and although in current-day usage
we take the term ‘heterosexual’ to mean ‘normal’ sex between a man
and a woman, originally it meant something quite different. The
term was used in the United States by Dr James G. Kierman in 1892
and was linked to ‘abnormal manifestations of the sexual appetite’;
this included desire for both sexes.25 A year later, sexologist Richard
von Krafft-Ebing viewed sex between a man and a woman as hetero-
sexual sex, with an implicit leaning towards procreative sexual desire.
Yet by the time Dorland’s Medical Dictionary was published in 1901,
‘heterosexual’ sex was still seen as an ‘abnormal or perverted appetite
towards the opposite sex’.26 The meaning of ‘heterosexuality’, how-
ever, would settle down into an understanding as Krafft-Ebing described
it – essentially as desire between members of the opposite sex.
Our understanding of the term ‘heterosexual’ (and indeed our
current understanding of sexual perversion) carries its own biases
inherited from these men. Since these sexologists were white, Western
men, they offered their own particular version of normal and abnor-
mal sex based on the sexual ideology of their time. They lived in a society
in which men were seen as the dominant and aggressive force, and
in which women were ascribed a passive and subdued sexuality. This
is summed up in Krafft-Ebing’s remark: ‘Woman, if physically and
mentally normal, and properly educated, has but little sensual
desire.’27 This was a marked departure from popular understanding
in the Enlightenment about women’s natural sexual rapaciousness.
Any sexual behaviour apart from straight procreative sex was
now described as a perversion. All kinds of behaviours were labelled
perverted – oral sex, masturbation, homosexuality, lesbianism, trans-
vestism, bestiality, sadomasochism, incest, paedophilia, necrophilia,
fetishism, flagellation, exhibitionism, voyeurism. Nothing was left off
their lists. These specialists – psychologists, psychiatrists and psycho-
analysts – were largely responsible for the development of our current-
day thinking about both heterosexuality and what was seen as its
opposite, sexual perversion. These men (for they were all men) con-
sisted of a group of researchers who sought out all the types of sexual
33
acts they could find through interviews with their patients. They
sorted and classified people into those with ‘normal’ sex lives and
those with ‘abnormal’ ones and incorporated medicine, biology,
sociology, anthropology and criminology into their research.
During this period, perspectives shifted and certain acts con-
sidered deviant or abnormal (in the past distinguished as natural
and unnatural) were no longer seen as sinful or criminal, but were
regarded as illnesses, a revolutionary idea at the time. These ‘con-
ditions’ were now medicalized. Furthermore, people committing
these perceived deviant acts were no longer seen as sinners but as
perverts and labelled as psychopaths, necrophiles, sadists, masochists
and so on. As men and women began to approach sexologists for help,
or were referred to them from a criminal board, the sexologists took
up their cases in an attempt to ‘cure’ those whose sexual preferences
they thought were aberrations. They claimed that sexology was a
‘scientific’ study of human sexuality; however, it was by no means
objective, but rather set in its time and place. To a large extent, these
same categories of ‘perverse’ behaviours continue but now need
unpicking if we are to understand sexual behaviour in the past and
the present.
Krafft-Ebing was a leading figure in creating our concepts of
modern sexuality and its perversities. His influential book Psycho-
pathia Sexualis, first published in Germany in 1886, was aimed not
at the reading public but at fellow physicians and lawyers taking up
cases in court.28 It underwent several new and expanded editions,
seventeen in German between 1886 and 1924, and translations in
several languages.29 As a result, it was ultimately he who was respon-
sible for the creation of modern sexual pathology; as Iwan Bloch
stated, ‘Krafft-Ebing is, and remains, the true founder of modern
sexual pathology.’30 Krafft-Ebing worked in Vienna as a neuropath and
physician at an asylum, then went on to open his own practice where
he took on patients with sexual problems. In a series of remarkable
case notes on his patients, he developed his theories and expanded
understanding of the behaviours considered too perverse for society
to accept. Among his patients were those who had committed seri-
ous crimes – lust murderers, rapists, paedophiles and necrophiles.
Other conditions, such as voyeurism, exhibitionism, urolagnia, copro-
philia, uranism (male homosexuality) and fetishism, he considered
less criminal but nonetheless problematic.
34
The cause of perverted behaviour was seen to lie both in a per-

son’s mental instability and the increasing pressures of society.
Krafft-Ebing promoted the idea that degeneration was caused by
the twin evils of bad heredity and modernity. The circulation of a
degenerational theory had become common currency from the mid-
dle of the nineteenth century, a sort of inversion of Darwin’s evolution
theory. Instead of an ever-adapting stronger and better population
developing, as Darwin had suggested was necessary for evolution,
sexologists, scientists and philosophers were promoting the idea
that an increasingly depraved society was emerging, with a popula-
tion declining in physical strength and moral fibre. This was a direct
adverse effect of modern ‘progress’. The eugenics movement sprang
from these anxieties, advocating that only the best-looking, richest
and strongest men and women should reproduce and thereby create
a new race. The Nazis would take this doctrine to the extreme during
the Second World War with the extermination of Jews, gypsies and
homosexuals and the promotion of the ‘pure’ Aryan race.
The emergence of the civilized state or sophistication of society
was to be blamed for the rise in ‘perverse’ forms of sexual behaviour.
Krafft-Ebing thought that such behaviour was inherited from an
increasing nervous susceptibility of previous generations; in turn,
this susceptibility was fostered by the cultured life of modern society,
caused excessive sexual excitation and led to abuse. Its culmina-
tion was expressed in perverse acts.31 However, he was careful to
point out the difference between perverse acts and perverse instincts,
since the ‘most monstrous and most perverse sexual acts have been
committed by persons of sound mind’. Cases were divided in two:
the individuals who suffered from perversity (a disease of the moral
will); and those who suffered from perversion (a disease of the body).
In other words, for an act to be pathological or seen as an illness, ‘the
perversion of feeling must be shown’. The importance of this division
could not be understated, since one apportions culpability and the
other does not; this needed to be understood, suggested Krafft-
Ebing, ‘in order to avoid the danger of covering simple immorality with
the cloak of disease’.32
Debates arose among the sexologists as to whether such ‘deprav-
ities’ were caused by an increase in the refinement of civilization,
or whether sexual aberrations also took place in primitive cultures.
Was sexual perversion more prevalent in the cities or in the country?
35
Were strange sexual behaviours inherited or acquired, biological

or psychological? Because of these dilemmas, there was a need to
understand these types of behaviour in terms of science, psych-
ology, medicine, instinct, nervous state and civilization. Karl Heinrich
Ulrichs had opened up the debate on perversion (or specifically
on ‘uranism’ – the term he used for same-sex desire) in 1864 when
he declared homosexuality to be congenital. Havelock Ellis added
to the debate on the subject of homosexuality in his book Sexual
Inversion in Men (the original German version was published in
1896, translated into English the following year), which he co-authored
with John Addington Symonds. He discovered a distinct lack of repug-
nance to ‘inversion’ or homosexuality ‘amongst the lower classes’,
who found sexual anomalies quite normal. Although the authors
were never prosecuted, in 1897 the bookseller Thomas Bedborough
was brought to trial for selling obscene material.33 Others, such as
young philosopher Otto Weininger in his book Sex and Character
(1903), believed that all people had a mixture of both man and woman
as part of their characteristics: the male part was the active aspect, the
female the passive. Whereas Alfred Binet explained all perversions
to be a result of associations of ideas formed in one’s youth.
Along with other like-minded physicians and lawyers, these men
contributed to the sexology debate and forged new theories about sex-
uality, many providing individual case studies in order to explain
anomalies in sexual behaviour. Yet quite a few sexologists had odd-
ities themselves, which may explain the lure of the new ‘science’ for
them. Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, was a cocaine user, and
Otto Weininger shot himself at the age of only 23. Ellis was married
twice, and failed to consummate either marriage until he was 59,
then with his second wife. Ellis had a lifelong interest in urolagnia
and enjoyed watching women urinate. Olive Shriener, who had a
non-consummated but loving relationship with Ellis, wrote to Edward
Carpenter saying of Ellis: ‘He has a strange reserved spirit. The tragedy
of his life is that the outer side of him gives no expression of the
wonderful, beautiful soul in him which now and then flashes out
on you when you come near him.’34
The full blossoming of Ellis’s work was collected in Studies in
the Psychology of Sex (1897), a major contribution to the sexologists’
exploration of sexual behaviour, but it is worth looking in some
detail at the unusual and sometimes troubled sexual aspects of
36
Ellis’s personal life. Ellis wrote to Olive Schreiner after reading her
book The Story of an African Farm (1883), and although they met
up soon afterwards in 1884 and were taken with each other, he was
impotent and unwilling to marry. Three years later he met Edith Lees,
a stocky bisexual with thick lips and a man’s haircut. They appeared
an unlikely couple but were drawn to each other for their intellectual
similarities. Unusual for the time, Lees and Ellis agreed to maintain
separate households and have no children. Lees was to remain inde-
pendent financially, making her living through lecturing and writing.
However, Lees took up with an old schoolfriend and had a lesbian
affair, hardly surprising since Ellis was unable to provide what she
needed physically in her relationship with him. In his autobiography,
Ellis admitted, ‘I had not been the faintest degree jealous of Claire
[as he called Edith’s lover] but, rightly or wrongly, as I have said, I had
felt that Edith’s love for Claire involved a diminished tenderness for
me.’35 Meanwhile, Ellis accepted the affections of another young
woman. When Lees found out, she was hurt but gradually came to
be understanding. She wrote to Ellis, ‘I’ve arrived at this conclusion
after intense suffering about Amy, but I shall never suffer again. Do
what you will – be what you will and don’t feel you must ever make
me understand.’36 This attitude to free love was part of a rebellion by
a small group of middle-class intellectuals but was usually confined
to sex before marriage between a man and a woman. Havelock and
Edith had taken the concept much further in their open marriage. Ellis
later took up with Margaret Sanger, a robust campaigner in favour of
contraception, who had fled to England to escape arrest in the u.s.
She remained a devoted friend to Ellis after she returned to America
to continue her work, setting up clinics and writing about birth con-
trol. The claim for free love in heterosexual relationships had now
shifted to take in demands for birth control. Ellis eventually found a
sexually fulfilling relationship with his second wife, Françoise Laffite-
Cyon, after Lees died, a relationship in which he was truly happy.
The push for ‘free love’ had begun at the end of the nineteenth
century with campaigners sending out illegal pamphlets informing
people about birth control and abortion. Prosecution was possible in
America under the Anti-Obscenity Act of 1873 (later known as the
Comstock Law) under which it became a crime to mail ‘obscene, lewd,
lascivious, indecent, filthy or vile article, matters, thing, device, or sub-
stance’; including ‘every article or thing designed, adapted, or intended
37
Cartoon from John

B. Ellis, Free Love
and Its Votaries
(c. 1870).
for producing abortion, for any indecent or immoral use’. Nonetheless,

the idea that sex should have to involve procreation and production
of children was weakening. Rather, sex between consenting adults was
coming to be seen as a form of healthy fun. In Britain, Annie Besant and
Charles Bradlaugh became household names in 1877 after publish-
ing The Fruits of Philosophy (1876), a book on birth control written
by the American campaigner Charles Knowlton. Although the couple
were arrested and Annie lost the custody of her children because of
their campaigning activities, the liberal press supported them and their
conviction was overturned on a technicality. During the trial, Besant
founded the Malthusian League, a society that promoted contracep-
tion and abortion. In 1922 the League published Sanger and Haire’s
Hygienic Methods of Family Limitations advocating birth control.
Other self-help manuals came out, such as Marie Stopes’s Married Love
(1918) and Dr Robert Latou Dickenson and Miss Lura Ella Beam’s
One Thousand Marriages (1931). However, most of the campaigners
38
aimed to provide education for married couples rather than single

people. Heterosexual sex, it seems, was still supposed to take place
within the confines of marriage. However, in America one of the
biggest sex surveys ever was about to smash many previous precon-
ceived ideas about human sexual behaviour.
The Sex Surveys

The American biologist Alfred C. Kinsey was the man responsible
for making one of the biggest leaps in the understanding of the rela-
tionships of men and women in one of the most intricate sexual
surveys ever undertaken. Supported by the National Research
Council’s Committee for Research on Problems of Sex, his results
were published in two books, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
(1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953). In all, his team
interviewed around 20,000 men and women between 1938 and 1956,
Caricature of
Victoria Woodhull
by Thomas Nast,
1872.
39
aiming to uncover their sexual practices and orientation.37 Examining

the results, Kinsey realized that there was much more overlap in orien-
tation than he had imagined, and less distinction between the sexes
than he had previously thought. Men and women’s sexual behav-
iours were not shaped merely by biological influences but formed
by cultural and social forces. He also found that people could not
be fitted into the three existing categories of heterosexual, bisexual
and homosexual. Instead, Kinsey invented the Kinsey Scale, which
provided a sliding scale of sexual orientation from completely hetero-
sexual to definitely homosexual. Most people fitted somewhere in
between, and some changed their sexual orientation throughout
their lives. Although Kinsey received his fair share of critics, his study
undoubtedly created one of the grandest shake-ups in beliefs about
sexual behaviour that had ever been seen.
Meanwhile, in 1949 Britain revealed the results of a much smaller
sex survey of its own when Mass Observation (Mo) started collect-
ing records. The Mass Observation Unit was a social organization
established in 1937 by Tom Harrisson, Charles Madge and Humphrey
Jennings, an anthropologist, poet and film-maker respectively. Their
aim was to collect research from everyday life from a group of around
500 volunteers who had been promised anonymity. This was under-
taken via open-ended questionnaires and diaries kept to record daily
events and opinions. The unit had begun collecting information ten
years earlier from 1939, but now they wanted information on sex for
their own ‘Little Kinsey’ report.38 The method of the British Sex
Survey was to take a cross section of 400 people in the British Isles
from the 2,000 people written to. The target group was mainly middle-
class citizens, with clergymen, schoolmasters and doctors among
them. All were given a questionnaire about their attitudes towards sex.
The Mo provided them with diaries and invited them to keep track
of events in their lives and send in day-to-day accounts. Although
the survey was considerably less ambitious than Kinsey’s and involved
fewer people, the synopsis of the Mo survey criticized the fact that
Kinsey accepted or even condoned what people did; and also criticized
the objective stance in Kinsey’s Report towards various forms of
sexual intercourse. However, the intention of Mo was to collect ‘not
merely what the mass or the people do about sex but also what they
say about it’.39 Some of the results of the Survey’s findings were pub-
lished in the Sunday Pictorial and later in a separate book.
40
When asked where they had gleaned their sexual knowledge,

25 out of every 100 respondents said that they had picked up infor-
mation on street corners, at work, ‘or even in the marriage bed’. Most
people interviewed (76 per cent) were in favour of sex education and
over half (54 per cent) thought it should start when a young person
was between eleven and fourteen years old. Women thought that
sex education should start before puberty because of fears of illegit-
imate pregnancy and the stigma still attached to it. Lack of knowledge
about birth control clearly deterred women from extra-marital affairs:
one said her boyfriend told her he used a ‘sort of rubber glove’ to pre-
vent pregnancy but she did not believe him and afterwards would have
nothing to do with him. One in six mentioned fear of pregnancy as
their reason for avoiding pre-marital or extra-marital sex. One woman
told a teacher who was working in the hospital, ‘My husband is awk-
ward like, He do put me in the [family] way every year and he do kick
me in the stomach to get rid of it.’40
Birth control was becoming an essential part of a heterosexual
couple’s sex life. Yet answers about birth control showed that there
was some confusion about its meaning. Fifteen per cent of people
had some implied knowledge, 8 per cent did not know what it was,
and 4 per cent got it wrong (which must have left for some future
unwanted consequences). Some even thought birth control to be
either an analgesic or a new form of government control. The richer
a person was, the more in favour they were of birth control. Even
Roman Catholics were in favour of some form of birth control, with
over one-third expressing approval for it, against the official teach-
ings of their religion. Methods of contraception for those who did
use it included the sheath (79 per cent); chemicals (56 per cent); the
cap (40 per cent); withdrawal (36 per cent); the ‘safe period’ (17 per
cent) and douching (13 per cent). There was general feeling in favour
of marriage and many respondents were against prostitution. Unsur-
prisingly, men were less so: a quarter of men admitted to having
visited a prostitute, 8 per cent admitted to having homosexual rela-
tionships and a further 12 per cent confessed to homosexual leanings.
One-fifth of women admitted to extra-marital affairs. Heterosexual
sex was still incorporating adultery and prostitution but prevention
of reproduction was now a main issue.
Although statistics may provide us with an idea of sexual practice,
many shared the feelings of one particular young man. His story
41
provides us with an emotional example of how people felt about

heterosexual sex during Second World War. A journalist in the forces
with the Royal Engineers in Chelmsford, Essex, he kept a diary, writ-
ing about the difficulties of his courtship. He lived in lodgings and
cycled to see his girl in Tunbridge Wells.
Now my worry is this: I’ve known the girl and her family all
my life. We’ve been in love for 2 or 3 years. But although we’ve
indulged in pretty extensive ‘necking’ or ‘petting’ (there
seems to be no other words!) we haven’t yet had intercourse
(another horrible word!). What I am wondering is whether
if, in view of the situation, I shall broach the subject and
suggest that we shall this weekend, and to that end, whether
I shall buy contraceptives.41
After having given it some thought, he obviously went through

with making preparations, ‘In Gravesend, I brought my first contra-
ceptive; a sheath for 1s. Embarrassment lessened by fact that I was
served by a young male assistant.’42
Awkwardness about sex was still prevalent among many couples,
especially young courting ones. This was mainly due to ignorance and
lack of sex education. There were huge gaps in the sexual knowledge
of the general population, which meant they experienced more sex-
ual problems. The shame about talking about sex only hindered the
process. Many people did not know what was ‘normal’ sexual behav-
iour, let alone what might be considered abnormal. For all the elevation
of heterosexuality and its ‘normative’ status, there seems to be a lot
of issues causing its disruption. This was to be rectified when through-
out the 1960 and ’70s, Masters and Johnson set the new framework
for reference about heterosexual behaviour, telling us all how it
should be done. In Human Sexual Response and Human Sexual
Inadequacy, published in 1966 and 1970, they outlined heterosexual
behaviour, writing about such topics as love, intimacy and ‘patterns
of sexual responses’.
However, there can be little doubt that one of the biggest changes
to sex in human history was the introduction of the pill – its impact
was so great that it would radically change the way heterosexual
people approached sex. Although contraception had been part of
family planning from ancient times, it had remained unreliable right
42
until the pill’s introduction in the 1960s – and it was only with this
release from the perpetual burden of childbirth that women could start
to enjoy an unlicensed freedom in their sex lives. Over the last few
decades, with the lifting of the worry of unwanted pregnancy, peo-
ple have been more inclined to experiment. More sexual behaviours
previously construed as perversion have now become mainstream
and inserted themselves into the overall understanding of hetero-
sexual behaviour.
43
A woman masturbates a man (background), from Nicolas Chorier, L’Académie
des dames (1680).
two
From Onanism to Spending

How it crushes nature, stints virility, nips manhood in its bud, and initiates
youth in wickedness.
Anon, Eronania (1724)
J udging from the slang terms for masturbation that are currently
circulating, it is viewed today as a fairly innocuous activity. Phrases
such as ‘jerking the gherkin’, ‘polishing your bayonet’, ‘spanking the
monkey’ and ‘jackin’ the beanstalk’ suggest that the activity should
not be taken too seriously. Female masturbation has since acquired
countless jocular names of its own – ‘beating the bush’, ‘petting the
pussy’, ‘jilling off’ and so on. Nowadays, women are quite happy to
shop in Ann Summers and purchase a wide variety of sex toys offered
in all colours and sizes with names such as ‘The Vibrating Hand-
Maiden’, ‘The Pulsating Rabbit’ and ‘The Pink Love Bullet’ with which
to give themselves pleasure. Indeed, masturbation is celebrated as
both a solitary and mutually enjoyable practice, although this was
not always the case. In the past such practices were considered a
perversion against nature, a heinous sin and a habit that had the
potential to bring about serious physical and mental debilities.
While masturbation was thought to be essentially a male preserve,
women no doubt undertook the activity, but wrote about it less. It
was simply more hidden, and fewer people knew about women’s
secret pleasures. However, the Sanofix vibrating machine would
surely have done for the Edwardian lady what the Pulsating Rabbit
does today.1
The Oxford English Dictionary refers to masturbation as ‘the
stimulation, usually by the hand, of one’s genitals for sexual pleas-
ure; the action or practice of masturbating oneself (or less commonly)
another person’. The earliest English usage of the term ‘masturba-
tion’ is around 1503, taken from Middle French, although there have
been a variety of names given to the activity throughout history. The
medieval authorities spoke of onanism. By the eighteenth century,
45
the Pleasure’s all Mine
Sanofix hand vibrator, 1913.
the term ‘to frig’ was used; the verb was taken from the French verb
frotter meaning ‘to rub’, but became synonymous with masturbation.2
The Victorians spoke of ‘spending’; nowadays ‘wanking’ is more
commonly used. Although seemingly a non-disruptive act, it is surpris-
ing what furore masturbation has caused. Many people in various
parts of the world today think it is either harmful or irreligious. Yet we
know that the practice was familiar in the ancient world, as it was
depicted in paintings and drawings. Through the centuries it has gone
from being seen as a health cure to a sin, a medical disorder, a dis-
ease of nations, and back to a suggested healthy alternative to sexual
intercourse. How this happened depended on the most prominent vocal
authority at the time, whether political, religious, medical or legal.
46
from onanism to spending
Ancient Spilling of Seed

In ancient Greece, masturbatory images were commonly painted
on vases and columns, usually of satyrs such as Pan. During the fourth
century bc, the philosopher Diogenes the Cynic blamed the god
Hermes for introducing masturbation to the world when he taught
his son Pan to masturbate. Diogenes was known for his more pro-
vocative behaviour; when he went to Athens, his purpose was to
upbraid the false morals of the citizens in what he saw essentially as
a corrupt society. As a protest, to demonstrate his displeasure, he ate
in the marketplace (which was at that time regarded as improper), after
which he proceeded to masturbate in full view of passers-by. He
declared, ‘If only one could satisfy one’s hunger by rubbing one’s
stomach.’3 Allegedly, he urinated in public, defecated in the theatre
and rejected any normal values of decency. The stories of how he died
varied – some say he died holding his breath, others that the cause
was an infected dog bite or eating raw octopus.
Although when undertaken in public, masturbation may well
have caused consternation, in private it was another matter. Phys-
icians suggested it as a method to relieve tension or sexual frustration,
the idea emanating from the medical supposition that the body
needed to rid itself of excess seminal fluid. Around 200 bc, Demetrius
of Apamea in his book On the Signs of Diseases told of an old man
who suffered from priapism. He tried, without any success, to obtain
relief by masturbation. His erection was so powerful that his organ
‘might have been made of horn’.4 Hippocrates (fifth century bc) and
Galen (second century ad) both thought it necessary for men and
women to orgasm regularly to release their ‘seed’ (both men and
women were thought to have seed). The most natural way to under-
take this was through sexual intercourse with a member of the
opposite sex. However, when this was not possible, physicians advo-
cated masturbation as beneficial to health. This was particularly
A Rabbit-type vibrator.
47
applicable to single women and widows since, without a man, there

would be no orgasm and seed would build up inside them – hence
unmarried women were thought susceptible to blockages. In order
to remedy the situation, in his treatise Diseases of Women, Hippoc-
rates suggests rubbing fragrant ointments on the vulva or inserting
dildo-like objects to simulate the penis.5 Galen compared masturba-
tion to the evacuation of a person’s bowels and the need to urinate –
releasing sperm or female ‘seed’ was necessary to prevent its unhealthy
build-up. By way of an example, Galen related the story of a woman
who had been a widow for a long time and suffered from the reten-
tion of her female seed. When she explained the problem, the local
midwife informed her that her womb had been ‘drawn up’, and that
she needed to apply her usual remedy. As certain substances were
rubbed in, the woman experienced ‘pain and at the same time the
pleasure’ associated with sexual intercourse, and passed a large
amount of thick ‘seed’.6 However, although masturbation might
be enough to alleviate a woman’s tension or blockages, ideally she
needed to ‘lie with a man’ as she would also benefit from the restora-
tive qualities of his sperm.
The Sin of Onan

By the medieval period, a new repression of masturbation had
emerged. This was not a result of public debate but originated in
discussions among the early Church authorities. The Church Fathers
took a decidedly dim view of masturbation, and thought the subject
was better left unmentioned, mainly for fear that people might try
it out for themselves. When the subject of masturbation was dis-
cussed, there was much debate as to why and when it was a sin. St
Augustine (354–430) of Hippo in North Africa thought that onanism
was sinful because it was unnatural – he suggested that it was better
for a man to visit a prostitute than to masturbate. How far his pro-
nouncement filtered down through the ranks to ordinary men and
women is debatable, but nonetheless it became the ruling of the
Christian Church on the subject.
Masturbation was regarded as ‘unnatural’ and against God’s
natural ordering of the world (a perversion in the eyes of the Church)
– reason enough to leave it alone. But another reason behind the
thinking of the Church authorities was that masturbation rendered
48
the sperm intended for procreation useless. The Church’s stance

on sex was that it was meant for reproduction within marriage – in
essence, sperm was intended for making babies. The Church Fathers
frequently pointed to the story of Onan as an example of the sin;
according to Genesis 38:4–11, he ‘spilled his seed on the ground’ in
order to avoid impregnating his brother’s wife. In fact this is a mis-
interpretation: the sin of Onan was not masturbation but coitus
interruptus. Nonetheless, Onan was referred to in cases of mastur-
bation for centuries to come, his name being used to describe the
activity in ‘onanism’.
Punishments for the sin of onanism varied according to a per-
son’s age. One penitential of the year 520 suggested a year’s penance
for adult men who had masturbated, but only 40 days for a twelve-
year-old boy – it was felt that an adult should have better control
over himself than a mere youth. The Irish penitential of St Columban
(559–615) went further and differentiated between masturbators
who were married and those who were not. A penance of a year was
given for the former but only six months for the latter, an indication
of the Church’s feelings about marriage. A married man’s job was to
impregnate his wife and he should be using his appendage for the
proper purpose of procreation. Because of this neglect of duty, mas-
turbation was a more serious sin for a married man than for a single
one. For an unmarried man with no convenient woman around, it
was perhaps more understandable.
Involuntary emissions were another matter altogether. When a
man ejaculated in his sleep, or accidentally while awake, could these
be considered sins? And if so, how serious were they? Members of
religious orders were supposed to refrain from onanism, so the ques-
tion of involuntary emissions naturally surfaced within the upper
ranks of the Church. Generally, it seems to have been agreed that if
masturbation was undertaken while awake, it was a sin. This view
was ratified when Pope Leo ix officially condemned masturbation
as a sin in 1054. Other leaders of the Church, such as Peter Damian
(c. 1007–1072), thought masturbation so bad that it was akin to sod-
omy and believed that similarly harsh penances should apply to it
(usually capital punishment). However, some clerics argued that
nocturnal emissions could not be the fault of a sleeping person,
who could not be held responsible for his ejaculations. Thomas
Aquinas (1225–1274), for one, could not bring himself to condemn
49
nocturnal emissions in his discussion on the subject. In his Summa

Theologiae, although he deemed self-pollution a sin against nature
in the same category of importance as sodomy, he considered the
cause of the emission to be relevant. Indeed, he believed that the Devil
might be involved in nocturnal emissions, in which case it could
not entirely be a man’s own fault.7 However, if a man had indulged
in lascivious thoughts before he went to sleep, it was generally sur-
mised that this was a sin in itself. Induced orgasms were therefore
considered more serious than accidental ejaculation.8 Aquinas
further believed that fornication was a lesser sin than masturba-
tion, as with the former there was at least a chance of procreation.
He believed that masturbation was a form of murder, since it destroyed
the semen meant for making a potential human being.9
Debates over the issue of sin and masturbation continued to
rage right through into the Renaissance. At the end of the sixteenth
century, the Franciscan Benedicti declared, ‘Whoever engages in
voluntary pollution outside of marriage, which is termed mollities
by the theologians, sins against the natural order.’10 It does not
mention whether it was considered acceptable inside marriage, sug-
gesting that it was believed to be a bachelor’s problem. The type of
sin, whether mortal or venial, was important (mortal sin condemns
a person to Hell after death; a venial sin is a lesser sin and forgiv-
able). While purposeful masturbation was deemed to be a mortal
sin, nocturnal ejaculation was more acceptable. These night-time
emissions were not a mortal sin if, for example, a man had eaten
lust-inducing meats, since his ejaculation was considered a result of
‘pleasures of the palate’. Since spicy foods might induce involun-
tary ejaculation in a man’s sleep, it was therefore deemed only a
venial sin. St Antonius disagreed and believed nocturnal emission
through gluttony was a mortal sin, presumably because it added the
deadly sin of greed and was self-inflicted. Such arguments over details
pervaded discussions for years to come.
As we have seen in these arguments, frequently sodomy and
masturbation were considered to be the same type of sin, therefore
warranting the same sort of punishments. In 1532, Holy Roman
Emperor Charles v ratified the Carolina laws, which included the
establishment of the death penalty for ‘fornication that goes against
nature’, taken by judicial authorities to include masturbation. Even
the Lutheran jurist Benedict Carpoz agreed that capital punishment
50
was a suitable response for people performing such activities. But not
everyone agreed. The Scottish legal advocate Sir George Mackenzie,
although he accepted the authority of Carpoz in principle, refused
to abide with his sentencing policy. He declared that sodomy and
bestiality ‘are crimes extraordinary and rarely committed in this
Kingdom’. His judgement was based on the surmise that no one in
Scotland would commit such abominable crimes. Notably, Mackenzie
wrote in English when he was discussing the crime of sodomy and
bestiality, but resorted to Latin when commenting on masturba-
tion, an indication of just how bad he thought masturbation was.
(Knowledgeable professionals such as physicians and legal men
frequently used Latin to write about sexual terms thought too ob-
scene to mention in public.) Despite these promulgations, the death
penalty was never actually used for masturbation in Europe. Flemish
and French lawyers usually accepted banishment as an alternative
penalty. The Protestant reproof was to hamstring the perpetrators
– crippling them by slicing through their hamstrings.11
A ‘Fatal’ Practice
Although the extent of the practice of masturbation is difficult to
estimate, some records survive that give us an idea of how people
thought about it. While few women left behind any mention of
it, or indeed of sex at all, some seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
gentlemen left behind diaries and journals which mention mastur-
bation. A handful of them thought it a fairly normal preoccupa-
tion of youth, but others believed it to be a perverted path to follow.
William Drummond, the son of a Scottish poet, recorded details
of his handiwork between 1657 and 1659.12 After his mother died,
he inherited a huge estate at Hawthorndon in 1649, a small hamlet
a few miles from Edinburgh. By the time he wrote his diary, he was
leading an isolated life alone in the castle but for a handful of ser-
vants. His diary entry for 20 February 1657 admitted to engaging
in debauched behaviour and cavorting with fellow delinquents –
‘dranke till twelfe a cloke in the night at which time we ranted thor-
rowe all the little towens with a great bagge pipe, to the admiration
[astonishment] of all the countrie people’. Not only did he indulge
in competitive drinking and libertine ways, but he lazed about in bed
all day and failed to attend church on Sundays. With time on his
51
hands, his thoughts turned to sex. Writing in semi-code, he recorded

his masturbatory habits, referring to them as ‘fatal’ – ‘all night fat-
tall’ and ‘fattall most grivously’. His favourite book was Ovid’s Ars
Amandi (The Art of Love), which at one reading apparently aroused
him so much that he masturbated twice. His activities apparently
did him no harm (despite what the medics of the day would have
said) and he eventually married. He must have had some concerns
about his habit or he would not have called it ‘fatal’, but he does
not appear to have felt considerable guilt.13
While some men were happy to indulge themselves without
feeling guilty, others were not. Unlike Drummond, the Puritan
George Trosse felt ashamed of his inclinations. He lamented his
past secret activities, recording how he had practised ‘a sin too many
young men are guilty of and look upon as harmless’.14 Despite his
earlier life of idleness and debauchery, Trosse obtained a knighthood
in the 1680s, so masturbation obviously did him no harm. Most
people, Samuel Pepys among them, preferred to keep their habits
a secret, often assisted by pornographic images and texts as found
in L’Ecole des filles (Michel Millot and Jean L’Ange, attrib., known
as The School of Venus, 1655) and L’Académie des dames (Nicolas
Chorier, 1660). Pepys recorded his masturbatory activities after
becoming excited over L’Ecole des filles. His diary entry for 9 February
1655 reads: ‘it did hazer my prick stand all the while, and una vez
to decharger’. He promptly burned the arousing book before his
wife could discover it. Just over a century later, James Boswell was more
concerned about the adverse physical effects of masturbation when
he mentioned it in his diary, also referring to it as a ‘fatal practice’.
He promised himself that he would stop masturbating and from
then on would pleasure himself only with women.
The warnings about masturbation went unheeded by some lib-
ertine men, who went so far as to form secret societies in order to
celebrate their masturbatory activities. At their initiation ceremonies
the Beggar’s Benison regularly used masturbation as a bonding
mechanism between ‘brothers’. The society had been formed by a
group of prominent Scottish professionals in 1732 to promote shared
business interests, and it continued to operate until 1836. During the
initiation ceremony of a new member, a ‘test platter’ was brought
forward, on to which all the members had to masturbate as a sign of
their virility. Women were also part of their pleasure; the society’s
52
minutes reveal that they hired local girls to strip naked and pose
for inspection by members of the group. ‘Sylphs’ or prostitutes were
also taken by coach up to Scotland from London to entertain the
men. Meanwhile, in France, the libertine Jean-Jacques Rousseau
caused disruption with the publication of his new novel Emile (1762),
in which he wrote about the ‘most deadly habit to which a young man
can be subject’. The book caused such an affront that it was pub-
licly burned. Some years later he related in his Confessions (1782) that
he had masturbated while fantasizing about his nanny. He con-
fessed, ‘I learned this dangerous supplement which deceives nature
and leads young men of my disposition to many excesses at the
expense of their health, their vigour and sometimes their lives.’ He
claimed he had picked up the habit from a Moorish bandit in Turin.15
Authors of sexual advice manuals, such as Nicolas Venette,
believed masturbation caused asthma, liver problems, fever, gout
and sterility, but was only a habit that affected men. In his Tableau de
l’amour conjugal (1686), which made its first appearance in English
in 1703 as The Mysteries of Conjugal Love Reveal’d, he suggested
that women could not masturbate, revealing,
Woman does not have the ability to pollute herself, as does

man, nor to expel the superfluous seed. She sometimes
retains it lengthily in her testicles or in the horns of her
uterus, where it becomes tainted, and turns yellow and
murky, or foul smelling, instead of clear and white as it
was formerly.16
The book was thought decent enough to act as information for

young married couples, although such sex manuals were also liable
to inflame the passions of young boys. One bunch of apprentices
were caught masturbating over another sexual manual, Aristotle’s
Master-Piece, a book which was one of the most popular of its kind
running throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.17
As the new science of medicine took hold, new theories began to
emerge connecting masturbation to physical disability. This accounts
for the increasing anxieties surrounding it that began to take hold
during the eighteenth century.
53
‘Les Charmes de la masturbation’, from Invocation à l’amour: Chant

philosophique (c. 1825).
Medicine, Maladies and Masturbation

Although Galen’s theories were still popular right up to the eighteenth
century, physicians began to question his ideas about masturba-
tion as contributing to health. Enlightenment medics entered the
debate with a survey of the dangers of masturbation with physicians,
surgeons and anatomists laying out their own campaign against
‘self-pollution’. Although religious factions continued their vilifi-
cation of onanism as sinful, masturbation was now seen not only to
be harmful to a person’s soul but to threaten to destroy him or her
physically. As early as 1587 the French doctor Jean Liébault advised
that masturbation and its ensuing seminal loss could cause paraly-
sis and convulsions. In his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) the physician
Robert Burton blamed celibacy for causing ‘masturbation, satyriasis,
priapism, melancholy madness, fornication, adultery, buggery,
sodomy, theft, murder, and all manner of mischiefs’.18 He avowed,
54
Homunculi in human semen,

engraving, 1699.
‘Idleness leads to lust, lust to disease, and disease to untimely death.’

Meanwhile, Puritans such as Richard Capel roundly condemned
masturbation; in his treatise of 1640, he listed an abundance of
sins, of which onanism was by far the worst, more so than adultery
or fornication.19 The rise of Puritanism in England ran parallel to
the emergence of new medical theories about masturbation and
the making of the new bourgeoisie in France; all three fed into the
creation of a new moral strictness.
These three factions – medics, Puritans and the bourgeoisie –
brought about radical new ideas about masturbation. Up until the
discovery of the microscope by Anton van Leeuwenhoek (1632–
1723), the aversion to masturbation and wasting seed was partly
due to ignorance of the process of procreation. It was believed that
tiny, fully formed humans were carried in the sperm. These cells in
the form of humans were called homunculi. Any waste of the pre-
cious fluid was therefore tantamount to homicide. With greater
medical understanding of procreation, new ideas sprang forth as
55
Homunculi in semen, from Antonio Vallisneri, Istoria della generazione (1721).
to why masturbation was dangerous, with medics now acting as the

moral authorities.
A watershed came with the publication of a new book on mastur-
bation, Onania; or, The Heinous Sin of Self-pollution, and All Its
Frightful Consequences in Both Sexes (c. 1710). The author explained
the cause of onanism, its consequences and its cure, and claimed that
onanism could cause debilitating diseases, blindness and insanity.
Written under anonymous authorship by ‘a clergyman’, it revolu-
tionized people’s perceptions about pleasuring themselves. Although
it has been suggested that the author was one Dr Bekker, no one has
ever identified such a person, although he was evidently well-read.20
Nor was he either ‘a clergyman’ or a medic; instead he was more than
likely to have been a quack, given the amount of advertisements
for cures placed prominently in the book. John Marten has also
been suggested as the author and this may well be the case, as
Marten was not only a quack but had also written other books sim-
ilar in style and content.21 Two medications in particular were
56
proffered as cures, ‘a strengthening tincture’ sold at ten shillings a

bottle and a ‘Prolific powder’ for twelve shillings a bag, an extraor-
dinary amount of money given that most labourers’ weekly wages were
only a few shillings. These medicines promised to cure symptoms
of gonorrhoea – gleets, oozings, sores, emissions – and all other
manner of problems associated with the venereal disease, including
‘nocturnal effusions’.22 The popularity of the book is shown by the
demand. By 1737, it had reached its sixteenth edition, the previously
modest 60-page pamphlet extended to 194 pages. Readers had written
in outlining their afflictions and hailing the cures (although these
may well have been written by the author himself, fabricated for
promotional purposes).23
For the first time, women were seen to be avid practitioners of
onanism alongside men. The author warned his readers that ‘to
imagine women are much more modest than men is a mistake’ as
they were just as likely to commit the act. While men might suffer
‘stranguaries, priapisms and gonorrheas, thin and waterish seed,
fainting fits and epilepsies, consumption, loss of erection and pre-
mature ejaculation, and infertility’, women might suffer imbecility,
fluor albus (leucorrhoea), hysteric fits, barrenness and be rendered
unfit for the act of generation. Cure involved true repentance along
with cold baths and a milk diet.24
Onania spawned a flurry of other similar pamphlets used to
scare gullible masturbators into parting with their money. One
response was Onanism Display’d (1719) in which the author agreed
that self-pollution was ‘a crime in itself, monstrous and unnatural;
its practice filthy and odious’, and asserted chastity and early mar-
riage as the best cure.25 Most of the books, such as Of the Crime of Onan
(1723), Onanism Examined and Detected (1724) and Eronania (1724),
carried adverts for so-called ‘cures’ in the form of various liquors,
potions and powders. Purging lotions could be bought for seven
shillings and sixpence to revive one’s constitution; an elixir cost a
mere guinea. Anodyne necklaces purported to cure everything from
exhaustion through over-masturbation to the effects of the pox (not
to mention teething in children). The front page of Eronania directed
the afflicted reader to a place next to the Rose Tavern in Temple Bar
where ‘the scheme of the secret disease and broken constitutions’
might be treated gratis. ‘Nothing could be of greater service than to
show the guilty how to get rid of so vile a habit and keep the unwary
57
from falling into it’, it claimed. Although the consultation may well
have been free, the hapless patient was a few shillings lighter by the
time he left the shop with his useless bottle of medicine.
But it was not just quacks who were condemning masturbation;
respected physicians were coming out in droves to attack the prac-
tice. The English physician Robert James in his Medical Dictionary
(1743–5) deemed it ‘a vice not decent to name, but productive of
the most deplorable and generally incurable disorders’.26 Other
respectable medical texts condemned the act as dangerous, stating
that it could even lead to psychological problems and induce phys-
ical changes. A woman could grow an elongated clitoris as a result
of over-stimulation, turning her into a ‘tribade’ (another name for
a lesbian). She could become hysterical and uncontrollable (a fate,
incidentally, more often applied to rebellious women than the quiet
submissive sort). Deranged imaginings filled the mind of the female
onanist, and encouraged sexual rapaciousness in her. Masturbation
was even blamed for nymphomania in women and satyrism in men.
In 1760, the Critical Review advised that ‘furor uterinus’, or raging
female nymphomania, could result from women masturbating.27
Women were vulnerable because they lacked the wherewithal to
command or reason, which left their imaginations riskily open.28
When women masturbated, therefore, they might go mad. Pictures
of onanists were reproduced in medical texts depicting delirious
women swooning on the verge of insanity and men crippled with
fatigue. But why did this panic occur now,29 and why was it so impor-
tant for medics to take up the baton condemning masturbation?
Over the preceding century, there had been a gradual decline of
belief in magic and witchcraft. By the time of the Enlightenment,
rationality and reason were being promoted as the correct path
to follow. It was generally thought that a more ‘scientific’ approach
to life was needed. This rationality extended to a need for control over
the workings of the body, both publicly and privately. While pre-
viously religion had been responsible for matters of moral control,
science was gaining an increasing voice of authority on the issue –
medicine rather than religion was becoming the arbiter of what
was good and bad sex. In turn, this meant that medics were now
the new overseers of repression and they therefore felt compelled
to write about the topic so as to establish themselves as the new
moral authorities.
58
‘A Woman Masturbates’, drawing by Antoine Borel, engraved by François-Roland
Elluin for Jean-Baptiste de Boyer (attrib.), Thérèse philosophe (1785 edition).
Frontispiece from an Italian edition

of Samuel Tissot’s L’Onanisme
(L’Onanismo, ovvero dissertazioni
sopra le malattie cagionate dalle
polluzioni voluntarie, 1785).
Samuel Tissot’s treatise L’Onanisme, où, dissertation sur les

maladies produites par la masturbation (1760) was to become one of
the biggest influences on the understanding of onanism through-
out Europe. Tissot described the debilitating effects of masturbation
in women who were ‘more particularly exposed to hysterical fits, or
shocking vapours; to incurable jaundices; to violent cramps in the
stomach and back; to acute pains in the nose’.30 In 1777, M.D.T.
Bienville took the matter further when he published a tract on the
subject translated into English as Nymphomania, or Treatise on
Uterine Fury four years later.31 Less is known about Bienville except
that he lived in Holland and he wrote several other scientific works,
including two treatises defending smallpox inoculation. However,
he described how the female onanist might fall into a dreadful state
of passionate insanity, ‘the expressions of which even ears not un-
commonly chaste cannot listen without horror and astonishment’.
Nymphomania, he believed, started with ‘a melancholy delirium’,
a sort of brain disorder that resulted from a woman’s wild imagin-
ation.32 These women then abandon themselves, throwing themselves
at the first available man to ‘gratify their insatiable desires’.33
By the turn of the century, masturbation was firmly linked to
depravity, disabilities and insanity. As physicians became more
interested in the way the mind worked, a new area of medicine
60
‘The Female Onanist’, from Tissot, L’Onanisme (1836).
developed in pathological anatomy. In his book Medical Inquiries

and Observations Upon the Diseases of the Mind (1812), the famous
Philadelphian psychiatrist Benjamin Rush declared that ‘chronic
aberrations frequently have been found in the cerebellum of the
onanist’.34 He not only associated ‘onanism’ with insanity, but also
‘seminal weakness, impotence, dysury, tabes dorsalis, pulmonary
consumption, dyspepsia, dimness of sight, vertigo, epilepsy, hypo-
chondriasis, loss of memory, manalgia, fatuity, and death’.35 France
was just as clogged with strange beliefs about the traumatic effects
of masturbation. In 1819, the Dictionnaire des sciences médicales
advised about the terrible effects of the ‘deadly habit of masturbation’.
61
‘Representing the last stage of mental and bodily exhaustion from Onanism or
Self-pollution’, R. J. Brodie, The Secret Companion (1845).
The subject was the topic of hot debate between prominent physicians,
one who asserted that ‘the continual excitement of the genital organs
is liable to give rise to almost all the acute or chronic illness which
can disturb the harmony of our functions.’36 Everything and any-
thing was blamed on masturbation. Onanism might affect the brain,
the spinal column or the mind; create imbeciles; lead to loss of sight
or hearing, paralysis, palpitations, heart lesions or scrofula. With
the establishment of lunatic asylums and incarceration of the
insane, eighteenth-century physicians could observe ‘the sick’ at close
quarters. What became apparent was that insane in-patients mastur-
bated. Yet, rather than believe patients masturbated from boredom,
doctors preferred to believe it was masturbation that caused insan-
ity. The proof was in their hospitals – of 272 mentally ill patients
placed in care in Bicêtre and Saltpêtrière hospitals in Paris, 41 were
men, and of those eighteen were masturbators.37
This concern over masturbation was to last through the reign of
Queen Victoria, although again, the reactions were shifting. Having
seen the attacks come first from religious quarters and then medical
ones, now concerns over masturbation were connected to eugen-
ics, hereditary disease and effects on race.
62
Keeping the Nation Pure

Masturbation began to affect the body politic, and was now seen
as the scourge of nations. One doctor even described it as worse
than the plague, war or pox. In France, Reveillé-Parise in his Revue
Medicale française et etrangère (1828) called it ‘the destroyer of
civilization’.38 Many other doctors followed suit and believed Dr
Fonssagrives’ explanation – that deterioration started in childhood
and progressed to adolescence, taking with it ‘the shared patrimony
of a country’s forces.’39 The problem was seen to affect not just the
individual but society as a whole. Masturbators were blamed for
causing the degeneration of entire nations, denying king and coun-
try the possibility of a strong manpower by enfeebling the bodies
of young men and making them unfit to be fathers. Moralists, histor-
ians and educators all came together to reinforce the creational
myth of the ills of masturbation.40 The trappist monk Pierre Jean
Corneille Debreyne (1786–1867), as moralist, theologian and physi-
cian, drew together all the potential negative attributes of the act
– a failed physical body, a deranged mental capacity and a blemished
soul. He attested that masturbators ‘end up falling into a hideous maras-
mus and a disgusting decrepitude’.41 Meanwhile, Professor Claude
François Lallemand, a physician practising in Montpellier, expressed
his concern over masturbation as it caused spermatorrhea, exces-
sive discharge of sperm or involuntary ejaculations. In A Practical
Treatise on the Causes, Symptoms and Treatment of Spermatorrhoea
(1835), he recorded 150 cases he had investigated in his fourteen
years of practice. He concluded that masturbation degraded a man,
‘poisons the happiness of his best days, and ravages society’.42
Meanwhile, Victorian Britain was carrying out its own war against
the ‘solitary vice’.43 There was a wave of new-fangled inventions to keep
the nation’s children free from vice and to act as a deterrent against
masturbation. Early detection was imperative if Britain was to avoid
spawning a country of defective children. They were therefore
warned to keep their hands above the bedclothes to avoid touching
their genitals. Parents were advised to put gloves with spikes on their
offspring if they wanted them to grow up ‘normally’. Even strait-
jackets were suggested. Erection detectors awoke parents with bells
ringing if their son had an erection in his sleep. Other preventative
devices included the sleeping ring, the cup with padlock, the truss,
63
the sheath, the hand-jive, the penis plate, the locking pockets, the
live wire and the body suit.44 All these devices inflicted pain as a
method of cure. For perpetual offenders, surgical methods were
implemented – in extreme measures, clitorodectomies and castra-
tions were suggested, but these were rare. Cauterization was also
used, the doctor burning the offending organ to cause the patient
pain in order to prevent them touching themselves. Every drug was
tried, from potassium bromide to opium, sulphur, hot pepper and
strychnine. Even leeches were applied to patients’ skin. Thin blan-
kets and cold bathing were less aggressive methods suggested to
help relieve the need to masturbate, since heat was thought to agi-
tate the genitals. But according to Samuel Bayard Woodward, writing
in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal in 1835, ‘Nothing short
of total abstinence from the practice can save those who have become
the victim of it.’45
Both puberty and bachelorhood were seen as particularly prob-
lematic periods in a young man’s life. In 1854, Sir George Drysdale
in his Elements of Social Science was revolutionary in that he urged
early marriages and the use of contraception as methods against
the ‘injurious habits of self-pollution’, although his detractors crit-
icized him for advocating ‘conjugal onanism’. Meanwhile, William
Acton was busy scaring the male population with The Functions
and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs in Youth, Adult Age, and
Advanced Life (1857), which induced at least as much panic as Onania
had done on its publication in the early 1700s. He reiterated the now
entrenched opinion that the waste of sperm could lead to debilitating
Four-pointed urethral ring, in J. L. Milton, The Electric Alarm, in Milton, On the

On the Pathology and Treatment of Pathology and Treatment of Gonorrhoea and
Gonorrhoea and Spermatorrhoea (1887). Spermatorrhoea (1887).
64
A woman masturbates. Illustration by Achilles Devéria for Alfred de Musset’s novel

Gamiani; or, Two Nights of Excess (1833).
diseases. So why was there a resurgence of anxiety about the activity

in the nineteenth century? Indeed, had it ever gone away? It has been
suggested that the renewed anxiety was a result of a confused reaction
of parents and medics to the early onset of puberty in Western Europe.46
Yet if this was the case, surely parents would have been worried about
their offspring attempting sexual intercourse earlier, and masturba-
tion should have been seen as a way to avert pre-marital pregnancies?
Since marriage was delayed until young people reached their early
twenties, parents may well have considered that masturbation for
boys was an acceptable way for them to relieve themselves, especially
since this might help prevent their sons’ seduction of young girls.
But this was not the case. Masturbation continued to be seen as a threat
to youths’ physical and mental abilities and became a particular
concern of the middle classes.
One reason for anxieties around masturbation was that the
Victorians considered that the reckless ‘spending’ of sperm threat-
ened to bankrupt the perpetrator both morally and physically. In
65
the economic culture of the mid-nineteenth century onwards, saving

and accumulation were vital parts of the creation of a sound future
and a morally restrained life. Samuel Smiles had already outlined the
need for restraint in his popular books Self-Help (1859) and Thrift
(1875). Discipline was everything to the upstanding Victorian citi-
zen, including self-discipline and the disciplining of one’s own
children. In order to instil this in youngsters, Acton advised complete
‘sexual acquiescence’ of the child and infant to the wishes of his or
her parents.
Added to the newly enforced Victorian discipline and suggestions
for a stricter morality were the fears stirred by the new field of psy-
chology and psychiatry. Old evidence in a new guise provided reasons
for the malaised child as the problem of insanity came back to haunt
the habitual masturbator. In 1867, Henry Maudsley, the recognized
British expert psychiatrist, revealed that masturbation was ‘charac-
terized by . . . extreme perversion of feeling and corresponding
derangement of thought, in earlier stages, and later by failure of
intelligence, nocturnal hallucinations, and suicidal and homicidal
propensities’. He particularly identified masturbation as a ‘mania
of pubescence’, a sort of mental disease of egoism whereby the
young patient fails to listen to others. This developed into a paranoia
whereby the youth feels his entire family is against him. Easily recog-
nizable was the youth who was entirely irreverent to his parents,
who ‘spent most of the day leaning against a door post, or wander-
ing about in a vacant or abstracted way’.47 Any parent might have
spotted this description in their own children and leapt to the con-
clusion that their offspring was a masturbator. Another psychiatrist,
Edward Charles Spitzka, author of Insanity: Its Classification, Diag-
nosis and Treatment (1883), also thought that youths were especially
afflicted, particularly those who lay in bed all day. For one particu-
lar patient who was impertinent to his mother, he proposed that
the youth spend two months in a straitjacket in an asylum. He also
saw unwillingness to work as a form of insanity, with hard work as
its cure. Masturbators were no longer harmless self-obsessives cured
by cooling of temperature or a healthy diet, but potential psycholog-
ical deviants.
The campaigning of the social purity movements and the pub-
lication of new child rearing tracts also had their effect on the social
climate – medical anxieties were no longer the only issue as the
66
Youth in an anti-
masturbation
corset, after
Johann Christoph
Fleck, Die
Verwirrungen des
Geschlechtstriebes
(1830).
question of salvation gained prominence. Campaigning groups such

as the Social Purity Alliance (founded in 1873), the Moral Reform
Union (1881) and the National Vigilance Association (1885) moved
to combat the double standard of morality, which allowed for men’s
infidelity and sexual philandering, and instead pushed for male
sexual purity. These movements emerged from the campaigns against
the Contagious Diseases Acts (1864–9), which introduced legally
enforceable medical inspection of prostitutes for venereal disease.
The Acts were introduced as a method of trying to contain venereal
disease in the armed forces, and police were particularly vigilant in
ports and garrison towns.
67
Books directed at youths suggested preventative measures against

self-pollution. In his Scouting for Boys (1908), Robert Baden-Powell,
founder of the scout movement, suggested that self-abuse led to
degeneracy and that the best way to prevent it was to wash the organ
in cold water every morning, then do as much exercise as possible to
tire oneself out. He never actually mentions masturbation, but his
main advice was on how boys should keep themselves healthy and
clean with self-discipline, good temper and cheer. Priscilla Barker
was more explicit in The Secret Book: Containing Information and
Instruction for Young Women and Girls (1888) when she briskly
advised ‘plenty of cold water on the private parts’.48 However, she
warned that those who ignored her advice might become pale, their
eyes grow dull, and their hands become soft and clammy from
indulging in the vice.49 Others suggested the oft-used cures of vig-
orous exercise, hard beds, a bland diet and prayer.
The amount of anti-masturbatory literature available at this
time peaked in 1900 and continued until 1914.50 Most of the moral-
ists in the second half of the nineteenth and the early twentieth
centuries targeted upper- and middle-class boys in the public school
system, and little concern was given to the working-class boy. It was
the bourgeois boy, surrounded by nannies, domestic servants and
personal tutors, who was seen to be the future of the country.
Alarmist Joseph Howe blamed servants for inducing a child’s later
bad habits by playing with its genitals; ‘It is an authenticated fact
. . . that children at the breast are often excited by their nurses. In order
to keep them quiet, the titillation of the child’s genitals produces
sensations of pleasure which allays its cries.’51 As they grew older, boys
would masturbate for themselves, and suffered from clammy hands,
stooped shoulders, flabby muscles and spots as a result. Edward Kirk
in his Talk with Boys about Themselves (1905) declared dramatically
that self-abuse ‘will stunt your growth, soften your tissues . . . and
wreck your health prematurely’.52 Annoyed with youngsters’ contin-
ued self-fondling, one female nurse, Ellen E. Perkins, went a step
further and invented a piece of equipment in 1908 for ‘keeping the
male pure’. This encased the crotch in metal with leather reinforce-
ments along the sides of the thighs and a centre flap on a hinge to
allow for urination. It could be locked from behind so the wearer
could not get out of it. But this could not help at public schools –
potentially hazardous places with dormitories full of boys and no
68
Ellen Perkins’s anti-masturbation

device, 1908.
parental control. Addressing a purity rally in 1910, Irish Christian Sir

Robert Anderson of the Criminal Investigation Department related
‘a harrowing story of an Eton boy, son of a colonel in the army, a
brilliant lad, “always ahead of his class” . . . who had been reduced
to a drivelling imbecile as the result of a secret sin, induced by the sight
of an obscene photograph exhibited by a scoundrel whom he met in
a railway train.’53
With increasing experiments on the senses, a new set of doctors
began to concentrate on how masturbation created mental problems.
A new phrase, ‘masturbatory neurosis’, was promoted by doctors
such as George M. Beard, Pierre Janet and Jean-Martin Charcot. In
his Clinical Lectures of Mental Diseases (1904), Thomas Smith Couston
claimed, ‘Habit of masturbation [is] very injurious to boys of neur-
otic temperament’. Krafft-Ebing and Freud were among those who
believed masturbation could cause neurosis, even psychosis, while
Havelock Ellis thought it was a symptom of a neurotic disorder.
69
Woman masturbates with a bottle, etching by André Vollot, from the series
Le Voyeur, 1930.
Seventh-day Adventist John Harvey Kellog, Md, now famous for his
breakfast cereal, ran a sanatorium based on holistic treatment of
nutrition, enemas and exercise; his cornflakes were an invention
for a healthy breakfast in keeping with his regime. He connected
masturbation to insanity, believing it to cause personality changes,
insomnia, indecision, confusion, acne, fear, pimples, shifty eyes,
fits and the use of obscenities. Female masturbators suffered all of
these, but had some additional symptoms: underdeveloped breasts,
hysteria, jaundice, rickets, stomach cramps, womb ulcers, hermaph-
roditism and even sterility. His favoured preventative technique
was to place electrodes in the rectums and urethras of his patients
and subject them to mild electric shocks.54
Adding to society’s anxiety, various surveys were undertaken in
the twentieth century that revealed that masturbation was actually
more prevalent than previously thought. Max Exner surveyed 700
college students in 1915 and found that it was a regular activity among
them, although he continued to try and educate the youths in the
error of their ways. Meanwhile, the social worker Dr Katherine Davis
revealed that the reality of the situation as regards women was some-
what different from what doctors and moralists were saying. Employed
70
by the Bureau of Social Hygiene to interview 2,200 women, she found

that it was not only boys or men who liked to masturbate frequently,
but women as well. Although the subject of female masturbation
had already been mooted, it was never at the forefront of concerns
and not thought to be so widespread as in men. Half of the inter-
viewees were married, half not, and the results were published in
Factors in the Sex Life of Twenty-two Hundred Women (1929). The
number of women who admitted they had masturbated ‘frequently’
since marriage was nearly as large as that of men. Nearly 65 per cent
of unmarried women and 40 per cent of married ones admitted to
masturbating. Two out of three of them thought the practice was
degrading, an opinion which reflected the repressed morality of the
day. Unlike men, the women usually found out about the practice by
themselves rather than being taught. Davis concluded that the
result showed women’s dissatisfaction within marriage.
Kinsey’s surveys in the 1950s were to further shock the public
when he revealed that masturbation in America was common among
both men and women, including married ones. According to his
research, 92 per cent of men and 62 per cent of women masturbated.
Youths were found to have a particular inclination for masturbation,
with the practice slackening off in middle age – yet the opposite was
true for women, who grew more adept with age.55
Although Kinsey’s surveys were the first to take an objective
attitude to all things sexual, and to expose masturbation as a preva-
lent activity, he was not the first to digress from society’s generally
negative attitude towards masturbation. Throughout the centuries,
many medics had disagreed with the ideas being promulgated. At
the end of the eighteenth century, reputable surgeons such as John
Hunter were beginning to question the alleged ill effects of mas-
turbation on an individual’s health. Hunter wondered if impotency
was ‘by far too rare for it to have originated from a practise so gen-
eral’.56 From this, it seems he presumed that masturbation was rife,
and that books on the subject had done more harm than good.
However, despite rumblings of dissent in the British medical frater-
nity, the idea that masturbation was a dangerous vice stretched way
into the nineteenth century and beyond. Nearly a century after Hunter
had questioned the veracity of such claims against masturbation, Sir
James Paget came forth to question the reality of spermatorrhea.
He denied that masturbation caused harm or could lead to the lunatic
71
asylum, even though he was disgusted by it, calling it, ‘An unclean-
liness, a filthiness forbidden by God, an unmanliness despised by
men’.57 In 1896 a German doctor, Emil Kraepelin, was the first to
prove that masturbation did not cause insanity, as a result of sex
research conducted in lunatic asylums. In 1929 the author Ralcy
Husted Bell declared that masturbation, ‘according to clinical data,
according to the plainest commonsense . . . is no more harmful
than the co-operative act between mates’.58 But it was Kinsey’s
contemporary, the German psychologist Wilhelm Stekel, who took
a solid stance against the detractors of masturbation. He condemned
traditional beliefs about masturbation, opposing the notion that
it induced anxiety and depression or in any way promoted suicide.
Instead, he called for the alleviation of religious and societal pres-
sures, and encouraged the belief that masturbation was good for
personal health and happiness. Although this might have been an
end to the matter, the old theories clung fast. Through the centuries,
none of these opponents of oddball theories on masturbation were
properly heeded.
In 2007, a British national probability survey found that among
people aged between sixteen and 44 years old, 95 per cent of men and
71 per cent of women had masturbated at some point in their lives;
and 73 per cent of the men and 37 per cent of the women reported
masturbating in the four weeks before their interview.59 During the
twenty-first century, there has been a distinct change in approach
to the topic, at least among the medical fraternity and educators. In
2009, a leaflet entitled Pleasure was published on behalf of the
Sheffield National Health Service, aimed at teenagers. It advocated
regular masturbation for teens as an alternative to the risk of sexual
diseases and teenage pregnancies and carried the slogan ‘an orgasm
a day keeps the doctor away’. The authors of the guidance say that
for too long experts have concentrated on the need for ‘safe sex’ and
committed relationships while ignoring the principal reason why many
people have sex (for pleasure). The medical fraternity finally declared
that masturbation is healthy. Despite these assertions, the overhang
of Christian guilt remains. The Internet demonstrates that there
are still religious leaders talking about the ‘disordered tendency’
and how to stop it.
Ideas about masturbation have therefore undergone a radical
change throughout the last 2,000–3,000 years: an activity thought
72
valuable and necessary by physicians in the ancient world became

a sin, then a physical and mental disorder, until, finally, it has again
become a healthy and necessary alternative to vaginal penetrative sex.
Such is the life cycle of a sexual perversion.
73
Eustache Le Sueur, The Abduction of Ganymede, c. 1650, oil on canvas.
three
From Ganymedes to Gays

If [the sodomite] truly is a scoundrel or a monster . . . then why has Nature
created him partial to this pleasure?
Marquis de Sade, La Philosophie dans le boudoir (1795)
M ale homosexuals have been called everything from Ganymedes –

after the beautiful Trojan youth of ancient Greek myth carried
away by Zeus to become his lover and cupbearer to the gods – to
catamites, sodomites and gays. More recently, homosexual men
have moved to reclaim previously disparaging words – queer, poof,
fairy, queen – for themselves. But these derogatory words indicate
a history of negativity towards men who prefer sex with other men.
Antipathy to homosexuality is still prevalent in many parts of the
Western world, and the death penalty for homosexual relationships
is still in place in some Eastern countries. Historically however, sex
between men did not always raise hostility.
Attitudes towards male homosexuality have shifted over the
years from an acceptance of love between men in ancient Greece,
to flogging, hanging and burning of homosexuals in the medieval
period, to permissible unions, legalized ‘civil partnerships’ and
marriages between men. The study of homosexuality in history
emerged during the 1980s. Since then, arguments have raged among
sociologists and historians about whether such a person as the
‘homosexual’ existed before Karl-Maria Kertbeny invented the term
in 1869. Was the homosexual a mere social construction?1 Or did
he exist all along, meaning that he can be traced in history? Given
the wealth of evidence, most historians recognize that whether the
term existed or not at different times in the past, men had sex with
each other, loved each other and lived together. They also had shared
sexual identities and formed subcultures through which they could
share practices.
Before the modern era, people distinguished between themselves
differently from how we do now. They did not ‘see’ the heterosexual,
75
the bisexual or the homosexual. Instead they saw people who married
or did not, and people who committed deviant sex acts (and they
could be married or not) or did not. Although the term ‘homosex-
ual’ did not exist, there were words with similar or related meanings,
such as ‘catamite’, ‘pederast’ and ‘sodomite’ – a man who committed
the act known as buggery, sodomy, the ‘abominable vice’ or a ‘crime
against nature’. Some of these men might have enjoyed sex with
women and they might even have been married. The most impor-
tant distinction made when assessing men who engaged in sex
together was the difference between who was the active or pene-
trative partner and who was the passive or receiving partner. Those
who took the passive role were viewed with disdain and seen to be
unmanly, while those taking the active role were considered more
manly and therefore were more acceptable. Where the passive part-
ner was a youth, treatment was more lenient. Once a man grew
older, he was expected to take the active role in sex. He should also
marry and have children, even if he continued to desire other men.
This way of thinking prevailed until the nineteenth century, when
the ‘birth of the homosexual’ supposedly came about. Even then,
many homosexuals were married and had children. At a time when
homosexuality was considered so disreputable a vice, it was easier for
a man to take refuge in marriage and continue his activities in secret.
There were, of course, many variants on this way of thinking through-
out different centuries.
Erastēs and Erōmenos

For the ancient Greeks, there was no division of human sexuality into
heterosexuality and homosexuality. Sex for men was a fluid affair
with few boundaries. A man might have sex with women other than
his wife, as well as with other men, without adverse consequences.
He might be married (and indeed was expected to take a wife and
produce children) but might also enjoy penetrating a male youth
in his spare time without any slight on his reputation. We have evi-
dence of this type of behaviour between adult men in ancient Greece
in contemporaneous artwork. Archaeologists have uncovered num-
erous vases that depict men having sex with each other, but there are
also various literary references to such activities. However, there is
some question about exactly how much anal intercourse went on,
76
f r o m g a n y m e d e s t o g ay s
as many of the depictions of male-on-male sex show intercrural

(between the thighs) sex.
In 1978, Kenneth Dover examined the subject of homosexuality
in the ancient world in his book Greek Homosexuality. He found that
the relationships of Greek men appear to have taken the form of
love between an older man (known as erastēs) and a young beard-
less youth of between about twelve and eighteen (known as erōmenos).
The youth in question would be expected to proffer his virtue (although
not to give in too easily) to his mentor, and take the passive role.
Generally the older man would take the active role of penetrator, a
role perceived as more masculine. The older man would woo the
youth with gifts – perhaps a pack of hunting dogs or a new outfit –
and provide the youth with an education. The youth would be expect-
ed to temporarily resist his admirer’s advances while being wooed,
but eventually succumb. While the affair continued, the youth was
expected to have a degree of self-control and self-assertion – he would
not allow too much penetrative sex to take place and would not have
too many suitors at once, nor would he take money for the act (which
would make him a prostitute). Both the suitor and the youth came
from elite backgrounds. When the youth grew up, he would be
Pederasty depicted on a black-figure amphora by the Painter of Berlin, c. 540 bc.

77
expected to marry and have children and perhaps pursue his own
young men. However, there was probably a wider variety of rela-
tionships between men than originally thought, not just those between
elite men and youths.2
In the Iliad, Homer described the close relationship between
Trojan War hero Achilles and his comrade Patroclus. They shared the
life of soldiers, fought side by side in battle and had a strong emo-
tional bond. According to Aeschylus, writing in the fifth century
bc, they also had a sexual relationship, with Achilles assigned the
role of erastēs and Patroclus that of erōmenos. In a surviving frag-
ment of his tragedy Myrmidons, Achilles speaks of a ‘devout union
Bearded man with a youth. Black-figure vase, mid-6th century bc.

78
of the thighs’, perhaps referring to intercrural sex.3 Similarly, in his

Symposium, written around 385 bc, Plato presents Achilles and
Patroclus as lovers. However, the speaker Phaedrus argues that
Aeschylus erred in saying that Achilles was the erastēs, ‘for he excelled
in beauty not Patroclus alone but assuredly all the other heroes,
being still beardless and, moreover, much the younger, by Homer’s
account’. Others argued that they were merely close war comrades:
a contemporary of Plato, Xenophon, claimed that the pair were
devoted to each other, yet chaste. But it seems that in ancient Greece,
there was also an understanding of love between adult men; it was
recognized that some men shared their lives together and held
deep affection for each other. Philolaus the law-giver lived with
Dioclese, an Olympic athlete, and requested that they be buried next
to each other.4
Adult men who had sex with men of their own age were more
often viewed with contempt. These kinaidoi, as they were known,
were older men who allowed themselves to be penetrated and were
therefore dismissed by citizens in their community as effeminate.
Taking a passive role meant that they had voluntarily lowered their
position, and they were seen as wilfully degrading themselves. Athen-
ian citizen men found it difficult to understand how a man could
choose another older man above a male youth, prostitute, wife or slave.
Aristotle summed up the antagonism against kinaidoi in a deroga-
tory description:
He has drooping eyelids. He is knock-kneed. He inclines his

head to the right side. He makes effete gestures with open
hands. He has two varieties of gait, one in which he wiggles
his bottom, and one in which he keeps it still. He rolls his eyes
around a great deal, like Dionysius the sophist.5
The world of ancient Rome saw the manly man penetrating any-
thing he could find – other men, women, boys, male prostitutes and
slaves. Male prostitution existed but was banned by Emperor Philip
the Arab in the third century. However, so long as a man did not
succumb to the advances of other men, he could have sex with whom-
soever he chose (with the exception of freeborn men and citizens).
However, he was expected to retain a degree of self-control. Nonethe-
less, some Roman rulers gained a bad reputation because of their
79
preference for men well past their youth. It was rumoured that the
emperor Galba, who briefly ruled for a few months in ad 68, eschewed
youths for ‘men, adult and strong’ after his wife died. Suetonius says
of him, ‘In sexual matters, he was more inclined to males, and then
none other than the hard bodied and those past their prime.’6 The
problem for Suetonius was not Galba’s preference for males but for
adult men. His predecessor, Emperor Nero, made an even greater neg-
ative impact because of his debauchery. He not only raped freeborn
youths but also allowed his freedman Doryphorus to penetrate him.
These incidents were problematic on three counts: first, defilement
of freeborn youths; second, having sex with an adult man; and third,
allowing himself to be penetrated.
Sins of Sodom
Christianity brought with it an incendiary hatred of any acts of
desire between men. According to the Bible, there were three types
of sodomy – anal sex between men and women; anal sex between men
and men; and sex between humans and animals – and the Bible was
responsible for making these sexual acts prohibited for Christians.
Before the term ‘homosexuality’ was in use, men having sex with each
other was therefore understood within the concept of sodomy. Such
an act was considered a sin, a perversion of nature’s laws and an act
against God. Leviticus 18:22 states, ‘Thou shalt not lie with mankind
as with womankind: it is abomination.’ Death was suggested as the
suitable punishment (20:13). Despite these instructions and the
potential severe punishment, men were still willing to seek out other
men in pursuit of sexual pleasure.
Religious leaders of cloistered all-male communities saw the
potential for problems where men lived in such close proximity with
each other. One example was the reforming monk Peter Damian,
prior of a monastery, who was later to become a cardinal. In his
Liber Gomorrhianus (Book of Gomorrah, c. 1048), he voiced his con-
cerns about sodomitical activities in the monasteries and noted that
some monks even fondled and kissed young boys. For such indis-
cretions, he suggested a self-inflicted punishment of flagellation.
His followers took their punishment all too willingly, and were so
keen to follow his instructions that they injured themselves in their
self-inflicted mortifications.7 His concerns were not isolated and,
80
Medieval monastic
flagellation.
with the rulings of the Third Lateran Council in 1179, the Church
authorities stepped up their attacks on sodomitical behaviour both
among their own leaders and their flock. Clerics who engaged in
‘unnatural’ practices were ostracized to monasteries (where they
might actually practice them all the more), whereas lay people were
excommunicated. Church Father Thomas Aquinas reinforced the
need to take a strict line against sodomy, deeming it the most horren-
dous sin. As a result of the Church’s stance, some of the worst ensuing
persecutions were of sodomites.8 Because of its negative connotations,
sodomy was often used by the leaders of the Church and the State
in accusations against their enemies as a means of political attack.
Both the Cathars and the Knights Templar became targets for the
Catholic Church, and were accused of buggery. In reality, there was
no evidence that either group did anything other than upset the
Pope and the king.
The Cathars had flourished in the twelfth century. After travel-
ling from Bulgaria, they settled in Albi in Languedoc (from where
they gained their alternative name, Albigensians). Known for their
81
purity of faith (cathar means ‘pure’), they were to become a thorn in

the side of the corrupt Catholic Church. They refused to have chil-
dren, believing that this would link them to the material world they
rejected. They therefore had no doctrinal objection to contraception
or suicide, nor did they believe in the need for priests or churches
– all issues that upset the Catholic Church. In order to wipe them out,
Pope Innocent iii called for a crusade and had them hunted down
and massacred. In this attack, which became known as the Albi-
gensian Crusade, an estimated 500,000 men, women and children
(converts from the Catholic faith) were slaughtered. A similar fate,
following similar accusations, befell the Templars, but this time the
attack was motivated by greed as well as resentment. With the royal
coffers empty after continuous wars, Philip iv of France was simply
after the great wealth the Templars had amassed as a result of their
plunders during various Crusades. In 1307, on being accused of
unnatural sexual activities, as many Templars as could be found
were arrested, tortured and murdered. In 1314, Jacques de Molay,
Grand Master of the Knights Templar, was sentenced to be burned
at the stake. Charges ranged from spitting on the Cross to kissing the
initiated man on his mouth, navel and posterior during ceremonies.
Rank had its obligations and even kings were expected to con-
form sexually. Edward ii of England placed himself in jeopardy
when he made no secret of his sexual preference for men. Surround-
ing himself with men at court, his homosexual tendencies led him
to grant his favourites outrageous liberties and allowed them to
dominate him. Seizing her opportunity, his wife Isabella and her
followers accused the king of incompetence and of being unfit to
govern. Perhaps outright accusations of sodomy in a king were too
much for a country to take, especially as God supposedly appointed
the monarch. Such declarations had the potential to undermine
the monarchy as an institution. In any case, as a result of the queen’s
manoeuvrings, Edward was forced to abdicate in 1327 in favour of
his fourteen-year-old son. But with Edward still alive, the Crown
was still in jeopardy and his death was inevitable. It came in a man-
ner that expressed his opponents’ contempt for his sexual habits.
One contemporary described the killing:
On 22 September, having suddenly seized him lying in bed

and having pressed him down and suffocated him with great
82
Jacques de Molay, Grand Master of the Knights Templar, sentenced to the stake.
From the Chroniques de France ou de St Denis, 14th-century manuscript.
pillows and a weight heavier than fifteen robust men, with a

plumber’s iron heated red hot, through a horn applied lead-
ing to the privy parts of the bowel, they burned out the
respiratory organs past the intestines.9
Edward’s murder was thereby a violent comment on his sex life. A

hundred years later, Eriksson, king of Norway and Sweden, was
forced to abdicate when he was accused of performing unnatural
acts with a knight.10 As leaders of men, kings were supposed to
abide by the rules laid down for them, rules that included having
a sexual preference for women, or at least showing no obvious lean-
ings towards men. The rules of sexual behaviour were so powerful
that even monarchs had to obey them.
83
Buggery in Europe
The establishment of the Inquisition in 1233 under the rule of Pope
Gregory ix fuelled public anxieties over sodomites and the situa-
tion took a more aggressive turn. In Europe over the next three
centuries, the persecution of sodomites entailed torture, maiming
and death for any man unfortunate enough to be caught. The cities
of Siena, Bologna, Florence, Venice, Paris, Ghent and Bruges all
brought out new laws to encourage the detection of sodomites, while
the public were encouraged to come forward and expose them. The
accused men came from all classes but were mainly tradesmen of
the middling sort – shoemakers, butchers, carpenters, tailors and
grocers. Apprentices or lower-class servants or labourers were among
them, while aristocrats accounted for about one-third of the total.
As ever, those with money found it easier to evade detection. When
caught, the perpetrators might suffer any range of punishments
from castration, blinding and amputation of limbs to the death
penalty (usually reserved for repeat offenders). Usually they were
burned at the stake. In cases where the accused was an older man,
he was often married with children. It seems that the notion of sin-
gle adult homosexual men was not part of the medieval picture.
In Florence the authorities became increasingly concerned
about a network of sodomites that flourished in their city. They dis-
covered that certain older adult men, who were often married, were
actively pursuing younger men. In 1325, in an attempt to discourage
such behaviour, a statute was introduced that prescribed castration
for men who sodomized boys. Because remuneration was offered
to informers, it provided the opportunity for anyone to extort money
from sodomites unlucky enough to attract attention, and black-
mail flourished. At this stage, it also became noticed that although
some youths were submitting to older men, this was by no means the
most usual kind of encounter. More frequently sodomy was occur-
ring between young men of a similar age, who were engaging in
mutually consensual acts. Subsequently, penalties were put in place
for youths who allowed themselves to be sodomized. Younger offend-
ers were usually lucky enough to escape with fines of anything
between 50 and 100 lire, together with a public flogging. Sometimes
the authorities thought it prescient to make an example of a youth.
Such was the case with the unfortunate fifteen-year-old Giovanni
84
di Giovanni, who admitted to being sodomized by many men over

a period of time. First he was paraded on an ass to a place outside the
city walls to ensure his plight was fully publicized; in full view of
the crowd, he was then castrated and mutilated with a red-hot iron
‘in the part of his body where he allowed himself to be known in
sodomitical practices’.11
In reaction to the amount of illicit sex taking place between
men, the appalled authorities embarked on an extended persecu-
tion. Between 1432 and 1502, town officials in Florence established
the ‘Officers of the Night’, a police force designated to root out and
destroy all sodomites. Even the clergy were attacked: in Bologna in
1475, one captured priest was enclosed in a hut, oil poured over it and
set on fire. Male prostitution was particularly rife in fourteenth-
century Venice. One man, who called himself Rolandina and sold
Donatello, David,
1430, marble;
the statue was
controversial
due to its unusually
sexualized, perhaps
homoerotic, nature.
85
Caravaggio, Amor Vincit Omnia (‘Love Conquers All’, known as Victorious Cupid),
1601–2, oil on canvas.
himself from around the area of the Rialto Bridge, was convicted
and burned at the stake. Before his death, in his statement given in
1354, he also bore witness that he believed he was doing nothing
wrong. Although he was married, he admitted that he had never
felt sexual desire for women.12 This persecution therefore did not go
unchallenged. Some men denied there was anything wrong with
86
the activity and were not afraid of speaking out. During the fifteenth
century, persecutions were also taking place in Augsburg, Regens-
burg, Basel, Ghent and Bruges, with increasing numbers of sodomites
placed on trial. In Basel, after being caught attempting to seduce the
youth Johannes Müller, the cleric Johannes Stocker used the defence
that everyone was committing sodomy. He retorted, ‘If everybody
who committed this were burnt at the stake, not even fifty men
would survive in Basel.’13
While this wholesale onslaught was taking place in towns in
Italy and the Low Countries, the rest of Europe seems to have been
comparatively lax in their punishment of sodomites. Medieval
Russia appears to have been quite uninterested in sodomy. Although
it was a treated as a sin under the Orthodox Church, there were no
Caravaggio, Boy with a Basket of Fruit, c. 1593, oil on canvas.

87
legal sanctions against it. London seems to have been equally

detached, with only one man charged between 1420 and 1518. With
new laws against sodomy issued by the Holy Roman Empire in 1532,
Spain seems to have stepped up its action against homosexuals,
burning 65 men between 1578 and 1616.
An alternative attitude to persecution ran concurrently even in
Renaissance Italy. Close male friendships were cultivated, and
notably captured in visual art. When Donatello encapsulated his
Ganymede in his statue of David, he combined both the fighting
manly spirit with desire of youth. In Baroque art Caravaggio, with
an eye for a beautiful boy, created pictures of idealized, fey youth.
Despite the persecution of sodomites, friendships between men
and pubescent boys were considered acceptable and mentorship
between noble families all over Europe was considered necessary
for social integration and elevation. Meanwhile in England, attitudes
towards sodomites were slower to shift.
Home-grown Vice
Unlike other parts of Europe, sodomy in England seems to have been
fairly well tolerated as a vice up to end of the seventeenth century,
so long as the sodomite fulfilled his social functions of marriage
and spawning children. The poet John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester,
was one of the most notorious libertines of the seventeenth century.
He openly declared his love of boys: ‘There’s a sweet, soft page of
mine / Does the trick worth forty wenches.’ However, the authorities
took offence to his play Sodom; or, The Quintessence of Debauchery,
published in 1684, which they censored, mostly because of its overt
references to sodomy. Restrictions were creeping in to prevent sodomy
becoming more widespread. Broadsides decrying sodomites were
becoming popular reading material, and most could be brought
for a few pennies. John Dunton published a poem entitled ‘The
He-Strumpets: A Satyr on the Sodomite-Club’ in 1707, declaring
that men were seeking out sodomites because so many prostitutes
had the clap.
All Cracks are found so full of Ails,

A New Society prevails,
Call’d S[o]d[om]ites; Men worse than Goats,
88
Who dress themselves in Petticoats,

To Whore as O[s]born did with O[a]tes.14
Sodomy was made a crime in common law for the first time in
England in 1533, and remained a capital offence until 1861, with the
last execution taking place in 1835.15 Because private incidents were
increasingly being made public through the courts, buggery was now
Woodcut illustration from the broadside ballad The Women Hater’s

Lamentation (1707).
89
perceived as being on the rise. In 1663, Samuel Pepys reported, ‘Sir

J Jemmes and Mr Batten both say that buggery is now almost grown
as common among our gallants as in Italy.’16 Certainly there was the
opportunity. This was a time when men shared beds, particularly if
travelling and staying at inns, and masters shared beds with their
apprentices who lived within the same household. These bounds
were sometimes overstepped, as in the case of Meredith Davy in
Somerset in 1630. According to evidence heard in court, Davy shared
a bed with his twelve-year-old apprentice, John Vicary, and after a hard
night’s drinking Davy would often have sex with the boy. Once, after
the boy cried out, Davy ended up in court.17 Few young boys had
the courage, knowledge or money to bring a case to court – most
probably simply moved on as soon as they could. Cases that reached
the courts were more often brought by other adults as a result of
overhearing or seeing the activities.
By the eighteenth century, the death penalty was used less, but
the very least a sodomite could expect was a stint in the pillory, a
hefty fine and a prison sentence of a couple of years. The pillory in
itself could often be a death sentence – people rarely came out
unscathed. Regarded by the mob as an occasion of spectacle and
entertainment, most of the crowd came armed with rotting food,
stinking fish bones, putrid eggs and dead rats and cats to throw at
the culprits. The overwhelming avalanche of missiles frequently
took out a prisoner’s eye or left him otherwise maimed. The extent
of alienation felt by victims is made evident in one broadside ballad,
or broadsheet, The Women Hater’s Lamentation, which described
in verse the raids taking place in 1707. As a result of the persecu-
tion, several men cut their own throats or hanged themselves while
awaiting trial.18
Even the most religious men were seen to be indulging in the
‘the worst of crimes’. On 9 October 1721, George Duffus was indicted
for sodomy on Nicholas Leader after they had met at a religious
meeting-house in Old Gravel Lane in London. Duffus had first
approached Leader to discuss the merits of the sermon and was
‘seeming very religious’. According to Leader, Duffus had spoken to
him and inveigled his way into his good opinion. At the next visit,
Duffus left it too late to go home and asked if he could stay the night
with Leader. At the trial, it was reported that
90
After they had been in Bed a little while, the Prisoner [Duffus]
began to kiss and embrace the Prosecutor [Leader], thrust his
Tongue in his Mouth, called him his dear Friend, and got
on his Back; but the Prosecutor resisting, threw him off 3 or
4 times, telling him if he would not be still, he’d turn him out
of Bed. The prisoner then seizing the Prosecutor by the
Throat almost strangled him, turned him on his Face, and
forcibly entered his Body about an Inch . . .
Leader was able to throw him off, forcing him to withdraw, and
‘prevented the prisoner from making an Emission Seminis in his
Body; but having thus forced the prisoner to withdraw, he (the
prisoner) emitted in his own Hand, clapping it on the tail of the
Prosecutor’s Shirt. Saying, Now you have it!’19 Duffus was found
guilty of sodomy, fined 20 marks and sentenced to a month’s impris-
onment and to stand upon the pillory near Old Gravel Lane – still not
a very heavy fine for what amounts to attempted sodomitical rape.
Young apprentices still seem to have been fair game for those
on the prowl. When Henry Wolf met John Holloway in 1735 on an
errand for his master, a brandy merchant, he took him to several
pubs where he fondled him, and on to Bishop’s Gate Church Yard,
where he bought him a nosegay and a penny custard. Eventually he
approached Bethlem Royal Hospital, which ran along the south side
of the Moorfields. Giving evidence, Holloway announced, ‘Coming
to Bedlam, he perfectly pull’d and haul’d me in to see the Mad-
folks. There he took me into the House of Office, and pull’d down
his own Breeches and mine, and – in his Mouth.’20 Oral sex seems
to have been a common sexual approach. When in 1802 the young
James Reader applied for a job to the Revd George Donnisthorpe,
the vicar offered him liquor and money and said, ‘if he were a Lady
and had ten thousand a year he would bestow it all on him’. There-
upon Donnisthorpe took the boy’s ‘private Member in his hand,
knelt down on one knee and put it into his Mouth’.21 Reader went
on to see Donnisthorpe four more times before warning him off, so,
despite bringing the incident to court, he does not seem to have
been entirely unwilling.
While it would seem that some apprentices were targets for older
men, the youths themselves sometimes received benefits in the
encounter, as sexual enjoyment and/or monetary gain. Others would
91
Depiction of sodomy in the monastery, engraving for Histoire de Dom Bougre,
portier de Chartreux, attributed to Jean-Charles Gervaise de Latouche (1741).
shout out for help and adults might intervene. Although attempts on
youths were common, some adult men preferred to look for groups
of like-minded men rather than individuals, finding the sociability
and shared enjoyments more convivial.
Sodomitical Subcultures
Subcultures of sodomites emerged throughout Europe during the
eighteenth century, where consensual sexual activities were prac-
tised.22 In France, Police Lieutenant Lenoir estimated that there were
around 20,000 sodomites in Paris in 1725. The type of man engaging
in this activity appears to have been changing. Previously sodomy
had been known as the beau vice, as it seemingly affected mainly
the nobility; now it was becoming a fashion among everyone ‘from
dukes down to footmen’. It was no longer the predilection of a few, but
crossed class barriers, with merchants, artisans and domestic ser-
vants all being caught up in raids and brought to trial. The banks of
the Seine were a favourite pick-up place, with some men putting hand-
kerchiefs on their heads and, as one observer commented, ‘imitating
women, mincing like them . . . They choose each other in these gath-
erings for mutual fondling and to commit infamies.’23 In order to keep
some sort of control over the situation, police kept a list of pederasts
and paid a series of informants – mouches (flies), as they were called
– to entrap sodomites. However, this method seems to have been
ineffective, as by 1780, Lieutenant Lenoir claimed that the number
of sodomites in the city had doubled to around 40,000. According to
him, there were now as many sodomites as there were prostitutes.24
Those caught were sent to the dungeon of the general hospital in
Bicêtre, south of Paris, a place known for its extremely high mortal-
ity rate. Once incarcerated, there was every chance an inmate would
not survive. Although legal battles continued against these men,
some contemporaries voiced their concerns about how shabbily
sodomites were being treated. The forward-thinking French philoso-
pher Nicolas de Condorçet wrote: ‘Sodomy when there is no violence
involved, cannot be part of the criminal law. It does not violate the rights
of anyone.’25 As public attitudes gradually shifted, the violence of
the punishments abated. The hanging of sodomites was no longer
considered appropriate and was partially supplanted with their depor-
tation to the French colonies in the West Indies such as Martinique.
93
In the Netherlands persecutions erupted in the 1730s for the

first time. Twenty-two boys and men from one village alone were
executed after the confession of a soldier revealed a network of
sodomites throughout major cities in the Dutch Republic. It became
apparent that there existed a sophisticated subculture in which
members knew about each other, often even in other cities. Similar
to elsewhere in Europe, pubs, brothels, parks and toilets were used
as meeting places in The Hague. In Amsterdam, sodomites picked
each other up on the ground floor of the City Hall. Kicking each
other’s feet, patting one hand with another and looking each other
in the eye with hand on hip were all signs and gestures indicating
their inclinations. Although anal intercourse took place, so did
mutual masturbation, known as ‘milking out’ or ‘throwing the seed
with the hand’. Oral sex seemed less popular, at least in the cases
that were brought to trial. An edict against sodomy came out when
the persecutions started in 1730, which was revised in 1764 and
held until 1811 when the country came under the French penal law.26
However, up to this time, no laws against sodomy had existed in
the Netherlands.
Other countries throughout Europe stayed quieter. Most were
increasingly reluctant to inflict the death penalty for sodomy. Even
those subject to the Inquisition eased up – Portugal, which had 278
arrests under the Inquisition between 1547 and 1768, saw only 23
men arrested in the eighteenth century, and no burnings took place.
In Denmark, although the death penalty existed for sodomy from
1683 until 1866, it was never applied. Private acts of sodomy were
decriminalized in many places (those under the Napoleonic Laws)
but were gradually recriminalized later in the nineteenth century.
Publicly, there was a decreasing acceptance of older men conduct-
ing such practices, particularly if they were seen to be effeminate
or ‘mollies’. Meanwhile, in Britain, persecution against sodomites
rose after the Society for the Reformation of Manners was founded
in 1691 and members actively began pursuing and prosecuting
sodomites and prostitutes. As a result, more cases of buggery came
to court than ever before.
Raids took place on various bawdy houses thought to harbour
sodomites, the places often identified by secret informers. One of the
most notorious groups was found in the infamous Mother Clap’s
Molly House, a private residence where Mother Clap brought in
94
liquor for her customers. Here, men were caught drinking, carousing
and having sex with each other; their practice was to dress as women
and perform mock marriages, giving ‘birth’ to wooden dolls and
Cheshire cheeses.27 After her conviction, Mother Clap was sentenced
to stand in the pillory in Smithfield, to pay a fine of 20 marks and
suffer two years’ imprisonment, but she was so badly pilloried that
she died of her injuries a couple of days later. Although Mother
Clap’s case was high-profile for London, other subcultures existed in
southern England, such as in Bath and Somerset.28
An unprecedented number of prosecutions for sodomy took place
at the beginning of the nineteenth century as antagonism towards
homosexual subcultures continued unabated.29 After raids on the
White Swan tavern in Vere Street, London in 1810, 27 men were
arrested, two of whom hanged and six pilloried. Once again, the anti-
vice societies were zealous in their persecution of all-male sexual
activity. Perhaps one of the biggest scandals erupted in 1889 after a
police raid on an all-male brothel in Cleveland Street, Fitzrovia. The
place had been discovered after fifteen-year-old Charles Thomas
Swinscow was found with the large sum of fourteen shillings on
him. He admitted that he had been working as a male prostitute at
the Cleveland Street brothel, and was just one of a handful of tele-
graph messenger boys employed as prostitutes by the brothel owner
Charles Hammond. The prosecution was made more difficult when,
to the horror of the police, most of the clients were found to be aris-
tocrats; one was rumoured to be the eldest son of the Prince of
Wales; another was Lord Arthur Somerset, equerry to the prince,
who quietly fled abroad. Somerset paid for the defence of the boys
involved and, as a result, they received light sentences. However,
the police were later accused of covering up the arrests in order to
protect the wealthy clientele.
While the authorities continued to swoop down on brothels,
they also picked off individuals – transvestites made particularly easy
targets. In one of the most notorious cases of the century, Ernest
Boulton and Frederick William Park, known to their friends as
‘Stella and Fanny’, were apprehended on the Strand on 28 April
1870 while on a trip to the theatre. At the time, Boulton was wear-
ing a cherry-coloured evening dress, trimmed with white lace and
a wig styled in a braided chignon, and he was adorned with bracelets;
Park was clad in a plunging, dark-green silk dress, a black lace shawl
95
Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, 1894.
and white kid gloves, his look completed by a blond curling wig. In
this case, the prosecution failed to prove that they had had anal sex,
or that it was a crime in Britain for men to dress in women’s clothes.30
While the Offences Against the Persons Act 1861 had finally abolished
hanging for the crime of buggery, a person could still be subject to
life imprisonment, with penal servitude. The Criminal Law Amend-
ment Act of 1885 further aggravated the situation when it introduced
a prohibition on all male-on-male sexual acts. Now not only sodomy
96
was illegal, but ‘any act of gross indecency with another male person’
was deemed a misdemeanour attracting two years’ imprisonment.
For the most part, the authorities had tended to keep quiet
about the topic of male-on-male sex as they were worried about
possible copycat behaviour, but by the turn of the century, homosex-
uality was to become more prominent in the public’s knowledge.
It was ultimately one particular trial – that of the playwright and poet
Oscar Wilde – which led to homosexuality being discussed more
widely. In 1895, Wilde had unwisely brought a case of libel against
the Marquess of Queensberry, father of his lover Sir Alfred Douglas,
after Queensberry had accused Wilde of posing as a sodomite. The
case backfired and Wilde was arrested for gross indecency. As a
result, he was to spend two years in prison serving hard labour. He
was in such poor health by the time he was released that he lived
only another three years. He and ‘Bosie’, as he affectionately called
Douglas, met up and lived together for a while in Naples, but it did not
work out and Bosie returned to England. Bosie was later to repudi-
ate both homosexuality and Wilde, but meanwhile braver men were
working behind the scenes to try and decriminalize homosexuality.
Now the question being asked was: ‘Are these people votaries of vice,
or are they insane?’31
Ernest Boulton and Frederick William Park under arrest, 1870.

97
The Birth of the Homosexual

With the development of sexology at the end of the nineteenth
century, there was a shift in the ideas surrounding homosexuality.
Sexologists declared that homosexuality should be seen as an ill-
ness rather than as a criminal deviance, and that instead of punishing
homosexuals, attempts should be made to ‘cure’ them. In order to
steer the homosexual on a course to ‘normal’ heterosexual feelings,
patients were advised to stop masturbating, and encouraged to fan-
tasize about women – if necessary, they should make regular trips to
a brothel. In addition, new medical therapies were introduced to
assist their normalization with potential ‘remedies’ being tried out
such as hypnotism, hydrotherapy and faradization (which involved
small electrical shocks being passed through the body). At the time,
these ideas of the sexologists were considered a revolution in com-
passionate thinking.
Initially, most of the sexologists concurred with the belief that
‘sexual inverts’, as they called homosexuals, were born, not made. They
argued that because these feelings were innate, homosexuals could
not be blamed for their sexual preferences. The onset of the inves-
tigation began when Karl Heinrich Ulrichs wrote about an alternative
sexuality in which he classified homosexual men as ‘urnings’ and
lesbians as ‘urninds’. He had had first-hand knowledge of the expe-
riences of those suffering punishment as a result of their sexual
inclinations while working as a legal advisor in Hanover, and his
aim was to change the law. However, because of his public persona,
when his homosexuality was discovered he lost his job. In a series of
books published between 1864 and 1879, beginning with The Riddle
of Male-Male Love, he urged people to consider urning not as sinful
or criminal but as natural. German psychiatrists took up the debate
when Carl Westphal published Die Konträre Sexualempfindung
(1869) on ‘contrary sexual feelings’. He was joined by Fabian and
philosopher Edward Carpenter, whose publication The Intermediate
Sex (1908) considered men’s right to love each other. For the first
time, sexologists were bringing the topic of homosexuality into the
medical realm and exposing the injustices of legal punishments.
Within this forum, sexologists began to explore who might
become homosexual, and why. In his Principles of Psychology (1890),
William James favoured the congenital consensus and believed the
98
Nude male youths photographed by Wilhelm von Gloeden, from his Taormina
series, c. 1893.
essence of the feeling to be in all men; he saw inversion as ‘a kind of

sexual appetite of which very likely most men possess the germinal
possibility’.32 Albert Moll extended this theory; he believed that there
were feminine and masculine feelings in both sexes from childhood,
‘that a homosexual tendency is very frequent in normal children’.33
Freud concurred with this idea, stating that most boys and girls dis-
play homosexual tendencies when they reached puberty. Indeed,
in Freud’s evolvement of psychoanalysis, he placed most anomalies
99
Male bathers, 1970s.
Thomas Eakins, Swimming, 1885, oil on canvas.

of sexual aberration within the frame of childhood experience. Since

he believed that these tendencies remained in neurotic people, Freud
never carried out any psychoanalysis of men or women ‘without dis-
covering a significant homosexual tendency’. Krafft-Ebing, along with
these other sexologists, also encouraged a more accepting stance
on homosexuality, referring to homosexuals as ‘step-children of
nature’. Although Krafft-Ebing had initially seen homosexuality as
a congenital disease or degeneration, he later modified his view after
seeing the mental superiority of some of his homosexual patients,
recognizing them to be educated, intelligent men devoid of mental
illness or incapacities. Part of this modification of his ideas was a
result of patients who, inspired by his non-judgemental stance, had
written to him to explain their own feelings and experiences.
Unlike Krafft-Ebing, fellow sexologist Havelock Ellis believed
that homosexuality might also be acquired or learned behaviour, and
considered the effects of childhood influences. In his book Sexual
Inversion, published in Britain in 1897, he pondered on the onset
of homosexuality while investigating the topic of schoolboys and
concluded that most homosexuality begins in school. To illustrate
his point, he provided an example letter from one of his correspon-
dents which highlighted this man’s own experience of schoolboy
sexual inverts. The correspondent suggested there were three types:
those who were ‘radically inverted’, who targeted the corruption of
younger boys; those who had been introduced to homosexuality as
passive victims in youth, then gone on to practise active and passive
acts with other known homosexuals, but would not contemplate
‘corrupting fresh victims’; and young boys who found pleasure
through masturbation or intercrural sex, but were probably ignorant
of any sort of sexual morality. The correspondent thought that the
appropriate punishments for the worst offenders should be the
birch for their first offence and expulsion for the second; for the
third category of offenders – those too young to know better – it
was better to leave them to grow out of it. ‘After all’, he commented,
‘there is no reason to ruin a boy’s prospects because he is a little
beast at sixteen.’34
By the time he wrote his treatise, Ellis believed that Krafft-
Ebing’s definition was no longer acceptable. He believed that the old
categories of ‘acquired’ or ‘congenital’ inversion were not enough, sug-
gesting rather that both a predisposition to homosexuality and an
101
acquired taste for it were necessary for homosexuality to develop.

Even when homosexuality became apparent only in later life, Ellis
sees it as a ‘retarded’ or latent congenital inversion. He refers to
Iwan Bloch, who gave the example of pseudo-homosexuality or, as
he termed it, ‘secondary homosexuality’, something which we would
now call ‘situational homosexuality’. This occurs when members of
the same sex are confined together for long periods of time, say in
prison, on board ship or in barracks, where there is no alternative sex
to choose. Some people in this situation are merely making the best
of a bad situation for their particular tastes and revert back to their
preferred heterosexuality when out of their institution.
Indeed, most sexologists were keen to differentiate between the
‘true’ invert and the pseudo-homosexual; to separate those who
possessed the sexual impulse or inclination from those involved in
homosexual acts for other reasons. Magnus Hirschfeld revealed
three types of men whom he called ‘spurious inverts’, who involved
themselves in homosexual acts but could not really to be consid-
ered true homosexuals. First, there were those who indulged in acts
for money – male prostitutes and blackmailers; second, those who
allowed homosexuality for the reasons of friendship, good nature
or pity of their homosexual admirers; and finally, those who were
in ‘situational’ homosexuality. The sexual act itself was seen as no
proof of sexual impulse or inclination. However, Ellis questioned
whether Hirschfeld’s categories were worthwhile. There was no
proof that people in these categories were bisexual or had true
homosexual inclinations.
It may seem obvious now that different people have different
leanings to varying degrees. In the past (and to a large extent still, par-
ticularly outside the West), social conditioning and laws making
homosexuality illegal have pushed many people into heterosexu-
ality who might not have been naturally inclined to the opposite sex.
Sexologists helped to bring the topic into the open, at least airing it
within medical discussions, and pushed for changes to the law con-
cerning the treatment of homosexuals.
Camping Out
At the beginning of the twentieth century, as men were finding new
ways to entertain themselves, the police were finding new ways to
102
prosecute them. Out and out ‘queens’ were more susceptible to

being picked up by police, as they were more obvious by their ‘camp-
ness’ – dressed in frocks, with painted lips and powder, they were
hard to miss. Police blotted their faces for traces of make-up to
use as evidence. Homosexual men responded to police harassment
by forging their own hidden areas where they might pick up like-
minded men and have sex – in urinals at the Black Lion pub on
Kilburn High Road and in Fair Street, Bermondsey, in London, for
example. In the face of these persecutions, men in drag showed
considerable personal courage in declaring themselves so openly.
The trial of Oscar Wilde was not far behind them and men were well
aware of the dangers in being declared a homosexual. Unfortunately,
police knew where to find their prey and made visits to the most
popular urinals as part of their regular beat. Searching under cubi-
cle doors for more than one pair of feet, they bashed down doors
in order to catch men in the act. Parks remained popular cruising
grounds. In London, Clapham Common, Hampstead Heath and Hyde
Park were old favourites, as were the main throughways of Oxford
Street, Leicester Square and Trafalgar Square. A Reverend Peel com-
plained in 1922, ‘One only has to walk through Hyde Park . . . to see
couples . . . lying on top of each other . . . the sights to be seen near
Marble Arch are disgusting.’35
Meanwhile, soldiers hung out below the National Gallery,
known as the ‘meat rack’, while queens preferred Piccadilly Circus
and the surrounding, less obvious, streets. New clubs emerged
where men met to dance and drink together – at the Caravan in
Endell Street at the corner of Shaftesbury Avenue, the Criterion
bar in Piccadilly Circus and Billie’s Club in Little Denmark Street.
It was ironic that bathhouses, such as Bermondsey Turkish Baths,
built for the working poor as a result of the upright Victorian obses-
sion with cleanliness, emerged as one of the most notorious and
favourite places to find homosexual sex. Even the rich and famous
found their enjoyment in bathhouses – film star Rock Hudson was
a frequent visitor to the Savoy Turkish Baths and the writer Chris-
topher Isherwood took composer Benjamin Britten there for his
first ‘outing’. For six shillings for an overnight stay, it offered a ‘safe’
place for men to have sex together, but often little sleep. One man
complained, ‘I slept for a week in a Turkish bath, which meant virtu-
ally, that I did not sleep at all.’36 A camp language known as Polari
103
allowed men to communicate in code without other people under-

standing them. This method of speech could be traced back at least
to the seventeenth century and was a mixture of Italian, Greek,
German, French and London cockney rhyming slang with a smat-
tering of Yiddish and Romany, commonly used by workers in
fairgrounds and circuses.
A self-imposed difference existed between men who had sex with
other men. Some men who recognized themselves as homosexual
during the 1920s and ’30s called themselves ‘queer’. Others who
were also having sex with men did not see themselves as anything
other than ‘normal’ (what we would now call ‘straight’ or heterosex-
ual), and did not see themselves as ‘queer’. Working-class men who
sold themselves in order to make extra cash were among those who
saw themselves as ‘normal’ and became known as ‘rough trade’; some
of them were married or had girlfriends. They saw their actions as
part of a tough masculine life. Because women were seen as ‘hard
to get’, men had to look for sex where it was offered. This made diffi-
culties for some queers who accidentally misjudged them. As one
self-confessed queer admitted in a letter to another man after trying
to pick him up in the Caravan, ‘Just a note to say that I was very dis-
appointed of you . . . I honestly thought you were queer, but different
from the others’.37
A different attitude towards homosexuality developed among
many British working-class families and a relationship between a
man and a youth might be accepted. It was even welcomed in some
families where extra income might be earned from the friendship.
When a fourteen-year-old boy, John, delivered groceries to one
Charles R every week in 1922, a sexual relationship developed, as
the boy explained, ‘I used to help clean up. He used to be with me in
the bedroom and play about with my privates. He used to undress
me and used to undress himself . . . He used to put his privates up
my back passage.’38 Charles used to give him a £10 note every time he
visited him and this became an integral part of John’s family income.
His mother and father knew about their relationship but seemed to
have accepted it, even forming their own relationships with Charles.
The boy’s mother borrowed money from him and in turn gave him
coal and chickens during the general strike of 1926. However, gen-
eral anti-homosexual sentiment existed at least until the 1960s in
Britain and America.
104
After Stonewall, the first Gay Pride march, New York, 1970.
A seismic shift occurred in public opinion when the Stonewall

riots erupted after a raid on a bar in Christopher Street, New York,
on 27 June 1969. Gays flooded the streets in protest at the treatment
they received from the authorities, resulting in violent demonstra-
tions. Others joined in and the protests continued the following
evening, and again some weeks later. Activists gathered and estab-
lished openly gay and lesbian bars where people could mingle instead
of gathering at furtive meetings in oft-raided secret clubs. Gay Pride
marches began to take place throughout the world on a yearly basis
to commemorate the riots. More exclusive gay and lesbian bars
emerged with the arrival of the discos of the 1970s and ’80s, where
specialized drugs were introduced to enhance sensation – poppers,
amphetamines and cocaine became the accessories to a good night
out. The gay man as queen gave way to the moustached macho-man
in tight denims, white T-shirt and with muscles to die for. Cruising
in toilets, bathhouses and parks continued unabated and a new gay
culture was born.
Gradually attitudes were changing and laws were introduced to
catch up. Activists in both Norway and Denmark had already set
up their first homosexual organizations in 1948 and had long been
campaigning for gay and lesbian rights – homosexuality was legal
from 1933 in Norway and 1944 in Sweden (but was already legal from
the 1790s in some countries such as France, Monaco, Luxembourg and
105
Belgium). For most Western countries changes in the laws around

homosexuality came later, from around the 1960s: 1967 in the uk,
state by state in America but legal nationwide only in 2003. The
Netherlands and Denmark had already begun the new wave of open-
ness to gay living in the 1960s; North America, Britain and Germany
did so later, in the 1970s; and Spain not until the 1980s. However, the
arrival of Aids in the 1980s saw a speedy halt drawn to the freedom
of gays as health officials demanded the closing of all bathhouses,
bars and backrooms. Although this period suffocated easily attain-
able sex, a better understanding emerged about preventing sexually
transmitted diseases. A realignment of gay culture in the 1990s saw
gay men heading for holiday destinations such as Mykonos, Ibiza,
Fire Island, Miami’s South Beach and Palm Springs to meet other gay
men. Nowadays with Internet culture and sites such as Gaydar, no gay
man need be alone.
A complete turn around in attitudes towards gays has occurred
in areas of medicine as well as law. In 1973, homosexuality was first
removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders list by the American Psychiatric Association. Before then,
medically speaking it was still considered a ‘perversion’. Most Euro-
pean countries did not allow same-sex marriage until the end of
the first decade of the second millennium. Today ‘civil partnerships’
or gay marriages are accepted in Norway, Denmark and Britain and
many other European countries. Again, Scandinavian countries led
the way against homophobic discrimination with Norway becoming
the first country to impose laws in 1981; Denmark made the first
same-sex unions legal as early as 1989; and gender neutral marriages
have been legal in Norway and Sweden since 2009. Slowly, other
European countries have followed suit. As a result of the new anti-
homophobic laws, at the beginning of 2012, one psychotherapist
faced being stripped of her accreditation to the British Association
for Counselling and Psychotherapy after treating a patient who said
he wanted to be ‘cured’ of his homosexuality, an illustration as to
how far attitudes have changed in the perception of homosexuality.
It is not only forbidden in law to discriminate against homosexuals
but homosexuality can no longer be seen as an ‘illness’ to be cured.
Although most countries in the West consider homosexuality to be
acceptable, there is still much discrimination. In May 2012, St Peters-
burg’s Governor Georgy Poltavchenko approved a law penalizing
106
‘the propaganda of homosexuality and paedophilia among minors’.

The law effectively outlawed any Gay Pride events as well as linking
homosexuality with paedophilia.
For years there have been discussions about whether homo-
sexual feelings are natural or nurtured, determined by biology or
constructed by society. The old debate reurfaces in new arguments
about whether a ‘gay gene’ exists, but what should really matter is why
people think it is so important to differentiate between different
types of sexualities or predilections and why homosexuals were (and
still are) not always accorded equal rights with heterosexuals.
107
Symposium scene, two prostitutes. Red-figure cup, c. 5th century.
four
From Female Friendships to

Lipstick Lesbians
Homosexuality may nearly always be suspected in females who wear their
hair short, who dress in the fashion of men.
Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis (1886)
A lthough lesbianism has been considered a perversion at times

in the past, overall it has created less furore than male homosex-
uality. Close female relationships were of small significance to soci-
ety at large, probably because women were considered less important
than men. Women could carry out the most intimate of relationships
without raising undue concern from observers. Indeed, passionate
female friendships were considered normal right up until the twen-
tieth century. Although occasionally queries hung over certain women
with more ‘masculine’ qualities, little attention was paid to them
apart from the odd derogatory remark. Famous women were an
exception and gossip surrounded queens such as Marie Antoinette
of France and Christina of Sweden; both were accused of being les-
bians. Such attacks were often used as part of political invective and
a way of denigrating the subject rather than having any basis in fact.
Uncovering the lesbian has proved more difficult than finding
her male homosexual counterpart as she was often hidden from
view. Certainly there were lots of names for her – Sapphist, Tommy,
butch, femme, dyke – and she does occasionally become noticed in
pamphlets, trial reports, medical records and newspapers. But as
long as she was domesticated and modest and deferred to men,
she would be ignored. She might conduct lesbian affairs without
causing suspicion if she resigned herself to an outward appearance
of decorum. Women were rarely arrested or hanged for the crime of
being sexually attracted to their own sex, as men were, and lesbian-
ism was never made illegal, although lesbians were persecuted
under different laws (fraud, indecency, sodomy). It was only when
women were seen to be wayward or stepping out of their allotted
domestic role that they were considered trouble. Then it was often
109
their rebelliousness that created antagonism rather than their desires.

Was this to do with people’s ideas of what form lesbian sex might take?
Indeed, was there any understanding about it at all?
Over the last few decades, historic cases have emerged which
show women who sought each other for sex, companionship and
love.1 In this search, historians have divided lesbians into certain
identifiable categories: female hermaphrodites; ‘female husbands’
who ‘married’ other women and took them as their wives; women who
conducted lifelong ‘female friendships’ and sometimes shared a
home; women who lived with other women in shared communities;
and transvestite women who ‘passed’ as men (although some women
who dressed as men did so for work opportunities, for adventure
and the sense of freedom it gave them).
Sapphist Beginnings
The earliest well-known lesbian was Sappho, who lived on the island
of Lesbos in ancient Greece and was thought to have been born
around 612 bc. Her poems were highly regarded, according to an
epigram in Anthologia Palatina (9.506) ascribed to Plato: ‘Some say
the Muses are nine: how careless! / Look, there’s Sappho too, from
Lesbos, the tenth.’ Her name came to be associated not only with
her poetry but also with the term ‘Sapphist’, which describes women’s
desire for their own sex; the term ‘lesbian’ derives from inhabitants
of her island, Lesbos. There, she seems to have run a type of girls’
boarding school, where she prepared young women for marriage
and taught them singing and music. Although it is not known for
sure, she may have led a thiasos (θιασος), a group of women who wor-
shipped Aphrodite and celebrated the Muses. Both these were seen as
perfectly acceptable pursuits, and feelings for other women were
not considered exceptional. But whether Sappho was a lesbian at all
is debatable. Certainly, in her writings she speaks of her desire for
certain women and the yearning to fall asleep on the soft bosom of
her female companion. She addresses female lovers, lovers of lovers,
ex-lovers and other women by name – Anactoria, Atthis, Andromeda,
Mnasidika, Eranna (although they may be fictional). But there is noth-
ing more explicit, and since only short fragments of her poems remain,
it is hard to infer anything more definite. Her orientation can only be
guessed at, although it is thought that she had sex with men too; she
110
from female friendships to lipstick lesbians
Engraving of
Sappho from Mary
Cowden Clarke,
World-noted
Women (1883).
had a daughter, Cleis, ‘like a golden flower’.2 However, none of the details
about Sappho’s biography are reliable.
Ancient Sparta was another place where women’s desire for each
other supposedly flourished. Women and girls lived apart from
men and boys, and at seven years old boys were taken to live under
the agoge system in communal barracks, where they were disci-
plined and trained for war. They could not leave active service until
they were 30, but they were encouraged to marry. Girls were brought
up together, educated in writing and practised athletics together
naked; close affinities existed between girls and women and some-
times developed into sexual relationships. Plutarch informs us that
Spartan women often had special relationships, unlike others in
Greece, in which older and younger women had erotic feelings for
each other.3 Since men were often at war, women were left to their
own devices, and it seems natural they should turn to each other
for companionship and sex.
Under the Roman Empire, some prostitutes were alleged to have
inclinations for other women. In his Dialogues of the Courtesans,
written in the late second century ad, the satirist Lucian wrote about
111
Megilla from Lesbos, who employed the services of a courtesan,

Leaina. Her male friend Clonarion tells Leaina, ‘People say Megilla,
the wealthy lady from Lesbos, is in love with you, as if she were a man,
and that she . . . I can’t explain . . . but . . . I have heard it said that the
two of you couple up just like . . .’. Clonarion is unable to put into words
exactly what he means. When Leaina blushes and admits this to be
true, more excitedly, he exclaims, ‘By the great Adrasteia! You must
tell me about it! What does that woman require of you? Exactly what
do you do when you get in bed together?’ Even then it seems, men
wanted to know what two women could do together sexually. Leaina
herself was initially curious and asked Megilla, ‘Do you have a penis?
Do you do to Demonassa what men do?’ Megilla replied that she did
Bronze figure of a running girl, c. 520–500 bc, found at Prizren, Serbia, and
possibly made in or near Sparta, Greece.
112
not have a penis but something far more pleasant – she had a penis
substitute. According to Leaina, Megilla looked like a male athlete,
with her head shaven under her wig, and asked to be called under
the male name Megillus. Although Megilla believed herself to be a
man in the body of a woman, she had no trouble satisfying her lovers
sexually. If Lucian’s attitude was common among Romans, it would
seem that they showed little concern about lesbianism, merely curi-
osity. They saw their society and sex as essentially phallic and had
difficulty construing life in any other way.4 By the medieval period,
this laissez-faire attitude would change to some extent. Although
most women’s close relationships would be ignored and the subject
of sex left unmentioned, when cases did come to light, the women
involved were heavily condemned by the authorities.
Medieval ‘Sex Without Men’

In the Christian era, the Bible defined its opinion about same-sex
relationships. Referring to the unrighteous, it explained,
For this reason God gave them up to dishonourable passions.

For their women exchanged natural relations for those that
are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural
relations with women and were consumed with passion for
one another (Romans 1:26–7).
There was therefore an understanding that such behaviour existed

but it was considered against the natural laws of God. However,
surprisingly Leviticus makes no prohibitions about sex between
women, as it does about sex between men. Nonetheless, the Church
authorities seem to have been aware of the possibilities and gave
out subtle warnings. For example, St Augustine expressed his con-
cerns about intimacy between holy women, suggesting that love
for a fellow Sister ‘ought not to be earthly but spiritual’.5 Nunneries,
in particular, were thought to be places that encouraged lascivi-
ous thoughts between women. We know this as the early medieval
punishments for women who had ‘sex without men’ were aimed
solely at nuns. The penalties, though, were surprisingly light. Nuns
would be given a penance of 38 days on bread and water if they
had mutually masturbated each other, 40 days if they had slept
113
together, and two years if such sins took place when either woman
was menstruating.6
Although lesbianism was not criminalized under civil law, Church
authorities treated some sexual acts between women as sodomy.
These were acts which involved penetration, with dildo-like devices
or homemade strap-on penis substitutes. Hincmar, Archbishop of
Reims (d. 882), warned about women who used such ‘instruments
of diabolical operations’ to excite desire. Burchard, Bishop of Worms,
recommended three years’ penance for women who had used artifi-
cial penises.7 How far these crimes and punishments filtered down
into lay people’s awareness is hard to detect, but the public would
have been aware of certain behaviour when scandals emerged. One
such scandal in Speyer, Germany in 1477 involved Katherina Hertzel-
dorfer, who was arrested after various women reported that she
had had sex with them ‘like a man’. Hertzeldorfer admitted that she
‘made an instrument with a red piece of leather, at the front filled
with cotton, and a wooden stick stuck into it, and made a hole
through the wooden stick, put a string through, and tied it round’.8
She informed the prosecution that she had first penetrated her
lover with one finger, then with two, then after trying a third, she
entered them with the dildo strapped to her. In such cases where a
penis substitute had been used for penetration, the Church author-
ities took a harsh line – they applied capital punishment, just as
they did to men who were found guilty of sodomy. Hertzeldorfer was
sentenced to be drowned. When similar crimes took place in Treviso,
Italy, female sodomites were stripped naked, then staked out for a day
and a night. Criminal prosecutions, however, were still rare and when
Church authorities did come across sexual incidents between women,
they often preferred to deal with the case themselves within the
confines of the Church. This was the situation in the case of two
lesbian nuns, Benedetta Carlini and Bartolomea Crivelli; their affair
was uncovered in 1619 but after a lengthy investigation by the all-male
church authorities, the nuns were simply separated and sent to live
in different convents.9
By the time the authorities of Basel had uncovered the activities
of Elisabeth Hertner in 1647, the witchcraft craze had hit Europe and
accusations of sodomy were associated with sorcery. Indeed, witches
were accused of all sorts of debauchery as well as making pacts with
the devil. Part of the pre-trial method of inquiry was to torture the
114
Etching showing dildo making, from Nicolas Chorier, L’Académie des dames
(1680).
A nun masturbates a young woman, from Chorier, L’Académie des dames (1680).
Hans Baldung
Grien, The Three
Witches, 1514.
accused witch and force a confession. Hertner admitted under torture

to having bewitched the wife of the carpenter who happened to be
a cousin of hers, and that the pair had committed ‘shameful acts’
together. As was the case with many cases of sodomy, the authori-
ties were unwilling to advertise the crime too broadly for fear of a
public outcry and preferred to keep the case quiet. Instead, they put
Hertner under protective custody.10
In America, prior to independence, British law applied (or at
least was enacted with amendments). Since there was no civil law
against lesbians, Puritan leader John Cotton thought it prudent to
try to introduce one. To this end, in 1636 he proposed that sex
between two women (or two men) should be made a capital offence
in Massachusetts Bay. His proposed law reiterated the sentiments of
Romans; ‘Unnatural filthiness, to be punished with death, whether
sodomy, which is carnal fellowship of man with man, or woman
117
with woman, or buggery, which is carnal fellowship of man or woman

with beasts or fowls.’11 However, this law was never enacted.
The Female Hermaphrodite

When hermaphrodites were described in the ancient world, they
were identified as having both male and female sex organs. In Greek
myth, hermaphrodites were legion: Dyalos, the androgyne; Arsen-
othelys, the man-woman; Gynnis, the effeminate; Agdistis, with
two sexes; Tiresias, who was successively a man and a woman. Medics
have known about such bodily forms since ancient times. The most
famous was Aphroditus, sometimes known as the later god Herm-
aphroditus, whose name means ‘Aphroditus in the form of a herm’.12
Aphroditus was portrayed as having a female shapely form and
clothing like Aphrodite’s but also as having a penis.13 Hermaphrodites
became increasingly discussed during the sixteenth century, with
authors such as Ambroise Paré and Jacques Duval writing on the
subject. Both medical author and jurist were attempting to impose
an identification of a single sex on a person’s body, be it male, female
or hermaphrodite. From France, the topic spread to the Reformation
countries of Germany and Switzerland, but only became popular a
century or more later in Britain.14
By the seventeenth century, with increasing interest in science and
the emergence of the new field of medicine, religious attacks on les-
bians – few that they were – were gradually being superseded by
investigations by physicians. These doctors were less interested in the
state of the women’s soul than that of her body. In order to explain a
lesbian’s condition, they therefore devised theories about a woman’s
physiology to explain her sexual leanings. Increasingly, the term ‘herm-
aphrodite’ came to be applied to women, particularly those who
showed masculine tendencies, their bodies seemingly betraying them.
The female hermaphrodite was judged to be a woman who desired other
women because of her over-large clitoris, and was sometimes labelled
a Sapphist or a tribade. A woman may have been born like that, or her
clitoris may have grown in later life. In some cases, over-masturbation
was blamed for this elongation. When this practice turned into a habit,
it could lead to nymphomania or same-sex passions called ‘tribadism’.
The clitoris was known to have been the seat of a woman’s pleas-
ure. The English midwife Jane Sharpe in The Midwives Book (1671)
118
Hermaphrodite statuette from Parthian Statue of Hermaphroditus.

period Babylonia, 1st century bc–
1st century ad
pointed out, ‘At the bottom of the woman’s belly is a little bank called
a mountain of pleasure near the well-spring . . .’.15 The bigger the
clitoris, it was thought, the lewder the woman, and the more inclined
to tribadism. Sharpe knew of some women in which ‘sometimes it
grows so long that it stands forth at the slit like a Yard [penis], and will
swell and stand stiff if it be provoked, and some lewd women have
119
From James Parsons, A Mechanical and Critical Enquiry into the Nature of
Hermaphrodites (1741).
endeavoured to use it as men do theirs.’16 Similarly, James Parsons,

Fellow of the Royal Society, investigated the nature of hermaphro-
dites in his book A Mechanical and Critical Enquiry into the Nature
of Hermaphrodites (1741). When he wrote of hermaphrodites he was
120
in fact writing about women with extremely large clitorises. He

declared, ‘There are many authors who have given Histories of
Women that have been detected in the Abuse of such large Clitorides
calling themselves Tribasi’ (lesbians). He cited another Fellow, Thomas
Allen, who had also presented a paper to the Royal Society and had
found, ‘These Tribades were no more than Women with clitorides
larger than ordinary.’ But these women were thought to have ab-
normal reactions. On examination of one such hermaphrodite he
found ‘That at the Sight of a Woman her Penis was erected, and
became flaccid at the Sight of a Man’. From this he concluded, ‘I can
conceive of no other than that she has more desire to the Woman than
the Man.’17
Women who dressed as men to live with other women were also
sometimes labelled hermaphrodites. These women have been called
‘Female Husbands’, a stereotypical title that alludes to a woman who
played the part of a husband, dressing as a man and going through
with a marriage ceremony with another woman. They were more
likely to be condemned than the non-masculinized lesbian. They
were thought to indulge in sex by committing ‘frotterism’ (rubbing
their genitalia up and down against each other). One such case came
to light in London in 1682 after it was found that one Amy Poulter
had married Arabella Hunt in Marylebone Church two years previ-
ously while disguised as ‘James Howard’. At the time, Poulter was
still married to her (male) husband Arthur, who only died a year after
the case came to light. Poulter suggested that her marriage to Hunt
had been undertaken, ‘not seriously, but rashly and unduly and in a
frollick jocular and facetious manner’.18 According to a female ser-
vant who was called as a witness at the trial, it would seem that Poulter
was dressed as a woman when she courted Hunt. This would indi-
cate that Hunt therefore knew Poulter’s true sexual identity, par-
ticularly since they had lived together ‘as Man and Wife at bed and
Board’ for six months prior to the wedding. Nonetheless, Hunt claimed
that she left her (female) husband as soon as she found that Poulter
was a ‘hermaphrodite’. Yet midwives denied that there was any phys-
ical abnormality and attested to the fact that Poulter was ‘a perfect
woman in all her parts’. The case was strewn with complexities and
it would seem that Hunt and her mother were gold-diggers trying to
tie themselves to Poulter’s wealth, rather than the pursuit coming from
the other direction. In this case, the wedding was annulled.
121
Usually, the authorities reacted more vehemently when women

married other women. In his narrative The Female Husband (1746),
Henry Fielding told of how Mary, aka George Hamilton, was pun-
ished for dressing as a man and marrying on numerous occasions:
‘The prisoner having been convicted of this base and scandalous
crime, was by the court sentenced to be publicly severely whipt for
several times, in four market towns within Somerset to wit, once in
each market town, and to be imprisoned.’19 The pamphlet could
be brought from booksellers and hawkers for sixpence, so the pub-
lic was well informed about such behaviour. John Cleland reported
another case of tribadism in Historical and Physical Dissertation on
the Case of Catherine Vizzani (1751), in which the surgeon suspected
Catherine might have an elongated clitoris because of her proclivi-
ties but was surprised on examination of her body after her death
to find her normal. Cleland called her inclinations ‘Perversion in
the Imagination’.20
By the Enlightenment period, although men were persecuted
for sodomy, no explanations were sought for their actions. Yet in the
case of women, attempts were being made to find the cause of their
same-sex desire – men simply did not understand why they might
prefer other women rather than men. During the 1600s and 1700s, trib-
ades had been seen as either physiologically different, as herm-
aphrodites; or as rebellious, purposefully upsetting the natural order
of things by aping men; or as witches, and therefore corrupted. Yet
explanations that the woman was corrupted physically, morally or
spiritually were found wanting, and new medical explanations were
sought. This resulted in blame being placed on their hermaphro-
ditism. In cases where there were no outward signs of masculinity or
masculine dress, women could carry on with their relationships
more easily.
Enlightened Tribades
Female friendships existed between intelligent women, but were
sometimes more intimate than at first glance. During the early eight-
eenth century in the court of Queen Anne, gossip flourished about
the intimate relationship the queen had formed with some of her
ladies-in-waiting. She was accused of running a court full of tribades,
headed by her long-standing lady-in-waiting Sarah Churchill, the
122
Duchess of Marlborough. Although Sarah was married to a man of

political influence and was to bear him seven children, she had become
the subject of malicious rumour because of her position. As the main
confidante of the queen, she wielded great power and the attacks
were no doubt politically motivated. When the queen’s affections
drifted towards Abigail Marsham (to whom Sarah had introduced her),
Sarah became jealous and increasingly belligerent towards the queen,
causing a permanent breakdown in their friendship. As a result,
Sarah lost her influence at court.21
Lesbian coteries existed in country houses where ‘female friends’
openly loved each other. Anne Lister, who wrote a diary about her
relationships, led one such group of women. Her lovers in her com-
munity knew each other and shared her desires. Confident enough
to walk the lanes picking up the local young women, Lister was obvi-
ously successful in her courting. As the prospective owner of Shibden
Hall in Halifax, she may have thought her class would offer her some
immunity against attack, but this was not to be. With her short hair
and masculinized clothes (although she still wore petticoats), she
became a target for the local youths, proving that it was still impos-
sible to be overt about being attracted to other women without risk
of insult. She took solace in visiting others like herself, travelling to
meet the ‘Ladies of Llangollen’, Sarah Ponsonby and her older part-
ner Eleanor Butler. The pair had fallen in love when young and had
been together for 42 years, 31 of them spent in a cottage in Wales. Mrs
Davis, their housekeeper, told Anne they were ‘so attached, so ami-
able together’.22 The couple had become notorious, with socialites
from all over the country dropping in to see them. Even where female
friendships were seen to be what they really were – lesbian affairs –
they often passed without too much adverse comment.
Other all-female communities, such as convents, were seen to be
potentially vice-ridden. The image of the lesbian nun was rife in
Enlightenment anti-clerical pornographic books. The French philoso-
pher Diderot had already been imprisoned for writing pornography
eleven years earlier, when his novel La Religieuse (The Nun) was pub-
lished in 1760. The book was based on the real-life story of Marguerite
Delamarre, a woman who had been placed in a convent against her
will and had been subjected to cruel treatment by her debauched
superiors. Essentially, the memoirs are pornographic fiction seen
in the actions of the character of the Mother Superior: ‘Let down
123
Joshua Horner,
Anne Lister
(1791–1840).
your underclothing! I am a woman and your Superior. What a splen-

did bosom! How firm it is! Am I to allow it to be torn by the nails of
that whip?’23 While Diderot’s intention was to expose the hypocrisy
of the Church – and the book certainly caused a stir at the time – in
fact his attacks were nothing new and Diderot was merely building
on a genre which other writers of Enlightenment erotica had already
explored. The theme of lesbian nuns had been evident as early as Venus
in the Cloister (1683), which tells of the seduction of a novice by an
older (and therefore more corrupt) nun.
Where most countries in Europe were happy to pretend sex acts
between women did not exist, the Netherlands stands out as one of
the few that followed a path of focused persecution. During the 1790s,
a flurry of cases was brought to court in which women were prose-
cuted. At least one incident had seemingly taken place in a brothel
or ‘lewd’ house in which Anna Schreuder and Maria Smit were caught
after an interfering neighbour had witnessed them when peeping
through the wall into the house. Not willing to let it pass, she pulled
in another neighbour to watch – which they did for the next two
124
hours. Finally, unable to contain herself, she shouted out, ‘you foul
whores, we can see you . . . didn’t you foul long enough?’ and went
off to raise a hue and cry. Such a crowd developed that a constable
had to rescue Schreuder, who was found cowering naked under her
bed, along with four other women who were also in the house. At the
trial, the neighbours gave evidence that they had seen the women
‘lain with their lower bodies nude and had kissed and caressed
one another, like a man is used to do to a women’. They had also con-
ducted oral sex – one ‘had licked the womanliness of the other with
her tongue’.24 Although Schreuder and Smit had been involved in
prostitution, sex with women was their preferred enjoyment. In other
The Ladies of Llangollen, Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, lithograph by

J. H. Lynch, c. 1880.
125
A woman shows off

the delights of her
friend’s posterior
in a drawing by
Antoine Borel, from
Jean-Baptiste de
Boyer (attrib.),
Thérèse philosophe
(1785 edition).
parts of Europe, tribadism was invisible. However, a new wave of

feminism was to create more focused attacks on women who thrust
themselves into public view.
The New Woman

With the emergence of the ‘New Woman’ in the 1890s, women began
to carve out new opportunities for themselves. This ‘New Woman’
was a modern woman with independent views on work, marriage
and dress. She abandoned the traditional ‘feminine’ aspirations of
staying at home and raising children in preference for a career.
As new professions opened up for them, middle-class women
flooded to work in areas previously unavailable such as medicine,
126
university teaching, administration and accountancy. The streets

filled with female workers travelling to and from jobs outside the
home, the women now public in a way they had never been before.
Meanwhile, middle-class men were growing increasingly concerned
about so many women vying for employment, and about their demands
for independence and the vote. In order to try and halt this progres-
sive force, men began to deride these women for their ‘masculine’
activities, for dressing in ‘rational’ dress (with its split skirt akin to
trousers), smoking cigars and riding bicycles. Male commentators
began to connect these new female roles and women’s masculine
characteristics to nymphomania and lesbianism. They accused the
New Woman who espoused free love (sex outside of marital rela-
tionships) as being ‘vicious’ – literally full of vice. Indeed, the idea
of women wanting sex at all was considered a breach in normality.
To Victorian onlookers, therefore, the New Woman’s lifestyle sug-
gested a wholesale sexual aberration. This New Woman was muscu-
lar, with a deep voice; her rooms were decorated with sporting scenes
and pistols and smelled of smoke.25
Some of the women had literary aspirations and made their living
through writing, the poet Charlotte Mew being a typical example.26 One
of her stories was published in the Yellow Book, a leading quarterly
journal of the 1890s associated with aestheticism and decadence,
edited by Henry Harland and sometimes illustrated by Aubrey
Beardsley. Some of Beardsley’s drawings hinted at lesbianism, such
as his illustrations for a new edition of Lysistrata. Following the
fashion of many a New Woman, Mew dressed in masculine costume
and wore her hair short. She also happened to be a lesbian, although
not all New Women were – in reality, fewer than the British public
imagined, although many were characterized as such.
Mew herself has been considered a ‘chastely lesbian’,27 in other
words, one who never consummated her relationships. However,
this seems debateable since Ella D’Arcy accused Mew of chasing her
round a bed. Another friend of Mew’s, Mrs Dawson Scott, was nick-
named ‘Sappho’ by Mew after Scott’s poem of that name. In response
to Mew’s sexuality and literary talent, Mrs Dawson Scott wrote in her
diary, ‘Charlotte is evidently a pervert. Aren’t all geniuses perverts?’28
However, life was not without its problems for Mew. It was difficult
enough to pursue a literary career as a woman, and to be a lesbian, but
tainted family genes were also to disrupt Mew’s life. Mental illness
127
Charlotte Mew
(1869–1927).
wracked her family so badly that two of her siblings had to be placed
in asylums. As a result, Charlotte and her sister vowed they would
never marry or have children to prevent passing on the insanity.
Worse was to come when her sister Anne died, and Mew became
severely depressed. Unable to overcome her grief, she eventually com-
mitted suicide by drinking a bottle of Lysol, a household disinfectant.
The antagonisms and threats New Women had to face were in
addition to their problems of trying to eke out a living on the small
incomes they could make. Their vilification was common; a typical
example was a Punch cartoon in which a journalist described the
New Women as Amazonians destroying marriages and families. In
reality, many New Women were simply moving towards a fuller
understanding of heterosexual relations and personal freedom,
although obviously lesbians were attracted to the movement as much
as any other woman.
Meanwhile, in nineteenth-century America, lesbianism was
taking a different form and African American women were finding
128
Aubrey Beardsley, Lysistrata Haranguing the Athenian Women, 1896.
their own ways to forge their identities. Snippets of lesbian relation-

ships emerge through the passionate letters of two African American
women, freeborn domestic servant Addie Brown and schoolteacher
Rebecca Primus. Their declarations of love to each other while
they were separated reflected how much they missed each other.
Addie confessed, ‘Rebecca, when I bid you good by it’s seem to me
that my very heart broke . . .’, adding, ‘No kisses is like youres’. She
also mentions fondling her lover’s breasts, so the relationship was
evidently sexual.29
Such relationships could not have been easily undertaken, and
family members often stepped in to separate women. One passionate
affair ended in murder when attempts were made to thwart it. The
incident took place in Memphis in 1892 when nineteen-year-old Alice
Mitchell met seventeen-year-old Freda Ward and became besotted
with her. Their fathers were well known in business circles: Mitchell’s
was a rich furniture dealer and Ward’s a planter and wealthy merchant.
Both the young women were, according to the New York Times,
‘familiar figures in society’. They had become increasingly close, so
much so that Mitchell had planned to ‘marry’ Ward, but, sensing
disaster, Ward’s sister tried to prevent the relationship going fur-
ther. Although Ward had stayed with Mitchell on occasions, the
relationship had gradually cooled. Mitchell, however, was unwill-
ing to let go and continued to pursue her erstwhile lover. When Ward
made some derogatory remarks about Mitchell, no doubt in an
attempt to get rid of her, this merely exacerbated Mitchell’s feelings
of rejection. One night, in a rage, she followed Ward and set upon
her, cutting her lover’s throat. The New York Times reported the
incident in lurid detail: ‘Grasping Miss Ward by the neck, she drew
a bright razor from out of the folds of her dress and without a word,
drew it across the throat of her victim.’ Ward sank to the floor, her
neck pouring with blood, the razor having severed her jugular.
Although taken to the nearest hospital by her sister and members
of the crowd, she was dead on arrival. Mitchell stated in court that
she loved Freda desperately, ‘better than anyone in the world’, that
she could not live without her. She told how they had made a pact
that if they should ever be separated they should kill each other.30
She was judged insane and committed to an asylum. Assessing the case
some years later in his book Sexual Inversion, Havelock Ellis described
Mitchell as a ‘congenital invert’, stating, ‘her face was obviously
130
unsymmetrical and she had an appearance of youthfulness below

her age’ – proof positive in Ellis’s eyes that she had inherited her
lesbianism and her ‘problem’. He already believed that congenital
defects ran in families and, in support of his theory, pointed to the
fact that Mitchell’s mother had been insane.31
The Female Sexual Invert

As with male homosexuality, sexologists saw lesbianism as sexual
‘inversion’, and classed it as a sort of mental illness. While some
believed that lesbianism was congenital (the women were born
lesbians), others believed these desires were acquired (as learned
behaviour). Most concurred that once female inverts were in bed
together, they split into the ‘assertive’ male and the ‘passive’ female
roles. Most agreed that lesbianism should be repressed.
Again sexologists went on to discuss why and when women might
become lesbians. Kraft-Ebbing pronounced that prostitution might
turn a woman to lesbianism, a point he picked up from Alexandre
Parent-Duchâtelet. The latter had written about prostitution in 1857,
asserting that many prostitutes turn to their own sex because they were
disgusted by the acts they were expected to perform with their male
clients – coitus in the armpit, between the breasts and in the mouth.
In fact, contemporary commentators blamed a host of activities that
were supposed to turn women into lesbians – reading novels, female
servants sleeping in the same bed, even some domestic activities.
Contemporary lesbians might have been surprised at the proposal
of hack writer Ali Coffignon, who suggested that excessive work on
sewing machines enticed a woman into the vice.32 However, Havelock
Ellis disagreed with the idea that the lure of sewing was a means of
developing lesbianism, but rather thought the opposite. In Sexual
Inversion he stated: ‘There is a dislike and sometimes incapacity for
needlework and other domestic occupations, while there is often
some capacity for athletics.’
The signs of lesbianism were all too apparent, and could be seen
in a woman’s brusqueness, masculine mannerisms and blunt speech.
Even the most liberated sexologists associated female homosexu-
ality with masculinity. Edward Carpenter attested to the fact that in
‘the extreme type of the homogenic female, we have a rather mark-
edly aggressive person, of strong passion, masculine manners and
131
movements, practical in the conduct of life, sensuous rather than

sentimental in love, often untidy, and outré in her attire’. The lurk-
ing lesbian could also be spotted for her oral appetites: ‘In the habits
not only is there frequently a pronounced taste for smoking ciga-
rettes, often found in quite feminine women, but also a decided
taste and tolerance for cigars.’33 Physiology was also blamed for a
lesbian’s inclinations; Hirschfeld found that two-thirds of inverted
women were more muscular than ‘normal’ women. Sometimes these
‘defects’ might offer hidden advantages: on examination, Flateau
found lesbian women to have decidedly masculine larynxes and Ellis
deduced as a result that ‘inverted women are very good whistlers’.34
Indeed, Hirschfeld knew of two who were so good they performed
in public.
This allusion to masculine traits in some lesbian women was
part of a broader understanding among sexologists that when
women had sex together, one would automatically take the ‘male’
role. This, however, was denied by the women themselves in a
study undertaken by Beam and Dickinson in America published in
1934, where the majority of women responded that neither of
them assumed a male role.35 Self-identified characteristics did not
therefore necessarily mesh with (male) medical ones about how
lesbians behave.
The Wild Girls

Paris was evidently more liberated in its attitudes towards lesbians,
since it became a major attraction for like-minded women in the
early twentieth century. Many American women crossed the ocean
to set up home there and join in with the newly emerging creative
atmosphere. Wild girls Natalie Clifford Barney and Romaine Brooks
moved to the city, opening up a literary salon that became a hub of
lesbianism between the 1890s and 1930s. Thirty-nine-year-old Barney
had met 41-year-old Romaine Brooks, another rich American and a
gifted artist, in 1915, and their relationship was to last more than 50
years. An extravagant poet, Barney insisted that ‘living was the first
of all the arts’, celebrating the work and love of women in her salon
at which men were permitted, but were not allowed to dominate.
The American Alice B. Toklas described Barney as ‘the one bright spot
in a fairly cheerless world’.36
132
Lesbian prostitutes, illustration from Léo Taxil, La Prostitution contemporaine (1884).
On her father’s death Barney inherited his millions, allowing her

to fulfil her passion for literature and the arts. She was spoiled and
utterly self-centred, and poured her energies into seduction, flirt-
ing and wooing her lovers, sometimes pursing women as far as the
toilets of Parisian department stores. If they were too mentally well
balanced, she would cast them off, preferring her lovers to be more
quirky and stimulating. She conducted Sapphic rituals in her garden,
133
which entailed women dancing naked or dressed as wood nymphs,

shepherdesses or court pages, much to the disgust of her neighbours.
Brooks came from a line of flamboyant insanity – her brother was
even madder than her mother. She recalled her vile childhood of
abandonment and cruelty in her unpublished autobiography No
Pleasant Memories, using as her hallmark a wing held down by a
chain, an indication of her feelings. While Barney enjoyed a gregar-
ious social life, Brooks disparaged the salons as full of drunkards
and society women, not really a fair description of such guests as
Gertrude Stein, Colette, Edith Sitwell, Pierre Louÿs and André Gide.
Although Barney was devoted to Brooks – she called her ‘my angel
and cruel love’ – this did not stop her from indulging in other long-
term relationships, such as a fourteen-year affair with Dolly Wilde,
Oscar’s drug-addicted niece. Even in 1956, when Barney travelled to
see Brooks, she stayed at a hotel so as not to encroach on the artist’s
sealed world. Left to her own devices, when she was 80 years old, she
picked up a new lover on a park bench – unfazed, Brooks simply
accused her of showing off.
Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein also recognized Paris as a
liberated city where they might set up house together unharassed.
In 1903 Stein wrote Q.E.D. (published posthumously in 1950 as Things
As They Are), a lesbian coming-out story. In Paris she wrote her nov-
els and poetry while Alice acted as her partner, maid and lover, and
cooked her famous hash brownies.
Germany had its own vibrant lesbian community, symbolized
by Marlene Dietrich in the film The Blue Angel. Dietrich herself was
bisexual and flourished as a singer in the nightclubs of Berlin, enjoy-
ing the drag balls and performing at cabarets. The German lesbian
scene had its own magazine, Die Freundin (The Girlfriend), which ran
between 1924 and 1933 and carried stories of ‘same-sex loving’.
Meanwhile, in New York in 1920s Greenwich and Harlem, certain
gay jazz clubs or speakeasies catered for lesbian women. White
women attended clubs such as the Clam House and the Ubangi Club,
where black singers such as Bessie Smith and Gladys Bentley sang
about their female lovers. In these establishments, lesbians carved
out swinging, autonomous lives for themselves.
Men were not so happy with the increasingly public roles for
women, nor with the new work opportunities afforded to women
during the First World War. They quickly tried to encourage their
134
Romaine Brooks
photographed in
1908.
wives and sisters back into the domestic space of home and children.
As one women’s magazine, Women’s Life, put it in their January issue
for 1920, ‘Miss Fluffy femininity carried off all the prizes’.37 However,
generally among working-class culture, there was an easier accept-
ance of lesbian couples. British newspaper reports in the News of
the World and the People exposed various wedding stories of two
women marrying, one taking the role as the groom, the other the
bride. The couples seem to have been accepted by their families and
gained respect as tricksters, with practising lesbians seen to be ‘getting
away with it’.38
135
Marlene Dietrich,
famous for her
androgyny, c. 1930.
In 1921, after centuries of having no legislation against lesbian-

ism, a Bill was introduced in Britain to try and make it illegal. During
the House of Commons debate, Lieutenant Moore-Brabazon expressed
his thoughts on the subject, stating that there were three ways of
sorting out perverts. One was to give them the death sentence; the
second was to lock them up in insane asylums; and the third – by far
the best in his opinion – was to leave them alone. He opined: ‘To adopt
a Clause of this kind would do harm by introducing into the minds
of perfectly innocent people the most revolting thoughts.’39 In other
words, he thought that drawing attention to lesbian activities was a
greater threat than the need to prosecute lesbians. In this case, at least,
lesbians were let off the hook. The act was never passed, mainly due
to the British tradition of keeping quiet about anything considered
too unsavoury.
Harassment of lesbians nonetheless existed, and women tended
to prefer to keep their relationships private. Vita Sackville-West kept
136
quiet about her lesbian relationships, although as the daughter of

a baron she presumably had more freedom than most. When her
husband gave her a venereal disease, she took up with Violet Keppel,
daughter of the mistress of the Prince of Wales, who seduced her.
Sackville-West admitted, ‘I hadn’t dreamt of such an art of love . . . She
appealed to my awakened senses.’40 Since her husband was also
homosexual, it is unsurprising that the two did not find gratification
in each other’s arms. West went on to have a passionate affair with
Virginia Woolf, who wrote Orlando in 1928 as a tribute to West, by
then her past lover.
It was Radclyffe Hall’s book The Well of Loneliness (1928) that
truly put lesbianism on the map. Her story of female invert Stephen
Gordon showed how lesbians lived in a sea of hostility, particularly
if they were ‘mannish lesbians’, as the character was portrayed – and
as was Hall herself. Her own perception of both herself and her
character echoed the sexologists’ understanding of female inverts –
‘a man trapped inside a woman’s body’. She recognized the isolation
suffered by many lesbians, which was her reason for writing the
book: she wanted to inspire ‘the inverted in general to declare them-
selves’, and at the same time she was well aware of the dangers that
might befall her, declaring in a letter to another literary scholar,
I knew I was running the risk of injuring my career as a writer

by rousing up a storm of antagonism; but I was prepared to
face this possibility because, being myself a congenital invert,
I understood the subject from the inside as well as from the
medical and psychological text-books.41
In the event, the book was banned in an attempt to suppress know-

ledge about lesbianism, but as usual with censored books, public
demand for it soared. Unsurprisingly, considering the media’s view
on lesbianism, various newspapers, including the Daily Express and
the Daily Telegraph, exploded in a vitriolic attack on it. James Douglas,
editor of the Sunday Express, declared, ‘I would rather give a healthy
boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel.’42
While female emancipation from domesticity was seen as a
contributing factor to lesbianism, the medical fraternity continued
to see lesbians as suffering from mental illness. During the 1950s,
Dr Frank Caprio declared, ‘Female homosexuality is becoming an
137
increasingly important problem. It is believed by some that women

are becoming rapidly de-feminized by their over desire for emanci-
pation, and the “psychic masculization” of modern woman contributes
to frigidity.’ In his introduction to his study Female Homosexuality (1954),
Caprio wrote: ‘Many of the naïve and ill-informed are initiated into
lesbian practices because of their complete ignorance, which enhances
their susceptibility to the advances of the older and experienced
invert.’43 His patients appear to have suffered all sorts of ailments –
headaches, fainting, fatigues, insomnia and dizziness. Extreme jeal-
ousy was repeatedly stressed as a factor common to all of the women.
Caprio decided that lesbians were ‘sick individuals’ in need of treat-
ment; according to him, many lesbians were sadists, psychopaths,
kleptomaniacs or obsessive-compulsive neurotics. Mutual masturba-
tion was, he declared, a symptom of a neurotic personality, a regres-
sion to narcissism, a disturbance in childhood development and
maladjustment in identification.
The most obvious fact that medics failed to grasp about their
female patients was that these women were not frigid; they simply
were not attracted to men. Even at this stage, there was a slim under-
standing of what lesbian feelings entailed. Caprio’s main conclusions
after personally interviewing many patients over an eighteen-year
period was that many prostitutes were lesbians, and ‘victims of
bisexual conflicts’; that many artists, dancers, musicians, writers and
actresses, because of their bohemian lifestyles, tended towards bisex-
uality; and that the behaviour of these women was environmentally
induced rather than congenital, possibly a result of the influence of
their unstable parents. Alternatively, he thought lesbian tendencies
may result from unpleasant sexual experiences when young, fear of
marriage or personality deficiencies. With diagnoses like these, it is
unsurprising that women suffered anxiety and guilt. However, he was
merely a man of his time trying to help people who had presented
themselves to him as suffering from depression.
One female patient who was obviously in love recognized the
normality of her feelings, although this seems to have bypassed the
doctor who saw them as abnormal. She stated: ‘I still feel incensed
and outraged that a woman’s sex life must be dictated and directed
by the public while a man is allowed perfect and complete freedom
in this respect.’44 She had read Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness
but felt it gave people the wrong impression of lesbians and that
138
the main character of Stephen cut ‘a ridiculous figure’. She had been
sexually assaulted by a man when she was nine years old, but her
humiliations continued in her adult life when people in the streets
who saw her as ‘different’, spat and snarled at her and called her names.
‘Feelings go hang. But it’s a terrible physical strain to be struggling
against the whole world every waking minute.’ Hardly surprisingly,
she developed various psychosomatic illnesses, such as tensions,
depression, inability to concentrate and feelings of hopelessness.
Small wonder, too, that so many people suffered mental breakdowns
when they were under the care of medics who had little understand-
ing of the true nature of lesbianism. As late as the 1960s, men with
psychology degrees and editors of health magazines were still mak-
ing such comments as ‘Countless Lesbians end their days in lunatic
asylums, as the practice of their perversions gets too much for them
to bear.’45 However, while some lesbians felt isolated during the
twentieth century, others began to find their own ways to support each
other and express their feelings.
Sexual Sororities
Certain institutions were thought to harbour ‘unnatural’ vices among
women – girls’ boarding schools, medieval nunneries, women’s pris-
ons and female branches of the armed services were all seen as places
where female sexual desire ran rampant. Krafft-Ebing believed that
although lesbianism was not as common as male homosexuality, it
similarly flourished in penal institutions, which he referred to as
‘hotbeds of lesbian love’. Lesbian inmates recognized each other
through their dress and exchanged glances. Jealousies and passions
often broke out as a result of these ‘forbidden friendships’ and some
female inmates would think nothing of beating up a woman who
so much as looked at her lover. In her examination of reform schools
published in the Journal of American Psychology in 1913, Margaret
Otis brought racial interactions into the equation and lent a broader
understanding of lesbian relationships. Her essay ‘A Perversion Not
Commonly Noted’ was based on her observations of relationships
between women in reformatories and it was radical in its sympathy
for lesbian relationships: ‘sometimes the love [of one young woman
for another] is very real and seems almost ennobling’.46 The process
of interaction occurred when one of the white girls received a note
139
s&M lesbians, postcard, c. 1920s.
and a lock of hair from a coloured girl (for so she called her) on arrival
at the reformatory. If the white girl was interested, she would make
the appropriate responses and an affair would begin. Mostly these
girls were working-class, and rarely would they interact with coloured
girls once they were no longer incarcerated. However, she noted that
these girls found it difficult to reveal themselves as lesbians in the
outside world.
The public belief in the flourishing of same-sex inclinations in
all-female institutions was reinforced when exposés of lesbian affairs
hit the news. Bernard Hollander, who had studied under Krafft-
Ebing, revealed in 1922: ‘I have known a fashionable girls’ school in
London to be closed in consequence of the discovery and criminal
habits of the head-mistress who for years had seduced one girl after
another.’ In her autobiography, one history graduate, Ester Hodge,
explained her affair with other women in her school in the 1920s. Her
junior Latin mistress chased after her, ‘I soon responded ardently, going
frequently to her flat’. Her mother suspected the relationship and tried
to break it up.47
Both world wars gave women a new dimension to freedom allow-
ing them to travel away from home, often for the first time. Far from
the prying eyes of family and neighbours, they were provided with
a chance to indulge in sexual relationships – both hetero- and homo-
sexual. The auxiliary services provided women with the opportunity
to meet other women. Jean Mormont recalled meeting up with les-
bians in her wartime work in the auxiliary service during the 1940s:
‘I never knew what a lesbian was, and I met some girls in there and
it used to puzzle me . . . they used to lay on the bed there cuddling
one another . . .’ . Other women were more savvy and grabbed the
opportunity to be together as often as possible. Two nurses in Hastings
Hospital, Monica Still and Marya McLean, made secret trips to each
other’s rooms; they had to creep about in dark cold corridors to
avoid the matron. They made vows to each other in church by way of
commitment to each other, but they eventually split up after a friend
of Marya told her to choose between them. Several decades later, Marya
spotted Monica, by then a well-known dog breeder, on television
in an advert for Pedigree Chum. The couple met up again and lived
together until Marya’s death.48
Meanwhile, the u.s. Women’s Army Corps caused a stir when a
handful of women were brought up on charges and placed under
141
barracks arrest. The Washington Post for 29 July 1955 reported that
around 100 female members of the wac were under investigation
for moral misconduct. One of them had attempted suicide after a
series of solicitations by fellow wacs and had left a note indicating
what had happened.
Despite continued bad press, lesbians were creating their own
strategies for dealing with their lives. Magazines came out in their
support, such as the Ladder, published 1956–72, a u.s. magazine
designed to help the ‘variant’. By the twenty-first century, lesbianism
was no longer vilified in the press, but used as a form of titillation. It
was also seen as a form of free publicity for music industry celebrities
and film stars. When Madonna and Britney Spears French-kissed at
the MTv Video Awards in 2003, faux lipstick lesbianism made front-
page news. Public attitudes had evidently changed enough for them
to think that a display of female eroticism might enhance their careers.
Other celebrities followed suit. Sandra Bullock and Scarlett Johansson
similarly made headlines when they French-kissed at the MTv Movie
Awards in 2010. It was a tiny bit edgy, rebellious, and just the way to
frighten parents of adolescent daughters by setting a trend among
teenage girls.
This type of pretend lesbianism for the sake of fashion irritated
some of the stalwarts. Beth Ditto, lead singer of the band The Gossip,
attacked popstar Katy Perry for ‘playing gay’ in order to turn men
on, declaring her lyrics ‘I Kissed a Girl’ to be ‘offensive to gay culture’.
Others were more frank about their real relationships; comedienne
and actress Ellen DeGeneres came out in 1997 on the Oprah Winfrey
Show, and stars such as Lindsay Lohan helped change attitudes
towards lesbianism. Even so, uptight conservatives continue to hold
on to their homophobic views; in 2012, heterosexual mothers attacked
family mall jc Penney when it hired DeGeneres to head an advertis-
ing campaign. Despite the vitriol, the firm held to its decision and
the mothers had to drop their protest. DeGeneres declared, ‘haters
are my motivators’.49
Certainly there has been a shift in attitudes over the centuries,
as seen from the differences in the acceptance of Sappho in ancient
Greece and the antagonism towards the author Radclyffe Hall in
the twentieth century. While in the past lesbians may have been seen
as perverted, there seems to have been only minor interest in them.
As women have gained a more equal stake in political and economic
142
life, they have become more visible – hence so have lesbians. The
focus on them has become sharper from the twentieth century
onwards, as women have become more prominent in the public
sphere and any sexual difference is more obvious (and possibly, to
some, more threatening).
143
Hercules dressed in a pink gown, serving Omphale. Bartholomeus Spranger,
Hercules and Omphale, 1585.
five
From Transvestites to
Transsexuals
For the simple man in the street, there are only two sexes. A person is either
male or female, Adam or Eve . . . The more sophisticated realize that every
Adam contains elements of Eve and every Eve harbors traces of Adam,
physically as well as psychologically.
Dr Harry Benjamin, The Transsexual Phenomenon (1966)
T hroughout history there has been a loose acceptability of cross-

dressing for the purposes of work or play, but not for sex. When
it was undertaken by someone pretending to be a member of the
opposite sex for personal feelings, for a sexual thrill or as a result
of confused gender identity, it was roundly condemned. Transsexu-
ality, if anything, has attracted even more animosity. Individuals
crossing the boundaries in this way were seen as threatening; they
were open to harassment and were generally stigmatized. But in
what circumstances would overstepping these boundaries cause
offence, and why?
In ancient Greece, men disguised themselves as women to obtain
an advantage over their enemies in war: beardless men dressed as
women at Thebes to kill the Persian embassy, and later to slaughter
the soldiers of the Spartan garrison.1 In Ovid’s Metamorphoses,
Achilles was dressed as a girl and kept among the daughters of King
Lycomedes in Skyros to escape induction into Agamemnon’s army.2
Men also dressed in women’s clothes at celebrations: every autumn
in Athens, a Dionysian wine festival called the Oschophoria was held,
during which two youths dressed up as women and carried grapes
from the sanctuary of Dionysus to that of Athena Skirus at Phalerum.
However, in certain cases, men dressed as women because of
their feelings about their own sexual persona or cross-dressed for
sexual purposes, and these were the areas that caused most con-
cern. One of the most infamous cross-dressers was the Roman
emperor Elagabalus, who liked both sexes and married at least
three women, but surrounded himself with male lovers. He was
145
only fourteen when he succeeded Marcus Aurelius in ad 218, and

managed to pack a range of debaucheries into his short but event-
ful life. He dressed in women’s clothes, plucked out hairs from his
body and shocked onlookers by wearing full make-up in public. The
historian Cassius Dio told how ‘he worked with wool, sometimes
wore a hairnet, and painted his eyes, daubing them with lead and
alkanet. Once, indeed, he shaved his chin and held a festival to
mark the event; but after that he had the hairs plucked out, so as to
look more like a woman’.3 The emperor lived the life of a woman,
and spent his days in the company of his concubines, spinning pur-
ple garments from the softest wool. In violation of all sorts of Roman
taboos, he raped a vestal virgin and was accused of working in the
brothels of Rome and offering his sexual services to passers-by.
It has been suggested that Elagabalus was bisexual but he was
evidently ambivalent about his own body. It was said that he had
attempted to castrate himself and declared he wanted a vagina
implanted in his body; this would make him a pioneer of one of the
first transsexual surgical operations, although it is more likely that
he merely circumcised himself. Praetorian soldiers eventually mur-
dered Elagabalus when he was only eighteen years old; his head
was cut off and his body was dragged through the streets before
being tossed into the River Tiber.4 Another, more famous emperor,
Nero, tried to turn the boy Sporus into a girl through castration.
Suetonius tells us that ‘he went though a wedding ceremony with him
– dowry, bridal veil and all – which the whole Court attended.’5 Nero
took Sporus home and treated him as a wife, dressing him in fine
women’s clothes and kissing him in public. Such effeminacy was
regarded with disdain in the ancient world as it was believed that an
overtly masculine ‘manly’ man should display authority. For rulers
such as emperors, this was even more important.
Many cases of transgression in dress and gender were less dram-
atic and it is evident that there has been a wide variety of types
of cross-dresser. In the medieval West, cross-dressing was allowed
at carnivals. While celebrating holidays such as May Day, men
commonly dressed as women and ran through the streets. Molly
dancing took place in East Anglia on Plough Monday (the Monday
after Epiphany), when unemployed ploughboys cross-dressed –
they decorated a plough and pushed it round the village, calling at
the houses of well-off villagers to beg for money.6
146
from transvestites to transsexuals
Opposition to cross-dressing in the medieval West was empha-

sized in the Bible, which indicated that donning the attire of the
opposite sex was a sin. Deuteronomy states: ‘The woman shall not
wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on
a woman’s garment: for all that do so are abominations unto the
Lord thy God’ (22:5). Whether authorities or communities were
antagonistic towards cross-dressers, however, depended primarily
on where and why an individual was perceived to be cross-dressing
and on a clear set of guidelines that varied at different times. Most
societies identified specific colours, styles, textures or types of
clothing with one or other of the sexes: in the Victorian period, for
example, it was considered appropriate for women to wear dresses,
and men to wear trousers. This was not always the case, however, and
the notion of what was proper for a man or a woman to wear has
changed throughout the ages. Men might well have worn tights in
the medieval period, but they were part of a woman’s attire by the
Medieval men and

women in similar,
but different,
loose clothing,
14th century.
147
twentieth century. If a man wore tights in the twentieth century,

he would have been considered effeminate or a transvestite. The rules
also change according to the country. In some places, skirt-like out-
fits might be allowed – kilts in Scotland, for example, or the lunghi
(a sort of wraparound skirt for men) in India – but there has always
been an appropriate dress code for each sex at any one time. Any
swapping of this clothing arrangement was seen as against the norm.
Cross-dressing also had a different meaning depending on the
sex of the person doing it. A woman might dress as a man in order
to gain status in a patriarchal world or to obtain employment and
independence and, although still seen as a transgressive act, her
purpose was at least understood. During the medieval and early
modern periods through to the Victorian era, single women had
fewer work opportunities and while they might find work sewing,
spinning, selling wares or in agriculture, these jobs were usually
seen as auxiliary to men’s work and usually paid at a fraction of a
men’s pay. It was less acceptable for a man to dress as a woman as he
already held the ‘superior’ position in life; in assuming the role of
a woman, he turned the world upside down. A cross-dressing man
who was not attempting to be comical or festive would be seen as
effeminate – and equated with a sodomite. In these instances, the reac-
tion of society was more antagonistic. Gender rules were therefore
defined by dress and overturning the order led to confusion and an
aggressive response.
Cross-dressers in Religion
Some cross-dressers created a greater stir because they had cross-
dressed for the purposes of entering religious orders, as in two cases
that emerged during the medieval period. In his account of the
rebellion at the monastery of Poitiers in ad 590, Gregory of Tours
recorded that a man had entered a convent and lived there unde-
tected for some years, dressed as a nun. The truth was only revealed
when a fellow nun by the name of Clotild accused her abbess of
sharing a bed with him. A meeting was hastily called, attended by
the nuns and a handful of senior male clergy. Gregory reported:
Clotild was called before us. She showered abuse on her

Abbess and made a number of accusations against her. She
148
maintained that the Abbess kept a man in the nunnery, dressed

in woman’s clothing and looking like a woman, although in
effect there was no doubt that he was a man. His job was to
sleep with the Abbess whenever she wanted it. ‘Why! There’s
the fellow!’ cried Clotild, pointing with her finger. Thereupon
a man stepped forward, dressed in woman’s clothing as I
have told you.7
During the meeting, the man in question told the onlookers, who
included six startled bishops and various interested strangers, that
he was impotent. It was thought that he had forsaken the outside
world, put on the habit of a nun and taken refuge in the nunnery.
The passionate revolt of the nuns at Poitiers began some years
after the death of the founder of the convent, St Radegund. Although
she had chosen Agnes as her successor, when Agnes died in 589, a
rebellion broke out when a women named Leubovera was chosen to
succeed her to the title of abbess. This appointment was particu-
lar irksome to Clotild, who believed that she herself should have
been elected, since she was the daughter of King Charibert i. Relying
on her close connection to royalty, she persuaded 40 of her fellow
nuns to take an oath that they would help her to remove the hated
Leubovera as abbess and appoint herself to the position in her stead.
Despite Clotild’s assertions that the abbess Leubovera had kept a
castrated man as a eunuch for her own sexual pleasures, the man was
found innocent of all charges. His physician came forward in his
defence, explaining how the circumstances had arisen.
When this servant was a young lad, he had terrible pains in

the groin. Nobody could do anything for him. His mother
went to St Radegund and asked her to have the case looked
into. I was called in and she told me to do what I could. I
cut out the lad’s testicles, an operation I had once seen per-
formed by a surgeon in the town of Constantinople.8
This case first throws up the question of how a man dressed

as a nun – and a man who apparently looked like a man despite his
disguise, otherwise Clotild would have been unable to identify him
– could go so long unchallenged in a nunnery. He himself said that
he lived locally and denied knowing the abbess or living in the
149
convent, but a man dressed as a nun in secular life outside the

convent would surely have raised eyebrows. In the end, he was deemed
innocent of the accusation and surprisingly little was mentioned
about the question of his dress. Second, and more fundamental, is
the apparent acceptance by the medieval onlookers of the idea that
either an impotent or castrated man was still able to service a woman
sexually without penetrative sex. It would seem that medieval cross-
dressing men were not always seen as either totally unacceptable
or as effeminate.
Although the above case is authenticated, the story of Pope Joan
is less certain and brings with it its own set of ambiguities. Her tale
became popular in the thirteenth century but it is uncertain whether
Joan actually lived, or if she was merely a figment of the imagination
of the Dominican monk Jean de Mailly of Metz, who wrote about her
around 1250. He tells how the twelve-year-old Joan had absconded
from her family in Mainz after being seduced by a monk or a servant.
In order to follow her lover, she dressed as a man so that they could
either enter into religious orders or a university to be educated
together, depending on which version of the story is followed. After
a stint of learning in Athens, when her lover died, Joan made her way
to Rome in search of employment, finding herself a job as a reader
of the scriptures in church. Her astounding learning and piety
impressed her colleagues so much that she was eventually elected
Pope. Unfortunately, one of her fellow cardinals or possibly a clerk
Pope Joan giving birth. Woodcut from Giovanni Boccaccio, De mulieribus

claris (c. 1539).
150
The sede stercoraria, which

became entwined with the
Pope Joan legend.
saw through her disguise, with the result that she was seduced,
coerced or raped by him. Her downfall came when she suddenly went
into labour while out on a religious procession. Having witnessed their
pope give birth, shocked and outraged, the crowd stoned her to
death – or then again, she may have died of natural causes. Such
were the mutations of the story.
Pope Joan allegedly reigned in the ninth century, although there
is no mention of her in the Vatican lists of popes; nor are there any
unaccountable gaps into which Joan might fit. The story was so
popular that other writers added to it; her tale was used by Protestants
as a means of challenging the validity of the Papacy. As late as 1675,
a book appeared in English entitled A Present for a Papist; or, The
Life and Death of Pope Joan, Plainly Proving Out of the Printed
Copies, and Manuscripts of Popish Writers and Others, That a Woman
called joan, Was Really pope of rome, and Was There Deliver’d of a
Bastard Son in the Open Street as She Went in Solemn Procession. But
writers such as the sixteenth-century magistrate Florimond de
Raemond also reclaimed Joan as defender of the faith in the Catholic
Counter-Reformation.9 It has popularly been argued that the ques-
tion of her sexual identity would have been uncovered when she
151
was made Pope after the use of the sede stercoraria, the throne with
a hole in the seat, was introduced; according to rumour, this facili-
tated the inspection of the testicles of the elected Pope in order to
establish his manhood. It has also been argued that the chair was
introduced after the papacy of Joan, in order to prevent the likelihood
of a similar mistake being made again. Although this toilet-like chair
was used in the consecration of Pope Pascal ii in 1099, the idea that
it was used to check the sex of the Pope is probably a myth. It has alter-
natively been suggested that the chair was either a birthing stool
for the aristocracy or used to check for castration. In any case, most
historians agree that the story of Pope Joan is fictional.
These tales reveal remarkably different reasons as to why men
and women might disguise themselves as a person of the cloth and
enter a religious house. In the first case, it would seem that the man
either dressed as a nun as a means of coping with ostracization in the
outside world, or to enable himself to live with the abbess as her
lover undetected. An impotent man (if he spoke the truth) was no
good to a godly wife who needed to produce children. However, he
might have been a welcome distraction for an encloistered abbess.
In the story, Pope Joan’s determination to strive for recognition in a
man’s world drove her to attain her position. It was the fear of such
female fortitude and usurpation that kept the tale leaping along
with such vigour. With such efforts, a woman might enter into any
area of a man’s world undetected.
Joan of Arc was another woman who cross-dressed because of
her religious conviction – this time to do battle as a soldier, although
unlike Pope Joan, she never denied her true sexual identity. None-
theless, her cross-dressing would result in her death. She first came
to the attention of the authorities as a thirteen-year-old girl, after
she had informed them that she had heard voices calling her to
battle. Until then she had lived the life of a normal young peasant
girl with her parents in Domrémy. Initially she was considered
with suspicion, but her mind was set on a higher authority than
the local priest. She followed the instructions of her voices and in
May 1428, travelled to Chinon to meet with Charles vii. Joan revealed
to him the story of the voices instructing her to lead the king’s army
in battle. After listening to Joan and considering her story with
some incredulity, he agreed to support her and gave her an army
to lead.
152
The sheer tenacity of Joan’s belief was enough to stir up willing-

ness among even the most dubious of soldiers. Now, backed by
sovereignty, the Church authorities were reticent to condemn her.
Support grew among her followers as she managed to rouse weary
men into battle when all seemed lost – a feat she achieved on succes-
sive occasions. With each victory, others watched astounded, and
the belief grew that she was unbeatable in battle, with the soldiers
heralding her as a saviour. Regardless of whether her religious expe-
rience was a case of schizophrenia, or a way to gain recognition in taking
leadership of an army, she nonetheless became a cause célèbre.
Joan of Arc on horseback and dressed for battle.

153
Joan was eventually betrayed by factions among the French and

handed over to their enemy, the English. Although her accusers
eventually deemed her a heretic, it was her cross-dressing that was
at the basis of their arguments. The fact that she had dressed as a
man when she took up armour in order to fight was used to dis-
credit her; her actions were deemed as perverse and against God.
Bishop Pierre Cauchon, who presided over her trial, was assisted
by Jean Delafontaine, Commissary Nicholas Midi and Gerard Feuillet,
and witnesses Thomas Fiefvet, Pasquier de Vaux and Nicolas de
Houbent were brought forward to give evidence. Although some of
the evidence was damning, it was Joan’s own responses that finally
let her down.
During her cross-examination on 12 March 1431, the interroga-
tors attempted to establish why Joan had cross-dressed and to
portray her actions as essentially perverse. They asked her if her
military captain had encouraged her. If not the captain, was she told
what to do by the voices that spoke to her? Joan defended herself by
asserting: ‘All that I have done of good, I have done by the command
of my Voices . . . even now if I were with those of my own side and
in this man’s dress, it seems to me it would be a great good for France
to do as I did before I was taken.’ Her interrogators pursued her
cross-dressing through constant questioning on the matter, but
Joan was more interested in obtaining permission to attend Mass.
She asked them to allow her access to a confessor: ‘Send me a dress
like a daughter of your citizens that is to say, a long “houppeland”.
I will wear it to go and hear Mass.’ Whatever Joan did, it was not to
save her. Her accusers proclaimed against her using her dress as an
excuse, in that she had acted:
against the modesty of the sex, and which are prohibited

by the Divine Law, things abominable to God and man . . .
dressing herself in the garments of a man, short, tight, dis-
solute, those underneath as well as above . . . she had attired
herself in sumptuous and stately raiment, cloth-of-gold and
furs; and not only did she wear short tunics, but she dressed
herself in tabards, and garments open at both sides . . . She
was always seen with a cap on her head, her hair cut short and
a-round in the style of a man. In one word, putting aside the
modesty of her sex, she acted not only against all feminine
154
decency, but even against the reserve which men of good

morals, wearing ornaments and garments which only profli-
gate men are accustomed to use, and going so far as to carry
arms of offence.10
The religious laws she had transgressed were clearly spelled out –
she had broken the laws of God in dressing as a man and had broken
the hierarchical laws of nature that allotted her an inferior place.
Furthermore, she had acted immodestly and avariciously: her male
dress was deemed short and tight, with ‘garments open on both
sides’ (yet this was presumably seen as suitable clothing for men),
and she was profligate in her wearing of ornaments, decorations
and furs. She was burned at the stake as a witch and a heretic in 1431.
Both Joans serve as examples of how women used the dress of man
to further their own agendas. However, other employment oppor-
tunities in which men and women could cross-dress were considered
less threatening to the authorities.
Dressing for Work

The public were more accepting of the cross-dressing of both sexes
in theatrical plays and actors and actresses have long since taken
up the role of the opposite sex in order to entertain audiences.
Cross-dressing in the theatre goes back to ancient Greece, where
men played all the female roles. This tradition continued into the
Renaissance; Shakespeare’s plays often depict confused cross-
gendered lovers. Julia in Two Gentlemen of Verona, Portia in The
Merchant of Venice, Viola in Twelfth Night and Rosalind in As You
Like It are all female characters dressed as men. These disguises
allow the female protagonists to show off their so-called ‘mascu-
line’ qualities of courage, intelligence and prowess, while keeping
more medievally perceived ‘feminine’ qualities of chastity, tender-
ness and fragility under wraps. Portia, while dressed as a man, explains
to her maid, ‘in such a habit . . . they shall think we are accom-
plished with that we lack’. Dressed in men’s clothes, Shakespeare’s
heroines can move freely about in a masculine world, striding confi-
dently about the streets or in the woods. They shed their passive
mantles to take the initiative, make decisions and address men as
their equals.
155
The fact that adolescent boys played the female roles in Eliza-
bethan plays further confused the illusion on stage, with audiences
complicit in the knowledge that they were watching boys acting as
women dressed as men. The situation changed after the Restoration
in 1660, when women were allowed on stage. Actresses began to
incorporate the strategy of cross-dressing in their repertoire, with
women such as Peg Woffington made famous for their ‘breeches’
roles. These roles provided the opportunity for actresses to cast off
their own long dresses and don men’s tights and a sculptured tunic
in order to show off their shapely figures to appreciative audiences.
Women also cross-dressed in order to join the army or the navy.
Although not encouraged to do so (and a woman could be dismissed
from the forces if discovered), this was not condemned to the same
extent as more sexually overt types of transvestism. An example of
the cordial fellow feeling operating towards such women can be
seen in a report given in a Norwich newspaper. Upon arriving in
town at the beginning of May 1741, one young girl brought herself a
frock coat, shoes, stockings and breeches and entered herself at the
barracks as a drummer boy in Colonel Bland’s regiment. Giving her
name as George, she served in the army until she was exposed by an
old acquaintance. As a result, she was dismissed from her position,
but her fellow officers had grown so fond of her that they advanced
her some money ‘for her honest and good’. 11 Other eighteenth-
century female soldiers, such as Hannah Snell, fought alongside
male comrades. Some, such as Anne Bonny and Mary Read, became
‘seamen’ in order to explore the world. Bonny and Read were accept-
ed by their shipmates as men, sharing the same work and the same
pay, and even did a stint as pirates. Such women who had disguised
themselves for purposes of work and adventure were feted in jolly
pamphlets about their exploits dodging musket fire or aboard rolling
ships on the high seas.12 However, when a lover of the same sex was
involved, the cross-dressing was more problematic.
One celebrated case that was treated severely came to light in the
seventeenth century after a physician examined a soldier in the army
of Prince Frederic Henry of Nassau. Discovering that she had a
‘clitoris the size of a child’s penis and thickness of half a little finger
and with that had carnal conversation with several women’, she was
reprimanded and her case investigated. The woman in question was
Hendrikje Verschuur, who had fought in the battle of Breda in 1637.
156
Female cross-
dressers in
Shakespeare: an
engraving of
Rosalind in As
You Like It, 1870s.
She was in love with another woman, Trijntje Barends, and ‘they
had been so besotted with one another that they would have liked
to marry if it had been possible’.13 Verschuur was whipped and exiled
for 25 years.
Strikingly, from extant cases it appears that although women
dressed as men in order to live with another woman, men rarely took
on a female persona in order to live with another man (although
they may have sometimes dressed up as women in private while
having a sexual relationship with another man). On the other hand,
some part-time male transvestites were married to members of the
opposite sex and considered themselves heterosexual or ‘straight’.
157
The Lure of a Dress

In eighteenth-century America, men were dressing as women for
the fun of it. Those with power, such as the governor of New York,
Lord Cornbury, donned women’s clothing in public without creat-
ing too much of a stir. When he opened the Assembly in 1702, he
dressed as Queen Anne, complete with ballgown, and no one com-
plained. As with some other famous transvestites, he employed the
most exclusive milliners and used the most expensive silks and rib-
bons.14 However, in small local communities, it was impossible to
transgress dress codes without being vilified. Sexual irregularities were
considered a problem as soon as they were spotted and vigorously
condemned. The Puritan Christopher Lawne established the first
English plantation in the Virginian settlement of Warraskoyack
around 1618. Other Puritan settlers joined him and the community
grew, but it was not without controversy. After ten years, a scandal
broke out after the servant Thomas Hall was caught dressing in
female clothing. Although most of the villagers thought him to be
a man, his employer, John Atkins, claimed that Hall was a woman.
Since Hall had been found to have ‘layen with a mayd’, there was
conflicting evidence about his true sexual identity. In order to clear
up the confusion, he was ordered before a group of local midwives to
have his genitalia inspected to determine his true sex. Married women
or midwives were commonly called upon to inspect female bodies,
usually for evidence of virginity or lack of it in proof of fornication.
After the inspection the women declared Hall definitely to be a man
but, humiliatingly for him, one with a very small penis – it was only
an inch long. Even he admitted he had no use of it. Further confu-
sion arose when he said he also had ‘a peece of hole’ representing a
vagina. At first, the judge decided to call in favour of him being a
woman and demanded that he should dress as one, but the female
inspectors remained unconvinced and a second inspection was
ordered. This time, both Hall’s master and the midwives were pres-
ent, but no evidence of his womanhood was found. The judge’s
decision was therefore reversed and Hall was once more declared to
be a man and ordered to dress accordingly.
Despite the bewilderment of the villagers, Hall’s predicament did
not appear to have bothered him, and he would have quite willingly
gone back and forth dressing how he pleased when the need arose.
158
Portrait of a Lady (‘Manly’ woman, possibly Edward Hyde, Lord Cornbury, in a

dress), c. 1705–50, oil on canvas, artist unknown.
Although he had been brought up as a girl, at 24 he had cut his hair

and dressed as a man so he could join the army. On his return home
to England, he found it easier to revert to being a woman until he
left the country again. When he arrived in America, he again changed
his mind and decided it would be easier to settle into the local com-
munity as a man. However, this leisurely attitude to gender shifts
was not greeted with enthusiasm by his neighbours, who refused
to accept his cross-dressing and demanded that he define his sex
once and for all. In the end, the court denied him his choice of dress
and ordered him to dress in a man’s basic attire but with a woman’s
apron and headdress, thereby stamping him as a deviant. It was
159
William Hogarth, Hudibras Encounters the Skimmington, 1726.
now obvious to anyone who saw him that he was a cross-dresser; this
punishment aimed at singling him out, humiliating him and making
him publicly ‘different’.15
Enforced cross-dressing was used as a method of displaying the
displeasure of the community with those who transgressed sexual
boundaries – and not necessarily always those to do with gender.
Sometimes an individual may simply have committed fornication,
or some other sexual infraction. Around the seventeenth and eight-
eenth centuries, if a man had allowed himself to become cuckolded
or was the victim of a shrewish wife, he would be dressed in women’s
clothes and paraded on an ass in a ‘skimmington ride’, which was
intended to embarrass him into stepping up to address the issue. In
1790, one weaver who had allowed his wife to dominate him became
the subject of such an exhibition. Other men from the village, fear-
ing that their own wives might similarly rebel, gathered together
to take action. They
mounted one of their body, dressed in female apparel on the

back of an old donkey, the man holding a spinning wheel on
his lap, and his back towards the donkey’s head. Two men led
the animal through the neighbourhood, followed by scores
of boys and idle men, tinkering kettles and frying pans,
roaring cow’s horns and making a most hideous hullabaloo.16
In other cases, a community came together in similar rowdy crowds

in the creation of ‘rough music’, where men beat upon drums and
women banged pots and pans to draw attention to the event and
160
publicly embarrass the victim. The targets were often men who
married much younger women, or had been adulterous. Women,
too, might be subject to such humiliation, particularly if they were
husband-beaters or regarded as being too masterful.
Male cross-dressing also occurred during times of political resist-
ance. During the Rebecca Riots of 1839–43 in Wales, enraged farmers
and agricultural workers joined forces to oppose the setting up of turn-
pikes. The Turnpike Trust collected road taxes supposedly as a means
to maintain the highways, but the money was often diverted to other
uses. The rioters were adamantly against the charges, seeing them
as an additional financial burden on the poor. While blockading the
toll gates, the men donned women’s clothes as a signal to outsiders
that they wanted to avoid violence in their protest. It is thought
that they took the name Merched Beca, Daughters of Rebecca, from
the Bible, most likely after a passage where Rebecca talks of the
need to ‘possess the gates of those who hate them’ (Genesis 24:60).
When an exchange was about to take place, the leader would call to
his followers, shouting for Rebecca and ‘her daughters’ to come
forth. Rumour was that the clothes worn by the men were borrowed
from an old woman in the village who was the only woman big
enough to have clothes they could fit into. Although the Rebeccas
Cross-dressing rioters: the Daughters of Rebecca attacking a toll gate in the

mid-19th century.
161
Dan Leno
dressed for his
‘You know Mrs
Kelly? . . .’ act.
targeted the toll gates, this was part of a broader attack against
impositions on the poor, which included the despised system of
the Poor Law. This kind of cross-dressing was acceptable in the
community since it muted potentially violent clashes.
During the nineteenth century, male and female impersonating
became a popular form of entertainment in Victorian musical halls.
The term ‘drag’ was in common usage in the nineteenth century, to
mean men dressing in women’s clothes. Eric Partridge, in his Diction-
ary of Slang and Unconventional English, believes the term is related
to criminal slang of around 1850, ‘to go on the drag’ or ‘to flash the
drag’, which meant to wear women’s clothes for immoral purposes.
In other words, its slang meaning of men wearing women’s clothes
pre-dates its usage as theatrical slang by some twenty years, and
perhaps has its root in a common practice of male prostitutes.17 In
drag shows, comedians often took on the persona of a female gossip,
such as in Dan Leno’s monologue ‘You know Mrs Kelly? . . .’. Although
female drag artists were less common, Matilda Alice Powles made
162
her name as Vesta Tilley, acting out various male characters. In 1870,
at the age of six, she was on the stage dressed as Pocket Sims Reeves,
a parody of a famous opera singer. A great success in the music halls,
she reached the height of her popularity in her fifties when she ran
a recruitment drive during the First World War dressed as ‘Tommy
in the Trench’ and ‘Jack Tar Home from Sea’. Actors also made their
mark in pantomimes, where they wore women’s clothes for comedic
effect as pantomime dames. This survives right up until the present
day in roles such as Widow Twanky in Aladdin.
Outside the theatre, wearing drag was still a dangerous occupa-
tion during the early decades of the twentieth century, so men took
to various underground clubs where they could dress up at drag
balls. At one club in Holland Park Avenue in 1932, police consta-
bles dressed up in drag in an attempt to infiltrate and arrest
Vesta Tilley
as a foppish
young man.
163
homosexuals. Numerous arrests were made and the men were hauled
up in court in drag and full make-up with numbered placards round
their necks.18 However, by the Second World War, camping it up
became a way to lift the morale of men in the armed forces. The
Entertainments National Service Association (ensa, popularly
known as ‘Every Night Something Awful’) was founded in 1939 to
entertain the troops. In order to avoid having homosexuals in a
mainstream fighting unit, anyone who was considered ‘queer’ was
seconded into the entertainment section – although plenty of non-
drag actresses and actors also worked at entertaining them, including
Joyce Grenfell, George Formby and Paul Scofield.
By the 1960s and ’70s, professional female impersonators became
popular in theatre, radio, television and film as British audiences
took camp men to their hearts. Kenneth Williams and Charles Hawtrey
in the bbc radio programme Round the Horne and in the Carry On
films had huge family audiences. Drag became increasingly outland-
ish, with men dressing in female accoutrements with massive false
breasts, fluffy, long-haired bouffant wigs, huge false eyelashes, full-
length Lurex gowns and six-inch golden-heeled sandals. Danny La
Rue, one of the first well-known drag artists to make drag main-
stream in Britain, was a regular performer at the London Palladium
throughout the 1960s. Popular and respectable enough to be invit-
ed to perform in front of the Queen, he was even awarded an obe.
In 1982, he was the first man to take over the role of Dolly Levi in
the musical Hello Dolly! Noël Coward called him ‘The most profes-
sional, the most witty . . . and the most utterly charming man in
the business.’
By the 1980s, places that had been marginalized and underground
in the 1970s, such as the Union Pub on Canal Street in Manchester
and the Royal Vauxhall Tavern in London, were being attended by
straights as well as gays.19 A new wave of drag artists topped the bills
at local clubs and pubs. Usually the entertainment consisted of drag
queens miming to gay anthems such as Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I Will Survive’
or ‘I Am What I Am’ from La Cage aux Folles, the musical by Harvey
Fierstein. Based on a French play of 1973 by Jean Poiret, a produc-
tion of this show won numerous awards in 1983, bringing camp to
Broadway. In the 1980s, drag artists such as Paul O’Grady and Julian
Clary both toured clubs and pubs before they obtained television fame;
O’Grady played his alter ego Lily Savage for eight years at the Royal
164
Vauxhall Tavern, and Clary toured the clubs with his stage show
The Joan Collins Fan Club, together with his pet Fanny the Wonder
Dog, before he found fame camping it up on television. In the 1990s
the comedian Eddie Izzard started doing stand-up routines wearing
a skirt, calling himself ‘a straight transvestite or a male lesbian’.20
Yet although entertainment made cross-dressing more acceptable,
at the beginning of the twentieth century it had been categorized as
a medical problem.
The Rise of the Transvestite

Modern day cross-dressers were first labelled ‘transvestites’ by German
sexologist Dr Magnus Hirschfeld – ‘trans’ meaning ‘opposite’ and
‘vestis’ meaning ‘clothing’ – in his book Transvestites, published in
1910. Working with a like-minded group of men, his work focused
on the ‘problem’ of cross-dressing while fighting for better under-
standing of homosexuality. In Berlin in 1897 they founded the
Scientific Humanitarian Committee, a campaign group which pro-
moted the idea that homosexuality should be treated as a medical
condition rather than as a criminal one (in line with Karl Heinrich
Ulrichs’s thinking), but also supporting bisexual and trangendered
people. Revolutionary thinking in its day, this was a major influence
on the movement to decriminalize homosexuality. In 1919, Hirschfeld
opened the Institute for Sex Research with his colleague Arthur
Kronfeld; Hirschfeld’s assistant Karl Giese helped out with admin-
istration and gave lectures. The Institute saw about 1,800 people a
year and was one of the first places people could go for advice on
sex problems without being judged. Doctors offered advice on con-
traception, sex education and sexually transmitted diseases, treated
those with no money and advocated for the rights of both women
and homosexuals. In 1933 the Institute was destroyed by the Nazis,
who hauled 20,000 books and journals out of the library and burned
them in the street. The Institute’s administrator, Kurt Hiller, was
sent to a concentration camp but he eventually managed to flee to
Prague and on to London. Giese also fled, to Czechoslovakia, but later
committed suicide when Hitler occupied the country; Kronfeld
killed himself as the Germans approached Moscow. Hirschfeld
escaped, since he was on tour in America at the time of the attack on
the Institute.
165
Transvestite, c. 1896.
Hirschfeld’s ground-breaking study of transvestites revealed a

cross-section of people with multifarious feelings and attitudes
towards their cross-dressing. Of the seventeen transvestites he inter-
viewed, only one was a woman. Nine of the men were married; seven
were fathers. Some of the men who cross-dressed were hetero-
sexual, but others showed desire for men. Some wanted to become
a woman, and wanted to play the role of a woman in a heterosexual
166
relationship, one man admitting that he had ‘the passing wish to

complete the ideal of the condition of a woman by means of a male
partner’.21 For nearly all the men, their transvestism started in child-
hood – they began by trying on their sister’s or mother’s dresses.
Most of the men wanted to be effeminate, and wished to do fem-
inine things. They spoke of acquiring the traditional feminine
qualities of their day – meekness, tranquillity and being ‘kittenish’,
modest and patient. All of them had an obsession with fashion and
concerned themselves with minute details of their female dress.
They often had fixations on particular items of clothing, including
corsets, knickers, gloves and veils, expensive lace handkerchiefs
and fine jewellery.
Studying women’s fashion magazines helped many of the men
to dress themselves better as women. They did not simply want to
wear a frock but wanted to look and act like a woman. Female occu-
pations were coveted, and men yearned to be governesses, milliners
or ‘chambermaid to a fine lady’. Many of the men developed female
hobbies at an early age – embroidery, crochet, knitting – and enjoyed
domestic housework. Female relatives sometimes offered assistance
in obtaining suitable attire. One mother of a female impersonator
Examining the links between androgyny, transvestitism and homosexuality:

a case from Magnus Hirschfeld, Sexualpathologie (1921).
167
helped her son by engaging a dressmaker for him and arranged clothes
swaps between him and his female cousin. His mother wrote to
him, ‘Gretchen is very happy about getting one of your silk dresses
. . . and wants to know if you have any use for some crocheted lace
and a night jacket.’22 Others were not so lucky and experienced
rejection by friends and family.
Most of the patients denied that cross-dressing caused sexual
excitement or titillation in any way. One male cross-dresser said,
‘Putting on women’s underclothing in no way calls up sexual stimu-
lation but rather gratifies me insofar as the feeling in my soul is given
external expression.’ When dressed in female attire, he acquired a
feeling of peace and clarity of mind. However, this was not the case
with all of Hirschfeld’s patients. One patient admitted he became
‘terribly excited’. At least five patients in his study had had homo-
sexual fantasies or had experimented with sex with men. ‘Mr F’ told
how at the age of 21 he had succumbed to anal intercourse with an
Arab while on holiday. However, most denied homosexual feeling;
one even asserted ‘There is no sign of any homosexuality present. I
deeply despise Urnings and effeminate men.’23
The one woman included in Hirschfeld’s study expressed how
she felt ‘light, well and able to work’ when she donned a man’s cap,
tie, underwear and boots, while women’s clothing cramped her style
and made her feel ‘unfree’. Dressing as a man provided her with
more opportunities to work with better pay. By the time she was 30,
she had already worked as a locksmith, a miner, a butler, a barber,
a house painter and in other ‘male’ jobs. She had even worked on
a whaling ship in Arendel where ‘everything would have been great
if the lice had not tormented us so’.24 Disguised as a man, she had
managed to travel all over the world. Now married with children, she
regretted giving up her previous independence and admitted she
felt fettered. Sexually she appeared to be bisexual, but Hirschfeld
thought her sex urge less strong than her urge to dress as a man.
From Hirschfeld’s investigations, as well as other sexologists’ stud-
ies, it would seem that female transvestism was less well understood
or investigated than male transvestism. This was probably because
it was less obvious, and women were more cautious about exposing
themselves. From the sexologists’ point of view, transvestites were
most generally seen either as sexually perverted in their psychology,
or somehow corrupted in their physiology.
168
More recently, in the 1980s, scientifically controlled studies have

sought to define whether transvestism elicits a sexual response or
not. All those who agreed to be tested denied that their reason for
dressing in women’s clothes was sexual. However, after being sub-
jected to certain stimuli under clinical observation in a controlled
environment, the cohorts showed conclusive evidence of penile tumes-
cence (blood rushing to the penis showing sexual stimulus) when they
read fantasies of cross-dressing. Scientists concluded that therefore
there was an association between the subjects’ dressing up and their
sexual thoughts, despite their assertion of the opposite.25
From Hirschfeld’s study, it would seem that various types of
transvestite existed: men who were homosexual but afraid to recog-
nize the fact; men who were heterosexual who simply liked dressing
as women; and those who actually wanted to change sex. From the
one woman interviewed, it seemed that cross-dressing was partly
used as a means to greater independence in a world which restrict-
ed women. Until then, little investigation had been undertaken on
gender dysmorphia.
While people still cross-dress for fun, for sex and as part of sex-
ual identity, transvestism has become much more diverse in the
twenty-first century. With medical developments, definitions of
transvestism and its understanding have became even more con-
fused. Both society and the law have struggled to keep up with the
great variance in sexuality taking place, most notably as a result of
the availability of hormone drugs and the emergence of transsexual
surgical realignment surgery.
Transsexuality
Although incomplete sex reassignment surgery had begun in the
1920s, it was rare in the first few decades of the twentieth century.
People of both sexes struggled to come to terms with the fact that
they felt as if they had been born in a body of the wrong gender.
One male transvestite interviewed by Magnus Hirschfeld appears
to have wanted a sex change, but there was as yet no such opportu-
nity. He referred to a ‘sexual metamorphosis’ and said, ‘I wish my penis
would have changed into a vagina.’26 The interviewee was an articu-
late physician who could appreciate his symptoms only too well; ‘I
feel as if I have been robbed of my own skin and am put into a woman’s
169
skin.’ His feeling of being a woman from head to toe persisted and
he felt as though he possessed female genitalia – ‘the penis feels as
though it was a clitoris’.27
Other individuals had similar problems and suffered as a result
of negative comments made by passers-by in the streets. One young
woman born in 1885, Miss Katharina T., appears to have been a pos-
sible case for transsexual surgery before the operation was available,
but managed to realign her identity through cross-dressing. After
the death of her mother, she had been brought up by her aunt and,
from the age of six onwards, indulged in mutual masturbation with
other girls. She showed no interest in boys in adolescence and by the
time she was 22 she noticed her voice becoming deeper. Soon she was
teased about her appearance. When she went out in women’s cloth-
ing, people thought she was a male transvestite and made unpleasant
comments. On cutting her hair and taking up wearing a man’s clothes,
the public humiliation stopped and she felt ‘completely a man’. Others,
however, wanted a complete physical sex change.
In an effort to help such individuals, Hirschfeld went on to devel-
op his ideas on transsexuality, and collaborated with Dr Harry Benjamin
(1885–1986), a pioneer working in endocrinology. The two men had
first met in Berlin before Benjamin moved to New York in 1915 to set
up practice. Benjamin was one of the first doctors brave enough to
shift the topic of transsexuality to firmer ground and began seeing
patients with sexual dysmorphia. In the preface to The Transsexual
Phenomenon (1966), he described himself as ‘neither surgeon nor
psychiatrist’ but rather as a student of sexological problems, and also
as a ‘long-time practitioner in sexology’. He began treating patients
with oestrogen, and Alfred Kinsey and other doctors started to refer
their patients to him. Patients read about his work and asked their
own doctors to refer them to him. In 1968, Benjamin placed an advert
in Esquire magazine and was inundated with letters from transves-
tites and transsexuals asking for help. Realizing the need for it, he
founded the Benjamin Gender Identity Foundation in 1972 to help
people with sex and gender conflicts. This was one of the first insti-
tutes of its kind to examine the possibilities of psychologically and
surgically assisting those in identity crisis.
Many of the authors of the letters written to Dr Benjamin in
1968 and 1969 related their life stories of how their transsexuality and
transvestism had left them with severe mental health problems.
170
Beset by guilt and the feeling of being abnormal, people were driven
into states of desperation and chronic depression. One man from
Iowa admitted, ‘I cannot stand having two people in the same body
much longer.’28 Another desperate man from Virginia confessed,
‘I am physically male but need to be cured of that desperately. I feel
I am slipping over the edge of something, and I am not sure I can
handle the future as a man.’ In general practice, doctors were still
unaware of how to best help a patient in this situation. The author of
the letter added: ‘My doctor is willing to prescribe hormones for
me, but he is not sufficiently familiar with this type of problem to do
so without further information.’29
Physiological differences caused just as many problems for the
sufferer as psychological ones. One example can be seen in the case
of one 56-year-old male who wrote to Benjamin informing him
that he had developed breasts at an early age and had period-like
symptoms. He wrote: ‘I have a tube protruding from the rectum from
which the bleeding would come from each month.’ After tests at
Miami Research, doctors pronounced that the tube was in fact a
vagina, and declared that his testicles were ‘completely dead’. At
first the doctors thought him to be ‘dual sex’, then pronounced him
a female. He was in pain from the small of his back to his head. He
was prescribed oestrogen, which eased his pain a little, but was
suffering from severe depression. Doctors later classified him as a
pseudo-hermaphrodite, but essentially he remained a mystery to
them and they wrote him off. He turned to Benjamin as a last resort
and Benjamin agreed to see him.30
Some patients had already started the transformation of gender
reassignments to become female. One man told Benjamin that
he had already had his Adam’s apple reduced and then had breast
implants. Oestrogen treatment had assisted his progress, but he
now wanted details of the best surgeon to complete the process.
Although the procedure of surgical reassignment was available, the
cost to many was prohibitive. One 27-year-old explained that Dr
Barbosa of Tijuana was prepared to operate but wanted $4,000 –
he himself earned only the equivalent of about $5 a month.31
Women also wrote in requesting reassignment. One eighteen-
year-old Canadian, ‘JA’, had been tested and declared to be 100 per
cent female but had always felt she was male. She offered to come
in for any sort of experimental surgery Benjamin could offer. ‘I would
171
rather die in the operation than live like a half a person the rest of
my life.’32 As with many others in her position, Benjamin was her
only lifeline. Benjamin always wrote back sympathetically offering
sound advice, usually with a referral to someone who could treat
them. After receiving his reply, ‘JA’ replied, ‘You don’t know how
much it means to me to find understanding from a doctor.’33 She
started therapy at the Clark Institute in Toronto, the first female
transsexual they had seen.
A man of great quality, Benjamin attracted the respect of his
patients with his caring attitude. Many of them kept in touch with
him for the rest of their lives. They often wrote later about how he
was one of the first non-judgemental people they had come across.
At this stage, few doctors knew how to treat their transgender
patients and ignorance still pervaded most of the medical frater-
nity. Although Benjamin’s priority was assisting patients, he was
making conscious efforts to ensure doctors were becoming more
educated in gender identity issues. He advised ‘JA’ to get her doc-
tors to read Transsexuals and Sex Reassignment (1969) by Richard
Green and John Money, two other doctors working in this area. One
understanding wife even wrote in for her husband, who wanted reas-
signment. Through Benjamin, the husband found treatment and
by 1975 could report that he was ‘well on my way to the solution of
my lifelong problem’.34
The first widely known case of a patient who had complete sex
reassignment was Christine Jorgensen (1926–1989). Born George
William, brought up in the Bronx, he was a frail little boy and afraid
of fights, but nonetheless as an adult did a stint in the army. After
taking female hormones, he saved enough to go to Sweden, where
such surgery was more advanced. While on a stopover in Denmark,
he was lucky enough to meet up with Dr Christian Hamburger, an
endocrinologist who specialized in hormonal therapy and who
agreed to help him. Jorgensen first had his testicles cut off, then had
his penis removed the following year. By this time he had heard about
Dr Benjamin’s pioneering work, so travelled to New York to have
vaginoplasty – a constructed vagina. The success of Jorgensen’s sex
change was to some extent a result of the additional hormone ther-
apy that had become accessible.
Jorgensen’s sex change hit the news in 1952 when the New York
Daily News ran an article with the headline ‘Ex gi Becomes Blonde
172
Beauty: Operation Transforms Bronx Youth’. The effect on the public

was diverse: some congratulated Christine and others discrimi-
nated against her and subjected her to crude and cruel remarks. One
police officer threatened, ‘If you dare to use a public restroom, I’ll have
you picked up and examined by a board of doctors.’35 Jorgensen
walked off The Dick Cavett Show after Cavett made a comment about
her ‘wife’; she had been unable to marry the man she loved because
of her status on her birth certificate. Her fiancé lost his job when it
became known he was engaged to a transsexual. Nonetheless, Jorgen-
sen used her fame to campaign for others in her position and
continued to earn a living by singing and entertaining in theatres.
She said in her autobiography,
I read The Well of Loneliness not long ago. It made me more

determined than ever to fight for this victory. The answer
to the problem must not lie in sleeping pills and suicides
that look like accidents, or in jail sentences, but rather in
life and the freedom to live it.36
She rose above the derogatory comments, always carrying herself

with dignity. She helped separate out the difference between trans-
sexuals and transvestites, remarking, ‘No one is 100 percent male
or female . . . we all have elements of both male and female in our
bodies. I just am more of a woman than I am a man.’
The Feminine Expression

Times were changing and in the 1950s, new help was offered to help
transvestites and transsexuals. A transvestite going by the name of
Edythe Ferguson, who lived in Long Beach, California, wrote a series
of lectures for the instruction of transvestites. His aim was to pro-
vide practical advice on how to look and act like a woman. This
involved changing mannerisms, vocal expression and physical
appearance using the ‘Julian Eltinge method of exploiting feminine
expression’.37 Ferguson produced an impressive list of 162 lectures
covering topics such as ‘Transvestism: Its Legal Perspective’, ‘A Most
Important Phase of Femininity’, ‘Corset Adjustment and Padding’,
‘Would You Be Feminine? Hah?’, ‘The Facial Hair Problem: Its Solution’,
‘The Odour of Your Personality’ and ‘Outstanding Elements of the
173
Feminine Personality’. Qualified students were given individual atten-

tion, but Ferguson demanded commitment in terms of both time and
money. Students received approximately three lectures a week over
an eighteen-month period at a cost of $375. Ferguson compared the
course to a stint at college; ‘the cost of the TransMuTaTion series is
approximating attendance at a standard girls’ finishing school’. He
was also very picky about who he allowed on the course:
Applicants who are overweight or whose bone structure is

very heavy or prominent, or who are more than 5’ 10 and half
inches in height are not encouraged for public entertain-
ment or appearance; nor those possessing serious handi-
caps or who anticipate a ‘short cut’ method of instruction.
Triflers ignored.
Classes in dramatic instruction, ventriloquism and male/female

impersonation were also provided.
Ferguson gave reasons why he thought men wanted to dress
as women:
This ‘feel’ [for female clothing] may be erotic or it may be

aesthetic, asexual. It may also be both. But its motivating
factor lies in an irresistible urge and impulse to more deeply
delve into, and explore and ‘know’ femininity by way of self-
expression and outward appearance.38
On the psychological understanding of transvestites, Ferguson was

fairly clear; the transvestite ‘knows full well he is a man but feels
sorry that he has to be one and would be a lot happier were he a
woman’. This understanding does not always fit with the modern
one, where some male transvestites are heterosexual, like to be men
but find pleasure (and some say security) in occasionally dressing
as women. Ideas then were, however, fairly new and unstable. Accord-
ing to Havelock Ellis, many transsexuals were of low educational
standards, although Ferguson questioned this.39 Judging from their
letters, most of the transvestites contacting Harry Benjamin for
help were articulate.
The criminalization of male cross-dressing was still a problem, as
Ferguson pointed out: ‘laws have been enacted making cross-dressing
174
a “crime” in the case of the male but not in the case of a female – who
is allowed to ape masculinity to her heart’s content.’40 Under the
Municipal Code of Los Angeles section no. 52, ‘any person desiring
to wear any mask or personal disguise, whether complete or partial,
upon any public street, sidewalk or park, shall file a written applica-
tion with the Board’. The board then had to be satisfied that the
person was of good moral character. The fact that women could dress
in slacks with impunity while men could not wear skirts or dresses
maddened Ferguson, who took up the topic in various lectures.
Gender Bending
Kinsey’s survey of the 1940s and ’50s complicated the hitherto
straightforward historical dichotomy of the sexes between male
and female. He introduced his ‘Heterosexual–Homosexual Rating
Scale’ which ran from one to six, assessing ‘femaleness’ or ‘male-
ness’ within any one person. Some people were more ‘masculine’,
at one end of the spectrum; others were more ‘feminine’ at the other;
and there were many varieties in the middle. However, these bodily
and mental varieties were further extended with the introduction of
hormone therapy and sexual reassignment surgery. Those who felt
they had been ‘born in a body of the wrong sex’ could now have sex
reassignment surgery, a development that has progressed exponen-
tially since its introduction. Now transwomen (male to female) can
have newly constructed vaginas and transmen (female to male) can
have newly constructed penises. The process has developed to make
the change less painful and its appearance more realistic, and it is
offered on a much broader scale.
Out of 5,000 people who had gender reassignment surgery in
Britain by 2004, only 450 were women becoming men.41 The country
where the most operations took place was Thailand, followed by
Iran, where gender reassignment surgery is accepted as a ‘treatment’
for homosexuality. Financial barriers preclude the poorest people
from the operation in some countries, such as America, although
other countries are changing their attitudes on this issue and allow
the operation on their national health service. In Britain, sex changes
on the nhs, which cost around £10,000, became a right in 1999 after
the Court of Appeal recognized that those who believed they were
born into the wrong body were suffering from a legitimate illness.42
175
Since the case in Germany in 2003 of a transsexual woman, Ms Van

Kück, who was refused payment for hormone replacement therapy
and gender reassignment surgery, application for medical treatment
has become easier. The court found that the German medical frater-
nity was in breach of its obligation to supply the patient with the
necessary treatment.
We now have the category of ‘transgender’, with which anyone can
identify who does not fit with conventional socially defined gender
roles. The term became popular in the 1970s to refer to people who
wanted to live as members of the opposite sex without undergoing
sex reassignment surgery. It can now apply to anyone who may not
identify themselves wholly with their gender assigned at birth –
or those who do not identify with either a male or female role but
move between them, or identify with both, or neither, or as a sep-
arate type of gender. Before or between surgeries, patients could
be ‘in between’ sexes: neither man nor woman, or both man and
woman simultaneously.
Pre-operative male transsexuals with a glamorous appearance
and full breasts but who also retain a penis have become a standard
feature in pornography and prostitution. In the past, men wanting
a sex operation who worked in the sex trade were called Ladyboys,
but this term was mainly used to describe Asian people, most fre-
quently in Thailand. In the nineteenth century in the West, the term
‘shemale’ was used to described assertive women, but has since
been taken up more recently to describe a man with a penis and
breasts who is on hormones and awaiting completion of his sex
change. However, this term is reserved for those working in the sex
trade and has demeaning connotations. It would be considered an
offensive term to use to describe a transsexual who was not adver-
tising themselves for business. A lesser-known term is the ‘hefemale’,
sometimes applied to the female who has had her breasts removed
and is awaiting the construction of a penis.
The area of gender and sexual orientation has therefore become
much further complicated by transsexuality. There are men who
want to transition to become women so they can have lesbian affairs,
or women who want to become men so they can fulfil their role as
a male homosexual. There are also those who have chosen to take
hormones but not to realign their sex organs; they wish to remain ‘in
between’. As a result, a shift has occurred in the ways people perceive
176
‘abnormalities’. Increasingly, people are calling for a way forward

where bodies are accepted as they are; they argue that we should
all be content to be what we all are born with, without the need to
change. Demands are made for society to change its attitudes to
avoid discrimination, rather than for people to change their bodies
to fit a standard ‘norm’ of one sex or the other.
177
Woman with a dog: Franz von Bayros, ‘Tantalus’, from his Tales at the Dressing
Table, 1908.
six
A Man’s Best Friend:

Bestiality
One thing I learned, you have to be careful in choosing your sex partner – it’s
difficult and dangerous to rape a horse.
Mark Matthews, The Horseman: Obsessions of a Zoophile (1994)
I n Lucius Apuleius’ The Golden Ass (or Metamorphoses, second

century ad), a willing animal is depicted copulating with a beau-
tiful woman, although it confesses to being a little nervous. The
ass admits,
I was greatly troubled by no small fear, thinking in what

manner should I be able, with legs so many and of such a
size, to mount a tender and highborn lady; or, encircle with
hard hooves her limbs softened with milk and honey and
so white and delicate.1
If the audience in the ancient world found it acceptable (or at least

funny) in literature for an ass to copulate with a human, why do
some people find it so offensive now? Often, in the present day, sex
with animals is considered with morbid curiosity rather than as a
terrible crime or sin, but in the medieval period, such actions
could condemn a person to eternal damnation. Why was it consid-
ered so dreadful?
Most of the answers take us back to Judaism, with part of its
morality being taken up by Christianity. Bestiality was considered
unclean and the Torah ordered that Jews should abstain from lying
with animals. Christians inherited this aversion and condemned
bestiality as an unnatural act and a sin. Sex with animals was con-
sidered among the worst of crimes among Christians, alongside
sex between two men, both acts being classed as sodomy. Bestiality
was seen as ‘against nature’ and women were considered as capable
as men of committing sodomy with animals. Leviticus 18:23 com-
manded, ‘Neither shall thou lie with any beast to defile thyself
179
therewith; neither shall any woman stand before a beast to lie down
thereto’, although few cases were ever brought before the ecclesi-
astical courts.
Today, in our secular times, can sex with animals be considered
out of bounds? Even outside the context of religion and sin, it is still
considered taboo. Is this because of outdated prudish concepts of
immorality that still linger, or a more deep-seated feeling of abhor-
rence towards such acts? Attention is now shifting from the idea of
human–animal sex as a problem towards the abuse of the animals
themselves. The long history of sex between humans and animals
suggests a deep-rooted connection between them – encompassing
hunger (food), work, entertainment, pleasure and even love – and
this bond is sometimes complicated by the emotions they evoke in
us. In the time of ancient Greece, however, animals were closely
connected to life and reproduction, and tales of sexual connection
with them were part of everyday life.
Zoological Tales
In mythology and legend, people were often described as being
enamoured with animals: the god Zeus turned into a swan in order
to seduce Leda, and she produced four eggs which hatched as her
children, Castor, Pollux, Helen and Clytemnestra. This was one of
Zeus’s more delicate affairs. In another, he disguised himself as a
white bull in order to impregnate Europa. Most of these narratives
involve a symbolically hyper-potent male animal mating with a
human female: Philyra was raped by Kronos manifest as a horse, and
bore the centaur Chiron; Poseidon, as a horse, mated with Demeter
in Arcadia, and she bore him the horse Arion. The satyr Pan attacked
the shepherd Daphnis and had frontal intercourse with a nanny
goat. Occasionally, women were the instigators of bestiality: after
Poseidon had cast a spell on Pasiphaë, the wife of King Minos, she
fell in love with a snow-white bull. In order to enable sex to take
place, she requested a wooden hollow cow to be built that she
could place herself inside. She then positioned herself in such a
way that her vagina was presented to the amorous attack of the bull
without fear of any damage to her body. The fruit of this embrace
was the Minotaur, half-bull, half-man, which was later to be slain by
Theseus.2 The ancient Romans were treated to a gruesome show
180
a man’s best friend
Fresco depicting a scene from Apuleius, The Golden Ass, c. 1575.
Léon-François Comerre, Leda and the Swan, 1908.
when, according to Suetonius, Nero caused the spectacle of Pasiphaë

to be enacted for real at public events.
Sex was part of religious rituals in which gods and goddesses
turned into animals and had sex with humans. Copulating with a
snake was said to produce great sons: Olympia, mother of Alexander
the Great, was a devout member of the orgiastic snake-worshipping
cult of Dionysus; it was said that Aristodama had sex with a snake
and bore Aratus. The founding of cities and families often depended
181
Pan copulating with a goat, ancient Roman marble statue found at Herculaneum,
now in the ‘Secret Room’ at the Naples Archaeological Museum.
on the creation of a legend in which men are spawned or nurtured

by animals. The myth of the founding of Rome is well known, with
Romulus and his twin brother Remus suckled by a wolf. Less renowned
is the mythical tale of the origins of the Danish royal family in which
a beautiful girl was impregnated by a bear. She bore a hairy son
with human limbs whom she named Ursus. After the bear was killed,
she took her son back to her city where he married and sired sons
of his own, one of whom in turn fathered Suens, king of the Danes.
Such tales reinforced the connection between people and animals
and assimilated them into everyday life. Bulls were worshipped;
horses were praised for their strength and heroics; wolves and
bears, which might have been regarded as a threat in the wild, were
befriended and became family.
Reports of real-life incidents of a bestial nature came from
Herodotus, who informed us that in ancient Egypt women copu-
lated with goats: ‘In my life-time a monstrous thing happened in
182
this province, a woman having open intercourse with a he-goat.’3

This activity allegedly took place in Mendes, where the goat was
considered sacred, and their god was worshipped in its caprine
form. Herodotus was known for his inventions and has not always
been found to be accurate, though Xenophon also records sex with
goats in ancient Greece. Plutarch commented on the state of Greece,
When Nature, supported though she be by law, cannot con-

tain your intemperance within the bounds of reason, as if
it were a torrent carrying it away perforce, she often and in
many places commits great outrages, disorders, and scandals
against nature in the matter of the pleasure of love; for there
have been men who have conceived a passion for she-goats,
sows and mares.4
The real-life activities of women in ancient Rome were no less savoury

according to Martial, who stated that women sometimes inserted
snakes into their vaginas. Curiously, this was supposed to have been
both for sexual purposes and also as a means of keeping cool, as
it was thought to deodorize that part of the body in the heat of
summer. Lucian also comments that snakes were taught to suckle
on women’s nipples.5
Satyr presents gifts to Venus, engraving by Maarten de Vos the Elder, c. 1580s.
183
This tolerance or even promotion of the imagery of sex with

beasts was part of the ancient religious world, in which animals
played a large role. Animals were incorporated into the universal
scheme, their lives interwoven with that of humans. However,
people in the Christian era were to distance themselves from animals,
at least in their understanding of morality, and bestiality was con-
demned as a sinful act and a perversion of nature.
To Lie with a Beast

Various penances were devised for the sin of bestiality. The most
appropriate punishment, according to Leviticus 20:15–16, was death.
Church authorities did their best to avert such intimacy with animals
by putting the fear of God into unwitting souls. One Church Father,
St Jerome (c. 347–420), declared that he had seen women giving
birth to satyrs after they had copulated with apes in the desert.6 By
the ninth century, Egbert, king of Wessex, deemed bestial relations
worthy of 100 days of penance. However, Burchard’s penitential list
suggested 40 days’ subsistence on only bread and water, with seven
years of penance for unmarried men who had committed bestiality,
and ten for married men. Just as in cases of masturbation, a single
man had the excuse of his lack of access to sex, but a married man
with a wife at home should not be practising sex with animals.
Nonetheless, certain communities continued to include bestiality
in particular rituals. Around 1188, a cleric called Gerald described a
bizarre ancient rite that took place in Ireland in the tiny hamlet of
Kenelcunill. When a king was appointed, he was brought before an
audience of his people and was expected to copulate with a white mare
while declaring himself also to be a beast. The mare was then killed
and boiled in water in which the king then had to bathe. Afterwards,
he and his people would eat the flesh of the mare and drink the
water in which he has bathed. Gerald suggested that this ceremony
was still being performed in the twelfth century.7
By around the year 1000, animals came to be seen as just as
culpable as their human partners and were brought before the courts
alongside their partners in crime. If found guilty, the pair were then
hanged or burned together. In the Middle Ages, therefore, animals
were considered just as guilty as the person who had perpetrated
the crime. The Parliament of Paris of 1601 and that of Aix in 1679
184
Gustave Courbet, Nude Woman with a Dog, c. 1861–2.
burned the beasts involved in such crimes on the grounds that if

they were allowed to live, the odious crime would live on in the
memory of others. Most frequently, culprits were caught when a
neighbour or fellow worker happened upon someone with a cow
in the cowshed, a mare in the fields or some other large animal.
Perhaps because of the size of the animals involved, these activities
could not be missed. For the same reason of size, activities between
cattle and humans tended to be committed by men. According to
the criminal records, women tended to prefer smaller animals
such as dogs and cats.8 Because of this, it was harder to detect them.
Did men and women who had sex with beasts actually prefer it or
did they do it because they could not get sex from other people?
Or were animals simply more available in rural areas and bestial
acts merely opportunistic?
Reasons for bestiality can sometimes be gleaned by examin-
ation of trial records. Only a few bestiality cases were recorded in
England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,9 but when
they did come to light, they provoked shock and horror among the
public. Records of bestiality often did not survive, as the trial papers
185
were burned along with the offenders in an attempt to erase the

shameful acts from history. In the sixteenth century, royal prose-
cutor Simon Gueulette ordered the destruction of at least 40 trial
records to get rid of any trace of the misdeeds, but copies survived
and found their way into the archives of the Bibliothèque Nationale
in Paris.
In one trial in November 1555, the defendant appears to have
made a habit of bestiality. Jean de La Soille was a 26-year-old mule
keeper employed to look after the asses of Monsieur de Terron. His
previous employer, the local grocer Josse Valeroin, had repeatedly
told his new employer that the youth had already sodomized a fav-
ourite jenny (female ass) some time previously. Meanwhile, another
witness, the local innkeeper, had caught the mule keeper sexually
assaulting a jenny only the week before. With so much evidence
before the judges, it was inevitable that La Soille would be found
guilty and given a death sentence; the unfortunate jenny was to be
burned before the prisoner and the prisoner then hanged and
strangled, his body thrown on to the fire following the animal. The
activities of Jean de La Soille appear not to have been merely oppor-
tunistic (although he had the perfect job to allow for the act); he had
made a specific practice of seeking out mules and asses. Enough wit-
nesses had caught him in the act to warrant him a true bestialist.
Some accusations of bestiality, however, seem to lie on less
certain grounds. In the case of 35-year-old wagonmaker Antoine
de La Rue, the accusation may have been a way of settling old scores.
He came to trial in 1622 after visiting the apothecary for a cream to
salve a strange injury – it appeared that La Rue had grazed his skin
through carnal intercourse, or at least that is what he had told the
apothecary who gave witness to the court. La Rue’s apprentice, Thomas
Le Fèvre, also gave evidence that he had seen his master sodomiz-
ing a white mare. Meanwhile, the prisoner’s wife told the court that
she knew her husband ‘copulated daily with the mare’, but felt unable
to do anything about it. She was, however, enraged by the fact that
her husband had earlier beaten her up, and therefore had reason
to bear a grudge. Her husband had also forced her to have unnatu-
ral intercourse with him in a way ‘other than is allowed by decent
marital relations’. Although she refused, he came upon her while
she was sleeping and fulfilled his intentions against her wishes.
When La Rue came to give evidence, he admitted he had beaten
186
his wife but said he did so because she was having an affair with the
apothecary. In this case, events behind the scene provide other
reasons for accusations of sodomy with animals. It may have been
a ruse of Le Fèvre’s wife, intended to get rid of a troublesome spouse.
While it easy to see how such cases might be fabricated, the author-
ities did not see likewise. La Rue was hanged in the square of
Montpensier and his body was burned along with that of the horse.10
Sometimes it was the animal itself that gave the game away, as
in the case of a sixteen-year-old girl, Claudine de Culam. She was
brought to trial at Rougnon in France in 1601 alongside her white
spotted dog. Despite her mother’s protestations of her daughter’s
innocence, the girl was ordered to strip naked. As the dog was brought
into the chamber, it jumped on her, ‘knowing her carnally’, and it was
obvious to all who were watching that it knew what to do. Both the
girl and the dog were strangled and then burned; their ashes were
thrown to the wind so that no trace would be left of them.11 Cases
of women having sex with dogs were also found in London. In 1677,
a married woman from Cripplegate thought to be aged between
30 and 40 was sentenced to death for her crime. According to the
summary of her case brought before the Old Bailey:
With not the fear of God before her eyes, nor regarding the
order of Nature, on the 23rd of June last, to the disgrace of all
womankind, did commit Buggery with a certain Mungril Dog,
and wickedly, divellishly, and against nature had venereal and
Carnal copulation with him.12
Through several holes in the wall between her house and next
door, her neighbours had been able to see her in acts of ‘uncleanli-
ness’. The dog was brought before the prisoner and ‘owned her by
wagging his tail, and making motions as it were to kiss her, which
’twas sworn she did do when she made that horrid use of him.’ She
was sentenced to death. No mention is made of what happened to
the dog.
Although now it may seem unusual for people to commit bestial
acts with their animals, it seems even worse that the perpetrator
should die for it. Yet in the past, the act was not seen as a simple sex-
ual transgression of society’s rules, but a complete abrogation of the
laws of God. It transcended normality and left a stain on society
187
too horrendous to contemplate. The act and the culprits therefore

had to be wiped out of existence.
An Abominable Sin
There was a certain reluctance by judges to convict for bestiality,
perhaps because of the capital punishments for guilty perpetrators.
This may also explain the unwillingness of lay people to report such
crimes when they came across them, despite their aversion to the
behaviour. Generally, legal authorities preferred to keep quiet
about the subject. This became evident in the 1670s, when the
Scottish legal advocate George MacKenzie demanded that cases of
bestiality must be tried at night, and instructed that no written
records should be kept of the trials. If found guilty, the perpetrator
was quietly drowned at dawn in order to keep the crime hidden.
People were gradually moving to cities where acts of besti-
ality were more difficult to disguise. According to the London court
records at least, bestiality was confined to domestic households
with smaller animals, while cases in the countryside tended to involve
large animals. It was not necessarily the case that there were fewer
large animals kept in the city, as horses were seen everywhere, being
an essential means of transport. But a sexual act with a large animal
would be easy to spot by people living and working in close prox-
imity to each other, and therefore potential perpetrators were less
willing to take the risk. When men were exposed in the act of com-
mitting a bestial act, the witnesses could be male or female – at
least in the countryside – but when women were caught, it was most
often by their female neighbours, in towns and cities. This may have
been because, as seen in the cases mentioned above, men were more
likely to choose larger animals while women stuck to smaller, often
canine partners. As a result, men were more likely to be caught in barns
and sheds (as their targets were larger bovine or equine creatures kept
outside) and women caught in their own rooms with their pets.
One case involved a woman whose activities were observed
through chinks in a partition floor by her fellow tenant in a town-
house. Mary Price, alias Hartington, from the parish of ‘Eling’ (Ealing),
was brought before the Old Bailey in London on 26 April 1704 and
indicted for the ‘Horrible and abominable Sin of Sodomy’ com-
mitted with her dog. The nosy neighbour lived in a room upstairs
188
from the accused, and it was reported that ‘she saw her sitting in a
Chair, by the Fire-side, looking backward, and took the Dog to her,
which she said, acted with her as to a Bitch.’13 The accused stated in
her defence that she did nothing of the sort and it was mere malice on
the part of the other tenant. Other neighbours gave evidence that
there had been quarrels between the two women and the accused
was acquitted.
It was mostly men who were caught in opportunistic incidents.
In Geneva in 1678 an eighteen-year-old farmhand named Jean-Marc
Tournier was brought to trial after being seen buggering a cow by a
neighbour. The authorities took the time and trouble to interview
countless residents of the village in Burgundy where the act had taken
place. They all thought it suspicious that he herded the cows alone
when it was usually a two-person job, but Jean-Marc gave the defence
that he liked to be alone ‘to think’. A wall of silence fell around the
villagers after the boy’s brothers threatened everyone in the village.
Those brought forward as witnesses to the act said that the boy in
the dock had the wrong colour of hair and hat. Although the court
felt Jean-Marc was guilty, the case collapsed from lack of evidence.14
Another fortunate fellow was a man from Shoreditch brought
before the Old Bailey on 17 June 1677. He had been seen ‘amongst the
Bricke-kilns [to] drive a white Mare to a small Heap of Bricks, which
he had laid together, and there use most unnatural and brutish
Endeavours several times, and after that to another Bay Mare’. He
confessed he lately came out of Kent to seek for work, and within
three or four days after his coming up was ‘apprehended in this
beastly Action’.15 He too was found not guilty.
In Britain, the crime of ‘buggery’ was generally applied to cases
of bestiality, as seen in the case in 1776 against Christopher Saunders,
a cook on a ship who ‘feloniously and wickedly against the order of
nature did carnally know the said beast called a cow, and with the
said beast called a cow did feloniously and wickedly and against
the order of nature commit and perpetrate the detestable and
abominable crime, not to be named among Christians, called
Buggery’. One of the witnesses, Abraham Denning, was working in
the cowshed on 10 March. In his evidence, he said:
I heard the cow move; I looked through to see what was the
matter, it was in another barn adjoining; it was a boarded
189
barn and there were chinks; I saw the prisoner at the bar
stroking the cow and patting her; I never knew the prisoner
before; this was about six o’clock in the morning; it was light
and I could see him stroking and patting her; then he went
to the other end of the barn and fetched a tub to put behind
the cow, it stood up edgeways; then he got up on the top of
the side of the tub; I saw him unbutton his breeches and
his trowsers; I saw him make motions as if he had a mind to
do; I did not see any part of his body, but he made motions
towards the cow.16
According to the witness, Saunders was with the cow for about ten
minutes. Another witness, John Tumey, told the court:
I knew nothing of this affair till the last witness came and
called me; I went down; he said there was a man in the barn;
I asked him what he was doing, he said come along, do not
stand, and we went there immediately; the prisoner was
standing close to the cow hustling his breeches up, he did
not get them up till we got to the door; Denning laid hold of
his collar on one side and I on the other; the prisoner asked
me what we were doing.
Despite evidence of his good character being given by Saunders’s

wife and various others, and continuing to deny his crimes, he was
found guilty and sentenced to death.
From the evidence of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
Sweden, it appears that many cases were not only opportunistic but
also involved drinking.17 In both Switzerland and Sweden, the pref-
erence was for cows, though pigs had been common in the New
World of puritanical seventeenth-century America. In New England,
the aptly named Thomas Hogg was accused of fathering a piglet
that resembled him. At the trial, Hogg was instructed to fondle the
animal, ‘and immediately there appeared a working of lust in the sow,
insomuch she poured out the seed before them’.18 Hogg denied
having anything to do with her but failed to convince the jury. In
the end, he was charged with the lesser crimes of filthiness, lying and
pilfering, and sentenced to a whipping and hard labour.
190
What the Papers Say

Few cases of bestiality were reported in the newspapers of the eight-
eenth century – and when they were, they were reduced to one-liners.
Although the reporters seemed to want the public to know about
such cases, they were not prepared to give out details. Under its
‘Country News’ section, the Whitehall Evening Post of 13 October 1789
reported that a Samuel Stretton had been arraigned for bestiality with
an ewe but was discharged. According to the London Evening Post
of 30 April 1772, a black man was tried for attempted bestiality at
Hickman’s Hall and found guilty.19 The Courier and Evening Gazette
of 23 July 1799 reported that Joseph Dewey had been found guilty of
bestiality at the Assizes in Leicester and sentenced to death, but no
mention was made of what happened to the animal.20 Perhaps the
newspapers wanted to encourage people to report such crimes, but
were afraid to provide the details in case others followed suit.
Not all perpetrators of bestiality were given a capital sentence,
and attitudes were gradually changing. Although in 1821 in Britain the
Buggery Act still applied a sentence of death for acts with animals,
in some cases the punishment was seen as too harsh for the crime
and those found guilty were let off with a prison sentence. The law
was eventually to catch up with changes in public opinion, and the
punishment was amended to life imprisonment under the Offences
Against the Person Act of 1861, which stated, ‘Whosoever shall be
convicted of the abominable crime of buggery, committed either
with mankind or with any animal, shall be liable . . . to be kept in
penal servitude for life.’21 By the early nineteenth century, accord-
ing to newspaper reports, guilty verdicts differentiated between
actual and ‘attempted’ bestiality, which may indicate the reason for
the lighter sentencing. According to the Bury and Norwich Post of
26 February 1823, a Mr Masby received only two months’ imprison-
ment for the latter, with the first fortnight in solitary confinement,
and a good whipping.22 The type of animal involved was not men-
tioned. Robert Rose and Jonathan Burrell were both charged with
bestiality at Norfolk assizes.23 No sentence was mentioned. In York
Assizes, the authorities seem to have been more lenient with those
less mentally able: they let off the ‘imbecile’ Daniel Woodliff from
Calster, who had been caught committing bestiality with a calf. John
Wilkinson, being tried at the same time for the same offence with
191
a cow, was less fortunate: he received two years’ imprisonment.24 A

person’s mental capacity was therefore an issue for the courts’ con-
sideration in cases of bestiality.
By 1830, newspaper reports on bestiality were starting to include
extra information, such as the judge’s comments and the state of
the prisoner. This may have been caused by an increase in public
interest in the subject, combined with decreasing censorship about
the activity (and less concern about making it public). Reporters rec-
ognized the titillation value of such scandals and wanted to make the
most of it. Under the heading ‘Abominable Crime’, the Morning
Post of 31 August 1830 told of 39-year-old Joseph Rowbottom, who
had come before the court for committing bestiality in Pendle, near
Manchester. While sentencing, the judge harangued him, declaring,
You have been convicted upon the clearest possible evidence

of the perpetration of a crime which by the laws of God and
Man has ever doomed the wretched individual by whom it
has been committed to be cut off from his fellow-creatures
. . . your mind being darkened by sin and iniquity.
The crime was still considered serious enough for Rowbottom to be

sentenced to death with no hope of reprieve. Similarly, the Liverpool
News for 16 August 1833 reported the events of the Lancaster Assizes
under the heading ‘Unnatural Crime’. This time the journalist report-
ed some background details about the prisoner, 41-year- old John
Haworth, a labourer who had been married twice and had two or three
children. He came to court in an agitated stated and burst into tears
on being sentenced to death, apparently not expecting such a harsh
sentence.25 The judge was unsympathetic, declaring the usual rhet-
oric, ‘You have been found guilty . . . of the abominable crime, not
to be named among Christians.’
Fear of the Hybrid

The antagonism towards bestiality comes in part from the fear of being
associated too closely with the animal race. The spawning of hybrids
became a real underlying fear when men began to travel far afield
and to encounter strange animals they had never seen before. Dutch
physician Jacob de Bondt (1591–1631), travelling with the Dutch East
192
India Company, introduced strange new creatures to the world. His

work Historiae naturalis et medicae Indiae orientalis (1631) depicted
the orangutan as an extraordinary-looking human female with fur,
and reported that it wept and showed human characteristics. Bondt
blamed local bestiality for the beast; he claimed that the orangutan
‘was born of the lust of Indonesian women who consort in disgust-
ing lechery with apes’.26 His assertions were typical of a group of male
travellers who saw dark-skinned ‘primitives’ – indigenous peoples
such as Africans, Aborigines, Maoris and Indians – as akin to beasts
and happily ascribed animalistic traits to them.
Sex between humans and animals also fascinated people because
of the idea that it could produce curious progeny and risk corrupting
the human race. Tales of human–animal hybrids were told not only
in mythology but also in real-life medical publications. Physicians
reported incidents of strange births to medical journals, and wrote
them up in casebooks. One remarkable book of curiosities was On
Monsters and Marvels, written by the sixteenth-century physician
Ambroise Paré, who explained, ‘There are monsters that are born with
‘Foemina cinnaminiae gentis’, woman Ape-like creature with human features,

with excess body hair, from Ulisse woodcut by Conrad Gesner, Historiae
Aldrovandi, Monstrorum historia (1642). animalium (1551–8).
193
Apes attacking two naked women: illustration by Jean-Michel Moreau for

Voltaire’s Candide, c. 1803.
a form that is half-animal and the other [half ] human, or retaining

everything from animals, which are produced by sodomites and
atheists who “join together” and break out of their bounds – unnat-
urally – with animals.’27 From these unions, hideous monsters were
born. One example, in a chapter headed ‘An Example of the Mixture
or Mingling of Seed’ relayed the birth of a creature in 1493 that came
about as a result of a union between a woman and a dog. The upper
part of the creature’s body resembled its mother but the lower part
194
had the hindquarters of a dog. The hybrid was allegedly sent to

the Pope. Paré also wrote about a shepherd named Cratain in Sybaris
who, ‘having exercised his brutal desire with one of his goats’,
produced offspring with the head of a child and the body of a goat.
Another of Paré’s tales involved a woman who gave birth to a
daughter as hairy as a bear because she had looked upon a picture
of St John in a bearskin. Such tales continued to reverberate well
into the eighteenth century.
In 1726, the infamous case of Mary Toft, a 26-year-old servant girl
from Godalming in Surrey, was on everyone’s lips after she asserted
that she had given birth to eighteen rabbits (the number varied in
each account). In search of fame and fortune, she had inserted
various rabbit parts into her vagina with the intention of duping
her doctor. She had called in her local physician, claiming to be in
labour, and, to his astonishment, out popped the various bits of
rabbit. He reported, ‘I waited for the coming of the fresh Pains, which
‘Youth with
the lower body
of a canine’,
from Ulisse
Aldrovandi,
Monstrorum
historia (1642).
195
hapned in three or four minutes, at which time I deliver’d her of

the entire trunk, strip’d of Skin.’ All of the parts were partially formed:
‘They were all broken in Pieces, and much in the same Manner . . .
First the four Paws with the Fur on; then the Liver and the Intestines;
the Trunk and Shoulders in another Part.’28 The king sent his own
surgeon to investigate and Toft continued to successfully outwit
most of the medical fraternity, relating her tale to anyone who
would listen. Although she may not have heard of the various strange
phenomena being regularly reported in the Royal Society’s pam-
phlet ‘Philosophical Transactions’, she would have been familiar
with local folklore. People still believed that a pregnant women’s
imagination could stamp monstrous marks – either birthmarks or
some sort of deformity – on her baby’s body.29 Toft played on such
beliefs to add credulity to her case, saying she had craved rabbit
meat during her pregnancy. In the end, she confessed her fabrica-
tion to investigating doctor Sir Richard Manningham and was sent
to Bridewell Prison, where she served four months.
White male Europeans wanted to distance themselves from
supposedly inferior, primitive men and animals. Darwin frightened
many a Victorian when he spoke of a common ancestor between
man and beast in his Origin of Species (1859) and Descent of Man
(1871). His idea had been popularized as the theory that man had
William Hogarth, Cunicularii; or, The Wise Men of Godliman in Consultation, 1726:
Mary Toft gives birth to numerous rabbits.
196
descended from the ape, with an unknown ‘missing link’ between men
and animals. These ‘links’ were leapt on as evidence of the possibility
of man-beasts or hybrids, so when travellers found astonishing
children in the wild they were taken as examples of this missing link
in the stage of evolution. Journeying through the kingdom of Oude
in the 1840s, William Henry Sleeman, an officer of the East India
Company, described the wolf-child cases he had heard about. After
being raised by wolves, these children were then rescued and returned
to the human world, by which time they were incapable of behaving
like humans. They refused to wear clothes, lapped water like dogs,
growled like wolves and walked on all fours.
A general interest in man-beast stories developed. Wild children
were a feature of popular books such as Thomas Henry Huxley’s
Man’s Place in Nature (1863) and Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book
(1894). A strong sexual element emerged, incorporating eroticiza-
tion of the animalistic, and attached itself to stories in which the
crossing of boundaries was feared, but nonetheless explored. While
the stories focused on a central erotic character, the subtext was sex
and horror. Books such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula (man into bat,
1897) and Robert Louis Stephenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and
Mr Hyde (man into beast, 1886) became best-sellers. Werewolf tales,
which had been around for centuries in Scandinavian folklore, re-
emerged in novels such as Guy Endore’s The Werewolf of Paris (1933).
In literature, the oft-used theme of humans falling in love with
beasts could be seen in such stories as Honoré de Balzac’s A Passion
in the Desert (about a love affair between a soldier and a female
panther, 1830) and David Garnett’s Lady into Fox (1922), and fairy tales
including Beauty and the Beast and The Frog Prince.
Similarly, love between humans and animals were taken up in
film. The gigantic gorilla King Kong (1933) with his love for a human
heroine kick-started a cinematic fascination with hairy beasts in
romantic lead roles. Many years later, the French film Max, Mon Amour
(1986, dir. Nagisa Oshima) took this idea one step further in a remark-
ably non-judgmental cinematic exploration of love and sex between
a woman (played by Charlotte Rampling) and a chimpanzee. More
explicit was the prolonged horse-mating sequence in Walerian
Borowczyk’s film La Bête (The Beast, 1975). America had its own bizarre
comedy take on bestiality with Woody Allen’s Everything You Always
Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask) (1972), in which
197
Lucas Cranach the Elder, The Werewolf, c. 1510.
a psychiatrist played by Allen falls in love with a winsome sheep

named Daisy. The discovery of the affair drives him to the gutter,
to drink ‘Woolite’ in despair.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, there was increasing
interest in why people wanted to have sex with animals. The question
of whether this was abnormal or not arose. The answers came with
the emergence of psychiatry, psychology and sexology, and a raft of
new scientific views to provide reasons as to why people might com-
mit acts of bestiality. In his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
198
(1908), Freud suggested that such people were timid and were unable
to find suitable sexual partners. Krafft-Ebing considered bestiality to
be connected to a low moral standing and a strong sexual drive. He
distinguished between zoophilia and zooerasty: the first was a kind
of fetish connected to a love of animals which might or might not
manifest itself in a sexual way, but involved a need to caress and
fondle animals that might act as an erotic stimulus; the second was
a pathological condition, a sexual perversion which manifested itself
in an insurmountable urge for sex with animals. However, acts of
bestiality might occur which involved direct contact with animal
genitals but with no pathological content when a great sexual desire
existed but no suitable partner was available. There have also been
cases of mixoscopic zoophilia – sexual pleasure experienced while
watching copulating animals.
Avisodomy, or Sex with Birds

One ‘new’ obsession that arose in the eighteenth century was copu-
lation with birds (although cases may yet be found to prove it existed
earlier). The act entailed a man putting his penis into the cloaca (post-
erior opening) of the bird, then strangling it. As the bird’s sphincter
contracted, it would squeeze the man’s penis and produce an ejac-
ulation. According to the Marquis de Sade, Parisian brothels catered
for the predilection (now called avisodomy), which he describes in
a scenario of one of his novels: ‘the girl holds the bird’s [turkey’s]
neck locked between her thighs, you have her ass straight ahead of
you, and she cuts the bird’s throat the same moment you discharge’.30
Havelock Ellis noted this desire for sex with birds in his analysis of
sexual perversions during the nineteenth century. Much as Sade
had envisaged, Ellis recorded that on their visits to prostitutes, men
took live pigeons to be strangled just before the men had intercourse
with the women. He also mentions a woman who could only orgasm
after catching and stroking a chicken and wringing its neck.31 This
last case, however, seems more in the realms of sadism as a sexual
stimulus rather than any sort of true bestiality.
By the mid-nineteenth century, the practice had become well
known in military circles, according to a case reported in the Gazette
Médicale in 1849. Non-commissioned soldiers became suspi-
cious after they were being served duck for dinner somewhat more
199
Gerda Wegener (1886–1940), girl with swan, from Les Délassements d’Eros,
c. 1925.
frequently than they would normally expect. Apparently the quarter-

master was sodomizing the ducks, splitting open their cloaca, then
serving them up for meals.32 Another case, United States v. Lebel,
was tried by general court martial in Oxford and involved a soldier
copulating with chickens. The defendant was charged around 10
October 1944 with violating the 96th Article of War. Although he
denied the crime, the soldier was dishonourably discharged with
two years’ hard labour. On 2 February 1960, Ricardo Sanchez was
brought before court martial by the u.s. Army after he was accused
of copulating with a fowl, ‘penetrating the chicken’s rectum with his
penis with intent to gratify his lust’.33 He had also molested a three-
year-old girl. He was found guilty and given a dishonourable dis-
charge with three years’ confinement.
Krafft-Ebing uncovered two cases of avisodomy both reported
in 1889; the reasons for each were different. The first only came to
200
Penis-headed ducks accost a young woman, Martin van Maële, La Grande danse
macabre des vifs (The Great Danse Macabre of the Quick Prick, 1907–8).
light after chickens had been dying one after another. The culprit
was eventually apprehended red-handed. When asked by the judge
why he had committed such an act, the culprit replied that his geni-
tals were so small that normal coitus was impossible. On examination,
this was indeed found to be the case – but he was found to be men-
tally sound. The second case was that of a sixteen-year-old shoemaker’s
201
apprentice who was caught with his penis in a goose. He was found
to have had a cerebral disease. Krafft-Ebing, in line with his thoughts
on other perversions, believed that the boy’s mental deficiency led
him to commit the acts.
Reasons to be Fearful
Although bestiality might be tried out opportunistically or as a
result of mental incapacity, people also experimented out of simple
curiosity. Havelock Ellis provided a case of one pretty, well-educated
country girl from Missouri who, on examination, was found to have
a profuse offensive discharge emanating from her genitals. When
questioned, the patient confessed that she had been playing with
the genitals of a large dog, which had become so excited that she
thought she might try ‘slight coitus’. On close inspection of her vagina,
she was found to be bleeding from three large tears. The animal had
hung on so tightly with his forelegs that she had been unable to
get him off – the dog’s penis had become so swollen that the dog
could not extract itself.34 If a dog is separated from its partner before
ejaculating, it can cause pain and serious damage. A dog’s penis has
a bone, the baculum, as well as a small bulb at the base, which swells
up to five times its normal size once inside the vagina. The bitch’s
muscles tighten and ‘lock on’, which means that two dogs become
stuck together. In this case, the young woman from Missouri suffered
considerable physical harm.
Alcohol continued to feature in twentieth-century bestiality cases.
In 1944, one 33-year-old cement worker from northern Sweden con-
fessed to police that he had stumbled into a stable and attempted to
put his penis into a cow, but fell off the stool he was standing on,
unable to complete the act, before groping his way home to bed.
He later retracted his confession and the court acquitted him. Jens
Rydström, the historian who uncovered the case, believes that the
period from 1880 onwards in Sweden was a time when views were
changing on bestiality. People who committed bestial acts (tidelag)
were no longer seen as ‘sinners’ but as ‘perverts’. Police tended to
regulate the sexual behaviour of the poor more frequently, and
bestialists brought before the courts were most often from the lower
classes, mostly farm-hands. Swedish authorities eventually abol-
ished the law on bestiality as they thought it outdated and considered
202
Girl stuck to a dog,

Martin van Maële,
La Grande danse
macabre (1907).
that a person who committed such activities was in need of treatment,

rather than punishment.35 Many perpetrators were also now being
classed as insane, although it seems obvious in some cases the acts
committed were merely opportunistic. These types of acts were still
most frequently committed by adolescent boys working on farms.
Another problem arose for the u.s. Army (u.s. v. Malone) during
the Second World War, when an American soldier was caught sodom-
izing a cow in Ipswich. A British farmer chased him through a field and
called the police. Rushing to the spot, when the police snapped on
their headlights, they found him mounting the cow. As mitigating
evidence, the soldier said he was intoxicated – he could hardly deny
the charge as his erect penis was encrusted with dung.36 According
to the police witnesses, the hindquarters of the cow were imprinted
on the defendant’s thighs. His case came to trial on 8 September 1943
and he was sentenced to a dishonourable discharge and three years’
hard labour.
203
In other cases, sexual acts took place with an animal because

the owner felt a real emotional attachment to it. Such a case of zoo-
philia was aired on the Jerry Springer show in the programme entitled
I Married a Horse. The story followed the commitment of marriage
made between Mark Matthews (a pseudonym) and Pixel, his pony.
Matthews had already tried marriage to a woman and had two chil-
dren, but he preferred his pony. Springer’s comment was ‘This is
pretty sick’, to which Matthews retorted, ‘A psychologist called it
an unusual adjustment to a unique situation.’ The programme
was not aired on some channels as it was considered too obscene.
Matthews wrote about his experience with his own version of ‘My Little
Pony’ in The Horseman: Obsessions of a Zoophile, published in
1994. While in college, he fell in love with a pony called Goldie that
lived nearby and began having sex with her. The man who looked
after the horse caught him with Goldie but was surprisingly non-
judgemental. As Matthews explained, ‘Loe surprised me alright. He
was the first adult outside of Dad who found out about my desires
and not only accepted but condoned them.’37 The relationship of
such men and women with their animals was not merely sexual, but
emotional, with loving attachments formed, apparently on both
sides. In these relationships, the human partner frequently declared
that the love was reciprocated.
The Love of Furry Friends

Attraction to animals appears to be gender-biased, with most stud-
ies concurring that women were less prone to bestiality than men.
In investigations of past trial records, this bias is seen to pre-date
modern times. In one study of bestiality involving the examination
of 1,200 cases in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Sweden, only
nine of the cases that came to trial involved women.38 Kinsey’s study
of sexual behaviour in the 1940s and 1950s found that only about
8 per cent of all men interviewed had had sex with animals, most
in adolescence. However, when it was narrowed down to farm boys
it was as high as 50 per cent. In Kinsey’s study, among women, the rate
was only 3.5 per cent. Just as with most of the eighteenth-century
cases, men usually went for larger farm animals, whereas women
opted for smaller animals such as dogs.39 Furthermore, according to
Kinsey, men opted for vaginal or anal copulation whereas women
204
liked general body contact or preferred masturbation of the animal.

Only a small minority experienced cunnilingus from the animal, or
coitus. Morton Hunt undertook a similar investigation in 1974; his
sample showed higher percentages of oral contacts for women, with
no actual female–animal coitus. He found a similar desire for cer-
tain animals as Kinsey had uncovered, but over twenty years, there
had been a decrease to just under 5 per cent for males and nearly 2
per cent for females who had sex with animals. This drop he attrib-
uted to a declining rural environment in the United States, as people
were moving to the cities.40 Also, the sexual revolution of the 1960s
allowed for greater opportunity for sex with other people and less
inhibition about sex generally. Both studies show that actual incidents
of bestiality were infrequent, and rare after adolescence.
More recently, a new kind of sexual activity has arisen which con-
nects sex, animals and humans among people who call themselves
‘plushies’ or ‘furries’. Plushophilia is a modern concept and describes
an obsession with stuffed animal toys. For some people, plushophilia
also extends to a fascination with large, furry animal suits. These men
and women may don life-size costumes, and plushie groups meet up
to share their obsession and to find a likely partner in plushiness. This
understanding has been extended to the love of large furry animal suits
Stalking Cat (Dennis Avner).

205
– men and women don life-size costumes and whole communities

meet up to share their obsession and to find a likely partner in plushi-
ness. The costumes are often inspired by Disney-type caricatures,
covering the whole body. In contrast to the plushies, the furries take
on animal characteristics and disdain plushies. Furries argue that
being ‘furry’ is an identity and furries often say how they feel anthro-
pomorphized – they feel part animal with human characteristics. They
partly dress as animals, the rest of their transformation completed
by using makeup to transform their features to look animal-like;
at least one man has had plastic surgery to define his features in
the shape of a cat. Plushies and furries meet at conferences such
as ConFurence and Further Confusion. These meetings attract around
5,000 people at a time, providing them with the opportunity to
openly display their fetishes. Furries have defined their role-playing
behaviour as ‘scritching’, which involves embraces, scratching and
combing one’s hand along a partner’s chest, head, scalp or back.
Making noises in response shows appreciation of a scritch. One
observer pointed out, ‘It should be worth noting that heterosexual
males and females within Furry Fandom also participate in this social
body language between members of the same sex without any appar-
ent threat to their sexual identity as a heterosexual.’41 In a survey of
360 furries taken in 1998, nearly half of those furries who responded
said that they were bisexual.
So in secular Western societies, should people be taking a differ-
ent view on bestial activities? Is bestiality hurtful or harmless fun?
Can animals consent? Is it important that they do? How do we know
when they do and when they don’t? In more recent years, with the work
of animal rights campaigners, a new caring attitude to animals has
emerged. Questions have arisen as to whether it is acceptable or
not to allow humans to have sex with animals (be it vaginal intercourse,
sodomy, cunnilingus or fellatio, and so on). These sorts of acts usu-
ally take place in secluded places or behind closed doors and so are
difficult to detect. Bestial activists argue that there should be a possi-
bility of accepting cases of shared affection between humans and
animals where boundaries can be crossed, whatever our personal
feelings towards the idea.
In seeking answers, governments and campaigners have come
together to change laws and provide more protection for animals,
particularly in the light of the exposure of human–animal sex farms.
206
In Britain, under the Sexual Offences Act 2003, a man is deemed to

have committed an offence if he ‘intentionally performed an act of
penetration with his penis’ and ‘what is penetrated is the vagina or
anus of a living animal’.42 For this, he can be imprisoned for up to two
years. Nothing is said about female bestialists. In November 2008,
Sweden discussed new sex laws concerning bestiality after the un-
covering of an animal sex ring where men met on a farm regularly
to have sex with a variety of animals. Concerns were raised after the
Swedish Animal Welfare Agency registered 115 cases of bestiality
between 2000 and 2005.43 Sweden is perhaps more advanced than
most countries in addressing the matter.
More worryingly, animal–human sex ‘farms’ are emerging in
the u.s. and people are even travelling abroad to find places where
they can indulge in bestiality more easily. In most Western societies
cruelty to animals is against the law, but some campaigners think
the penalties are neither harsh enough nor enforced as strictly as they
should be. One case involved a woman who was convicted of besti-
ality in Britain in 2011 after police found photographs of her having
sex with her Rottweiler. The picture of the 42-year-old woman was
taken by her 41-year-old boyfriend. According to the Liverpool Echo,
police found a cd of 33 ‘vile images’ in a raid on their Liverpool home
after he was suspected of arson and voyeurism. Officers also uncov-
ered 61 indecent images of children. The woman, who had two teenage
daughters and one grandchild, admitted at Liverpool Crown Court
to having had sex with the animal. Judge Robert Warnock called
her a ‘troubled and damaged individual’ and imposed a two-year
community order with supervision. The pair hid their faces as they
fled court. A neighbour said they still own the dog, adding: ‘It’s dis-
gusting. They seemed a normal family.’44
Our attitudes towards bestiality might therefore vary depend-
ing on the person and animal involved and the individual case. Cases
involving cruelty are obviously quite different from situations in
which, say, an animal willingly licks its owner’s genitalia in a show
of mutual affection, with both animal and human enjoying the act.
The dog in effect is consenting by being the ‘active’ partner. Some
cases seem to have arisen from opportunity (working on a farm) and
lack of outlet for sex with a human partner; we might think that
these cases unfairly exploit the animal that has been subjected to such
an act. Certainly where small creatures, such as birds and mice, are
207
involved, and the act results in the death of the creature, it can be
considered cruelty, and legal penalties can thus be levied. The ques-
tions around bestiality should therefore surely be ethical rather than
moral. In cases where the animal is consenting, does it really matter?
The difficulty is in trying to prove consent.
208
seven
The Ties that Bind:

Sadomasochism
Hurt, and be hurt, and, at the same time, experience the exquisite pain of
orgasm until the pain becomes one great climax, or the sight of pain inflicted
grows into the organs.
Marquis de Sade (1740–1814)
T he enjoyment of inflicting pain, or taking pleasure in punish-

ment, has been experienced for centuries. All sorts of equipment
used in real historical torture and punishments has since been put
to use for sexual pleasure, including ropes, whips, canes, chains,
manacles and spiked collars.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, sadism is a desire
to inflict pain, suffering or humiliation on others, a specific psycho-
logical disorder characterized by sexual fantasies, urges or behaviour
involving the subjection of another person to pain, humiliation or
bondage.1 Masochism, frequently defined as the opposite of sadism,
is seen as the urge to derive pleasure, especially sexual gratification, from
one’s own pain or humiliation. Types of sadomasochistic behaviour
range from primary sadism (desire to inflict pain) to moral masochism
(seeking punishment, often unconsciously and non-sexual), male or
female sadism/masochism, homosexual sadism/masochism, extreme
non-consensual sadism, extreme consensual sadomasochism, self-
inflicted pain and sadomasochistic role-play.
Although sadism was reasonably well known in the ancient world,
we have less evidence of masochism; perhaps people had less desire
to feel pain as a sexual pleasure because pain was more commonly
experienced. Before modern medicine, people felt more pain, since
there were few possibilities of easing suffering. Apart from the odd
medicinal herb or two, little was available in the way of anaesthetics.
In addition, more injuries were experienced, either through fight-
ing in hand-to-hand combat or accidents in the field or at home – life
was simply less safe. Effective anaesthesia during surgery was non-
existent until 1847, when chloroform was introduced. Prior to then,
209
any operations or amputations saw the patient in agony, although

opium, alcohol and hypnosis were used in attempts to alleviate suffer-
ing. In recent times, with the advent of analgesics such as chloroform,
gas and air, and opiate-based drugs, people suffer less pain. Now-
adays, the absence of pain makes it more unusual when it is suffered.
This therefore makes the experience, for some people, more exciting
and exotic.
Pain in the Classical World

The Greeks and Romans were well versed in other people’s suffering,
having enjoyed centuries of domination during which they thrashed
their slaves and beat their prostitutes. One of their unusual methods
of foreplay involved slapping a partner with a sandal. More serious
infliction of pain – such as severe whippings and burning parts of
the body with oil lamps – was undertaken only by men on women, not
vice versa.2 The demarcation of such inflictions depended on where
a person stood on the class ladder, and whether they were a man,
woman or child. If they were a freeborn and high-bred citizen, they would
be unlikely to suffer pain at the hands of another man or woman.
Slaves and non-citizen women, however, were more than likely to
be harmed in some way by irate masters or more seriously sadistic
owners, either through being whipped as a form of chastisement or
subjected to someone else’s sexual enjoyment. In ancient Greece, both
Gladiatorial games.
210
t h e t i e s t h at b i n d
high-class courtesans known as hetairai and street-walking prostitutes,

pornai, might be slaves. Both might have pimps, panderers or be self-
employed but either might be beaten for sexual pleasure or as a means
of control. Slaves could be sold to brothels or abused by their own-
ers; one Greek husband, Euphiletus, for example, was accused by his
wife of manhandling his female slave while drunk.3
Few people fared better under the regime in ancient Rome, a
slave society powered by slaughter and sex. Essentially brutal, Roman
society paid tribute to victory in strength and adulated the ‘manly
man’. Aggression was part of everyday life and became a key element
in successful entertainment in the Roman amphitheatre. People flocked
to the gladiatorial games to watch spectacular shows of cruelty where
criminals and Christians faced lions and gladiators fought each other
to the death. The Roman audience revelled in the sight of blood and
took their pleasure in the pain of the victim as he received injury after
injury. Here, the bloodthirsty spectators experienced the tyrannical
delights of sadism, albeit by proxy. In this context, pain was undoubt-
edly linked to power.
Despotic Roman emperors such as Caligula and Nero excelled
in inflicting pain on others and epitomized the sadism of the times.4
Caligula demanded people worship him as a god, and killed people
on a whim; when presiding over the gladiatorial games, he ordered
an entire section of an audience to be thrown into the ring to be
eaten by lions merely because he had became bored after they had
run out of criminals. He was, however, as a young man, obsequious
to his adoptive grandfather and the imperial household. Suetonius
wrote that people said of him, ‘Never was there a better slave, or a
worse master!’5 He possessed a natural brutality, and he loved watch-
ing torture and executions. Once he watched the manager of his
gladiatorial games being flogged with chains for several days, only
having him killed when the smell of his suppurating brains became
insufferable. Nero prowled the streets and taverns looking for men
to attack, stabbing them if they resisted, then dropped their bodies
in the sewers. He kicked his wife Poppaea so badly that she died
from her injuries. He also used his power to sadistically abuse others
sexually; he raped the Vestal Virgin Rubria6 and seduced freeborn
boys. Roman sex was taken rather than asked for, a concept neatly
summed up by Ovid in his The Art of Love:
211
It’s all right to use force – force of that sort goes down well with
The girls: what in fact they love to yield
They’d often rather have stolen. Rough seduction
Delights them, the audacity of near-rape
Is a compliment . . .7
The idea that women (and ‘inferior’ men) should be subjected to

sex with violence pervaded parts of everyday life in much of the
world for the next two millennia. A new religion was about to emerge
which would perpetuate the belief in the natural submissiveness
of women and promote physical disciplining as a method of grow-
ing closer to God.
A maenad defends herself against a sexual assault by a satyr. Red-figure cup by

Makron, c. 480 bc.
212
The first generation of Roman men abducting neighbouring Sabine women to

take as wives. David, Rape of the Sabine Women, 1799.
Sin and Suffering

In the Christian era, the concept of pain was linked to blood and suf-
fering. This was encapsulated in the image of the crucified Jesus. A
new world of pain opened up to allow for a succession of maso-
chistic saints to endure terrible torments. Heaven-bent on taking up
the burden of Christ’s torment, they were covered in boiling tar, en-
gulfed in the flames at the stake, tied to cartwheels and had their bodies
pulled apart with ropes. Monks and nuns yielded themselves before
Christ’s image in prayer, while flagellating themselves in obeisance.
It was no longer good to feel pleasure except in suffering for one’s sins.
The necessity for Christian discipline was passed on to parents
educating their children. Rather than pampering their offspring,
parents were advised to beat them. A disciplined child was a God-
fearing one and the phrase ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child’ became
a Christian mantra. Derived from Proverbs 13:24, the saying declared,
‘he who spares the rod hates his child, but he who loves the child is
careful to discipline him’. In fact, the Book of Proverbs was full of
such advice for disciplining children and pointed to beating as the only
way to lead a godly life. To be blunt, the Judeo-Christian tradition
sanctioned physical child abuse.8
213
Albrecht Dürer, The Martyrdom of St Catherine, 1497–8.
Christian Idea of the Torture Wheel, woodcut From Tortures and Torments of the
by Nicolas le Rouge, 1529. Christian Martyrs (1903).
In early Christianity such violence was not merely applied to

children; sadism was part of early medieval life. More often than
not, sexual sadism was inflicted on women and more vulnerable
men, usually by men of higher social status who wielded power
over them. Men were well placed in society – socially, sexually and
legally – which made it easier for them to inflict pain on women
without retribution. In law, a man was allowed to beat his wife if
she strayed from the conditions laid out for her in her subservient
role as a chaste wife. But for many, the concept of sadism was rec-
ognized only in the eighteenth century, after a man who investigated
every conceivable aspect of sadism in his novels created the ultimate
in a grand sexual philosophy.
The Exquisite Pain of the Marquis de Sade

The Marquis de Sade unwittingly gave sadism its name, and it was
he who was responsible for pushing sexual sadism to its fictional
extremes. Laying out scene after scene of all the types of pain and
pleasure imaginable, Sade believed he would write about 600 per-
versions, but in the event managed only 30. While he was imprisoned
in the Bastille, he explored every aspect of sexualized pain in his novel
215
Justine, written in 1787 and published in 1791. His heroine, Justine,

was the prototype of the pure submissive masochist. Virtuous and
innocent, she is subject to various torments, beatings and rapes. In
contrast, the heroine of his mirror novel Juliette (1797) actively seeks
out every perversity known to man. These two novels, along with
Les 120 journées de Sodome (written 1785), Aline et Valcour (written
1785–8) and La Philosophie dans le boudoir (1795), were the best of
his outpourings but his literary influence was not widespread in his
own times – The 120 Days of Sodom was found belatedly in a huge
scroll left behind in the Bastille but was only published in 1904.
Although his fictional work was highly imaginative, Sade himself
played out some of his fantasies in real life. Indeed, he ended up in
prison for his perverted practices, which included, among other
things, torturing his maid and poisoning prostitutes.9 His life story
provides an insight into why an intellectual aristocrat such as Sade
might enjoy sadism.
Marquis Donatien Alphonse François de Sade was born in Paris
on 2 June 1740 into a noble family and was brought up and educated
by his uncle. He started to write when he was about 23 years old, by
which time he had already gained a reputation among the bawds of
the Paris brothels for his violent behaviour. Eventually, the extremity
of his violence towards prostitutes came to the notice of the police.
One Inspector Marais complained about Sade,
He has been pressing Madame Brissault to provide him with

girls for his petite maison supper revels. Fully aware of what
he is capable of, she has consistently refused his requests
but he has apparently applied to others who are either less
scrupulous or who do not know him and we may thus be cer-
tain that before long we will be hearing about him again.10
In October 1763, Sade was imprisoned for abusing a woman who had
been supplied to him by Madame Brissault. The woman was Jeanne
Testard, a fan maker by trade, who sold sex as a sideline. During the
encounter, not content to have conventional sex, Sade threatened
her with pistols and sodomitical rape but, worse still in the eyes of
the law, masturbated over a crucifix while spouting a stream of blas-
phemy. Although he was released after fifteen days, his arrest marked
the beginning of his brushes with the law. Another incident was to
216
Frontispiece and title page from the Marquis de Sade, Justine (1791).
H. Biberstein, Fantasy Portait of the Marquis de Sade,

19th century.
Spanking scene from the Marquis de Sade, Justine (1797 edition).
put him behind bars for much longer. In April 1768 Rose Keller, the
36-year-old widow of a pastry baker, approached Sade in the street
for alms. Instead of giving her a handful of change, he took her back
to his chateau at Arcueil, stripped her naked, whipped her until
she bled and poured hot wax on her. He then locked her up, but she
eventually escaped and later brought a prosecution against him –
she dropped the case after being given a vast sum as a pay-off. Five
years later in June 1772, Sade once again encountered the law when
he was accused of ‘poisoning’ a group of prostitutes by adding can-
tharides (‘Spanish fly’, which was alleged to act as an aphrodisiac as
a result of its irritation of the genito-urinary tract, but was also toxic)
to their drink.
Despite being ostracized by his peers for his flagrant behaviour,
Sade had managed to find a woman of good status to marry: the daugh-
ter of President de Montreuil, a magistrate at the Court of Aids. The
situation may have settled down, but once again Sade antagonized
those closest to him. Having fallen in love with his wife’s younger
sister, he enraged the rest of the family by eloping with her, and with
these actions sealed his fate. His disgusted in-laws used their influ-
ential contacts to force the couple to return home and had their
son-in-law thrown in prison for a variety of minor offences. After
further indiscretions, Sade was detained under a lettre de cachet that
stated that he should be kept in jail indefinitely at the king’s pleas-
ure. His in-laws never forgave him and would manage to keep him
incarcerated on and off for the rest of his life. He was first kept in the
Château de Vincennes for seven years, then removed to the Bastille
for a further five, released only after its storming in 1789 during the
French Revolution. In all, he spent around thirteen years in prison,
passing through frustration, despair and psychosis. As a result of his
attacks on the Church and the state, he made countless enemies in
powerful positions. He made no secret of his hatred of these institu-
tions, along with those who ran them – priests, bishops, judges and
army generals were all vilified in his books. Indeed, his hatred of his
own class and his portrayal of them was at least part of the reason for
his persecution.11
Despite the force of his writings and his vivid descriptions of
sexual sadism, Sade himself did not necessarily indulge in all the
perversions he wrote about. Philosophers, psychologists, psychia-
trists and sociologists, as well as historians, have all tried to pinpoint
219
Illustrations of sexual torture from the Marquis de Sade, Juliette (1797).
his predilections, but attempts to retrieve the thoughts of such an

intellectual have proved problematic. However, his military life may go
some way in explaining the fluency and vitality of his descriptions of
violent scenes. While in the army as a young man, Sade had witnessed
brutality and slaughter on a mass scale, and had seen the slaughter
of villagers by the conquering army during the Seven Years War. Such
profound experiences are bound to have left a vivid impression.
Yet Sade went further than merely marking out territories of
boundless physical pain and pleasure, and invented an inverse moral
code by which anything is possible. In his novels, he dispenses with
the usual dividing lines of normality and abnormality. Active and
passive sodomy, paedophilia, gerontophilia, necrophilia, coprophilia
and a host of other acts that would later be labelled perversions were
all explored in The 120 Days of Sodom. Sade also exposed many dif-
ferent types of sadism – infantile sadism (cruelty inflicted on babies and
young children), murderous sadism (involving sex before murder),
necrophilia (involving sex after death) and blood-sucking sadism.
His understanding of perversion contradicted that of contemporary
commentators, who pointed to how sex between men and women
was ‘natural’ and all other sexual acts – sodomy, necrophilia, copro-
philia and so on – were ‘unnatural’. Sade turned this viewpoint on
its head when, in the epigram to Juliette, he defended its publication
stating that he saw ‘unnatural vices’ as ‘the strange urges inspired
by Nature’.12 ‘Natural’ for Sade were all the perversions he described.
His philosophy stated that we sense pleasure when we act accord-
ing to nature and with our own nature, and that thus all acts must
be natural. It was a pamphlet against Napoleon that finally ensured
his fate. In 1801, he was arrested again and in 1803 he was locked up
in Charenton as a lunatic. He was 74 when he died in 1814, still in
the asylum.
The Ultimate Masochist: Sacher-Masoch

Sade’s antithesis was Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, considered by
most people to have been the man who gave rise to the concept of
masochism. He created a stir both with his book Venus in Furs (1870)
and because of his relationships with his lovers Anna von Kottowitz
and Fanny von Pistor. Born in 1836 in Galicía, he studied at the uni-
versities of Vienna and Prague and, like Sade, fought as a cavalry officer.
221
As a child he had been attracted to depictions of cruelty in paintings,

executions and the sufferings of martyrs. But it was his Aunt Zenobia,
whom he adored, who was to be the crux of all his later fantasies. His
sexual predilections revolved around her after an impressionable
event in his childhood – his beloved aunt had beaten him after dis-
covering him watching her having sex with her lover. At the time, she
was completely naked but for her fur-lined dressing gown, a kaza-
baika – an item of clothing which would forever feature in his fantasies.
In 1861, his first love affair with Anna von Kottowitz scandalized
the town of Graz, Austria. He was only 25 at the time, and she was
a doctor’s wife eight years his senior. She left her husband to live with
Sacher-Masoch and, at first, they were happy. As time went by,
Sacher-Masoch began to find fault with her and complained about
her excessive expenditure on luxuries. When asked about it, she flew
into a fury and hit him, startling him, but leaving him begging for
more. Since she also seemed to have enjoyed the experience, they
embarked on increasingly sadomasochistic behaviour. At first he
asked her merely to whip him, but he quickly graduated to a lust for
humiliation. He therefore suggested she have an affair with another
man in order that he might experience the pain of ‘betrayal’. To fulfil
his fantasy, they searched for someone to fulfil the role and landed upon
‘Count Meciszevski’, who was not a count at all, but a man wanted
back in Russia for theft. Unfortunately for Anna, he gave her syphilis;
in revenge, Sacher-Masoch arranged to have the count deported.
Sacher-Masoch went on to describe his relationship with Anna in
his novel The Separated Wife, which was published in 1865, thereby
creating further waves of gossip.
It was Fanny von Pistor who completely fulfilled Sacher-Masoch’s
masochistic fantasies. They met in 1869 after she had sent him a
thick bundle of manuscripts, signing herself ‘Baroness Bogdanoff’
from Baden. She had read The Separated Wife, so had more than an
inkling of his masochistic personality. Since they pleased each other,
they made a formal written agreement about the type of relation-
ship they would have: he would act as her footman and she would
humiliate him while they travelled around the world. They signed a
written contract to that effect: ‘Herr Leopold von Sacher-Masoch gives
his word of honour to Frau Pistor to become her slave and to comply
unreservedly for six months, with every one of her desires and com-
mands.’ For her part: ‘The mistress has the right to punish her slave
222
in any way she thinks fit for all errors, carelessness or crime of lèse-
majesté on his part.’13 Part of the contract included her promise to
wear furs as often as possible in order to indulge his obsession. On
their trip to Italy, he again began to fantasize about being subjected
to betrayal and insisted she have an affair. This time, unable to find
a suitable aristocrat (pretended or not), they ended up with a third-
rate actor, Salvini, who was only too willing to have an affair with Pistor.
Salvini, knowing nothing about the type of relationship she had with
Sacher-Masoch, could only congratulate himself on finding such a rich
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1836–1895).

223
mistress. Although the six-month agreement between Sacher-

Masoch and Pistor proved a success, both had had their fill at the
end of the period. The contract was not renewed.
In 1873, Sacher-Masoch married 27-year-old glove maker Angelika
Aurora Rümelin (she later called herself Wanda, after his heroine
in Venus in Furs). She also wrote a series of letters to him under a
pseudonym, obviously a method guaranteed to pique his interest.
She was a young woman of humble background who knew he was
rich and was no doubt attracted by his high status. A friend had already
drawn Wanda’s attention to Sacher-Masoch when she had presented
her with his book The Heritage of Cain and told her, ‘He needs a
woman who will drag him under the yoke – who will chain him up like
a dog and kick him when he growls.’14 As Wanda intended, the mysteri-
ousness of her letters fascinated Sacher-Masoch so much that he went
out of his way to find her. Initially, their marriage was a happy one but
the death of their first child left them both consumed by grief. A
continued lack of finances and Sacher-Masoch’s demands for beat-
ings on a daily basis left Wanda drained – Leopold was only satisfied
if she wore her fur dressing-gown and treated him as her slave. Once
again, he turned to the idea of forced adultery in order to enable him-
self to revel in the pain of betrayal. He told her: ‘It is necessary to love
a woman to the point of madness – as I love you – for her infidelity to
make one suffer a martyrdom as excruciating as that which I will
suffer when I see you in the arms of another man.’15 For a young
Catholic woman used to regular confession, the idea was all too much.
In her memoirs, she relates an occasion when they visited friends
on their estate in Hungary and her husband insisted that they all
indulge him in his favourite game. He would make all the women dress
up in furs and run around the grounds of the estate playing hide-
and-seek, chasing him like a pack of wolves. Once they had captured
him, they were instructed to fall on him and bite him. He eventually
absconded with the children’s governess in 1887, and had two children
by her. He died in 1895.
Sacher-Masoch was one of the first people to write constructively
about masochism and his sexual fantasies involving masochistic
behaviour. Sade’s revelations also exposed the connection of pain
and suffering to heightened lust and desire. The work of both men
was to become the basis of explorations into sadomasochism that
would change medical thinking in the twentieth century.
224
Algolagnia, the Love of Pain

Although pain, pleasure and suffering had been linked together for
centuries before, it was Krafft-Ebing who linked the names of Sade
and Sacher-Masoch in his explanation of sadomasochism. He was
among the first to examine sadism and masochism in the 1890s as
sexologists began to make the connections between pain and sexual
pleasure a subject of medical concern. He described sadism as ‘the
experience of sexually pleasurable sensations (including orgasm) that
is produced by acts of cruelty and bodily punishments, either self-
inflicted or witnessed in others, whether animals or human beings.
It may also consist of an innate desire to humiliate, hurt, wound, or
even destroy in order to create sexual pleasure in oneself.’16 According
to Krafft-Ebing, sadism was a form of sexual perversion, whereby
‘an act of cruelty is practised by a man on the body of a woman, not
so much as an act preparatory to coitus in the case of a shrunken
libido or potency, but as an end in itself, as the satisfaction of a per-
verse vita sexualis’. Masochism, on the other hand, he described as
‘Where, the man, because of his sexual sensations and impulses,
permits himself to be mistreated by the woman and prefers to take
the part of the pursued rather than the pursuer.’ From that time,
sadism became known as the pathological pleasure enjoyed by some
people by inflicting pain, masochism its opposite. Such acts came
to be seen as illnesses of the mind rather than merely exotic paths to
sensual pleasure.
As the study of pain associated with sexual pleasure spread, in
1892 the German doctor Albert von Schrenck-Notzing (who inciden-
tally also had an avid interest in the paranormal, examining both
telepathy and hypnotism) coined the new descriptive term ‘algo-
lagnia’ to describe the lust or craving for pain which included sexual
excitement or gratification obtained by suffering pain. In reasoning
that was advanced for its time, he recognized that the organs for
sensing pleasure and pain need little stimulation and that some-
times the two sensations meshed together. Up until then the
similarities between the sensations of pain and pleasure had not
been explored.
The investigations of sexologists at the end of the nineteenth
century threw up three main themes: first, the idea that women were
more prone to masochism because of their ‘natural’ submissiveness;
225
second, the debate about the causes of sadomasochism – whether

a result of inherited congenital defects or an acquired or learned
behaviour; and third, the notion of sadomasochism as an urge
which could not be resisted, an ‘irresistible impulse’ (by implication
thereby rendering the sadomasochist not culpable for his or her
actions). Victorian and Edwardian values permeated the work of
sexologists with a prominent perception of women as naturally
passive and men as natural aggressors. An ideal was envisaged where
men were the heads of the household and the material providers
for their families and women were the domestic angels of the hearth
and instructors of moral values. This was, after all, an era when science
had ‘proved’ that women had inferior brains, inferior skeletons and
inferior bodies.17 Women were thought to be irrational, impulsive and
unable to control their feelings. This was exemplified by Ellis in his
work Love and Pain (1903), which categorized men as the sadists and
women as the receivers of pain. As in Krafft-Ebing’s work, sadomaso-
chism only became a major issue when men chose to receive pain. For
women it was considered more ‘natural’ to be submissive and only
became pathological if it got out of hand. Ellis surmised, ‘While in men
it is possible to trace a tendency to inflict pain, or the simulacrum of
pain, on the women they love, it is still easier to trace in women a
delight in experiencing physical pain when inflicted by a lover, and
an eagerness to accept subjection to his will.’
A spot of bondage, illustration by Bernard Montorgueil, 1930s.

226
In Love and Pain, Ellis more specifically explored the theme of

sadism and its ‘normality’. In trying to further the cause of sexual
liberation, he used ‘science’ to argue that pain was related to normal
sexual desire and therefore should not be considered a ‘perversion’
at all.18 His description is very much based on what we would now
call ‘evolutionary biology’ – that in courtship, it is nature’s way to
cause pain: male animals treat females roughly and females respond
by surrendering. A woman as well as a man could prove cruel in this
love process, as she ‘delights to arouse in the highest degree in the male
the desire for her favours and to withhold those favours from him,
thus finding on her part also the enjoyment of power in cruelty’.19
Ellis believed that ordinary male and female relationships involved
an aspect of sadomasochism. He observed the cries ‘of a woman in the
ecstasy of passion, when she implored the man to desist, though that
is really the last thing she desires’.20 Thus for Ellis, the male and female
sexual impulses in courtship involved a non-pathological type of sado-
masochistic tendency which he considered to be ‘normal’. He does at
least qualify this notion by refuting the idea that women actually
enjoy pain, professing, ‘As regards physical pain, though the idea of
it is sometimes exciting, I think the reality of it is quite the reverse.’21
He believed that even a small amount of pain would destroy a woman’s
enjoyment completely.
Like Ellis, Charles Féré believed that women, by their very natures,
wanted to be subjugated. In The Evolution and Dissolution of the
Sexual Instinct (1904), he described masochism as ‘the seeking of
real or imaginary suffering, whether for the purpose of exciting and
facilitating sexual pleasure, or for obtaining an actual equivalent of
sexual excitations that provoke orgasm’.22 Unlike Albert von Schrenck-
Notzing (who thought the condition was acquired through auto-
suggestion), Féré believed that the desire was congenital, asserting
‘the need of association between cruelty and violence with sexual
enjoyment, such violence or cruelty not being necessarily exerted in
the person himself who seeks pleasure in this association’. As with
homosexuality, the congenital versus acquired debate was applied
to sadomasochism.
Many sexologists agreed that sadism was part of normal sexual
instincts and was only problematic when carried to its extreme.23 The
psychiatrist Albert Moll asserted that ‘the sexual impulse consists of
the tendency to strike, ill-use and humiliate the beloved person.’24 In
227
1902, Albert Eulenburg wrote on algolagnia in his book Sadism and

Masochism. Here he plays on the evolutionary theory, speaking of
the ‘irresistible impulses’ and ‘brutality of human nature’. He asks,
‘Is the inclination towards cruelty deeply implanted in human nature
as one of the fundamental instincts?’ and whether it is ‘peculiar only
to humans’.25 As a professor of neurology, he was interested in physi-
ology, although his explanation of the need to inflict pain seems to
concur with the idea of a primitive type of reaction described by
other sexologists. He saw sadism as an act of cruelty and believed that
the negative feelings that men felt for women after sex were inherent,
a result of ‘the bodily and spiritual reaction of regaining one’s digni-
ty after sexual enjoyment (at times in man) frees itself in antipathy
towards the partner’. He may have surprised some of his readers
when, by way of an explanation of the feelings of sadism, he declared,
‘Many men look upon the sleeping woman at their side with whom
they have just had intercourse with a feeling as if they could at least
thrash this lovely or even unlovely women, if not stab her or choke
her to death in cold blood.’ Luckily for the Edwardian woman, this
appears to have been only a ‘momentary seizure, a fleeting upheaval
of flaring up’ which ceases after a moment.26 For Eulenburg, man’s
‘desire for power’ is caught up with the need to inflict pain on others.
However, in an unusually insightful revelation for his day, he up-
braided men for keeping women in a state of perpetual servitude, a
tradition that had continued over thousands of years. He asks whether
rape can be committed by non-sadists. Rapists do not necessarily
have sadistic motives. The primary action is undertaken not because
of the perpetrator’s love of inflicting pain but his need for the ‘disgrace-
ful humiliation and maltreatment of his victim’.
Sigmund Freud’s contribution was to shift the understanding
of sadomasochism away from the idea of congenital causes and
evolutionary theory, and explain it in terms of his Oedipal theory of
sexuality. Freud refuted the idea that sadomasochism had an evo-
lutionary basis and thought it stemmed from incidents in childhood.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Freud identified violence
applied to children as part of the adult masochistic make-up, a hypo-
thesis promulgated as part of his work on the Oedipal complex. In
his essay ‘A Child is Being Beaten: A Contribution or the Study of
the Origin of Sexual Perversion’ (1919), he explored the concept of a
child being beaten in his patient’s fantasies; this discipline awakened
228
simultaneous feelings of sexual pleasure and disgust. In his Three

Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), he blamed boys’ rough
games such as wrestling and tumbling for causing sexual excitement.
The connection between sexual excitement and dangerous physical
activities was seen as one of the reasons for higher rates of ‘crimes
against the person’ in young men (a result of ‘high testosterone’). In
the 1960s, Freud’s psychoanalytical theory influenced psychiatric
thinking and psychiatrists began to use Freud’s analysis to explain every
sexual perversion. Unusual or ‘abnormal’ sexual impulses were related
back to childhood experiences. Yet even this late, doctors of mental
health were talking of ‘the evils of sensuality and sadism, with their
attendant vice – masochism’.27
Although sexologists were responsible for giving us the definitions
of sadomasochism and went some way to explaining the behaviour,
many of the meanings are far too narrow to encompass the vast array
of understanding and experiences of s&M that evolved during the
twentieth century. Sexologists tended to define sadism and maso-
chism through representations of the assertive male (the sadist) and
the passive female (the masochist), but there are of course excep-
tions to this. The sexologists also tended to concentrate on s&M in
heterosexual sex and did not generally explore homosexual sadism
or masochism to a large degree, although there was the occasional
mention of the homosexual sadist.
Hirschfeld noticed a connection to childhood experiences and
the discovery of pleasure in pain, but explained it in a quite different
way. He noticed that his transvestite patients who had experienced a
masochistic pleasure in childhood grew up with tendencies towards
penetration of parts of their body, such as piercings or tight corset-
ing. One transvestite even mentions the pleasure of the extremes of
humiliation expressed through dressing as a woman, asking ‘Is there
a greater humiliation than when a physically stronger man is forced
to take on the form of the woman?’28 The enjoyment of self-inflicted
harm of parts of the body has since developed into a fully ritualized
element in sadomasochistic activities, although some psychiatrists
say that such activities are a result of a lack of self-worth or a result of
depression and self-destruction. Legally, inflicting harm on others has
been seen as a criminal offence, regardless of consent.
229
Stabbing and Cutting

Cutting and stabbing as acts of sexual sadism appears to have been a
fairly common crime, at least as far back as the eighteenth century.
These sadists tended to enjoy stabbing their victims – most fre-
quently young women – with sharp instruments such as blades, pins
or scissors. One eighteenth-century London case hit the news after
a man known as the ‘London Monster’ took to cutting women’s dress-
es as he passed them in the street. He made his first appearance in
1788, shouting obscenities and stabbing women in the buttocks. Some
years later, a series of attacks sprang up in Paris in 1820 where a group
of men known as the ‘piqueurs’ strolled round the boulevards and
the Palais Royal making random assaults on women by stabbing
their buttocks and ankles, causing the blood to flow. These incidents
died out without anyone being apprehended. Similar attacks were
reported as having taken place in London, Brussels, Hamburg and
Munich.29 In Metz, the ‘Hip Stabber’ attracted attention by wound-
ing at least 23 women with a needle-like instrument. Another stabber
followed suit in Trier; this time, he aimed at the genitals. Meanwhile in
Kiev on 23 October 1901, eighteen-year-old Ivan Kaprovitch was appre-
hended after he attacked a number of young girls, stabbing them in
the throat and lower abdomen in the street with a penknife. Many of
the women had to undergo serious operations as a result. When
asked in court the reason for his crimes, he answered, ‘I cannot stand
the women. Their appearance gives me cramps . . . I must stab them
until the blood runs.’30
Less common but equally confounding were attacks carried
out by women on young girls. One sadistic female attacker was re-
ported on in Alienist and Neurology in 1907. The culprit had stabbed
and mutilated the genitals of a young girl whom she had adopted
from ‘a Home’. The woman was not found to be insane or normally
violent; on the contrary, she gave the appearance of being modest,
chaste and even prudish. She carried out over a hundred attacks
using scissors, forks and similar instruments, although the wounds
on the girl were kept fairly superficial. Significantly, the woman used
domestic weapons, something not usually indicated in other cases.
Although she was married, she was said to be an ‘invert’, her patho-
logical tendencies brought out because of the repression of her
true feelings.
230
Isaac Cruikshank, The London Monster, 1790.
Self-inflicted s&M was another problem with which sexologists

thought they had to grapple. In the 1950s, the psychiatrist Frank Caprio
attempted to explain the behaviour of one of his patients, who experi-
mented with almost every form of painful equipment on his own
body. His favourite experience was to feel scratches, and he enjoyed
the feeling of pricking on his penis, scrotum, anus and buttocks. He
231
admitted, while out on his forays in isolated woods: ‘I often delib-

erately brought my scrotum into contact with briars while in a state
close to the sexual climax.’31 This invariably gave him a strong orgasm.
He continued to follow other avenues in attempts to replicate the
pleasure, telling his doctor, ‘Later I pushed pins and needles through
a fold of the scrotum, foreskin and the lower abdomen and achieved
the same response.’ A hairbrush pressed against his scrotum or anus
had the same effect. After inserting a thermometer into his urethra,
although he found the painful sensation erotic, he gave it up for
fear of injuring himself. He moved on to experimenting with bind-
ing his body up with straps and belts, then with rubber bands around
his erect penis. He also tried suction with rubber hoses and water
aspirators. According to Caprio, his patient responded success-
fully to psychotherapy, resolved his sexual conflicts and was finally
happily married.
When a patient self-harmed, psychiatric treatment was often
sought to uncover the reasons – usually given as untoward influences
in childhood – and therapy was given to attempt to prevent the patient
continuing the action. Where injury was inflicted on or by a third party
and the actions were consensual, the ethics of the activity became a
public matter.
A Case of Supposed Sadism

On Saturday 7 August 1920 at about four thirty in the afternoon, a Mr
McM., who was walking in an easterly direction through a vacant lot
adjoining the large High Park in Toronto, noticed a boy of about
eight lying on a path, almost hidden by weeds. The weeds were pat-
ted down in the vicinity and there was no indication of a struggle.
The boy was breathing slowly, his mouth was opening and shutting
and his eyes were fixed and staring; he was bleeding and apparently
insensible. Two buttons of his knickerbockers were undone, and his
right knee protruded from a hole in his torn clothes. Seeing a person
(afterwards identified as Frederick L. Davis) moving slowly some 40
or 50 feet away, McM. called to him; Davis quickened his speed, but
was overtaken by McM. running. Davis had his hands in front of
him, apparently closing the flap on his trousers. McM said to him,
‘There is a little boy fell. Will you stay by him till I get help?’ Davis inter-
rupted him: ‘I didn’t do nothing; I was just urinating.’ McM. asked him
232
to stay with the boy till he got help, and Davis went towards the boy.
On returning with help, Davis was nowhere to be seen. The clothes
of the boy had been buttoned up, but the boy was dead.
The post-mortem found that the boy’s skull was fractured and
his throat had been cut from ear to ear. The rectum was gaping and
patulous; three gloved fingers could be inserted without difficulty.
There was a tear about one-third of an inch long in the mucous mem-
brane of the posterior wall of the rectum, indicating recent violence;
the other conditions indicated long-term passive pederasty. Davis
absconded before the police had a chance to apprehend him. He
pawned his tools and a stolen bicycle and went by boat to Rochester,
New York. He was eventually caught and the case came to trial in
Toronto in January 1922, where he was found guilty.
Despite the conviction, when Canadian William Renwick Riddell,
a lawyer, judge and historian wrote about the case, he called it A
Case of Supposed Sadism. Whether the term ‘supposed’ was insert-
ed because he was unsure about the sadism involved is unclear. But it
seems that the term ‘sadism’ was used as an alternative word for sex-
ual abuse before rape and paedophilia became separate emotive
issues. Here, sadism is directly connected to lust-murder. Sadism at
this time was therefore connected to rape and murder rather than
seen as a stand-alone sexual pleasure. Riddell believed that ‘Sexual
inclinations towards children are especially apt to be associated with
sadistic acts and in a comparatively large proportion of cases children
are the victims of lust murder.’32
Certainly Davis’s background suggested possibilities for the
making of an unstable character. His father was unsociable and died
when Davis was only six years old, leaving his mother free to marry
again. For four years thereafter, he was separated from his mother
and lived with his grandfather, but later joined her and his stepfather
in Chicago. After his mother died when he was eighteen, disturbing
his development still further, he took up an itinerant life. He contract-
ed syphilis at twenty after intercourse with a prostitute. He married
seven years later but his wife left him after another seven years. In
statements to the prison surgeon, he denied sexual perversion of
any kind. He said he had been initiated into homosexual practices
when he was under ten by an adult man. Although he had normal
sexual relations with women, he did not enjoy their company and
preferred young boys. He was a chronic alcoholic and his mental age
233
was classed as eleven years and ten months. He alternated his story
as he saw fit. On conviction he said, ‘Under the eyes of god, your
Lordship, to the best of my knowledge, I am innocent’, yet admitted
that he had murdered the boy to the prison warden. He said he had
no knowledge of what made him do it as he had no ill towards the
boy, but nonetheless expressed no remorse. Riddell stated ‘that cere-
bral syphilis will produce a state of mental disorder leading to sexual
offence against children is as well recognized as the similar effects of
chronic alcoholism’. In other words, Riddell thought Davis’s mental
reduction to be a ‘general paralysis of the insane’, a disorder caused by
syphilis and a common argument of sexologists. The prisoner was con-
victed of murder but died in prison on the day set for his execution.
As a non-consensual act, sadism becomes an act of violence,
which, as Eulenburg pointed out, does not necessarily have a sexual
context. Eulenburg saw the fullest extent of sadomasochism realized
in lust-murder and necrophilia, which he places under the category
of ‘violent unlawful non-consensual sexual intercourse’, but recog-
nizes that ‘not every lust-murder arises from purely sadistic motives’
(as perhaps in the Davis case).33 In most countries the law covers a
non-consensual act as violence against another person in one form
or another (grievous or actual or bodily harm with or without intent,
common assault, attempted murder and so on), murder being the
ultimate violent act. However, as indicated, not all murders are sadis-
tic. Types of non-sadistic murder can range from torture used in order
to extract confessions to mass genocide – the point being that for
sadism to occur, the perpetrator must derive some sexual pleasure
from the activity. There are equally many reasons given why certain
people might enjoy sadomasochism: not only mental derangement
or incapacity, or even having been molested as a child, as was the
case with Davis.
The Question of Consent

A prime example of the problems of establishing the difference
between consensual sadomasochism and bodily harm can be seen
in the ‘Spanner Case’, when in December 1990 sixteen gay men were
sentenced to up to four and a half years or fined for engaging in
consensual s&M activity. Their activities were exposed as a result of
a police investigation called ‘Operation Spanner’, and a chance finding
234
of a videotape of the men’s activities. Although s&M was not ‘illegal’,

anybody involved in such activities could be prosecuted for assault.
In this case, those involved were convicted. Despite their later appeal,
their convictions were upheld by both the Court of Appeal in the
uk and the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. All of
the defendants stated that they had consented to the acts, but the
standard offence of assault occasioning actual bodily harm was
applied and their convictions were upheld.
Police stated that they had become involved after watching the
videotape, in which a group of men were seen to be involved in heavy
beatings and genital lacerations. The injuries inflicted were great enough
for the police to have believed that someone had been murdered.
During their investigation, they interviewed dozens of gay men to
try and track down the people involved. In all, the investigation is rum-
oured to have cost £4 million, and at this stage the police must have
felt the pressure to go ahead with a prosecution. Summing up in a
complex legal argument, Judge Rant decided that the activities in
which the men had engaged fell outside the exceptions to the law
of assault. The problem lay in the fact that, in law, a person cannot
consent to an assault, although there are exceptions. For example, a
person can consent to a medical practitioner touching and possibly
injuring their body; a person can consent to an opponent hitting or
injuring them in sports such as rugby or boxing; and a person can
consent to tattoos or piercings if they are for ornamental purposes.
But in the ‘Spanner Case’ there was no exception to the rule. The judge
explained that any bodily harm applied or received during sexual
activities was not unlawful if the pain it caused was ‘just momentary’
and ‘so slight that it can be discounted’. Bodily marks such as those
produced by beatings or bondage must not be of a lasting nature. In
this case, he decided that the injury, pain or marks were more than
trifling or momentary and therefore deemed them illegal and to be
considered an assault under the law. However, many groups cam-
paigned against the decision and supported the right to freedom of
choice for the individuals involved.
The Philosophy of Pain and Pleasure

Trying to explain the enjoyment of experiencing pain has been prob-
lematic. Although sexologists provided us with ideas – some believing
235
sadism to be congenital, some believing it to be acquired through

childhood experiences – this by no means explains the case for
everyone. In his study Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty (1989), the
French philosopher Gilles Deleuze uses a literary approach to dis-
associate sadism from masochism in an examination of Sade and
Sacher-Masoch’s work. He argues that although the sadist and the
masochist have been depicted as polar opposites, this is not really true:
a sadist would never want to torture a willing victim, and a masochist
would never want a sadist to beat him/her, but would want someone
of a specific type who cares for them enough to beat them. The con-
nection or tie between them therefore is looser than we are given to
believe. Deleuze believed that masochists are trying to suspend
pleasure for as long as possible, and ‘deny the reality of pleasure at the
very point of experiencing it’.34
Sexual pleasure has since been connected to watching people in
pain and noting a person’s reaction. In an experiment conducted in
the 1980s, students were shown pictures of bondaged women in
various states of distress and non-distress in pornographic pictures.
The results concluded that the normal white male became increas-
ingly sexually aroused in direct correspondence to the level of pain
shown on the woman’s face – in other words, the distress of a woman
in bondage had an erotic appeal. The more antisocial the men were
deemed to be, the higher their level of arousal.35 Does this take us back
to the idea with which the sexologists started: that the natural sexual
impulse of men is based around sadism?
From the 1960s onwards, with the liberating effects of the pill,
women could for the first time decide not to have children, to take
lovers without fear of pregnancy, and to shun motherhood in favour
of work and economic independence (although the pill brought
other problems for women, such as coercion into unwanted sex and
increased risk of thrombosis and high blood pressure). Today, most
Western women are no longer trapped in passive social and econom-
ic roles. New abortion laws gave added freedom from unwanted
pregnancies. This begs the question why some women and men,
having battled for their freedom from violence, are now choosing to
enter voluntarily into s&M relationships. If there is no longer an imbal-
ance between the sexes that encourages women’s ‘natural subservience’
as suggested by sexologists, which gives rise to sadomasochistic tend-
encies (‘natural’ instincts or impulses), then why do such relationships
236
continue to exist as a matter of choice? Although the law is clear-cut

on issues of domestic violence, it has clearly had more difficulty in
deciding what to do about consensual s&M.
A more scientific explanation for the draw to sadomasochism is
based on recent medical evidence. The receptors of pain and pleas-
ure have been found, as predicted by von Schrenck-Notzing in the
1890s, to be closely related, as can be seen through brain scans. Both
sensations are linked to production of dopamine. Although the
means to test this were not available in Eulenburg’s time (he published
on algolagnia in 1902) he managed somehow to intuit the connec-
tions in the brain. In a somewhat convoluted diagram, he describes
a system of corrupted neurological pathways that divert the pleasure
pathways to pain. New research carried out by the u.s.’s Massachusetts
General Hospital backs up previous studies undertaken by scientists,
who have found that feelings of pleasure and the sensation of pain affect
the same area of the brain.36 Although sadism and masochism were
categorized as illnesses, it is now understandable why pain can bring
so much pleasure.
The 2010 version of the who’s International Classification of
Diseases lists sadomasochism as a disorder, describing it as ‘a pref-
erence for sexual activity which involves the infliction of pain or
humiliation, or bondage. Often an individual obtains sexual excite-
ment from both sadistic and masochistic activities.’ Auto-asphyxiation,
‘strangulation or anoxia for intensifying sexual excitement’, is also
classed as a disorder. However, in 1994, the American Psychiatric
Association, in the dsM iv, responded by modifying the denotative
criteria that defined ‘sadism’ and ‘masochism’. Consensual sado-
masochistic behaviour was no longer considered a sexual disorder.
People have won the right to experiment in their sex lives, and
they can obtain more information on sex than ever before. Those
who want to spice up their love lives can find sex toys, drugs, films and
Internet porn on offer. For those who want a more shared experi-
ence, most European cities boast a wide variety of s&M clubs. All sorts
of fetishisms are catered for on the high street; leather clothes and high-
heeled boots are de rigueur. Items such as nipple clamps, masks and
whips are widely available and their use is much less likely to raise eye-
brows, and people can indulge in role-play to their hearts’ content.
s&M is no longer seen as a distinct phenomenon but can involve all
sorts of other so-called perversions – drinking urine, golden showers
237
(urolagnia), scatophilia or coprophilia, bondage, flagellation, clamping,

asphyxiation and so on.
The last words on the subject I leave to the philosopher Edmund
Burke (1729–1797), who summed up his thoughts about pain and
pleasure in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of
the Sublime and Beautiful:
Pain and pleasure are simple ideas, incapable of definition.

People are not liable to be mistaken in their feelings, but they
are very frequently wrong in the names they give them, and
in their reasoning about them. Many are of the opinion that
pain arises necessarily from the removal of some pleasure;
as they think pleasure does from the ceasing or diminution
of some pain. For my part, I am rather inclined to imagine, that
pain and pleasure, in their most simple and natural manner
of affecting, are each of a positive nature, and by no means
necessarily dependent on each other for their existence.37
238
eight
Loving the Dead

Living or dead, the prize that I have in view shall be mine.
Charles Brockden Brown, Ormond (1799)
N ecrophilia literally translated from Greek means ‘love of the dead’

(from necro, dead, and philia, love) but the term is usually under-
stood as the sexual attraction to corpses.1 Sex with the dead has existed
at least as far back as the ancient world. Herodotus tells us that in
ancient Egypt, men from elite families guarded the corpses of female
relatives until they started to decompose in order to put off unscrupu-
lous morticians from copulating with their wives and daughters:
The wives of men of rank when they die are not given at once
to be embalmed, nor such women as are very beautiful or
of greater regard than others, but on the third or fourth day
after their death (and not before) they are delivered to the
embalmers. They do so about this matter in order that the
embalmers may not abuse their women, for they say that
one of them was taken once doing so to the corpse of a woman
lately dead, and his fellow-craftsman gave information.2
Greek mythology gives us a glimpse of necro-passion, after the Byzan-

tine scholar Eustathius of Thessalonica added to the story that, when
Achilles kills Penthesilea, queen of the Amazons, he consummates his
desire by having sex with her corpse.3 Periander, a tyrant of Corinth
who ruled during the seventh century bc, was possibly one of the
first recorded rulers to have murdered and had sex with their wives.
Describing Periander’s necrophilia, Herodotus wrote: ‘Periander baked
his bread in a cold oven.’4 But why did sex with the dead create such
an aversion for the majority, but such an appeal for a few? And did
this happen at particular times in history? If so why, and how has it
changed, if at all?
239
The actual practice of necrophilia is more difficult to uncover

than its myths. Throughout history, few people have been caught
copulating with dead bodies and, as with so many other marginal
sexual acts, it remains very much hidden. The dead tended to be laid
out in enclosed, private places, so when the act took place, it was
unlikely to be seen accidentally by others. When cases did come to
the attention of the authorities, records may well have been burned
(as with the bestiality cases), as they were considered too offensive
to remain in existence. Necrophilia is therefore harder to detect
than other ‘perversions’ and our understanding of it is skewed to
the few extant records. Cases emerge in anecdotal accounts, in medi-
eval Church investigations, in nineteenth-century hospital asylum
The Egyptian god Anubis prepares a body for mummification, c. 1280 bc.
240
J.H.W. Tischbein, Death of Penthesilea, 1828.
records and in reports of twentieth-century psychiatrists. These later

cases show that necrophilia came to be treated as a medical problem
rather than a legal one (although touching the dead had been a
taboo for centuries). Because of the relative scarcity of cases, we
therefore have to make some assumptions based on societal reac-
tions to dead bodies. Incidents were exposed when the body had
been disrupted somehow (for example, if there was evidence of semen
or damage to the flesh or body parts of the corpse); or gravediggers,
241
The Amazon Penthesilea killed by Achilles. Athenian cup from

Vulci, c. 460 bc.
morticians or others working in proximity to the dead detected it. In

some cases, these were the very people committing the act.
Another reason for the lack of evidence of necrophilia is that in
many countries, up until recently, necrophilia itself was not specifi-
cally named as a crime. This lack of legislation could indicate a
variety of feelings about necrophilia. Perhaps some people con-
sidered it unimportant; it may have been considered too awful to
mention; or maybe it was considered in a completely different way
from the way we see it now. Since sexual predilections have been
known to be partly related to taboo – forbidden acts being the most
exciting ones – if dead bodies were not taboo, then was there less
necrophilia? Were dead bodies as much a taboo in the past as they
are now?
From Herodotus’ reports, it would seem that necrophilia was
taken seriously and considered an offence to extant family mem-
bers of the dead. This seems to hold true throughout the ages. Most
people feel protective of their dead relatives and do not want their
242
loving the dead
corpses violated by strangers. However, the dead body itself was

also seen as unclean. The Israelites considered touching a corpse
as defilement and the person in contact with the dead body was
seen to be in need of immediate purification. Sexual intercourse with
a corpse would be considered the ultimate taboo by both Jews and
Christians. The Book of Numbers 19:13 states, ‘Whosoever toucheth
the dead body of any man that is dead, and purifieth not himself,
defileth the tabernacle of the Lord; and that soul shall be cut off
from Israel: because the water of separation was not sprinkled upon
him, he shall be unclean; his uncleanness is yet upon him, he shall
be unclean.’ There are more scriptures that make it abundantly clear
that contact with the dead was forbidden. Leviticus 21:11 stipulates
of a priest, ‘Neither shall he go in to any dead body, nor defile him-
self for his father, or for his mother’. While the phrase ‘go in to any
dead body’ could be interpreted literally (as in male penetration of
a female corpse), the New English Bible translates it as ‘He shall not
enter the place where any dead man’s body lies.’ The only exception
to the rule of not touching the dead was when they were being in-
terred, with the proviso of purification afterwards. Veneration of the
dead, disturbing grave sites and touching and interacting with corpses
for any other reason was likewise prohibited in many ancient soci-
eties. This prevalent idea that the dead were unclean may have kept
some attempts of copulation with corpses at bay.
By the medieval period, although dead bodies may still have
been taboo, people could be on open display when they were in
their death throes. Just as they had in ancient Greece and Rome,
people continued to die early and easily in domestic brawls and
wars. Mass deaths also occurred in the plagues that repeatedly swept
through Europe – the Black Death is believed to have killed one-
third to one-half of Europe’s population during the fourteenth
century. Rotting bodies were thrown into the streets for the corpse
collector to pick up, piled on to handcarts and wheeled away to be
burned. Death was exposed even further in public executions. Every-
one from the richest nobles to the lowest peasants witnessed the
spectacle of the latest traitor or murderer being killed. Indeed,
public executions became well-established as popular forms of
entertainment. Laying-out of the dead meant that relatives, both
young and old, came to visit the dead before they were buried. Death
was therefore a common sight and people were introduced to it at an
243
early age. Was this the reason that necrophilia was rare – that death
was simply not taboo enough?
A Medieval Necrophile
Continual wars meant that many men observed mass slaughter at first
hand. For some soldiers, the aftermath of war meant a search for
peace and tranquillity, but the constant and bloody hand-to-hand
combat and the sight of scene after scene of body-strewn battlefields
left others obsessed with death. As a result, for some, the connection
between euphoria and brutality became embedded, leading to what
we would now diagnose as psychiatric disorders. This was the prob-
lem of nobleman Gilles de Rais (1404–1440), one of history’s most
infamous necrophiles. As with many cases of sexual atrocities, his
predilection involved more than one vice, taking in paedophilia
as well as necrophilia. Known for fighting bravely alongside Joan
of Arc during the Hundred Years War, he debauched, tortured and
murdered around 800 children; many of their bodies were never
recovered. The tale is remarkable in that he left a personal testimony
to the crimes, now preserved in the Nantes archives.
After a long series of battles, Charles vii of France decided to
disband his armies and a period of calm ensued. Nobles such as de
Rais, who had experienced the excitement of leading bloody battles,
were told to either enjoy court life or retire to their estates. After mass
slaughter and the thrill of battle, a quiet life was perhaps not what
de Rais had in mind. At first, he retired to his castle in Tiffauges and
set about spending his family fortune, holding debauched parties
and surrounding himself with sycophants. Property was sold off
piecemeal to pay for his extravagant lifestyle, and he eventually
turned to alchemy in an attempt to turn his finances around. It was
rumoured that his first murder of a child occurred when he slit a
boy’s throat, cut out his heart and eyes, and used his blood for the
purpose of an agreement with the Devil. However, in reality, it would
seem that his abuse and slaughter of children had little to do with
the black arts; instead, these acts were crimes undertaken purely
for his own sexual gratification.
The first murders began at Champtocé, where he was living at
the time of his grandfather’s death. There he managed to murder 40
children without attracting too much notice. His status as a wealthy
244
loving the dead
Gilles de Rais by Eloi Firmin Féron, 1835.
lord and marshal of France, as well as his spectacular military career,

provided him temporarily with immunity from suspicion. The fact
that many of his victims came from peasant families or were orphans
meant that they were hardly missed. In a time of great poverty in
France, swathes of orphaned children scoured the countryside look-
ing for food. Even children with parents were urged to seek work
wherever they could. Luring the children to his castle in promise of
a job would have been simple. De Rais’ cousins, Gilles de Sillé and
Robert de Briqueville, acted as his procurers, venturing into nearby
villages, ostensibly to search for a boy who could come to work at
the castle; but the boy never returned home. The first victim to alert
suspicion was a young apprentice called Jeudon (although there were
245
so many murdered children that it has been impossible to document

the complete facts). It was only because the child worked for a local
furrier that it became known he was missing.
When de Rais moved to Machecoul, he built his own chapel,
which he called the Chapel of the Holy Innocents, and filled it with
beautiful children, all dressed in bonnets, furs and robes of the finest
cloth. Two of his favourites, the boys with the finest voices, André
Buchet and Rossignol, were purchased from their parents. He would
later debauch them and then draw them into his secret life. Here in
his castle, a further 40 bodies would later be found.
When the evidence was brought in court, de Rais’ page, Etienne
Corrillaut, otherwise known as Poitou, bore witness to his master’s
crimes. He revealed that de Rais’ favourite trick was to have a servant
hang up a child by a hook, enter the room feigning horror at the
child’s plight, then sit the child on his knee. He would then gently
wipe away the child’s tears and slit its throat. The page told the
court that,
in order to practise his libidinous pleasure and unnatural

vices on the said children, both boys and girls, first he took
his member in his hand and stroked it until it was erect, then
placed it between the thighs of the said girls, rubbing his
member on the bellies of the said boys and girls with great
delight, vigour and libidinous pleasure until the sperm ejac-
ulates on their bellies.5
The children were subjected to further violent sexual assaults as they

lay dying; sometimes they were already dead.
The reason de Rais was finally caught was more to do with an
interest in his property than in the murders themselves. De Rais had
already ploughed much of his money into his luxurious chapel full
of choirboys and decided to mount a huge theatrical production
there. This was to be a mystery play in which he was to perform the
central role, acting out all the heroic deeds he had undertaken in
his earlier days. The play was to be presented on 8 May 1435 in Orléans,
but his family, seeing him rack up all manner of debts, were not
prepared to sit back and watch him squandering the family fortune.
They therefore called a clandestine meeting to discuss how best to
stop him and decided to take his estate at Champtocé by force. On
246
loving the dead
hearing of his relatives’ intentions, in a panic, de Rais ordered his

henchmen to recover as many corpses as possible under cover of
night, and to shift them to his estate at Machecoul. Hidden in the
tower of the castle, the bodies first had to be prised out of the
shafts before they could be encased in strong chests with ropes
wound round them to prevent them inadvertently falling out.
However, other bodies were hidden elsewhere – so many that his
servants had forgotten where to look for them. No sooner had de Rais
moved his entourage to Machecoul than children started to disap-
pear in that vicinity. By the time an official inquiry was launched,
hundreds of children had been murdered.
De Rais was put on trial in both a secular and ecclesiastical court
in 1440, but at first he refused to confess to his crimes. Witness Henriet
Griart reported that de Rais had not only raped the children but had
taken his greatest enjoyment in playing with the severed heads and
limbs of his victims. He said,
When the said children were dead he kissed them and those
who had the most handsome limbs and heads he held up
to admire them, and had their bodies cruelly cut open and took
delight at the sight of their inner organs; and very often when
the said children were dying he sat on their stomachs and
took pleasure in seeing them die.6
It was only under the threat of torture that de Rais finally confessed.
When asked why he had committed such atrocities, he admitted
he did them ‘in accordance with his own imagination . . . solely
for his pleasure and carnal delight’. His sentence was to be excom-
municated and burned to death but in the event his body was only
symbolically passed through the flames and his intact body was
given back to his family for a Catholic burial in the churchyard of
the Carmelites.
De Rais’ case served as a perfect medieval example of sexual per-
version in its connection to moral and spiritual corruption. His
crimes were acted out as a result of diabolical desire, an inversion
of moral consciousness, rather than simply a negation of the law,
and were seen as a form of radical evil.7 Why de Rais committed
such atrocities is more difficult to understand. It was suggested at
his trial that Gilles de Rais had started his crimes as early as 1426
247
but he himself stated that he had begun his assaults on children

after his grandfather died – sometime between spring 1432 and
spring 1433. His grandfather’s death therefore appears to have made
a dramatic impact on his inner emotional life, snapping the final
thread connecting him to reality – since his grandfather had exer-
cised at least a semblance of parental control over the young de Rais.
Coming so soon after the execution of Joan of Arc (she had been
burned to death in 1431), perhaps the death of his grandfather was
the last blow which sent de Rais over the edge. His victims were small,
beautiful, fair-haired children, the image of himself as a child. Those
who might try to explain his adult behaviour in terms of childhood
trauma would describe this as a sort of self-murder by proxy after
some psychological affliction had taken hold, the veracity of which
is impossible to know. His experience of blood, gore and death in
battle had provided him with a euphoria he could only recapture
in a sexual assault on freshly mutilated corpses.
Similarities appear in comparisons between Gilles de Rais and
the Marquis de Sade. Sade had a similar background to de Rais in
that he was an aristocrat, cosseted as a child, separated from his
parents while still young and had been subject to bloody battles dur-
ing his time in the military. Curiously, they played out similar fantasies.
In his novels Juliette and The 120 Days of Sodom, Sade explored a heady
mixture of sex, torture, pain and death. Throughout his stories, he
uses the method of graduating his sexual atrocities from the least
sexual abominations to the worst, necrophilia being among the
latter. In some stories, he spoke of carving new orifices in the dead
bodies to create a wound to penetrate. In one scene in Juliette, Durand,
Juliette and Clairwil visit a cemetery where they have an orgy with a
pile of rotting corpses. Gruesome details include how she uses a
skeleton bone as a dildo and how Durand uses a severed hand with
which to masturbate Juliette. On coming across a cadaver, Juliette
declares, ‘It occurs to me that these bones, shaped as they are, might
serve in the stead of pricks.’8
While de Rais carved out a world of necrophilia for himself in
his castles, Sade experienced necrophilia vicariously through his
novels. Although Sade indulged in sadism, as far as we know he did
not commit necrophilia but merely wrote about it. He did, however,
admit to knowing a Parisian who ordered corpses to be brought to
his house in order to indulge in necrophilia.9 In de Rais’ case, his
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loving the dead
desire to experience closeness to death meant copulation with fresh

corpses. Murder was an essential part of the ritual. If not, he would
merely have dug up corpses, as did the ‘regular’ necrophile.
Doctoring the Dead

By the time of the Enlightenment, ideas about dead bodies were
shifting. The new science of anatomy meant that surgeons were
dissecting and displaying the interiors of corpses in ways that had
not been seen before. The public were left with a strange sense of
unease, as most people felt they wanted their dead to be buried intact.
The Church preached that come the day of the Resurrection, the
faithful would be bodily restored to life. It was therefore important
to keep the body in one piece. In this light, aversions to dissection
can be seen as a reasonable fear, since people wanted to retain all
their limbs and visceral organs in heaven. These anxieties were real-
ized in popular prints such as Hogarth’s depictions of the dissecting
table in ‘The Reward of Cruelty’ (1751), the fouth plate of The Four Stages
of Cruelty. As the corpse is stretched out on the table, it undergoes the
onslaught of the surgeon pulling out its entrails. Rowlandson’s print
The Persevering Surgeon adds a sexual dimension to dissection. Here,
the lone debauched surgeon leers over the naked torso of a beautiful
young woman.
While such prints reflected the public’s aversion to dissection,
medics at the Royal College of Surgeons and groups such as the
Royal Society were moving in the opposite direction, increasingly ex-
ploring the interior workings of the body. For this they needed more
corpses; interest in anatomy grew. The surgeon William Hunter began
a series of lectures on the subject in 1746 and provided specimens for
display. As a result, more students were influenced to join the expand-
ing profession, which meant an increased demand for cadavers.
Since few people wanted to donate their bodies to scientific investi-
gation, surgeons were left with a shortage of corpses on which to work.
Stealing bodies therefore became a profitable occupation. The prob-
lem was significant enough to be satirized by Rowlandson in his
drawing Resurrection Men (1775), which shows two dubious-looking
characters digging up a corpse, assisted by a gruesome skeleton repre-
senting death. As Death holds a lantern, egged on by his friend, one
of the men lies atop the prone female corpse as if about to copulate
249
William Hogarth, The Four Stages of Cruelty, plate iv, ‘The Reward of
Cruelty’, 1751.
with it. In a similar vein, another picture by Rowlandson, Death in

the Dissecting Room (1815), shows a pretty young corpse lying on
the floor, about to be sliced open by an unscrupulous surgeon as
another man brings in another corpse in a sack. At least the idea of
sex with the dead was therefore present in the Enlightenment mind.
Reflecting public anxieties over death and sexual violation, dis-
section also became a topical subject in magazines. In a letter to the
Gentleman’s Magazine in 1747, one man expressed his concern over
stolen bodies: ‘The affair which lately happened to the vaults at St
Andrew’s, Holbourne . . . [the] body was taken away by the sexton,
the very night of its interment and sold to a surgeon’, believing it to
250
loving the dead
be ‘a common practice with these fellows’. In order to try and prevent

such crimes while freeing up more corpses, pressure was exerted on
the authorities to allow the bodies of executed murderers to be used
for the purpose of dissection, culminating in the Murder Act of 1752.
Since money could be made selling bodies to surgeons for dis-
section, ruthless villains turned their hand to murdering for profit.
Although accounts of Burke and Hare’s activities are comparatively
well-known, few know about Dr Robert Knox and the corpse of
Mary Paterson. Both are connected in a series of events entailing the
murder of vagrants and prostitutes, and involved the possession of
the body of a young woman in the dissecting rooms of Dr Knox. The
gruesome case of Burke and Hare came to court in Edinburgh in 1828
after the murder of sixteen people (it is a popular misconception that
they were grave robbers). William Hare ran a boarding house with
his wife Margaret Laird in the West Port area of the city. Nearby, the
Thomas Rowlandson, The Persevering Surgeon, late 18th century.

251
Edinburgh Medical School was suffering from a shortage of cadavers

on which to practice – only two or three bodies of executed criminals
were available for a large number of students. According to Burke’s
testimony, after one of their tenants died of natural causes, owing £4
in rent, Hare and Laird hit on the idea of selling the corpse to the
medical school. They received £7 10s. for the body, a handsome
sum, considering that a pint of beer cost one and a half pence and a
loaf of bread weighing 2 lb cost fourpence. With such easy profits to
be made, Laird and Hare, along with their accomplices William Burke
and his partner Helen McDougal, began murdering drunks, prosti-
tutes and anyone whom they thought would not be missed. At first
Thomas Rowlandson, The Resurrection Men, 1775.

252
loving the dead
Surgeons fuss over a male cadaver with undue interest in Thomas

Rowlandson’s The Dissecting Room, 1775–80.
they murdered their tenants, but later moved on to luring men and
women from the street, getting them drunk and smothering them.
When the case came to light, it was evident that the bodies had been
sold on to a surgeon for dissection.
The person who had been receiving the bodies was the famous
Edinburgh anatomist Dr Robert Knox, a graduate of Edinburgh Uni-
versity. It was said that after being presented with one female corpse
he thought it too lovely to dissect and kept it in a tub of whisky for
three months before dissection.10 The body was that of Mary Paterson,
a teenage prostitute who had been lured to her death in Burke’s
brother’s house. Scores of students scrambled to Knox’s dissecting
rooms to view the pickled woman. The fact that she was both beauti-
ful and naked no doubt helped swell the numbers signing up for Knox’s
classes. Once Burke and Hare came to trial, Dr Knox was implicated
by connection and his activities were exposed. The Royal College of
Surgeons immediately demanded his resignation, resulting in the loss
of his teaching job as well as his lucrative lecture tours. Gossip festered
around him for years to come, and he would never again find a posi-
tion as a surgeon.
253
Rowlandson’s depiction of the Burke and Hare story.
Hare and Laird were let off for turning King’s Evidence and giving
witness against Burke and McDougal. Burke was hanged, watched
by enormous crowds. Perhaps in a case of poetic justice, his body was
later taken for dissection. The two wives of the men escaped with-
out charge, but only narrowly missed being attacked by an angry
mob. As soon as the case came to court, gossip about the Burke and
Hare murders spread through word of mouth, broadsheets and
pamphlets. The story fed into public concerns about grave robbers
and body-snatching, with the lurid details laid out for all to see. The
case reinforced what people had suspected: that doctors were un-
scrupulous lechers delving into areas that should not be seen. The
case helped influence the introduction of the Anatomy Act of 1832,
which expanded the legal supply of cadavers for medical schools.
Meanwhile, scientific experiments and demonstrations of new
findings continued to instruct interested audiences at public lec-
tures. Fresh, exciting displays were on offer in 1791, when scientist
Luigi Galvani used electricity to charge life into otherwise seem-
ingly dead body parts. In packed lecture rooms, he brought frogs’
legs ‘back to life’ using the trick of electrocution to make the legs
dance. Men and women watched, entranced by the fact that bodies
could be made to move even though they were dead. Galvani’s ideas
254
loving the dead
captured the imagination of Mary Shelley. His experiments would

inspire her some years later to write her Frankenstein (1818), a sad tale
about the creation of a human-looking monster pieced together
with body parts scavenged from executed criminals and brought to
life by electricity. The monster wandered the woods looking for love
but, unable to find anyone suitable, demanded his master make
him a female counterpart. Thus necrophilia reached it apotheosis
in the image of dead bodies having sex with dead bodies. The theme
was explored in depictions in film such as Frankenstein (1931) and Bride
of Frankenstein (1935). Since then, zombie movies such as Porn of
the Dead (2006) have taken sex with the dead to its ultimate form
in celluloid.
Feminizing Fatality
The feminizing (and sexualizing) of death was apparent in images,
news reports and pamphlets where the female body was closely
linked to lust and death. An example can be seen as early as 1517 in
the image Death and the Maiden by Hans Baldung Grien. By the
Dr Knox was
implicated in
the Burke and
Hare murders,
portrait c. 1830.
255
Elsa Lanchester and Boris Karloff in Bride of Frankenstein

(dir. James Whale, 1935).
eighteenth century the female body was objectified and passified

in doctoring, in death and in sex. Women, sex and death melded
together in a display of a sort of macabre exoticism.11
Nowhere was this more evident than in the eighteenth-century
execution of Mary Blandy. Her story was recounted in the pamphlet
A Genuine and Impartial Account of the Life of Miss M. Blandy (1752)
after she had poisoned her father at her lover’s instigation. Blandy
was convicted and sentenced to hanging, a spectacle that attracted
an exceptionally large crowd. In the pamphlet, the narrator gave a
general description of the incidents leading to her trial, but lang-
uished most lovingly over the intimate details of her execution and her
bodily appeal. Her clothes were described down to the ribbons and
bonnets she wore; her female form was outlined with care – even in
death, it seemed, her figure retained its pert bosom, its shining hair
and its trim waistline.12 The author tells us Blandy ‘begged to be
hanged decently’, not too high, so the crowds could not see up her
petticoat. In the event, when her body was cut down it was passed
among the crowd, revealing all.
Fewer women than men were hanged and there were therefore
fewer female corpses available to dissect. In response to this lack of
256
Hans Baldung Grien, Death and the Maiden, 1517.
female corpses, some doctors took to ordering their own human

dummies of wood or wax, making them available as a tool for teach-
ing. These life-sized models were anatomically correct and could be
pulled apart to expose the insides of the female body, complete with
visceral organs. Indeed, some were clearly made with the intention
of exposing female sexual features and reproductive organs; or as
one historian put it, they ‘delighted the sight and invited sexual
thoughts’.13 Ostensibly educational, the figures had real hair and were
even given eyebrows and eyelashes. These models were invariably
shown lying down on a table, passive, their bodies open to the eyes
of the male investigator; contrarily, male models tended to be shown
standing and assertive. Such models were exhibited all over Europe,
the most famous of which were displayed in La Specola in Florence
and the Josephinium in Vienna. The extraordinarily gifted modeller
Clemente Susini (1754–1814) was chiefly responsible for their tech-
nical construction. The models were produced in Florence between
1784 and 1788 and then brought to Vienna in costly transportations.
By the nineteenth century, the models were being openly exhibited
to the public. However, owing to the exposed nature of the bodies,
men and women attended on different days – it was evidently thought
too intimate an exhibition to have shared viewings.
Clemente Susini, Anatomical Venus, late 18th century, now in the

Josephinium medical museum, Vienna.
258
loving the dead
Wax anatomical
model by
Clemente Susini
(1754–1814), in La
Specola, Florence.
The idea of extreme female passivity was to infiltrate Victorian

culture at all levels. The Pre-Raphaelite artists made a huge contribu-
tion to the romanticization of death. John Everett Millais’s painting
of Lizzy Siddal as the drowned Ophelia reinforced the Victorian
connection of women to submissiveness, sex and death.14 This pop-
ular painting also triggered rumours about the model’s own death.
Gossips suggested that her health was damaged as a result of catch-
ing cold while lying in a bath for hours posing for the artist. This
fanciful image of the ideal dead woman was enhanced by the impul-
sive action of Siddal’s husband, the artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti. They
had been had been romantically involved from around 1852, but
their relationship was erratic. They parted in 1858, but married two
years later. Her death by overdosing on laudanum a few years later
sealed her image in the public imagination as the Queen of Death.
In a spate of grief, Rossetti encased a book containing the only copies
259
John Everett Millais, Ophelia, 1851–2, featuring the artists’ model Lizzie Siddal.
of some of his poems in the coffin with her body, only to regret it
some years later. In 1870 her coffin, buried in Highgate Cemetery, was
exhumed at Rossetti’s request so that he could retrieve the poems.
The romanticized dead featuring the adored female lover was also
encapsulated by Robert Browning in his poem ‘Porphyria’s Lover’
of 1842. Here, he portrays a man who has strangled the woman he loves
because he cannot possess her except in death.
About her neck: her cheeks once more

Blushed bright beneath my burning kiss:
I propped her head up as before . . .
And thus we sit together now,
And all night long we have not stirred . . .15
Browning recognized the idea that necrophilia was sometimes

inspired by the fact that the body is a subject of deep affection.
Unrequited love in this case was just too much to endure.
260
loving the dead
Understanding the Necrophile

Such desire for extreme forms of passivity can similarly be seen in
a necrophile who admits to being unable to socialize with women
properly. Psychiatrists have claimed that sex with dead bodies is
related to the feeling of insignificance experienced by the necrophile.
In interviews, the necrophile has often shown up as a particular
type, with a certain sort of childhood background – timid, bullied at
school and unable to have successful relationships with women.
Necrophiles often admitted to being unable to attract women, so
they found non-resistant sex attractive. In these cases, the body on
which the necrophile focuses his (and it is usually his, not her) atten-
tion is objectified. The corpse was a body that would not refuse him,
so any fear of rejection was removed. The body in these cases could
belong to anyone. However, in other cases of necrophilia, the person
to whom the body belonged was important to the necrophile. Who
that corpse once was, and the feeling of love for that person, was
closely connected to desire of that specific dead body and it was not
simply about the ease of copulating with a non-resisting corpse.
In some cases, mere caressing or even having coitus with a corpse
was not enough. Mutilating, dismembering or destroying the cadaver
in some way was necessary for a necrophile to gain the most intense
pleasure, often through violent orgasms. Dr Auguste Ambroise Tardieu
wrote graphic accounts of patients who had dug up corpses to have
sex with them. One of his most detailed cases was that of Sergeant
Bertrand, a French army officer who confessed to his crime in 1849.
Bertrand was 25 when he was arrested. He was considered a slight man
‘of delicate constitution’ who admitted to being prone to solitude in
his childhood. Perhaps in recognition of the rejection he felt, he con-
fessed that his parents stopped buying him toys, as he broke everything.
By the age of nine, he was fantasizing about murdering and having
sex with female corpses (sometimes even fantasizing about men, but
he felt revulsion at this). As was often the case with necrophiles (and
indeed, lust-murderers), his love of death began by mutilating and
killing animals. By the time he was fourteen he was masturbating up
to seven or eight times a day, later saying, ‘The mere sight of an arti-
cle of feminine attire was enough to cause an erection.’ He admitted,
‘I would in my mind torture them [the women] in every possible
way, according to my desire. I would imagine them as dead before me,
261
and would defile their corpse.’16 The mere closeness of a graveyard

sent his pulse racing and his heart beating.
By 1847, he had exhumed his first corpse and mutilated the body,
experiencing orgasm while he sliced it into bits. By way of explana-
tion, he simply said, ‘I felt in need of mutilating dead bodies.’ He
began to target newly dug graves, knowing there would be a fresh body
recently interred. On 10 March 1848, he went to the cemetery, having
to climb a wall and swim across an icy ditch to get there. He described
the incident:
No sooner had I entered the cemetery than I began to disinter

a young girl who might have been from 15 to 17 years of age
. . . I have kissed this dead woman in all parts of her body,
I pressed her against myself as if to break her in two; in a
word I lavished on her all the caresses that a passionate lover
could on the object of his love.17
He then started to press out her entrails, replaced the body in the grave
and went back to his barracks. Bertrand also admitted to having dug
up male cadavers, but with those he restricted himself to masturba-
tion. With females he would have full coitus.
Bertrand told his doctor, Marchal de Calvis, that he would not
have risked digging up corpses merely to have sex with them, but that
his overwhelming desire and pleasure was to mutilate and destroy
them. Although Bertrand described himself as a Lothario, alleging to
have had many women whom he had satisfied sexually (according
to him, many even wanted to marry him), his doctor believed this to
be a delusion. It may also have been a pretence made up to protect
himself from his own lack of confidence – self-aggrandizing is often
undertaken by those least likely to achieve the heights they say they
have. He was finally caught and sentenced to a year in prison.
Cases of unrequited passion and continual rejection led some men
to copulate with the female dead. Under his pseudonym Stendhal
(1783–1842), Marie-Henri Beyle described in his thinly disguised auto-
biography how he was drawn to a cemetery and dug up a decomposing
body of a girl of twelve or thirteen, removed her entrails and muti-
lated her genitalia. But his original passion had been an incestuous
love of his mother. He confessed, ‘I wanted to cover my mother in
kisses even when she had no clothes on. She loved me passionately
262
loving the dead
and hugged me often. I returned her kisses with such a fire that she
often was obliged to run away. I hated my father when he used to come
and interrupt our kisses. I always wanted to give them on her bosom.’18
Stendhal seems to have had a confused sexuality (whether fantasy or
reality) combining necrophilia with incest, but such cases seem to
be rare. However, necrophiles sometimes developed unusually strong
feelings – of either love or aversion – for their parents.
By the turn of the nineteenth century, sexologists were interview-
ing and assessing patients who were confessed necrophiles, trying
to understand their behaviour. Krafft-Ebing interviewed countless
perverted patients, but admitted to being stumped when it came to
necrophiles. He left few words on the subject in his book Psychopathia
Sexualis but summed up his feelings on the matter: ‘This horrible
kind of sexual indulgence is so monstrous that the presumption of
a psychopathic state is, under all circumstances, justified.’ While
showing compassion for many of his cases, he could not muster sym-
pathy for the necrophile. In order to be able to have sexual congress
with corpses, he believed people had to be mentally unstable; that a
perverse sensuality was necessary to overcome the natural repugnance
that ordinary men have for corpses.
On assessing Victor Ardisson, a French grave robber and necro-
phile, Krafft-Ebing blamed mental incapacity for his crimes, describing
him as a ‘moron void of any moral sense’. Ardisson had earned the
nickname ‘the Vampire of Muy’ because of his predilection for suck-
ing on his victims’ body parts. His case came to light when he was
arrested in 1901 for robbing graves and mutilating corpses; his job as
a gravedigger provided him with the perfect opportunity to indulge
his passion. While some necrophiles appear not to care what the
corpses look like, Ardisson’s desire was only for beautiful young
women. William Stekel reported that Ardisson admitted that he drank
his own semen after masturbation, ‘because it would be too bad to
have it go to waste’.19 As with other necrophiles, Ardisson was social-
ly inadequate with women and all his marriage proposals had been
rejected. In compensation, he masturbated as he watched women
urinate. He admitted that his inadequacies led him to pay for one
beggar woman to have sex with him. While he had problems with
women, he continued to fellate men for money. He claimed to have
copulated with his mother after her death but Stekel believed this to
be mere fantasy (this fantasy bears a striking resemblance to Stendhal’s
263
desire for his mother). His method of assault on female bodies,

whether dead or alive, was first to suck their breasts, then to perform
cunnilingus on them. Albert Moll identified his behaviour as ‘pas-
sivism’, a behaviour typified in a certain type of self-disregarding
person. Ardisson spent the rest of his life in the psychiatric hospital
of Pierrefeu du Var.
Incidences of necrophilia have been associated with narcolepsy,
where perpetrators of the crime suddenly fall into a deep sleep after
fulfilling their sexual obsessions with the dead. One example can be
seen in Henri Blot, who was arrested in 1886 for raping a number of
exhumed corpses. His first act of necrophilia had been with a ballet
dancer buried in the Saint-Ouen cemetery, after which he fell into
a deep sleep. It was only after his next excursion, when he was found
in this coma-like state next to the corpse, that he was apprehended.
The female necrophile is uncommon in fact or fiction. Perhaps this
is due to physiology – it is more difficult for a woman to copulate
with a corpse unless the male cadaver is in the throes of rigor mor-
tis. However, one strange case emerged in 1848 of a royal lady who
had allegedly secreted the corpse of her lover in her home. The woman
was Princess Cristina Trivulzio di Belgiojoso, who was to become the
sweetheart of Paris intellectuals and counted Chopin, Liszt, Victor
Hugo and Alexander Dumas among her friends. Known as a revolu-
tionary, her book Della Condizione Delle Donne e del Loro Avvenire
(Of Women’s Condition and of their Future; 1866) was a proto-fem-
inist tract. The princess was also a neurotic and apparently suffered
from epilepsy, a condition thought by sexologists to be common in
necrophiles. After the Italian Revolution of 1848 she fled her home
in Locate but left behind the body of her 27-year-old lover Gaetano
Stelzi, who had died of tuberculosis earlier that year. He was found
completely preserved, dressed from head to toe in black. The coffin
in which he had been supposedly buried was dug up and found to con-
tain only a log. It is believed Stelzi had died suddenly of a lung
haemorrhage in the presence of the terrified princess in her house
in Milan. From there she had his newly embalmed body transferred
to a vault on her estate. How his corpse ended up in her cupboard was
never revealed. After fleeing the country she ended up in Turkey,
living in a tent; she eventually returned to Italy where she died in 1871.20
By the twentieth century a new way had been found to bring death
and dead bodies into people’s daily lives and viewing space to
264
loving the dead
replace eighteenth-century public hangings and nineteenth-century

funeral displays. The American television company hbo aired a
special documentary, Autopsy, in 2005, about one of the most infam-
ous cases of necrophilia from the 1930s. The programme focused
on Carl von Cosel (sometimes called Carl Tanzler), a radiologist living
in Florida who treated a young, beautiful tuberculosis patient, Maria
Elena Milagro de Hoyos. He looked after her and tried to save her
life, buying her medicines and visiting her regularly, but the disease
finally killed her. By this time he was in love with her. Unable to accept
her death, with her parents’ permission, von Cosel had her exhumed
and placed her body in a mausoleum specially built for her. Unbeknown
to anybody, he took the opportunity to clean and re-embalm the body,
writing about his experience in his memoirs: ‘Decay had set in a most
disheartening manner. Only with the greatest care was I able to peel
the pieces of textile from her body; this took hours.’21 He sponged her
face with a specially prepared solution, spread her clean body on to
a white sheet and sprayed it with preservatives.
Hoping that he might be able to slow down the inevitable process
of decay, he thought it preferable to keep her body above the ground.
He visited the corpse every day, taking her presents – flowers, a comb,
a shawl. Soon he could no longer bear to be parted from her so he
decided to transport her secretly from the mausoleum to the cabin
of an old aeroplane he kept at the back of his hospital. Now he could
spend more time with her. As he undid the casket once more, he
saw she was ‘pure, despite the mud and slimy rags in which she had
been lying for so many months’. He kissed her lips and breathed
deeply into her body so her bosom rose. He carefully redressed her
in a wedding gown – she was now his ‘sweet wife’.
Two years after her death, with her body still inside it, he moved
the plane to a hanger at South Beach where he could rest happily at
her side. Here, he built a laboratory in which to keep the equipment
he needed to preserve her – her incubator, sterile tissues, chemicals
and wax to keep the remnants of her flesh together. As the years passed,
he had to keep her bones together with piano wire and performed the
time-consuming task of daily applying new wax and slathering per-
fumes on what was left of the body. He also made wigs of her hair to
keep as much of her genuine as he could. He loved her even though
she was patently rotting: ‘I looked deeply into the fallen cavity of
her eyes, like deep, empty black holes. I saw her dried lips, slightly
265
The corpse of Maria Elena Milagro de Hoyos (1910–1931) encased in wax and
plaster, c. 1940.
loving the dead
parted with her white teeth gleaming between them.’ Eventually he

found an old house to rent where he could place her in a proper bed.
Not wanting to leave his home, he received huge deliveries of the
wax and sprays, until his neighbours started to become suspicious.
Rumours were circulating around town because of the amount
of purchases he made of perfume, wax and other objects necessary
to keep the corpse fresh. Gossip eventually reached Maria’s sister,
Nana, who insisted on seeing the body, which she thought was still
resting in the mausoleum. Von Cosel managed to convince her not
to go to the mausoleum, but instead to come to his house where
the body now lay. He may have thought Nana would have been
happy to see her sister again, but she was horrified at what she saw
and reported him to the authorities. On investigation, they found
that along with daily love letters to Maria Elena, the technician had
consistently had sex with what was left of her body – basically bones
and silken packing material, as there was no flesh left. Dr DePoo,
who made the autopsy on Maria, stated: ‘I found a tube wide enough
to permit sexual intercourse. At the bottom of the tube was cotton,
and in an examination of the cotton, I found there was sperm.’ Von
Cosel had gone to the trouble of inserting a tube where her vagina
had been in order to allow himself to penetrate what was now essen-
tially her skeleton.
Although the events were not pleasant for Maria’s family, Dr
von Cosel was never a violent man and his love for Maria was unques-
tionable. His love story provoked an outpouring of sympathy for
him and letters of support poured in. Strangers as well as friends
visited him in prison, bringing him food and gifts. He was fined but
released, since, after being examined by a psychiatrist at the order
of the judge, he was found to be sane despite his obsession. The court
returned the body to Maria’s sister, who took it to be buried in an un-
disclosed location, presumably to keep publicity (and Cosel) at bay.
Von Cosel returned to his hometown in Germany, where he died
in poverty.
From the late 1940s onwards, Western societies were at a stage
where the sight of death was becoming less common and therefore
more taboo; so, did cases of necrophilia increase as a result? Although
sexologists had identified necrophilia as a paraphilia, there were
remarkably few known cases for them to discuss. Necrophilia seems to
have been an aside in terms of sexually perverted behaviour.
267
Recent research has shown a worrying trend that the act of

murder undertaken in order to obtain a body for the purposes of
sexual violation is increasing. A pair of psychiatrists working at
the Department of Psychiatry at Cleveland Metropolitan General
Hospital, Ohio, investigated necrophilia and published their find-
ings in 1988. In this study, Rosman and Resnick found that 42 per
cent of their sample of necrophiles had murdered in order to obtain
a body. They established that there were three types of true necro-
philia – necrophilic homicide (where the necrophile murders in order
to have sex with a body), ‘regular’ necrophilia (where the necrophile
copulates with an already dead body) and necrophilic fantasy (where
the necrophile imagines having sex with a dead body but does not
act upon it). Psychosis, mental retardation and sadism do not appear
to be inherent in necrophilia. The researchers stated: ‘The most
common motive for necrophilia is possession of an unresisting and
unrejecting partner. Necrophiles often chose occupations that put
them in contact with corpses. Some necrophiles who had occupa-
tional access to corpses committed homicide nevertheless.’22
In the u.s. there is no federal legislation specifically barring sex
with a corpse. Fewer than half of the states have their own laws, and
many of them class necrophilia only as a misdemeanour. Sexual
penetration or ‘interference’ of any part of a corpse became illegal in
the uk only with the Sexual Offences Act 2003, although prior to
that it might be considered ‘indecency with a corpse’ under common
law. In Britain, the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 states
that it is also illegal to possess physical depictions of necrophilia,
electronic or otherwise. Necrophilia pornography falls under the gov-
ernmental description of extreme pornography, possession of which
is classed as illegal under the Act. If the person is role-playing, the
picture is no longer illegal. But how might the authorities detect that
a person is really dead merely from pornographic photographs? Is this
law worth anything?
The dsM v of the American Psychiatric Association classifies
necrophilia, also called thanatophilia and necrolagnia, as a para-
philia. Its British equivalent, the icd-10, calls it a ‘disorder of
sexual preference’, which puts it in the same category as bestiality.
However, while attitudes towards sodomy, homosexuality, lesbian-
ism, sadomasochism and bestiality have changed, necrophilia stands
out as being continually condemned as a ‘perversity’. But what is
268
loving the dead
the ‘crime’ of necrophilia, if murder or stealing of corpses is not

involved? The ‘crime’ of necrophilia surely lies not so much in hav-
ing sex with a corpse as in not having gained consent prior to the
person’s death.
269
The incestuous couple: Nero and his mother Agrippina as she crowns him with
a laurel leaf; c. 54–59.
nine
Too Close for Comfort:

Incest
Incest is like many other incorrect things, a very poetical circumstance.
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)1
H aving sex with one’s closest kin – a brother, sister, father or

mother – has been seen as a prominent taboo throughout most
of the Western world. More distant connections, say aunts and uncles
by marriage or cousins, have been more contested. Generally speak-
ing, though, the closer the blood tie, the greater the aversion. Incest
was, and is, unlawful in most Western countries, but legal conditions
and sentencing vary enormously.
The Oldest Loves

In the past, incest was not only permitted, in some cases it was
positively encouraged. Members of the royal families in Egypt were
seen as gods. It was therefore considered unacceptable for them to
procreate with commoners. Royals needed to find other gods and
goddesses with whom to copulate and this invariably meant keeping
procreation in the family. This ensured that the bloodline remained
pure but also kept the family wealth intact. These incestuous mar-
riages set the royal family apart from the rest of society, as commoners
did not tend to marry their sisters or daughters. Proof of this can be
seen in the census returns in Roman Egypt during the first three
centuries ad.
In Egyptian royal families, the line of succession ran through
the eldest daughter rather than the eldest son. Pharaohs who wanted
to make a claim for the throne therefore had to legitimize them-
selves by marrying a sister or half-sister. Both Cleopatra vii’s brothers,
Ptolemy xiii and subsequently Ptolemy xiv, became co-regents
when she married them. Amenhotep iii’s daughter, Satamun, was
known as ‘king’s wife’ and even ‘king’s principal wife’, along with her
271
Zeus and his sister Hera by Annibale Carracci, 1573.
Albrecht Altdorfer, Lot and His Daughters, 1537.
mother Tiy. Their son, Akhenaten, married the beautiful Nefertiti,

and also married at least one of their daughters. The fact that they
had offspring indicates that these unions were consummated.
In Greek mythology, gods and goddesses who were related fre-
quently bore children together. The brother and sister Kronus and
Rhea were married and produced the leader of the Heavens, the
brother and sister couple Zeus and Hera. In reality, incest was not
272
too close for comfort
Hendrik Goltzius, Lot and His Daughters, 1616.
allowed, and Greek tragedies were full of the problems it might cause.
In Athens in the fifth century bc, Sophocles’ play Oedipus Rex warned
audiences about such domestic drama, with the hero Oedipus known
as the exemplar of familial incest. Having killed his father (unaware
of who he really was) in a brawl at a crossroads, he unwittingly mar-
ries his mother, Jocasta. After a plague of infertility sweeps the city
of Thebes, Oedipus consults the Oracle at Delphi and asks what he
should do. The messenger of the oracle tells him he must avenge
the murder of Laius – which, of course, he himself had committed.
On discovering that Laius is his father, and that his wife is actually
his mother, Oedipus bewails, ‘Incestuous sin! Breeding where I was
bred! Father, brother, and son; bride, wife, and mother confounded
in one monstrous matrimony! All human filthiness in one crime
compounded!’2 Jocasta hangs herself, while Oedipus pokes the pin
of her brooch into his eyes and is left to wander blindly through-
out the country. In this Greek tragedy, it is the very closeness of the
blood ties that is the problem, quite the opposite of the understand-
ing of the ancient Egyptians.
While ancient Roman society also considered incest as forbid-
den, Rome’s history is littered with incestous families. According
to Cicero, the Roman politician Publius Clodius prostituted himself
273
dressed as a woman but also committed incest with his sisters.3

Caligula committed incest with each of his three sisters in turn and
loved Drucilla so much that he treated her as his wife.4 He so adored
her that he is said to have gone insane after her death. Caligula’s
sister Agrippina the Younger supposedly lured her son Nero into sex.
Nero’s passion for his mother was so great that her enemies feared
that if it was consumated, she would become even more powerful and
ruthless. However, Suetonius tells us, ‘some say that he did, in fact,
commit incest with Agrippina every time they rode in the same litter
– the state of his clothes when he emerged proved it’.5 Notwithstanding,
her overbearing ways became too much for him and he had his
henchmen slaughter her.
For Christians the Hebrew Bible provided the law. Scholars have
argued that the laws of Leviticus developed to separate the lifestyle
of the Israelites from the sinful lives of the people of Canaan. Leviticus
(18:6–18) outlines the types of kinship that are allowed and those that
are forbidden. A man should not committ incest with his mother,
father’s wife, sister, granddaughter, aunt, daughter-in-law or sister-
in-law. Although the list does not include daughters, this is implicit
in verse 6, which comands ‘none of you shall approach to any that
is near of kin to him, to uncover their nakedness’. Ostracization is
suggested as the appropriate punishment for incest with one’s own
sister – ‘they shall be cut off in the sight of their people’ (20:17); if
a man lies with his aunt or sister-in-law (as did Henry viii), they
shall die childless. Other crimes were more serious; if a man com-
mits incest with his wife’s mother, he should be burned to death.
Incest with a daughter-in-law was punishable by death for both
those involved. However, despite the fact that the Bible condemned
incest, the Old Testament depicts it in the book of Genesis. When Lot
left the city of Sodom to live in a cave alone but for his two daughters,
no other men were available to impregnate them. The elder daughter
tells the younger, ‘Come, let us make our father drink wine, and we
will lie with him, that we may preserve the seed of our father’ (Genesis
19:32). In their favour was the fact that they did not see him naked.
Lot’s excuse would have been that he was drunk at the time.
274
Incest Laws
From the beginnings of Christianity, the main discussions around
incest tended to be focused on consanguinity (how close a person was
related to another in blood) or affinity (ties by marriage) rather than
child abuse by a family member as they tend to be today. Laws and
customs were mainly concentrated on marriage and stretched way
beyond the nuclear family. In the West, the incest taboo related to
most of the extended family and anyone related by blood or marriage
to the sixth or even the eighth degree (second and third cousins – each
degree accounting for one generation from a common ancestor).6 A
person could not marry their in-laws or even the in-laws of their
in-laws, nor their godparents or godchildren.
Church authorities were, however, divided on the matter of per-
missable relationships. St Ambrose (339–397) claimed that divine
law forbade the marriage between brothers’ children ‘joined in the
fourth degree’, while St Augustine suggested it was not divine law
but imperial law which made such unions illegal. Meanwhile, the
Code of Justinian allowed marriage between first cousins (conso-
brini), but the Greek Church in 692 at the Second Trullan Synod
condemned such marriages. According to Theodore Balsamon, a
twelfth-century Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch, even those
of second cousins (sobrini) should not be allowed. Pope Gregory iii
(732–41) forbade marriage to the seventh degree of consanguinity,
whereas the Roman Penitential of Halitgar (c. 830) stipulated that
a man’s stepmother and his uncle’s wife were out of bounds. Debate
continued into the second millenium. In 1215, the Lateran council
decided that the law was too harsh and reduced the degree of con-
sanguinity from seven to four. Yet around 1440, Jacob’s Well, a treatise
on the ‘cleansing of man’s conscience’, advised: ‘Contract of matri-
mony in kynrede in-to be fyfte degree is forfendyd’,7 disallowing
marriage up to (but not excluding) the fifth degree. If the Church
authorities seemed to contradict themselves, it must have been
even more confusing for the layperson.
The word ‘incest’ was introduced into Middle English around
1225 as a term to describe the sin of familial incest, but was not
widely used.8 Although incest was not a civil crime, it was regulated
by the Church. The ecclesiastical courts placed incest in the same
category as adultery and fornication (all sex outside marriage was
275
illicit) and doled out penances accordingly. Usually plenty of

warnings were given beforehand and penalties were light. Incest
was not considered as bad as sodomy – even when undertaken with
one’s closest relative, procreation was at least still possible. Capital
punishments were meted out in some cases of incest, but usually
such severe sentences were reserved for situations where the cul-
prit was also accused of bestiality or sodomy. For example, in the
1490s in Ferrara records show ‘a peasant burned to death for im-
pregnating his sister and for bestiality with asses, a 17-year-old
youth from the suburbs burned for sodomy, another peasant hanged
for theft and incest with his sisters . . . [but] an 80-year-old draper
convicted of sodomy and sentenced to death by burning was spared
his life’.9
Kissing Cousins
The Church authorities had referred back to Leviticus in decision-
making about incest and cousin marriages. To clarify the situation,
the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 defined incest as sexual inter-
course between relatives of the fourth degree, which included
cousins.10 This also allowed the Church authorities to introduce a
fee-based dispensation for marriages taking place between first,
second or third cousins.11 In other words, an individual was allowed
to marry a first, second or third cousin but had to pay off the Church
for the freedom to do so.
In 1540, a statute of Parliament did little to change the situation.
It decreed, ‘all persons be lawful that be not prohibited by God’s
laws to marry; and that no reservation or prohibition, God’s Laws
except, shall trouble to impeach any marriage without the Levitical
degrees’.12 The list of prohibitions on incestuous marriages in
Leviticus was therefore still the ruling on such matters. First cousins
were still not specifically mentioned on the list of prohibited rela-
tionships, nor were they mentioned at the Council of Trent in 1563
when a list of forbidden marriages was drawn up. The degrees of
consanguinity and affinity in reference to cousins therefore con-
tinued to remain cloudy and were not stated explicitly in canon law
– that of 1606 simply referred back to the ecclesiastical table of 1563.
Adding to the confusion, canon law and civil law counted the degrees
of consanguinity differently, so cousins-german (or first cousins)
276
would be considered second-degree cousins under the former and

fourth-degree cousins under the latter.
Meanwhile, over half a century later, the little-known Puritan
scholar Andrew Willet (1562–1621) provided a litany of examples of
why it was best to avoid first-cousin marriages, as they were not
only ‘inconvenient’, but also possibly illicit under divine law. Yet it
was common for European aristocrats at this time to marry cousins
or fairly close family to keep wealth in one family – even among
English squires, cousin marriage was so frequent that it had become
meaningless in terms of patronage, as everyone was related to
someone else nearby.13 In England, while marriages between first
cousins were not illegal, the rest of the family closely oversaw them.
Lydia DuGard wrote regular letters to her first cousin, Samuel DuGard,
between 1665 and 1672, which tell a touching story about courtship
and romantic love between cousins. She wrote to him, ‘I did not
think such reports would have bin spread abroad from our Whitford
Journy. A year or two since it would have troubled me much, but
now since I am so used to hear people talk of you and mee.’14 At
first, she tried to conceal their relationship from the rest of her
family. The family had a say in the way the matter progressed, with
the couple’s behaviour regulated by a code of social conduct defined
by ties between its members, but the couple eventually were allowed
to marry.15
The anxieties about incest between cousins remained and were
sometimes expressed in concerns about the possibility of diabolical
creatures being born from such unions. Written anonymously, A
Most Straunge and true discourse . . . of incestuous copulation (1600)
acted as a warning to all those contemplating similar behaviour. It
tells of a young girl named Frances Browne who gave birth to a
strange-looking child in the Malvern Hills. Two years earlier, she
had gone to work for her uncle, living in his house along with two of
his sons. She started an affair with one of them, ‘their lust was so
hot, that soon after the same began to be kindled, it was so set on fire
that the divill had blinded the eies of these two, they lay together and
she was gotten with child by him.’16 When the child was born, it
was extremely deformed. Although it was fed and tended, it never
stopped crying and they thought it had no eyelids. Three days later,
it died. Such cases of incest became more public around the seven-
teenth century as small pamphlets were published in London issuing
277
Limbless child, illustration from the British Medical Journal, 8 June 1889.
details of the sin, which were then hawked all over the country. The
moral of the story, and similar ones in the same vein, shows a con-
junction where medicine met religion – the deformity did not happen
by chance but was taken as a sign of ‘God’s will’ against incest.
Warnings were no less frightening by the eighteenth century, but
for different reasons. Gentlemen’s magazines were providing incest
as means of sexual titillation for their readers, but within these
stories there was an implicit suggestion that cousins should be
guarded against. The Rambler for Saturday 2 November 1751, carried
a piece entitled ‘The History of Misella debauched by her relation’,
a title intended to pique every reader’s interest. The article came in
the form of a letter allegedly from a girl who had been ravished by
her cousin. In it, she relates how he took advantage of the familial
ties to complete her ruin, backing her into submission while act-
ing as her benefactor.17 Intended as a cliffhanger, in the following
week’s journal, she related her decline in ‘Misella’s description of
the life of a prostitute’.18 Her cousin continued to visit her and was
bent on her complete defilement; ‘but I now saw with horror that
he was contriving to perpetuate his gratification, and was desirous
278
to fit me to his purpose, by complete and radical corruption’. He

eventually deserted her, fleeing with his family to Ireland, leaving her
destitute and without any apparent means of supporting herself.
After an elderly man invited her to a tavern, she was initiated into
prostitution and ended up on the street: ‘In this state I have now
passed four years, the drudge of extortion and the sport of drunken-
ness; sometimes the property of one man, and sometimes the
common prey of accidental lewdness.’ The readers are provided with
full details of the sordid life into which she had been forced – all
this as a result of her male cousin.
By the nineteenth century, marriage between cousins and in-laws
was becoming a common practice, a strategy of the new bourgoise,
undertaken to bind families together. The Darwin and the Wedgwood
families used multiple first-cousin marriages to make useful family
alliances, and it was common for brothers and sisters to marry other
brothers and sisters to create a double bond.19
Incestuous ‘Marriages’
While cousin marriages were becoming less threatening (at least
in Victorian England), marriages between in-laws and step-relations
remained a problem for the authorities. In recently settled America,
Samuel and Rebekah Newton of Marlborough had their marriage
broken up when the courts discovered she was the widow of his
uncle, Isaac Newton. Although they had two children together, they
were prohibited from cohabiting any longer.20 Yet in the United
States, in Massachusetts and Plymouth, there were no incest laws,
which meant that magistrates were left to deal with incestuous
marriages as they saw fit. In this case, ultra-puritanical New Haven
enacted the incest laws verbatim from the Old Testament. These
lapsed when the state joined with Connecticut, which had no incest
law until 1673, when laws were introduced for father–daughter and
mother–son relationships. Courts dealt with other incest according
to its perceived seriousness.
Among the lower ranks, the reason for marriage was often based
on basic economic and domestic needs. Plebeian widows looked for
financial security, while plebeian widowers needed a housekeeper
and someone to look after their children. In the rural British county
of Somerset between 1730 and 1835, most incestuous births resulted
279
from a relationship between a stepdaughter and stepfather. It would

have been less costly to cement a relationship this way rather than
dividing the household after the death of a wife and mother. Any
clergy marrying a couple had to rely on a couple’s declaration that
they were legally entitled to marry. Yet step-relatives still attempted
to marry. Revd Holland wrote in horror about his discovery of an
incestuous relationship between a stepfather and his stepdaughter
which had resulted in the birth of a child. He complained, ‘that shock-
ing Sinner Old Porter . . . had a child by his own Wicked Daughter
. . . [and] did not seem to have much sense of guilt on his mind, but
I spoke to him in Strong Terms’.21 Holland considered the young
woman as guilty as her stepfather, but it is unlikely that a poor girl
in her situation would have had anywhere else to go. In another case,
the same reverend apparently had more sympathy for a man who
had children with his sister-in-law. Nonetheless, he refused to marry
them. It would seem that little distinction was made by the clergy
between affinity and consanguineous incest.
Cases of incest were still unusual enough to be reported in
newspapers. The Oracle Bell’s New World for Tuesday 28 July 1789,
reported: ‘A French manufacturer by the name of Warrin in Artois
has been convicted of incest with two of his daughters, and an attempt
to debauch a third.’22 This newspaper seems to have been keen to
expose the perpetrators of such indiscretions; a month later, it
reported another incest case, this time that of a British man from
Littlehampton, 55-year-old Richard Glazemark. He had been living
in incest with his daughter Jemima for over fifteen years but, enraged
by jealousy upon her marriage, he stabbed her husband and set
fire to his house. For reasons that were undisclosed in the newspaper,
the jury acquitted the father, but he continued to storm around the
village, threatening to burn down houses and barns. He also threat-
ened to kill the children he had had by his daughter. Finally, after
forcing his daughter to meet him in a public house, he took her to
a field and mutilated her. He stayed with her until she died, then
made a failed attempt to cut his own throat. He was finally picked up
at his house and taken to court where, after five hours of delibera-
tion, the jury found him guilty of murder.23
Meanwhile, gossip flourished when Fanny Burney’s brother eloped
with his half-sister in 1798. The courts were powerless to prevent
them, as no civil law against their activities existed; nonetheless, the
280
Eugène Delacroix,
The Bride of
Abydos, 1857.
couple shocked polite society by living together for the next five years.
Lord Byron similarly attracted scandal when his wife spread rumours
about his affair with his half-sister Augusta Leigh. In his original
idea for his epic poem The Bride of Abydos (1813) he celebrated a
love affair between a brother and sister, but lessened the impact
when he changed their relationship to one of cousins for publication.24
Incest came to be seen as a serious sexual perversion, which led
to the corruption of society and the downfall of queens. Henry viii
notoriously blamed his incestuous marriage with his brother’s widow
for his lack of an heir to the throne. Close familial incest was associ-
ated with witchcraft in some countries, and sexual depravity in others.
With the coming of Cromwell, new puritanical measures were intro-
duced in 1650 for ‘supressing the detestable sins of incest, adultery
and fornication’.25 A short-lived English statute was introduced in 1650
which declared incest to be a felony, but this did not live past the
Restoration in 1660. Surprisingly, in Britain incest was not made
illegal until 1908.
Discussion around the problem with marrying a close in-law con-
tinued unabated throughout much of the early nineteenth century.
281
In England, only with the Marriage Act of 1835 were the laws about
the degrees of kinship in marriage firmed up. Marrying one’s sister-
in-law became legal only with the Deceased Wife’s Sister’s Marriage
Act of 1907, although this had been a hard and long battle waged in
Parliament on a yearly basis. It took another fourteen years before
the Deceased Brother’s Widow’s Marriage Act 1921 was passed.
Meanwhile, as a result of the rise of the new middle classes, a new
target for pornography emerged and incest in the family became a
main theme.
A New Pornography
The use of incest as a subject in pornography had already taken off
in France. In the Histoire de Dom Bougre, portier de Chartreux (1741),
attributed to Jean-Charles Gervaise de Latouche, by the fourth
page the narrator is anxious to commit incest with his sister Suzon:
‘I kissed her and she slapped me on the cheek; I forced her to the
ground and she writhed like a snake. I held her tightly in my arms,
kissing her breasts through her bodice.’26 The Marquis de Sade
took the subject much further, devoting a whole novella to incest.
Although his novella Eugénie de Franval (1800) is less well known
than most of his other works, it provides an intriguing account of
an incestuous relationship, the manipulation of a young daughter
Eugénie by her father, Monsieur de Franval. As soon as she was born,
he ‘conceived the most detestable designs on her’. In an early case of
grooming, he first separates her from her mother, then from all
other guidance except his own. Franval admits, ‘I love my daughter,
I love her passionately, she is my mistress, my wife, my sister, my
confidante, my friend, my sole god on earth – she is in short all the
titles which can win the homage of a heart.’27 She in turn loves him as
no other, refusing to be with any other man.
The English were proving to be more reticent than the French in
their depictions of incest in pornography. At the beginning of the
eighteenth century, incest was merely mentioned rather than being
explored in any depth. A New Description of Merryland (1741) pointed
out the drawbacks of maternal incest, since ‘to enter again in that Part
they were born in, is looked on as an infamous Crime, and severely
punishable by Law; yet some have been hardy enough to do it.’28
Initially, the English took to inserting incest into translations of
282
A brother watches as his sister fornicates with a priest. Anonymous engraving
from Histoire de Dom Bougre (1741).
An illustration typical of 19th- and early 20th-century pornography: a father
figure molests a young girl. Martin van Maële, La Grande danse macabre (1907).
French pornography, the translators adding bits here and there as

they chose. In the dialogue between two women in The School of Venus
(L’Ecole des filles), one remarks, ‘incest is counted no sin, for they
put it off with a jest, saying it makes the top of their prick look redder
if they dip it in their own blood’.29 Yet there was no mention of incest
in the French original. There was, however, an increasing move towards
portraying scenes of incest, as new predilections were explored in
English pornography from around the 1770s onwards.
By the Victorian period, incest was littering the pages of the
gentleman’s erotica collection. This shift occurred at the time of
growing concentration on the nuclear family in which the home
was to be the haven of peace, set apart from the bustle of the outside
world. ‘Home’, wrote William Thayer (1820–1898) in Pastor’s Wedding
Gift, ‘is the harbinger of all that is good . . . and a panacea for all ills
. . . a sweet bower of peace and joy in this desert world’. Within this
idyllic family set-up, the father was the disciplinarian, the mother the
nurturer of their children; their offspring were blessed gifts from
God, their innocent natures guided by the strict but loving hands of
their parents. This happy family was a prototype depicted by moral-
ists and pornographers alike, but for widely different reasons. While
the Victorians were peddling the patriarchal family as the Christian
ideal, pornographers were striving to parody them, thereby attacking
the ideals of bourgeois society. The pornographer’s aim was to shat-
ter this illusion of purity and to replace it with sexual perversion –
sadism, sodomy, fellatio, cunnilingus, lesbianism and coprophilia all
served to displace the procreative process that led to family life.30
British pornography pursued the incest theme with passion. Books
such as the anonymous Romance of Lust, privately printed around
1873, explored sex between various family members. Readers knew
exactly what sort of treat they were in for as by the third paragraph,
the hero and his sisters were experimenting with each other’s gen-
itals: ‘My sisters and I all slept in the same room . . . we had discovered
that mutual handling gave a certain amount of pleasing sensation;
and latterly, my elder sister had discovered that the hooding and
unhooding of my doodle, as she called it, instantly caused it to swell
and stiffen as hard as a piece of wood.’31 The fact that the British
middle-class family was such an esteemed social institution made
the breaking of its boundaries even more transgressive, and there-
fore more exciting.
285
Tainted Families
Incest in the Victorian and Edwardian periods was becoming a new
focus for consideration. While pornographers were experimenting
with the fantasies about the Victorian libertine, nineteenth-century
philanthropic investigators such as Henry Mayhew, Charles Booth
and William Acton were busy exploring London’s labouring poor
and uncovering the harsh realities of life.32 They noticed that incest
was connected to poverty, and saw overcrowding as the underlying
cause; mothers, fathers and children were all forced into small living
areas. In the towns, hovels were so overcrowded that there was no other
place to sleep than to huddle together in one bed. It was also a con-
venient way to keep warm in a chilly, uninsulated home. Where few
had the fuel to keep their fires lit all night, the warmth of each other’s
bodies was a comfort. Similarly, in rural hovels, the whole family
might sleep in one bed: the daughter slept against the wall in order to
safeguard her chastity in case of intruders, then the mother, followed
by the father with the son on the outside. With so many people in
the same bed, the real danger was suffocating one’s child, not its
sexual molestation.
Andrew Mearns, secretary of the London Congregational Union,
assisted by W. C. Preston, undertook his own inquiry into the con-
ditions of the abject poor in The Bitter Cry of Outcast London (1883).
Initially published anonymously as a penny pamphlet, it reported:
One of the saddest results of this overcrowding is the inevi-

table association of honest people with criminals. Often is
the family of an honest working man compelled to take
refuge in a thieves’ kitchen . . .Who can wonder that every
evil flourishes in such hotbeds of vice and disease? . . . As
if the men and women living together in these rookeries
are married, and your simplicity will cause a smile. Nobody
knows. Nobody cares . . . Incest is common; and no form of
vice or sensuality causes surprise or attracts attention . . .
The low parts of London are the sink into which the filthy and
abominable from all parts of the country seem to flow.33
Attitudes against incest began to firm up in the nineteenth

century as studies were published proving that ‘idiots’ were born
286
as a result of close blood unions. In 1846, the American Medical

Society brought out an influential study concluding that close mar-
riages led to mental deficiencies in resulting offspring. By the
1870s, pioneering American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan
was suggesting that people should avoid the evils of the con-
sanguineous marriage altogether and look for a partner outside
the family.34 As a result, thirteen American states outlawed cousin
marriage by the 1880s; double that number had done so by the
mid-1920s.
Although studies of poverty helped to convince the public of
the environmental influences leading to incest, sexologists added
their own views. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, sex-
ologists, psychiatrists, anthropologists and sociologists began to
attempt explanations of why incest occurred and why it was pro-
hibited. They incorrectly assumed that incest was forbidden in all
cultures and societies, and that incest was commonly seen to be a
danger to society. Furthermore, they did not adequately explain
why societies might want to prohibit intimacy between close rela-
tives in the first place. What they did debate was why a person might
want to commit incest.
Nearly all of the sexologists took it for granted that incest
was a perversion and not ‘natural’. The Finnish sociologist Edvard
Westermarck in The History of Human Marriage (1891) stated
that people have a natural biological mechanism to avoid incest.
Of women, he reported: ‘There are certain facts which cannot be
explained as either the direct or indirect results of feminine coy-
ness, but indicate a close connection between sexual modesty and
the aversion to incest.’35 Krafft-Ebing thought mental deficiency
was to blame, asserting that ‘only great sensuality and defective
ideas of law and morality can lead to incest’, although he recog-
nized that both conditions may be present in ‘tainted families’.36
In men, drinking alcohol encouraged incest, as did weakness and
lack of shame in women. Incest was also more likely to occur in the
lower classes because of ‘defective separation’ and their inability
to keep the sexes apart. Interviewing patients, he found both men
and women were riddled with angst because of their incestous
desires. Some of the more desperate among them threatened
suicide when their offspring threatened to leave. One 44-year-old
‘nymphomaniac’ (as Krafft-Ebing described her) attempted suicide
287
because of unrequited love for her son; ‘She pestered him with
kisses and caresses and tried one night to force him to engage in
coitus, which he refused.’37
Ellis believed that any incestuous desire tended to be found in
children and died out naturally as a person grew up, ‘when stronger
stimuli from outside are applied’. He claimed ‘for children there is
only love for an object of affection, not incestuous desire’.38 Taking
a psychoanalytical approach, Sigmund Freud examined childhood
complexes more deeply in a series of essays in 1905, adding to them
in later editions his theory that children’s desires for the parent of
the opposite sex was normal. These desires needed to be redirected
to people outside the family if a child was to grow up to become a
healthy adult. He blamed a combination of the biological urge of
sex and the mother’s nurturing of the human infant as the reason for
the emergence of an incest taboo. Opposing Krafft-Ebing’s early
ideas, he argued: ‘It is the fate of all of us perhaps, to direct our first
sexual impulse towards our mothers and our first hatred and our
first murderous wish against our father.’39 As an example, he developed
his now famous theory of the Oedipus complex, according to which
a boy, via his suppressed unconscious, desires to sexually possess
his mother and kill his father. His colleague Carl Jung took this idea
further, establishing the concept of the Electra complex, by which
a girl desires her father and directs her anger towards her mother.
The successful resolution was supposed to take place when the child
finally identified with the same-sex parent. In his Totem and Taboo
(1913), Freud published four essays, one of them tackling the subject
under the title ‘The Savage’s Dread of Incest’. Here, he examined the
complex social organization of Australian Aborigines, which had been
put in place in order to prevent incest, and allied this totem system
to the Western nuclear family. The system was applied to prevent sex-
ual relations not only between relatives but also those who were not
blood relatives but were members of the same family. To some extent,
the psychoanalytical theory pandered to the Edwardians, who were
eager to distance humans from other animals and see themselves
as culturally and intellectually significant.
Anthropologists saw incest and its taboo in terms of the relation-
ships between individual human nature (through evolutionary biology)
and society. At least one asserted, ‘The taboo on incest within the
immediate family is one of the few known cultural universals.’40 The
288
anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss in The Elementary Structures

of Kinship (1949) suggested that the incest taboo emerged because
it violated the inherent social design of society. Like some sexologists
before him, he believed the incest taboo to be universal, but for him
the problems of the behavioural urge lay in the social context of
human societies, not in the human psyche. Broad sexual interaction
and marriage was needed to prevent a family becoming isolated. In
this way, the incest taboo served a purpose – it was not simply a
means by which a community policed undesirable sexual behaviour
but it encouraged people to go elsewhere to find a mate. Meanwhile,
the evolutionary biologists developed a new theory based on biol-
ogy. They pointed to the incest taboo as a way humans evolved to avoid
reproducing bad genes – it was intended to encourage the spread of
the gene pool outside the immediate family or community. This would
prevent defective genes concentrating in a small community and
producing increasingly defective individuals. Arguably, though,
everyone in the family staying together could better serve social
cohesion, and it is more likely that the incest taboo arose from an
attempt to prevent the breakdown of harmonious relationships. If
there was a father–daughter or mother–son sexual relationship, it was
problematic for the other spouse, causing friction in the family. The
ensuing imbalance in domestic equality would contribute to the
breakdown of the family.
From the anthropologist’s perspective, the incest taboo existed to
promote social function and interaction. Other social scientists
believed that there was no reason for societies to prohibit intimate
relationships between close relatives. In contradiction to the evolu-
tionary biologists, the anthropologist Conrad P. Kottak asserted,
‘There is no simple or universally accepted explanation for the fact
that all cultures ban incest.’41 However, these sexologists and anthro-
pologists got it wrong:42 incest taboo never has been universal, and
this really is the point. Although some may regard incest as taboo, it
has been committed the world over. One aware investigator declared
‘It is incest itself – and not the absence of incest – that has been
universal for most people in most places at most times.’43
With the introduction of the Punishment of Incest Act 1908 for
the first time in England, perpetrators could be prosecuted under the
criminal law. Yet only a handful of incest cases came in front of the
Old Bailey between 1908 and 1913, the individuals involved usually
289
accused of ‘unlawfully carnally knowing’. Three years’ penal servitude

seemed to have been the usual punishment, as indicated by the
case of 53-year-old John Daniel, who pleaded guilty to raping his
adult daughter Caroline Drain on 12 October 1909. The age of the
girl at the time of a rape seems to have made no difference to the
length of sentence. When 51-year-old Charles Bennett came up on
rape charges, although he ‘pleaded guilty of carnally knowing Jane
Bennett, his daughter’, who was around fourteen or fifteen, he still
only received three years’ penal servitude in 1910. It also seems to
have been regarded as less serious if a sister was involved rather
than a daughter. Twenty-two-year-old labourer William Morley only
received eighteen months’ hard labour when he pleaded guilty to
indecently assaulting his sister in 1913.44
By the 1950s, studies of incest were being undertaken to assess
the reasons why it was happening. American Professor of Sociology
at Roosevelt University, Dr S. Kirson Weinberg studied over 200
cases. He concluded that different types of incest occurred in differ-
ent types of household. Father–daughter incest was prevalent in
father-dominated households; sibling incest was apparent where
the father did not take the dominant role; and mother–son incest
occurred where the mother was the dominant figure.45 The pathol-
ogy of the perpetrator included drunkenness, being highly strung,
nervousness, irritability, loneliness and moodiness.
Changing attitiudes resulted in the Marriage Act of 1949 in the
uk, which prohibited sexual relations with adopted daughters.
Families were no longer organized merely along ties of blood, but
were increasingly based on newly emerging love and living arrange-
ments. More recently, because of the rising divorce rate, remarriage
and the rise in the number of second families, the nuclear family
has become one which includes half-brothers, stepsisters, second
husbands, third wives and so on. Gay couples also sometimes have
extended families involving friends as egg or sperm donors, further
complicating the modern-day model of the family. Because of this,
blood ties matter less in terms of incest than the context of the rela-
tionship. In a world where families are made up of children from
different marriages and partners are unrelated to the children in
the house, it is sexual desire between adults and children which
becomes the overriding factor of concern. Anxiety is now focused on
control and power within the family.
290
In cases of separations and sperm and egg donorships, often

children are unaware of those to whom they are related. They might
meet their parents later on in life, and see them as viable sex part-
ners without ever knowing the true connection. Brothers and sisters
who have been separated at birth and share the same biological
parents have met up later in life as adults and fallen in love. One of
the recent cases of sibling incest arose in Germany after the separa-
tion at birth of a brother and sister. Patrick Stübing had been taken
into foster care when he was three years old and was later adopted.
He found out about his natural parents when he was 23 and made
contact with them. This was when he first met his biological sister,
Susan Karolewski. He moved in with his natural family and around
six months later he became sexually intimate with her after their
mother died. The pair had a child together in 2001, the first of four,
three of whom were born mentally and physically disabled. As a
result, their children were taken into care, and a battle began between
the family and the authorities. Their wish to remain together has
brought into question the nature of incest and its illegality. Stübing
has already served two years in prison as a result of their incest but
the couple say they are happy together. The main problem in this par-
ticular case was that Karolewski was only sixteen and thought to be
mentally impaired. Could she therefore be seen as having consented?
Since Stübing underwent a vasectomy and there was no evidence of
coercion, there was no reason for concern about genetic problems
and seemingly little point in pursuing further prosecution.
Various studies have also shown how people choose to mate with
those who look like themselves – which increases the likelihood of
being attracted to a family member. Indeed, studies have shown that
sibling incest has become more common more recently.46 Although
Stübing took his case to the European Rights Commission, they ruled
that it was acceptable for a country to have laws against incest.47
There has been a shift in thinking from the idea that incest was
a rare occurrence to the idea that it is (and was in the past) more com-
monly taking place than originally thought. During the 1980s in
America, the public were shocked to be informed that incestuous
child abuse was rife in many of their communities. Celebrities came
out in droves to speak about their childhood abuse stories, tales of
familial torture and abductions. From the investigations of sociol-
ogists to the increasing number of confessional books, there has been
291
an attempt to understand the ‘survivor’s’ story. Therapists introduced

new ways to uncover and retrieve ‘lost memories’ of abuse. In many
of these cases, the victim was ashamed at having been abused, and
saw it as their own fault. As Toni McNaron and Yarrow Morgan,
both ‘survivors’ themselves, stated, ‘We feel shame at having been
abused by those we know are supposed to love us, and the horror of
that abuse and shame turns inwards as the victim tries to learn what
she has done wrong, why this is happening to her.’48 They feel that
keeping silent has led to suicide attempts.49
In response to public exposés of incestuous abuse, family mem-
bers who said they had been wrongly accused formed a backlash
organization called the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. The
adults who via various forms of therapy had ‘retrieved’ childhood
memories of abuse were now accused of ‘false memory syndrome’.50
Occurrences of father–daughter incest are most common among
fathers who have been absent for long periods of time, when the child
was growing up elsewhere, and between non-biological relations, such
as stepfathers and stepdaughters.
On the subject of incest taboo, questions have been posited about
how laws are made; have laws been created by those in power, or do
they come from so-called ‘natural’ aversions, be it from individuals,
groups or societies? Legalization of incest is now openly discussed
and allowed in certain cases. In Brazil, for example, a blood-related
uncle and niece or aunt and nephew may have a relationship pro-
vided they undergo health checks. In Argentina, Austria and Italy,
the same relationship is allowed. Currently in England and Wales,
sexual relationships are illegal between a person and their parent,
grandparent, child, grandchild, sibling, half-sibling, or a blood-
related uncle, aunt, nephew or niece. Under the Sexual Offences
Act 2003, the maximum sentence for adult incest is two years’ impris-
onment.51 In America, it varies from state to state: in New Jersey
incest is not illegal for consenting adults, whereas Massachusetts
can hand out twenty-year prison sentences. Most countries still do
not allow marriage between siblings, the exception being Sweden,
which allows marriage between half-siblings.52 What is incest in
one country therefore is not incest in another.
Incest is a taboo in most countries, but people still violate these
restrictions, just as they do with other forbidden sexual activities. And
although incest may be taboo, that taboo is not universal. Whereas
292
cases have emerged of incest being tolerated between father and

daughter, siblings, step-relations, in-laws and cousins, no mother and
son incest has ever been seen as acceptable, as far as my research has
revealed, although cases from the past may well eventually be uncov-
ered. The case of incest with underage children, or paedophilia, is an
entirely different matter, as we shall see in the next chapter.
293
Anthony van Dyck, George Villiers, Second Duke of Buckingham, and His
Brother Lord Francis Villiers, 1635.
ten
Child Love or Paedophilia?

It is quite difficult to lay down barriers [particularly since] it could be that the
child, with his own sexuality, may have desired the adult.
Michel Foucault
S ex with children is one of the most contentious topics of modern

times. The word ‘paedophilia’ creates a reaction that overrides all
other concerns about sexual deviation. The term comes from the
Greek παίς (pais), meaning ‘child’, and φιλία (philia), the word for
love or friendship. The meaning has since been corrupted and is
now taken to mean the sexual abuse of children. Because of this,
most people have difficulty thinking rationally about child sexual-
ity, particularly in their own children. But was this always the case?
There was no legal or medical classification of ‘paedophilia’ right
up until sexologists defined it at the end of the nineteenth century.
Was desire for the young not a problem in the past? And how did it
come to be placed at the top of society’s concerns?
To understand these concerns – if there were any – in the more
distant past, we need to understand how those who lived around
children saw them, and how parents and employers treated them in
the household and at work. In legal terms, and in medicine, this can
be seen in marriage arrangements and in debates about the age of
consent and the desexualization of the childhood body. The ways
in which child victims and perpetrators have been treated in court
reveal whether the society of a certain time and place saw the act
of sex with children as a serious matter or not.
A Child’s Place
From antiquity up to the eighteenth century, unwanted babies
were routinely thrown off cliffs or exposed to the elements. With no
reliable contraception, plenty of children were born; plenty died
from accidents and diseases. The wanted Greek child was, however,
295
carefully guarded, and considered so unruly as to need nurses and

pedagogues to watch him or her constantly. Girls were kept out of
public view under the supervision of their mothers, while boys were
sent to school once they reached a certain age. They did, however,
have to be supervised or accompanied when going out, as Xenophon
explained: ‘When children are able to understand what they are
told, at that time slave-pedagogues are appointed and they are sent
to school.’1 As we have seen, youths were prey to the attentions of
adult men and to some extent this was accepted and understood,
but strictly within certain rules. The fact that girls were kept at home
and boys had to have guards indicates a real fear for their moral and
physical welfare once they were in the outside world.
In ancient Greece, children of slaves automatically became
slaves themselves and were routinely bought and sold into prostitu-
tion. Some ended up in brothels, with the more fortunate becoming
hetairai or courtesans, who entertained citizen men. The well-known
courtesan Neaira, who was born in the decade after Athens lost
the Peloponnesian War to Sparta (404 bc), was sold into prostitu-
tion as a child, along with six other young girls. They were bought
by Nikarete, a freewoman of Charisius of Elis, who spotted their
beauty and recognized that it could be turned into profit. In order
to obtain the highest price from the men wanting to have sex with
them, Nikarete pretended that the children were freeborn, calling
them ‘daughters’.2
Roman citizen children were brought up by slave nurses (although
they may also have had pedagogues, a practice influenced by the
Greeks), but not everyone thought this a good idea. Writers at the
time frequently criticized Roman parents for handing over their chil-
dren to foreign and corrupt nurses; Favorinus, for example, attacked
mothers who did not suckle their own children but instead handed
them over to a wet-nurse. The bad nurse was thought to be unchaste,
vulgar and drank too much; she failed to take proper care of her
charges, who then ended up morally weak and degenerate. Nurses
were even portrayed as procurers who perverted the sexual behav-
iour of the young girls they were meant to be protecting. The bad
nurse, it seems, personified the general decline of Rome and its degen-
eracy.3 Despite the care taken over children, some emperors nonetheless
managed to corrupt them. Suetonius condemned Tiberius because
he taught ‘little boys who he called “his minnows” to chase him while
296
c h i l d l ov e o r pa e d o ph i l i a ?
he went swimming and get between his legs and lick and nibble him’.
Suetonius also condemned the emperor for letting unweaned babies
‘suck at him’, calling him ‘a filthy old man!’4
By the medieval period, there was little reticence about men-
tioning sexual matters in front of children. Louis xiii’s father played
with his son’s genitals until the child was three years old and made
jokes about them. Sex came early for young royals: at the age of
fourteen, Louis was married off, placed into bed with his wife and
expected to perform.5 As the next monarch, he would have been
closely protected throughout his childhood. Girls were even more
closely guarded. Just as in ancient Greece and Rome, their virginity
was vital if they were to find a marriage partner. Nobles had a distinct
moral code; the male head of the household had a duty to look after
the women in the family and preserve their chastity. Yet children
were dressed as mini-adults, further complicating judgement on
their sexual maturity. Children of higher birth might be sent away to
live with other noble families as a form of education and patronage.
This practice was presumed to be safe, as it was a matter of honour
for those fostering the noble children of their peers to ensure that they
were protected and treated as members of the family.
Labouring adults concentrated on getting their children to
work as soon as possible. Children took up menial tasks, and then
gradually took on more responsibility as they became more able.
In rural families, children would help their fathers or mothers either
in the fields or the home. Later, around puberty, they might go into
an apprenticeship or domestic service. This was when children
were usually at their most vulnerable, as the court records show,
with assaults made on domestic servants and apprentices. Not only
did they leave the family household, but they also had to deal with
being newly aware of their sexuality and sexual attractiveness.
However, parents and municipal courts did their best to pro-
tect children from molestation. In 1339, when one man assaulted a
fourteen-year-old girl, he was forced to pay £40 to the chamberlain
in recompense, to keep for the girl until she was married or came of
age. Similarly, when Robert Trenender, a brazier from Byrstow, and
his wife Issabell complained that Philip Rychard had deflowered
their daughter, the case was taken to arbitrations and Rychard was
told to give the child Agnes either a pipe (a large storage container)
and a half of woad or £20 in compensation. Adolescents themselves
297
Pederasty: a man titillates a youth. Red-figure cup by Brygos Painter,

c. 500–47 bc.
were recognized as developing their own sexual desires, and the

onset of puberty was seen to be a worrying time of ‘lust-longing’
when they needed to be watched.6 Generally, close-knit communi-
ties in the country had their own form of policing – neighbours would
look out for other neighbours’ children, and children old enough to
work were overseen by their masters in apprenticeships (although,
occasionally, as we shall see, these masters were themselves abusers).
298
From the eighteenth century, as the urban centres of Europe grew

larger and more anonymity was possible, there was a breakdown in
community networks; with this came more opportunities for unsuper-
vised access to young girls and boys.
Age of Consent
The legality of sex hinged on the age of consent. If a child was con-
sidered under the age of consent, an adult could be prosecuted for
having sex with them. Above a certain age, an individual was no longer
considered a child and therefore could consent to sex. Yet the age
at which a child was responsible for its actions was something of
a conundrum to the medieval layperson. In law, a child was only
considered capable of deception at the age of seven. Their legal res-
ponsibility came into play only between the ages of twelve and
seventeen; this varied depending on the issue at hand. In 1118, Henry
i ordered that the earliest age at which a child could bring legal
action or sit on a jury was fifteen. From the Church’s point of view, if
a couple having sex were unmarried, they were committing fornica-
tion, which was illicit at any age. The age of consent therefore depended
on the permissible age for marriage.
During the medieval period in England, the marriageable age
was twelve for a girl and fourteen for a boy, although they were often
betrothed before then. Noble families were particularly keen to unite
their fortunes as soon as possible. Occasionally the children were
still young, even prepubescent, when they were married, although
close relatives frequently refused to allow consummation to take place
until the girl was older. How far the law was implemented and suc-
cessful was another matter. Lady Margaret Beaufort, the mother of
Henry vii, was particularly keen to protect her granddaughter from
an early marriage because she herself had gone through one in 1450
when she was only six years old. This marriage was later dissolved,
since she had not been of age. As soon as she was twelve, however, she
was forced into another marriage and widowed a year later, only to
find herself seven months pregnant. This was by no means unusual.
The idea of young love was common, as seen in the theatre audi-
ence’s understanding of Shakepeare’s Romeo and Juliet – Juliet was
only thirteen when she fell in love with Romeo and her father was
already trying to find a husband for her.
299
Because of the importance placed on female chastity, early British

law made attempts to establish some sort of protection for children
regarding rape, abduction and sexual assault. If a girl had been raped,
her prospects of marriage were grim. When the rape of prepubes-
cent girls occurred, it was therefore taken extremely seriously and
was a capital offence. Similarly, the abduction of underage girls
was punishable by death, with no exceptions. There was, however,
no understanding of ‘paedophile’ or ‘paedophilia’, just adults who
‘ravished’ children. In 1275, in England, part of the rape law made it
a misdemeanor to ‘ravish’ a ‘maiden within age’ (this was taken to
be around twelve), punishable by two years’ imprisonment, whether
with consent or not. In Elizabeth i’s reign, rape and carnal knowledge
of a girl under the age of ten were made felonies in 1576.7 If a girl
was abducted, restitution was usually paid to a girl’s parents, since
she belonged to them, just as restitution was made to a raped woman’s
husband. Children up to puberty were still considered ‘infants’ right
up into the eighteenth century; this can be seen in the terminology
used in trial records. For example, when Stephen Arrowsmith was
indicted in 1678 for ravishing and abusing Elizabeth Hopkins, she
was referred to as ‘an Infant of the age of eight years’.8 Meanwhile,
the ravishment of boys did not come under the same law, but came
under the general laws against sodomy.
By the seventeenth century, little had changed when English
jurist Sir Edward Coke made it clear that ‘the marriage of girls under
twelve was normal, and the age at which a girl who was a wife was
eligible for a dower from her husband’s estate was nine even though
her husband be only four years old.’9 But the situation in which a man
had consensual sex with a girl between ten and twelve was a grey
area (twelve or over was considered acceptable). Any sexual intercourse
in such cases would more likely be considered a misdemeanour than
a felony, while sex with a girl under ten years old was a felony regard-
less of consent. Whether a girl agreed or was coerced was harder to
prove, and when rape charges were brought against a man, it was
difficult to obtain a conviction.
Age of consent differed between centuries, and between coun-
tries. In Norway during the Viking age (c. 800–1050), the age of consent
for heterosexual sex was from the onset of first menstruation, but
in some regions this changed during the Lutheran Reformation to
twenty years of age. In 1875, England raised the age to thirteen years,
300
making an act of sexual intercourse with a girl younger than thirteen

a felony. In countries which fell under the French Napoleonic Code,
the age of consent was set at eleven in 1791 and raised to thirteen in
1863. In countries which did not take the Napoleonic Code, age was
set by statute law, or as local custom determined.
The Changing Notion of Childhood

Church teachings had seen children as having original sin, which
had to be beaten out of them. It was advised that children should
not be mollycoddled or pampered by their parents but should be
disciplined to keep them on the path of virtue. Elder children were
expected to play a part. In sixteenth-century Germany, Thomas
Platter remembered being beaten as a boy; ‘my cousin Paulus would
walk along behind me, armed with a stick or a pike, and would beat
my bare legs, for I had no breeches and only a bad pair of shoes.’10 It
became a matter of moral responsibility for masters of schools to
ensure their charges were regularly thrashed. In order to fulfil this
commitment, at Winchester College in England during the seven-
teenth century, pupils were flogged every Saturday to keep them in
line, the day known as ‘the bloody day’.11
Anxieties about children’s susceptibility to corruption further
surfaced in instruction manuals from seventeenth-century Jesuit
boarding schools in which the Jesuits suggested that children should
not be left alone at night. Nor should they be left in the company of
domestic servants who might have a negative influence on them.
The potential for domestic servants to corrupt their charges was
reiterated throughout the eighteenth century; the French cardinal
De Bernis stated, ‘nothing is more dangerous for the morals and
perhaps for the health than to leave children too long in the case of
servants.’12 This fear of servants corrupting children was a concern
that would continue to filter down through the ages.13
The question of ‘innocence’ in childhood was discussed in the
French Enlightenment, and the notion emerged that children were
naturally good but corrupted by society.14 This turned the old idea
of original sin on its head. One influence on people’s perceptions
of children was the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
whose book Emile (1762) established the idea of a separate period
that existed prior to puberty, a time in which a child remained
301
George Cruikshank, birch discipline for the Child Dunce, 1839.
untainted and uncorrupted. This ideal was to become common-

place in the Victorian family and broader society a century later.
Despite the fact that the industrial revolution was a time of great
exploitation of child labour, a time when children were forced to
work in unsavoury conditions down mines and in cotton mills as
well as in brothels, it was also a time when the wider public under-
standing of childhood and adolescence was shifting. After centuries
of ignoring, starving or working children to death, children were
now seen to be in need of protection, and broader laws were intro-
duced to safeguard them.
Meanwhile, the idea that poverty was responsible for early sex-
ual encounters in childhood was gaining ground. Concern about
Schoolmaster applies the birch.

302
Learning in the Enlightenment; sketch by William Hoare (1707–1792).
childhood prostitution had started to emerge in the eighteenth

century, with philanthropists and police alike eager to get rid of it,
but for essentially different reasons. Philanthropists were concerned
for the welfare of children, observing that they were bought and
sold into sex, while police simply wanted to clear the streets of prosti-
tution altogether, since they saw prostitutes as a nuisance. Magistrate
John Fielding, founder of the modern justice system, was perhaps
more concerned than most when he pondered the plight of young
girls brought up in the slums: ‘they often become Prostitutes, even
before their Passions can have any share in the Guilt’.15 He believed
that children lacked that innate lasciviousness which adult women
were thought to possess, a desire that drove them into prostitution.
At least Fielding recognized that most young girls had been coerced
into prostitution because of poverty. Boys, on the other hand, he sug-
gested, went on the streets to become thieves. However, evidence
suggests that boys, too, were forced into prostitution or raped, or
suffered attempted sodomy.16
One twelve-year-old boy, Benjamin Taylor, became the victim of
Michael Levi, as told in court on 23 May 1751 at some length. Levi lived
in London’s Holborn and ran an alehouse from a stall in Baptist’s
303
Child labour in the United States, c. 1900.
Head. Most nights he would carry up the boxes left over from his
night’s sales after shutting up his stall and go up to the room he had
in the house in the same yard. On the night in question, around
dusk, after shutting up the stall as usual, Levi asked Taylor to help
him get the boxes inside. He then proceeded to assault him. The
boy told the court, ‘he unbutton’d my breeches and threw me down
on the bed on my face, he unbutton’d his breeches and put his c – k
into my backside.’17 This carried on for about quarter of an hour.
Taylor admitted he had been too ashamed to say anything about
the incident, although he told one of his friends, who in turn told his
father, and the father told Benjamin’s father. Levi was sentenced to
death for sodomy. Although when caught the perpetrators were
dealt with harshly, often there was difficulty in making the accusa-
tions stick.
Catching the Abuser

Looking back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in inci-
dents of sexual assault, it was usually the parents or guardians of
304
the child victims who were responsible for bringing the case to the
notice of the courts. Even so, many of the cases brought before the
courts were dismissed because of lack of evidence and witnesses.
If the child had developed venereal disease since the attack, it was
more likely that this would be taken as evidence that an attack had
taken place, especially if the perpetrator was known to be ‘poxed’.
One such case of 1680 was that of William Harding, tried for ‘rav-
ishing’ Sarah Southy, a girl of about seven or eight years of age. He
had enticed her down into a dark cellar with the promise of some
apples. The court recorder verified that he then ‘accomplished his
detestable Villainy, not only giving the Child the foul Disease where-
with himself was infested, but likewise by forcibly penetrating her
Body, so abused her secret parts’.18 She was left in a distressed con-
dition, but was afraid to complain to her mother in case she was
beaten by her.
The fear of a parent’s reaction might make a child unwilling to
reveal an incident of rape. It explains why in some cases the child
might have felt it was easier to let the matter go. Those who did go
through the unsettling procedure of informing their parents then had
to give witness in front of many hostile adults in court – judges were
unwilling to send a man to his death on the word of a child unless
there was a cast-iron case. Sarah Southy finally told her mother, who
procured a couple of surgeons to examine her daughter. Both physicians
found that she had been forced into intercourse. Witnesses at court
denounced the perpetrator as a ‘debauched fellow’ who ‘was wont to
Act carnally with his own mother, threatening when she refused to
permit his incestuous desires, to Fire the house about her Ears’. When
he was examined, he was found to have ‘several Simptoms of the
Venereal Distemper’, which allowed the jury to find him guilty of rape.
The fact that he had passed on venereal disease to his young victim
acted as evidence in proving his guilt.
In other cases, perpetrators simply disappeared, which seems to
show that the attitude of the law towards child rape was rather lax.
On Saturday 6 January 1722, the Weekly Journal or Saturday’s Post
reported that an ‘old gentleman’ accused of raping and thereby
murdering a three-year old-child had disappeared. In another case
of rape, reported in Tunbridge Wells on 5 August 1727, the Weekly
Journal or British Gazetteer pronounced that Lord Lateran, ‘who
had for many Years been highly honour’d and distinguish’d by the
305
Quality, and others who use the Wells’, was caught in an attempt to
rape a child of seven; rather than facing trial he had also absconded.19
It seems that the authorities were more cautious about immediately
apprehending a man of any standing or taking him into custody for
fear it might go against them and that they would gain a powerful
enemy. However, when the perpetrator was convicted, the law came
down heavily upon them. Unsurprisingly, lower-class men were
more easily caught, and more of them suffered the death penalty.
Others managed to escape execution or got off with a whipping.
On Friday 10 April 1730, George Roufon was tried at Hicks Hall for
raping a child of nine and sentenced to be ‘Whipt twice from Islington
Turn-pike to the Church. And to be kept on Hard Labour at Clerken-
well Bridewell for one Year.’20 Some prisoners were sentenced to the
pillory at Palace Yard, Westminster, like Henry Herbert, who in 1731
had attempted to rape an eight-year-old girl.21 This at least gave the
public a chance to express their opinion. When James Allen stood in
the pillory at Charing Cross in 1737 for attempted rape of a six-year-
old, the crowd pelted him viciously.22
Despite the existence of capital punishment for rape of under-
age girls, few cases were ever brought to justice during the eighteenth
century. Believing a child’s word against that of a grown, and often
respectable, man, was hard for most judges. More importantly, there
was a ‘normalization’ of heterosexual rape – a prevalent public (and
male) belief that it was a fact of life for a man to desire sex with a young
girl.23 As we have seen, in Victorian and Edwardian pornography,
images of incestuous sex with children were common. Youngsters were
portrayed as responsible for sexually enticing their elders. A cult of
defloration flourished in which having sex with a virgin was viewed
as something desirable, a result of a shared understanding between
libertine men. Various men’s clubs paid procurers to bring virgins for
their members to deflower; cracking a hymen was a glorification of
a man’s sexual prowess. Rumours also floated around that sex with a
virgin would cure a man of the pox. As a result, diseased men flocked
to brothel-keepers – who themselves were often women – who could
supply them with young virgins. Men had no need to rape to find
young victims; they merely needed a few pence in their pockets and
an eye for a starving child.
The age of the girl in rape cases made a marked difference to the
attitudes of the judges. A fifteen-year-old girl would have been classed
306
‘Presto Agitato’
from Martin van
Maële, La Grande
danse macabre
(1907).
as any other adult woman, as shown in the case of Stephen Cooper,

who had raped fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Child and was reprieved
before the judges even had the chance to return home.24 Doctors’
evidence was provided in court where they had examined the woman,
girl or boy involved in rape or sodomy charges. If there was evidence
of rupture, scatches, bruising or other signs of violence, it assisted
the case. In Newcastle, on 17 May 1736, William Johnson went into
the house of George Atkinson of Bishop-Warmouth and, finding
everyone else out of the house, he attempted ‘in an unnatural manner’
to rape (sodomize) Atkinson’s seven-year-old daughter. The injuries
were so great that the surgeon took her into his care.25
Character witnesses went a long way in swaying the court against
conviction. In Dublin, a man called Keely escaped sentence for
raping a ten-year-old girl because of the positive testimony on his
character provided by the witnesses.26 Indeed, there was a history of
307
doctors believing that it was impossible to rape a child of ten or under

because of her physiology – she was deemed simply too under-
developed for penetration. In one case of the rape of a nine-year-old
girl at the Old Bailey in 1678, an apothecary told the court that in his
opinion, ‘a Child of those years could not be Ravished’. This notion
held into the nineteenth century and was repeated in Alfred Swaine
Taylor’s Medical Jurisprudence (1844).27 Generally, the forensic evi-
dence of rape or abuse was to check whether a girl’s hymen had been
broken, the concentration being on the investigation of the abuse of
girls. Sometimes ‘female searchers’ were brought in to examine a girl
in the presence of doctors, but generally female physicians were not
used, even after 1865, when women were allowed to qualify as doctors.
Doctors used various texts when trying to establish child abuse, such
as Thomas Percival’s Medical Ethics (1803) and Michael Ryan’s A
Handbook of Medical Jurisprudence (1831).
The courts recognized that offenders frequently escaped because
of the difficulty in establishing proof of ejaculation in sodomy
and rape cases. The Sexual Offences Against the Person Act was
therefore passed in 1828, making it easier to prosecute: evidence of
ejaculation was no longer necessary and penetration, even partial,
was enough to bring about a prosecution of sodomy.28 Nonethe-
less, this did not seem to discourage the perpetrators of such crimes.
According to the child rape cases of the Middlesex sessions between
1830 and 1910 at the Old Bailey, 67 per cent of sexual assault victims
were children; the majority of these cases involved the children
of the poor working classes and lower-class artisans.29 However,
rape ceased to be a capital offence in 1841, and from then on the
number of prosecutions, particular successful ones, rose dramat-
ically.30 The nineteenth century was a confusing time in respect of
attitudes towards children and child abuse. It teemed with contra-
dictions; although many statutes were introduced in an attempt
to protect children, men continued to molest children and escape
the consequences.
By the 1850s, two French physicians, Adolphe Toulmouche and
Ambroise Tardieu, undertook an investigation into signs of abuse
on boys,31 using their exceptional knowledge of forensic medicine
to investigate maltreatment of children. Tardieu even provided a
detailed description of the ‘pederast’:
308
Hair curled, face made up, neck bared, waist cinched to

accentuate his curves, the fingers, ears, and chest covered
with jewels, the most penetrating perfume wafting from
the whole person, and in his hand a handkerchief, flowers
or some needlework: such is the strange, repulsive, and by all
rights suspect physiognomy that betrays pederasts.32
This pederast not only preyed on youths, but also sold his effemin-
ate body. Tardieu published his studies of child abuse cases as
Etude medico-legale sur les attentats aux moeurs (Forensic Study
on Offences against Morals) in 1857, thereby bringing the problem
to the attention of the medical and legal world. Even so, most doc-
tors seem to have been extremely reluctant to admit to signs of abuse.
Since then forensic science has developed considerably, with various
methods of ‘testing’ abuse, but it was years before it was possible
to properly protect children from it.
So how are we to apply the shifting notions of childhood to paedo-
philia? There is plenty of evidence to suggest that parents cared greatly
for their children and were anxious about their children’s welfare –
and they had need to be.33 People perpetrated sexual rapes and assaults
on young children because they were attracted to children, not simply
because there were no suitable or willing adults about, and such
attacks were taken extremely seriously. People, including those of
the law, recognized that children were seen as easy targets, more
vulnerable than adults, and in need of protection. Men regarded as
pillars of society, such as Lord Melbourne, Queen Victoria’s first
prime minister, enjoyed sexually abusing children. He not only beat
his wife and mistresses but also took an unhealthy interest in whip-
ping children.34 His interest was patently sexual: he cut out pictures
of children being beaten from a collection of French erotica called
Les Dames gallantes and sent them to his mistress, Lady Elizabeth
Brandon. In return, she sent him pictures of children being flogged
for ‘reasons of discipline’.
Concerns around paedophilia have led to questions about why
a person would seek out children for sex. A flurry of scientific studies
has emerged over the last 30 years or so in an attempt to understand
the reasons for paedophilia.35 One recent line of thought suggests
that a paedophile’s prior cognition about children as potential sex-
ual partners plays a role in their searching out children for sexual
309
behaviour; their conception of children plays a pivotal role in their

attitude towards them in relation to sex. There must therefore have
been a conception of the young child as a sexual object in the past
for the attacks to have taken place.
The Golden Age of Childhood?

The cult of the girl child emerged in the 1850s and was to morph
into the golden age of childhood at the turn of the century. Alluring
images of children were painted, photographed and written about
by artists and authors, all seemingly acceptable to those around
them. Millais’s Pre-Raphaelite, euphemistically titled painting Cherry
Ripe provided the provocative picture of a prepubescent girl, her
cheeks flushed and her hands pointing to her pudenda. The 28-
year-old painter Philip Wilson Steer used the eleven-year-old Rose
Pettigrew and her sisters as models for his paintings of prepubescent
girls, depicting them naked or with their clothes in disarray. Steer and
Rose kissed, danced and drank wine together; he even proposed to
her and gave her a ring. The relationship went on uncontested until
she was eighteen years old, when she left him after a quarrel at a dance
and refused to see him again.36
The sexually ambiguous cult of the girl child saw a period of seem-
ingly innocent adoration of pre-pubescent girlhood by adult men.
Edgar Jepson wrote, ‘There was at Oxford in the eighties a cult of
little girls, the little daughters of dons and residents: men used to
have them to tea and take them on the river and write verses to them.’37
How innocent these relationships were is questionable. Lewis Carroll
(Charles Dodgson), author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1965),
entertained girls aged between five and eleven in his rooms at Christ
Church, Oxford University, where he was a mathematics don. During
these friendships, he took photographs of them naked, but broke
off connections when they reached twelve – an age at which they
evidently lost their appeal for him. Carroll’s provocative photographs
of the prepubescent Alice Liddell, the girl who inspired ‘Alice’, were
considered acceptable at the time but Carroll evidently had a pen-
chant for little girls even if he did not act on it sexually. Another
admirer of young girls was the poet Ernest Dowson, who became
obsessed by Adelaide Foltinowicz. When he first set eyes on her in
her parents’ cafe in Soho, she was nearly twelve. Although he never
310
John Everett Millais, Cherry Ripe, 1879.
had sex with her, he adored her and wrote poems to her, but she
never took as much interest in him. He waited and waited (as was his
way – Dowson was a known procrastinator), but when she reached
the age of eighteen she found another suitor and married him instead.
Although Adelaide was always Dowson’s one true love, she was not
the only subject of Dowson’s devotion; he also adored and wrote
poems about other young girls.
311
Between 1890 and 1910, a so-called ‘golden age of childhood’

developed from an ideal espoused by writers and artists who believed
in the basic innocence of children. Kenneth Grahame wrote The
Golden Age (1895) and The Wind in the Willows (1908), J. M. Barrie,
Peter Pan; or, The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up (1904) and E. Nesbitt,
The Railway Children (1905) as part of the movement of the glorifi-
cation of childhood. In America, Katharine Forrest Hamill cemented
this type of sentimentality towards childhood innocence in her book
The Golden Age of Childhood, published in 1906, an illustrated book
of children’s poems accompanied by pretty pictures of children.
Philip Wilson Steer, The Black Hat, a picture of Rose Pettigrew, c. 1900.
312
Lewis Carroll’s
photograph of
Alice Liddell.
Barrie was known to be inordinately fond of children. In the opening

to chapter Nineteen of The Little White Bird, published in 1902,
the narrator described how he undresses the boy: ‘David and I
had a tremendous adventure. It was this – he passed the night with
me . . . I took [his boots] off with all the coolness of an old hand, and
then I placed him on my knee, and removed his blouse. This was a
delightful experience, but I think I remained wonderfully calm until
I came somewhat too suddenly to his little braces, which agitated me
profoundly . . . I cannot proceed in public with the disrobing of
David.’ Despite its obvious description of sexual allurement, the
reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement wrote: ‘If a book exists
which contains more knowledge and more love of children, we do
not know it.’ Meanwhile, Barrie indulged in dressing his favourite boy,
one of the sons of the Llewelyn Davies family, as Peter Pan.
313
The golden age of childhood was in contradiction to the tawdry

realities of life for some children. In some cases of sexual abuse,
doctors such as Lawson Tait were pronouncing children ‘virulent
little minxes’, set up by their mothers to cry rape in exchange for
money for keeping quiet. However, Victorian campaigners real-
ized that child abuse permeated society. The nsPcc (which had
developed from the London Society for the Prevention of Cruelty
to Children, founded in 1884) had increasing success in bringing about
prosecutions for child abuse. Their most notable success was the
uncovering of a Baptist minster in 1905 who was found indecently
assaulting three young girls in his charge. Again, the blackmail ruse
was presented by the defence, but the girls gave their own account
and described how the minister had invited them to extra Bible
Cover of Kenneth
Grahame, The
Golden Age (1895).
314
classes. Their testimony was supported by a policeman who witnessed

that the minister had been ‘suspected of immorality for years’.38
The supposed golden age of childhood had brought with it
some of the definitions and examples of serious child abuse, which
we now term ‘paedophilia’. The ‘discovery’ of sexual abuse in England
started from around the 1860s, with the campaigning movements
for child welfare and the social purity movement. The emphasis,
however, was on rescuing fallen women and girls rather than con-
cern over adolescent boy prostitutes.39 Howard Vincent of the
Metropolitan Police told a Select Committee of the House of Lords
in 1881 that female prostitution abounded around the Haymarket
and Piccadilly, with children of fourteen, fifteen and sixteen openly
soliciting. But the biggest scandal was about to erupt as a result of the
work of the journalist W. T. Stead, after he undertook a clandestine
operation to try and expose the ‘white slave traffic’. It was thought
that women and young girls were being abducted and sold as sex
slaves abroad. The results of his investigation were published in a
series of articles in the Pall Mall Gazette in July 1885 under the head-
ing ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’. Here, he declared, ‘It
is, however, a fact that there is in full operation among us a system
of which the violation of virgins is one of the ordinary incidents;
that these virgins are mostly of tender age, being too young in fact
to understand the nature of the crime of which they are the unwill-
ing victims.’40 He claimed to be revealing just how easy it was for a
man to purchase a child for sex. In fact, he had tried for weeks to
do so unsuccessfully and in the end had to hire a known procuress,
who lied to the girl’s mother, saying the child was going into service.
Once the mother found out what had happened, she went to the
magistrates and Stead was arrested.
However, Stead had good intentions. He had long been an
ardent advocate of civil liberties, world peace and women’s rights, a
defender of the oppressed and a supporter of the social purity move-
ment by the time he set up a secret committee to investigate child
prostitution. His comrades included the social purity campaigner
Josephine Butler and members of the London Committee for the
Suppression of the Traffic in British Girls for the Purposes of Conti-
nental Prostitution. In order to publicize the subject, in May 1880
Butler wrote a letter to the Shield, a weekly newspaper for the Campaign
Against the Contagious Diseases Act, where she complained about
315
Victorian idealized view of children in a wood engraving after William Small

(1843–1929).
the extent of child prostitution in European brothels: ‘in some of

the houses in Belgium there are immured little children, English
girls of some twelve to fifteen years of age, lovely creatures (for they
do not care to pay for any who are not beautiful) innocent creatures
too, stolen, kidnapped, betrayed, got from English country villages by
artifice and sold to these human shambles . . .’.41 Butler, along with
the rest of the Committee, supported Stead’s proposals to procure an
underage girl as means to expose the ease of such a purchase. Indeed,
Butler herself pounded the street with her son Georgie, pretending
to be a madam procuring girls, spending £100 in the process. However,
316
Two girls kissing,

Julia Margaret
Cameron, The Turtle
Doves, 1864.
it was Stead who managed to purchase an underage virgin for £5

through various contacts. Despite the fact that he had undertaken
the operation only to expose the crime, once the fact became known,
Stead was prosecuted and served three months in jail. Nonetheless,
the exposé was to have a profound effect on the public and would
help to effect a change of law. The Criminal Law Amendment Act
was introduced in 1885 as ‘an Act to make further provision for the
Protection of Women and Girls, the suppression of brothels, and
other purposes’. It raised the age of consent from thirteen to sixteen,
just as the social purity reformers had wanted, and with it Stead had
at last accomplished his aim.
The Making of the Paedophile

Krafft-Ebing first coined the term ‘paedophilia’ in 1886 to describe
sexual attraction to children. He explained the process; ‘the sexually
317
needy subject . . . [is] drawn to children not because of a degenerated

morality of psychic or physical impotence, but rather because of a
morbid disposition, a psychosexual perversion, which may at pres-
ent be named as erotic pedophilia.’42 Although the perpetrator of
such crimes was labelled a ‘pervert’, the classification of the pae-
dophile was that of a person with a mental disorder – and, indeed,
still is, medically speaking. Although the concept of paedophilia was
introduced in the medical arena in the early twentieth century, it
was not taken up by the public until much later.
According to Krafft-Ebing, one-third of all cases of ‘sexual atroc-
ities’ that came before the criminal forum for the period 1856–60
were committed on children; he said such crimes were on the increase
in Western European countries. In France, for example, the rate of
rape of children rose dramatically from 136 cases in 1826 to over
800 in 1867. Similar trends were seen in England, rising from 167
during a four-year period from 1830 to a staggering 1,395 for the
three years 1855–7. Yet Krafft-Ebing personally knew of only a hand-
ful of paedophiles, and considered it to be mainly a condition of
men, a state which he saw as a ‘platonic love’ (something which
paedophiles commonly assert) stimulated only by little girls. All of
the patients were ‘tainted’ by heredity and developed emotions
towards little girls either early on in their own childhood, or as young
men in their early twenties. He insisted that the men were a danger
to society and should be placed in an insane asylum, and blamed
‘coital impotence and moral decay (senile dementia)’ for their acts.43
Few women were thought to have similar sexual obsessions with
children. Sexologists reported a few cases, but they thought them
unusual. Krafft-Ebing reported on one 29-year-old woman who had
a strong desire for sexual intercourse with one of her five nephews,
the first when he was only five. She could not explain the inclination,
but transferred her desire to the youngest of each of them in turn as
they grew up, and would orgasm at the sight of them. Havelock Ellis
found a similar disorder in another female patient, a 48-year-old
schoolmistress who went out of her way to seek physical contact with
her young charges. She would take two or three of them and ‘lie on
the bed naked with them and make them suck her breasts and press
them to every part of her body’.44 She was caught after other children
peering through the keyhole saw her, and she was placed under the
care of a doctor. Sometimes a patient who had been diagnosed with
318
Eadweard Muybridge, ‘Woman Spanking a Child’, from Animal Locomotion, 1887.
one sexual disorder also had others; one married woman with two
children was a female invert (lesbian) and before marrying had had
sex with a dog. She was also a sadist: after adopting a girl from a
children’s home, she inflicted over 300 wounds on the girl’s breasts,
labia and clitoris and half starved her. According to Ellis, the woman
was curiously ‘pruriently prudish’, which he deemed was ‘often the
case with sadists’. The woman was sent to a hospital for the insane
and afterwards served two years in prison.45
Sexologists gave little consideration as to why it was mainly men
and not women who were thought to be so prone to paedophilia, but
took it as given. The general thrust of the understanding of the sex-
ologists was linked to the ideology of the time; women were thought
to be more passive, less sexual and less aggressive than men and
therefore less likely to commit such crimes. They did, however, give
much thought to the type of man who might become a paedophile.
Krafft-Ebing categorized two different types of sex offenders
against children: men who use children as a substitute for an adult
partner; and paedophiles who have a disorder. When Freud investi-
gated child abuse, he took a different path. He believed that for every
case of hysteria there was a case of childhood incestual abuse behind
it. He later replaced this with his Oedipus theory in which he classed
reports by women of abuse as subconscious fantasies. In other words,
he believed that women reporting childhood rape were suffering
from delusions as a result of a fixation with their fathers. In certain
319
cases, Freudian psychoanalysts did not consider the abuse as a real

problem. Frank Caprio mentioned a case of father–daughter incest
in the 1950s to which he had been alerted when the mother came into
his office for a consultation. She told him that she had caught her hus-
band performing cunnilingus on their eleven-year-old daughter. For
Caprio, this perversion represented for the man ‘a psychological return
to the sex life of his own childhood’. The molested child herself was
given less consideration, the male adult patient being the doctor’s
main concern. About the paedophile, Caprio surmised, ‘as a rule they
masturbate to excess. Not all of them are dangerous.’46 He later took
up the case of a young married man who had been charged with sex-
ually molesting children and, confident of his own ability, testified
in court that the man could be cured by therapy.
So where did the current concept of paedophiles as violent child
abusers come from? During 1960s Britain, there was no mention of
paedophilia in the course of everyday life. Mothers warned their
children not to talk to strangers but no one talked of ‘paedophiles’.
‘Flashers’ or male exhibitionists were known to operate in the local
parks, but they were not generally considered to be rapists. Children
were instructed not to look and to run home as quickly as possible.
The topic on everyone’s lips was the case of Myra Hindley and Ian
Brady who had abducted and murdered several children on the
Saddleworth Moors. The other notorious case was that of eleven-
year-old Mary Bell, who was convicted of murdering two children in
1968.47 As it turned out, Bell herself had been the subject of cruelty
from her sadistic mother and had been sexually abused by various
men who came to the house. This cycle of being abused, and then
abusing others in turn, was for some psychiatrists the answer to
unlocking the mind of the paedophile. While this may have been the
case in some instances, it does not answer the questions about how
child abuse surfaces in those who have not been abused themselves.
Also, not all people who have been abused themselves automatically
go on to become child abusers.
In the 1960s, although there was considerable attention paid to
battered, physically abused or murdered children, the topic of their
sexual molestation was not at the forefront of the discussion. But
from the late 1970s onwards studies attempted to understand and
‘cure’ the paedophile and to understand childhood sexuality.48 Certain
studies have made the case that most children have no innocence to
320
lose, and that most children are already aware of their own socio-
biologically inherited sexuality. William O’Donohue argues that we
need to understand the types of harm sexual acts can do to children;
that children do not have the capacity to consent by virtue of being
children; and that adults have a duty not to harm but to protect
children.49 It has also been suggested that some professionals’
reactions to paedophilia, with their interventionist approach with
children, are more harmful to children than the abuse. Fear is in-
grained in children and any subsequent medical investigations of
their body can be more intrusive and traumatic than the act itself,
adding further stress to the child and leading to anxieties as an adult.
Historically, there has been an innocence ascribed to children
in most Western societies where prevention of any form of sexual
behaviour for young people is the norm. Yet Kinsey gave detailed
and extensive physiological examples of arousal and even orgasm in
infants and prepubescent children. However, the data relating to this
issue was decidedly suspect, as it was taken from a self-admitted
paedophile who had been operating over many years. He gave data of
his sex episodes with children to Kinsey’s researchers, but they
questioned much of the statistical information. Also, some of the
researchers questioned the morality of including data provided by
a paedophile.50
In 1974, paedophiles set up their own organization, the Paedophile
Information Exchange (or Pie) in Britain, ostensibly to campaign
for their rights, as they claimed they were misunderstood. In 1978,
they brought out a pamphlet containing questions and answers,
which provided an insight into how they viewed themselves and
their activities. They asserted that ‘those involved represent no
special threat to society but on the contrary are often a force for
social good.’ Since many people disagreed, they should have per-
haps added an explanation of their reasoning. The authors use the
words ‘sexual love’ to describe the sexual relationships of paedo-
philes with young people, a description claimed by other paedophiles
elsewhere. In answer to the question ‘would most paedophiles like
to be normal?’, they argue that sexuality is natural, harmless and an
integrated part of their personality and they would not want to change,
even if it were possible. Nor do they approve of the use of drugs as
‘treatment’, as it ‘is not desirable to destroy a paedophile’s love for
children’. The authors assert that the child is often ‘a willing partner’
321
and the adult ‘gentle, fond of children and benevolent’.51 On 16 July

2011 the Guardian newspaper reported that detectives found over
3,000 drawings of children being raped at the home of the former
leader of Pie, alongside thousands of pictures and films that were
described as ‘vile and disgusting’. As a result, he was jailed, becom-
ing the first person to be prosecuted under the Coroners and Justice
Act of 2009. This in itself highlights problems in the law, since
‘prohibited images of children’ under the Act includes ‘a moving or
still image (produced by any means)’. Regardless of what we think
of paedophiles, how can a drawing, the making of which has not
involved any illegality, be illegal? If an artist depicts a paedophile rape
scene but no actual abuse has taken place of any child, how can this
be deemed illegal? Also, artists who have been placed in an abusive
relationship may portray the event in their own work – is this then
also illegal?
However, it took the sordid case of the Vatican’s cover-up of mass
paedophilia within its ranks to outrage both those in the Catholic
faith and those on the outside, and bring paedophilia to the centre
of public concern. In 1984, the case of Father Gilbert Gauthe in
Lafayette, Louisiana, led to numerous revelations of similar cases
of abuse all over America. Church officials routinely refused to
believe victims, intimidated them into silence or failed to act upon
complaints – not once, but repeatedly. By 1985, the victims had begun
to take up the matter in civil courts. Action spread throughout the
u.s., Canada, Ireland and the uk. Under pressure, investigations were
eventually commissioned in the u.s. John Jay College of Criminal
Justice and the National Review Board found that dioceses had
reported almost 4,500 clerical perpetrators since 1950 and at least
10,000 victims were involved. The National Review Board report
places blame for the widespread scandal directly on the negligence
of bishops.52
A further flurry of concern about paedophilia hit the newspaper
headlines around the 1980s with reports of paedophile sex rings oper-
ating in Amsterdam. Child murder was now beginning to be more
closely associated with the sexual abuse of children, and the term
‘paedophilia’ was becoming more widespread. The Belgium police
came under attack after a widely publicized case during the 1990s when
Marc Dutroux, formerly an electrician, kidnapped and abused six
girls aged between eight and nineteen years of age, four of whom
322
he killed. He had been known to the police for years before he was
finally arrested in 1996. The police had even searched his house and
heard the screams of two of his victims but did nothing, choosing to
believe the noise came from children playing outside. They later
discovered that he had been let out of prison in 1991 after serving
only three and a half years of a thirteen-year sentence for multiple
rape. Because of the catalogue of ‘mistakes’, the public believed that
there had been a major cover-up and that police were involved in
the paedophile ring. The prison authorities even briefly allowed
Dutroux to escape from prison. He was then nearly released on
human rights grounds as it had taken the police so long to bring a case
against him. He was finally jailed for life in 2004.53 His accomplices,
Martin and Lelièvre, were also jailed for 30 and 25 years respectively,
but no further paedophiles have been exposed in the network. It
was such cases of murder, abduction and violent child abuse that
moulded public perception of paedophiles and shook the legal sys-
tems in Europe and the u.s. into bringing out new laws.
By the 1990s, concern about child abuse was at a historic high
when 45 million viewers tuned their televisions to watch a docu-
mentary about the subject, Scared Silent, which aired on 4 September
1992 in the u.s.54 By 1997, steps were taken by the police to monitor
the movements of convicted sex offenders but the information was
kept from the public and shared only between the police, probation
officers and the local Member of Parliament. Under the British Sex
Offenders Act of 1997, convicted paedophiles were obliged to reg-
ister their names and addresses at their local police stations within
fourteen days of their release. Increasing public reaction against
paedophiles led to campaigns for more openness about their where-
abouts. In the u.s., community notification laws were enacted
throughout the country in the 1990s following the murder of seven-
year-old Megan Kanka; popularly known as Megan’s Law, public
disclosure of the identity of convicted sex offenders was allowed to
the local community in which the paedophile lived. A similar pub-
lic campaign to introduce ‘Sarah’s Law’ was launched in Britain after
the murder of eight-year-old Sarah Payne in 2000. Because of the
prominence and violent public reaction to horrific child murder cases,
all paedophiles have now come to be considered as sex abusers who
might potentially go on to murder children. Treatments have been
applied to paedophiles in attempts to alter their sexual interests.
323
These have ranged from surgical castration (although this is no longer

used) to drugs (effectively chemical castration) and aversion therapy,
and they can be administered without the patient’s consent. Paedo-
philes can be incarcerated for life, particularly if they do not admit
that what they have done is wrong, since an admission is seen as
part of their ‘treatment’ and shows that they are ‘getting better’. More
recently, some paedophiles have declared themselves incurable and
that attempts should not be made to ‘cure’ them. They have claimed
that their feelings are merely another sexual orientation.
Public perception and anger has since concentrated on the more
severe end of the spectrum of paedophilia. Public emotions were
further stirred up in the tabloids in 2000 when News of the World
editor Rebekah Wade (later Brooks) created a controversial ‘nam-
ing and shaming’ campaign attacking convicted paedophiles. She
declared, ‘The fact is, that if you have paedophiles in society that
aren’t monitored they will strike again.’55 Her statements about ‘pro-
tecting children’ encouraged the establishment of a vigilante movement.
In 2000, in Newport, South Wales, a mob, in their ignorant frenzy,
targeted a paediatrician’s house for attack because they had con-
fused the word with ‘paedophile’.56 Public fury was understandable,
though, when the police admitted to ‘losing’ four convicted paedo-
philes. Scotland Yard said that the perpetrators had served their jail
sentences but had gone missing after failing to report to their local
police station under the terms of their release.
The public perception of a paedophile is of a stranger who abducts
young girls (or sometimes, but less often, boys). Yet the idea that the
paedophile is always unknown to the child is misplaced. More com-
monly, the abuser is an adult already known to the child. Research
in the u.s. indicates that 40 per cent of children who are raped are
victims of family members.57 Studies of father and daughter incest
in child abuse cases show common features existed within families
where such abusive relationships took place. Generally, the father
is extremely dominant with a mother resigning from the role of
caring for her daughter. Older daughters are usually the targets. As
a result of childhood abuse, a woman (or man) may develop psycho-
logical problems in later life, often being unable to connect to their
partner. The majority of American rape victims (61 per cent) are raped
before the age of eighteen; furthermore, 29 per cent of all rapes
occurred when the victim was less than eleven years old. Eleven per
324
cent of rape victims are raped by their fathers or stepfathers, and

another 16 per cent are raped by other relatives.58 The perpetrators
involved were fathers, stepfathers and uncles. Even when the wrong-
doing was explained to them, they refused to stop the abuse; they
not only failed to recognize how they had used their power to make
the children submit, but identified their abuse as caring for the
child. Half of those interviewed claimed that the love was mutu-
al.59 Yet public anger over paedophilia has made discussion about
its prevention extremely difficult and debate about children’s own
sexuality is virtually non-existent. Better sex education at all ages
and increased awareness is needed.
Feminists shifted the perspective of child incest to some extent
when they argued that it was not a rare occurrence as previously
thought, but was a common experience. Most victims were girls and
most perpetrators were men. Twenty-nine per cent of incestuous
child abusers were birth fathers and a quarter were stepfathers.60 To
this extent, it has been argued, the acts express masculine norms
of power and control and feminine norms of passivity within a patri-
archy system.
icd-10 defines paedophilia as ‘a sexual preference for children,
boys or girls or both, usually of pre-pubertal or early pubertal age’.
According to the dsM paedophilia is a paraphilia, in this case a form
of sexual arousal or gratification which is extreme or atypical in
which a person has intense and recurrent sexual urges towards and
fantasies about prepubescent children (usually considered to be
thirteen years old or under), and on which feelings they have either
acted or which cause distress or difficulty. The person must be at
least sixteen years old, and five years older than the child in the case
of adolescent paedophiles, for the act to be classified as paedophilia.
However, some paedophiles never act out their fantasies and just
masturbate, so can these people be deemed harmless? The last
point has also been made by several researchers who have remarked
that a so-called ‘contented paedophile’ – an individual who fantasizes
about having sex with a child and masturbates to these fantasies,
but does not commit child sex abuse, and who does not feel sub-
jectively distressed afterward – does not meet the dsM criteria for
a paedophile.
There has also been increasing discussion about the age a young
person is thought able to consent, particularly relating to young
325
Wilhelm von Gloeden, male youth in classical pose, from his Taormina
series, c. 1900.
teenagers. This opens a whole area of debate about erobophiles, those

who are attracted to young men. Groups such as naMbla (the North
American Man/Boy Love Association) argue that such relationships
are mutually consensual and beneficial to both parties, and independ-
ent research has found the same.61
If an adolescent agrees that they have consented and not been
in any way coerced, and that they have enjoyed the experience, can
their older partner be seen as a paedophile, particularly when what
is considered acceptable varies from country to country? What is
326
considered acceptable in Spain, with an age of consent of thirteen,

for example, would result in a prison sentence in Britain, where it is
sixteen.62 Technically, therefore, what is acceptable in one country
is classed as paedophilia and an imprisonable offence in another.
327
Jules Scalbert (1851–1928), The Bathers.
eleven
The Games People Play

There are rules against shitting that way; you should at least have given us
notice; you know damned well that we are prepared to receive shit at any
hour of the day or night.
Marquis de Sade, The 120 Days of Sodom (1785)
O ver the centuries, people in search of erotic experiences have

generated various methods of sex play. These games have had
different origins and often arose from complicated feelings; some
people were influenced by social conditioning in childhood or
adolescence and needed to replicate as adults a sensation they
had felt in the past. Yet others were simply adults on the look out for
new sexual adventures – sometimes straightforward sex was simply
no longer enough.
New ideas were conjured up in the form of openly displaying,
or passively watching, the sexual activities of others; there were
watchers and doers, actors and spectators. The more aggressive forms
of exposure were seen in public exhibitionism. For the more pas-
sive personality types, voyeurism often gave equal pleasure – the
eighteenth-century female dominatrix might play the role of gov-
erness to the pupil; Victorian men and women experimented with
slave and master relationships (although this game did not neces-
sarily follow the path of current sadomasochistic role-play); in the
twentieth century, nurse and patient games developed, or mother
and child games in adult-baby play. People in same-sex relationships
played different games – cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians –
or dressed up as public servicemen or tradesmen such as firemen or
builders. These forms of play might involve ‘extras’ such as copro-
philia and urolagnia, sometimes known colloquially as ‘shit-loving’
or ‘golden showers’. These roles and games also varied throughout
history – but when did they arise, how were they defined and how
they were played out?
329
Playing games, from the Marquis de Sade, More games, from Sade, Juliette (1797).
Juliette (1797).
Exhibitionism
Exhibitionism has taken various forms throughout the ages. According
to Herodotus, the Egyptians who travelled to Bubastis to celebrate
the festival of Artemis exposed themselves to those they passed by.
They came on barges in great numbers and on the way the men
would play flutes and the women sing, clap and clatter castanets.
As they passed by a town on the riverbank, they would bring their
barge close into the shore and the women would ‘shout abuse at
the women of the place, or start dancing, or hitch up their skirts’.1
These activities were an expected part of the procession. However,
there were a variety of reasons and opportunities for showing off,
and not all fitted neatly into patterns.
People have also exposed themselves as a form of insult. One
woman called Mara from sixteenth-century Dubrovnik had gone
to the house of Fiorio Petrovich and condemned him as a sodomite,
calling him a ‘horned goat’ while gesticulating with lewd gestures.
Afterwards, according to Petrovich, ‘to spite me, she lifted her clothes,
330
t h e g a m e s p e o p l e p l ay
A female dancer exposes herself to a satyr. Martin van Maële, La Grande danse
macabre (1907).
showing her private parts’.2 Such displays of intimate body parts

were later to become recognized by twentieth-century anthropolo-
gists as methods of challenging or aggressive behaviour in ‘primitive’
people. As Evans-Pritchard remarked of the Azande women of Central
Africa, ‘unusual action of the female genitalia is considered unlucky.
331
It is injurious to a man if a woman provokingly exposes her vagina

to him, and it is yet more serious if she exposes her anus in the pres-
ence of men.’3 This belief gave women an innate power over men.
Yet this type of exposure was obviously undertaken not only by
tribal people but was also a common form of expression made with
the intention of frightening the onlooker.
Some exhibitionistic acts undertaken in the past do not fit into
a category of serious sexual deviance but were intended to shock
with a laugh. Chaucer’s ‘Miller’s Tale’ in his fourteenth-century
Canterbury Tales told of one man involved in an incident in which
he bared his buttocks:
And so he opened window hastily,

And put his arse out thereat, quietly,
Over the buttocks, showing the whole bum;
And thereto said this clerk, this Absalom,
‘O speak, sweet bird, I know not where thou art.’
This Nicholas just then let fly a fart
As loud as it had been a thunder-clap,
And well-nigh blinded Absalom, poor chap . . .
However, the seventeenth-century libertine was equally capable

of intentionally insulting other people by showing off his buttocks,
as Samuel Pepys was to record. He reported an incident of lewd
exposure in his diary after the infamous Sir Charles Sedley had been
celebrating at the Cock in Bow Street in June 1663, along with a
party of friends that included Lord Buckhurst and Sir Thomas Ogle.
Drunk as lords, they went out on the balcony, and according to one
observer, ‘putting down their breeches they excrementized in the
street: which being done, Sedley stripped himself naked, and with
eloquence preached blasphemy to the people.’4 He was heavily fined
for his actions.
More innocuous acts involved tempting bets from friends who
urged each other on to expose themselves. The Observer newspaper
reported that on the evening of Friday, 5 July 1799, at seven o’clock,
a naked man was arrested at Mansion House, the official residence of
the Mayor of London. From there he was sent to the Poultry Compter,
the small prison run by the Sheriff of London. The prisoner confirmed
that he had accepted a wager of ten guineas (worth about £750 in
332
Thomas Rowlandson (1856–1827), The Congregation.
today’s money) to run naked from Cornhill to Cheapside.5 While these

types of exhibitionism were not taken too seriously (although there
were sometimes small fines involved), laws were introduced to deal
with more obvious intentions to shock, frighten or insult.
The Vagrancy Act of 1824 enabled the prosecution of ‘every
person willingly, openly, lewdly and obscenely exposing his person
with intent to insult any female’.6 It was thereby deemed to be an act
perpetrated by a man towards a woman. Henceforth the perpetra-
tor would be deemed ‘a rogue and a vagabond’ according to the
law. However, men continued to exhibit themselves. On 2 January 1843,
43-year-old George Herridge was indicted ‘for indecently exposing
333
himself’; he pleaded guilty and was jailed for twelve months. However,
when 31-year-old John Daniels was found guilty of the same offence
nine months later on 23 October, he only received only one month
in jail; there is nothing in the records to indicate why there was a
disparity in sentencing. Some years later, on 2 July 1849, 62-year-old
William Joiner was confined for four months for indecent exposure.
Without more in-depth knowledge of the incidents, it is impossible
to understand why some were treated more seriously than others,
but other mitigating circumstances may have been involved. Then
again, sentencing was, and is, notoriously inconsistent from one
court to another.
In any case, given the low sentences passed, the activity was evi-
dently not regarded as being too threatening. Even when the case of
exposure took place in public places, it was often difficult to obtain
a conviction. When, on 5 January 1857, Felix Hue exposed himself
to Elizabeth Williams, it was on a public highway. Nonetheless, he
was found not guilty, so presumably there were no witnesses. Even
when there were witnesses, it seems to have still been problematic
to ensure a conviction. On 27 February 1860, 31-year-old Giuseppe
Pugno was accused of exposing himself to Margaret Stafford in the
presence of William Henry Crocker. The incident had taken place
in a railway carriage used for conveying passengers along the South
Eastern Railway. Crocker’s defence argued that the carriage was not
in a public place and suggested the carriage ‘might then be lying
under some shed, or undergoing some repair in the carriage-house’.
The indictment was squashed on a technicality as ‘although it alleged
the exposure to be in the presence of another person, it did not allege
that it was within the view of that person; who, though present,
might have been blind or sleeping’.7
‘Streaking’ or ‘mooning’ became new terms for old activities.
‘Mooning’ as a popular term originated in the u.s. only around 1968
and was specifically used to apply to the act of publicly displaying
the bare buttocks. It was usually done for fun rather than erotic
arousal. Although the term ‘to streak’ had been used since medieval
times to mean ‘to rush or run around’, it only came to imply naked-
ness from around 1973 onwards; this occurred after a mass nude
run by 533 people took place at the University of Maryland. It seems
to have been a particularly popular pastime at sports grounds – at
cricket, rugby, football, tennis, snooker, golf and even the Olympic
334
Games in 2006. One of the most famous female streakers (mainly

because of the size of her breasts) was Erica Roe, who ran across a
rugby match during an international tournament, showing off her
forty-inch chest. Thousands of people saw the incident as it made
headline news. Exhibitionism and its prohibition or acceptance
therefore is, to a large extent, dependent on time and place.
The Medical Invention of the Twentieth-century

Exhibitionist
The French physician Charles Lasègue first described exhibitionism
in 1877 as the act of receiving gratification by exhibiting sexual organs
to persons of the opposite sex, commonly to children or ‘innocent’
people. Overall, sexologists classed exhibitionism as a perversion and
recognized it as an illness, a psychological disorder. Lasègue thought
these types of acts were performed mainly by men.
Krafft-Ebing defined exhibitionism as acts ‘exclusively those of
men who ostentatiously expose their genitals to persons of the oppo-
site sex . . . without, however, becoming aggressive’. The cases he
described generally involved older men (not youths) who exposed
themselves mainly to young children. Many of those he interviewed
were married and had suffered from some sort of brain deterior-
ation. He therefore concluded – as with most other sexual perversions
– that those who committed such crimes were men of moral or
mental weakness, degenerates or idiots.
Once the law was involved, exhibitionism officially became ‘inde-
cent exposure’. An example of this can be seen in Krafft-Ebing’s Case
210 in Psychopathia Sexualis (1886):
At nine o’clock at night in the spring of 1891, a lady, very much

in great trepidation, went to a policeman in the city park
of X. and stated that a man, his front absolutely naked, had
approached her from the shrubbery, after which she has run
away frightened. The officer went at once to the place indi-
cated and found a man who exposed his naked belly and
genitals. Although the man attempted to escape, he was over-
taken and arrested. He stated that he had been excited by
alcohol and had been at the point of going to a prostitute.8
335
While the ages and excuses of the perpetrators varied, this case was
fairly typical of reported incidents. Many of those caught exposing
themselves claimed to have been urinating, others that they had
forgotten to do up their trousers. Also known as ‘lewdly exposing’,
and later ‘flashing’, exhibitionism was just one of the fixations that
men and women experienced – sometimes compulsively, according
to sexologists.
Various sexologists, including Iwan Bloch, Sigmund Freud and
George Merzbach, interviewed and assessed exhibitionists and
concluded that their behaviour was a weakened form of sadism.9
In other words, the exhibitionist was forcing himself or herself on
to unwilling victims who had no option but to watch. Only when the
exhibitionist’s own behaviour became a problem to himself was it
classed as a psychological disorder.
Certain physical ailments such as epilepsy were connected to
exhibitionism and sexologists believed that its onset usually took
place while a patient was still young (mid-teens or early twenties).
They noticed that the exhibitionist frequently felt decidedly uncom-
fortable with his actions, but was compelled to go through with
them. This was attributed to a feeling of guilt on the part of the
perpetrator. An example can be seen in a case reported by Albert
von Schrenck-Notzing involving a loving husband and father who,
unable to stop himself, exposed himself to women in the street and
suffered terrible guilt thereafter.
Guilt was associated with an emotional feeling that was expressed
by a person when they had committed a moral offence for which
they bore responsibility. The appearance of this emotion came as
a result of a shift from public shame to private guilt.10 Prior to this,
in the medieval period in rural areas, people had been shamed into
conformity, which prevented them from acting in a way that might
be considered as out of the ordinary. In these incidents, there was
not necessarily any guilt involved on the part of the perpetrator,
only shame, and then only after he was found out. As rural commu-
nities broke down and people moved to urban centres, there was less
supervision of public morals from the local neighbourhood. The
Lutheran Reformation also shifted attitudes towards sin, encourag-
ing the development of a more internalized world of personal guilt.
An inner, closer God who made a person responsible for his or her
own sins replaced an omnipotent, retributive God. These sins were
336
no longer so easily absolved by a local priest but elicited strong

inner feelings about moral responsibility for one’s own actions. This
new feeling of inner personal guilt was partly responsible for giving
an added frisson to exhibitionism.
As the licentious eighteenth century gave way to the more
reserved Victorian period, exhibitionism became more prevalent.
Although the whole argument around the great Victorian cover-up
has been questioned, the increase in the middle classes and the
emergence of a more ‘polite’ society meant there was more potential
for shocking people. Evangelicals in particular were ‘consistently anti-
sensual as was humanly possible’, with a restraint placed on revealing
dresses for women, dancing and reading novels. One shocked London
footman remarked on women’s dress, ‘they are nearly naked to the
waist . . . the breasts are quite exposed except a little bit coming up to
hide the nipples’.11 By the twentieth century, the German sociologist
Hans Freyer was reporting entirely different reasons for exhibi-
tionism than the early sexologists had. A 35-year-old barber had
the usual array of ‘tainted’ family members: his father was a drunk
and his mother and sister both suffered from nervousness. As a
child of between seven and eighteen years old, Freyer’s patient had
suffered from convulsions, but he had managed to achieve sexual
intercourse from the age of sixteen. At 21, his behaviour began to
change and he started to display unusual symptoms: he passed a
playground and began to urinate there. When the children noticed
him, he admitted he obtained a sexual thrill, leading to an erection
and ejaculation. From then on, he found it difficult to have sexual
intercourse with women. His exhibitionism was only detected
when he was caught and imprisoned after inviting a young girl to
touch and feel his penis. On physical examination his penis was
found to be smaller than average but he was of sound mental condi-
tion. The diagnosis was that his complex had arisen due to his small
penis size.
Unlike Freyer’s case, other reported cases of exhibitionism found
that the size of genitalia was not an issue. In the 1950s book Sexual
Perversion and the Law, Porter Davis found that the size of the penis
of exhibitionists varied widely – some had very big penises and
some very small. Their display was more likely to be based on feel-
ings of inadequacy. Davis believed that ‘the exhibitionist is usually a
less virile person and less intelligent than the flagellant. His sexual
337
impulse is much weaker and he is often a degenerate.’12 According

to Davis, indecent exposure rarely went further than exhibitionism.
A man did not approach or want to touch the woman to whom he
had exposed himself. His excitement was gained merely from the look
of disgust his actions evoked on the woman’s face.
Explanations of exhibitionism were still relatively new and some-
times contradictory. While some doctors believed that the behav-
iour was a result of a physiological defect, others began to explain
exhibitionism as a result of a psychological problem, increasingly
so with the development of psychoanalysis. The law was less ambig-
uous and tended to recognize it as indecent behaviour. Nonethe-
less, exhibitionism was not taken particularly seriously. In the
1950s, the New York Penal Law outlined its stance on indecent
exposure: ‘A person who willfully and lewdly exposes his person or
the private parts thereof, in any public place, or in any place where
others are present – is guilty of a misdemeanor.’ However, it would
seem that unreported crimes of exhibitionism were far more
widespread than police statistics indicate. When interviewed by
doctors, many victims were found never to have reported the inci-
dent to the police.
In his Variations in Sexual Behavior (1957), Frank Caprio argued
that exhibitionism was one of the most common sexual offences,
yet displayed a misunderstanding of what it was. When he declared
that ‘Exhibitionism was a widespread phenomenon among primitive
people’, he was failing to recognize the urge behind the perversion.
Nakedness or exposing one’s genitalia among ‘primitive’ people
cannot in itself be considered exhibitionism, since the intention is
not to shock but to insult. When tribal people want to exhibit them-
selves, they use different methods and it means different things. They
might flaunt their bare bottoms to another person, but this was
considered an aggressive act, or even witchcraft – their behaviour was
not necessarily to do with genitalia or sex.13
In an equally ill-conceived statement, Caprio asserted, ‘Among
adult groups we find vicarious expressions of exhibitionism in today’s
nudist camps.’14 Again, nudism in the West cannot be seen as exhi-
bitionism, since nudists have no intention to shock or disturb other
people or to elicit attention. Frequently they congregate with like-
minded people – and in an enclosed, private colony rather than in
public. Naturists tend to just want to take a break with a group of
338
people taking part in normal daily activities – pitching tents, playing

volleyball, swimming and so on. These forms of nakedness therefore
would not generally be considered as sexually perverted or as para-
philias, although they might well be considered deviances in law.
However, certain forms of flaunting one’s naked body, such as bur-
lesque, strip shows (which Caprio also mentions), and lap and pole
dancing, are legally acceptable as ‘entertainment’ but nonetheless
can be seen as exhibitionism, but only in as much as any other form
of public dancing is. This shows just how confusing the Western
concept of exhibitionism is.
By the mid-twentieth century, the psychological profile of the
male exhibitionist had been fleshed out. He was thought to be a
man who feels inferior, is insecure and needs attention; he was driv-
en to exhibitionism as a means of proving himself a man by provoking
a reaction. Because this insecurity was deeply ingrained, the prospect
of legal penalties did not deter him from committing the illegal act
again and again. In contrast to Krafft-Ebing, who had found his
patients to be men of moral or mental weakness, in the 1950s, Caprio
found his patients to be overly moralistic and often well-educated.
Nonetheless, the old sexologists’ idea that these people possessed
hereditary problems continued to linger. Discussing one nineteen-
year-old who had displayed his genitals since the age of fourteen,
Caprio noted that the family history was ‘heavily tainted’, since both
his parents had been neurotic. His father was religious and had
attempted suicide. One uncle was in a lunatic asylum; another had
been dismissed from his job as a teacher for exposing himself.
Caprio thought the reason for his young patient’s trauma was that
his mother had showered in the same bathroom while her son was
cleaning his teeth; we would hardly consider this traumatic now.
In another case, Caprio commended one wife who chose to stand by
her husband after he confessed the full story to her, but only after he
had been caught exposing himself while driving around in his car.
But, according to Caprio, ‘Many wives become quite hysterical when
they learn their husbands have been arrested for indecent exposure
and immediately run to an attorney for a divorce.’15
Frotterism was seen as a sort of progression of exhibitionism,
described as a man’s irresistible urge to rub his penis against a women’s
body, the target usually being her buttocks. The behaviour was usu-
ally carried out in crowds in a public place, say on a crowded train.
339
One man was caught at a bus station in the act of rubbing his penis
on a woman’s bottom. He repented deeply, but admitted that it was
the woman’s noticeable posterior that made it irresistible. Although
he admitted to becoming ‘confused’, he was apprehended and sent
to an asylum. But prejudices against women reigned in the 1950s
and ’60s, with men blaming women for not taking enough care of
themselves and wearing provocative clothing. One author, in a book
on sexual deviation published in 1964, suggested that such sexual
advances, ‘though distasteful to many women, are not always repelled’
– all men, it would seem, are likely to have felt the urge.16 He even
blamed women who walked alone over heaths and commons for
seeking out exhibitionists, grumbling, ‘the woman who complains
that this experience often happens to her may generally be justly
accused of seeking it out’.17
Other erroneous statements were made about exhibitionism,
too. One writer discussing sexual perversion and the law claimed,
‘True exhibitionism never involves any actual sexual connection
such as rape.’18 More recently this has proved not to be the case at all.
In a series of studies undertaken by psychologists and behavioural
scientists, it has been found that extreme sex crimes such as rape have
often been preceded by the lesser crime of indecent exposure. In
1998, Freund and Seto undertook a study based on a sample of
127 rapists. Twenty-two per cent admitted voyeurism, with the same
number admitting exhibitionism. Whether this shows an escalation
from exhibitionism to rape, or that exhibitionism is just another
sign of sexual deviance, is unclear. However, a further study under-
taken by Rabinowitz-Greenberg and his colleagues provided a clearer
picture when they assessed 221 exhibitionists between 1983 and 1996.
They compared recidivists and non-recidivists in order to examine
the probability of escalation in the offence chain, and to clarify the
differences between hands-on and hands-off sexual offenders. The
results indicated that indecent exposure was often a recurring crime,
with the same offenders brought before the court again and again.
Of the 41 sexual recidivists, fourteen went on to commit more severe
hands-on sexual crimes (sexual assault). In a follow-up on the same
offenders (thirteen were ‘lost’) in 2006, the investigators found that
‘It is apparent that approximately 39 percent of our sample went on
to commit other offenses, with approximately 31 percent committing
a sexual or violent offense’, which points to escalating patterns of
340
offending behavior from non-contact sexual offending towards more

serious sexual assaults.19
If in the past the motivation behind exhibitionism was the
desire of men to reveal their penises to passing female onlookers,
what might sexologists make of it today? In Sweden in 2006, as
many women as men reported having exposed their genitals to total
strangers and to have become sexually aroused by it. Again, the
people subjected to these displays were ususally children and ado-
lescents.20 The question as to why this happens in a Scandinavian
country which generally takes a much more liberal attitude to
nakedness shakes the idea that more exposure and exhibitionism
might take place in countries where bodies are less on show. If bare
flesh, including genitalia, is available for viewing, why is there a
need for exhibitionism – indeed, what is the difference? Again, the
answer must be in the shock value, the reaction of the victim and the
lack of consent from the innocent party.
Generally, though, when women display their genitals in public,
most men are less upset than women are when men expose their inti-
mate body parts to them. There is an apparent disparity between
the sexes about how offensive exposing parts of the body can be (and
which body parts). The contrived exposure of flesh in the striptease
act illuminates the difference between men and women’s reactions.
When men go to a strip club, or to watch pole dancing, they go to
experience sexual pleasure and to become excited by watching
women take off their clothes or dance naked. Women, on the other
hand, go to see male strippers such as the Chippendales for a bit of
fun, usually along with a gaggle of girlfriends. For hen parties or
all-female nights out, these strip clubs are arguably a spectacle of
mirth rather than taken as any sort of serious eroticism. Nowadays
we see a huge amount of exposure of the body, including genitals,
in the theatre, on television, in popular magazines and at the cinema
– does this make us all voyeurs?
The exposure (and the watching) of bodies also seems to be
gender-biased in the media. Arguments currently circulate about
the sexualization of our media and culture and its ‘pornification’.
But generally it is women rather than men who have become in-
creasingly sexualized in popular culture.21 And if we examine the
equivalent in the past – for example, erotic prints and drawings – they
consisted of mainly sexualized women rather than men, so perhaps
341
things have not changed so much after all. This concentration on

showing female genitalia has extended itself to television, which
shows vaginas and labia, though erect penises are still taboo. This is
generally the case throughout the media in most Western countries,
including America and Britain. Those concerned about censoring the
over-virile member use as their guideline the ‘Mull of Kintyre’ rule,
a crude benchmark which says that you cannot display a penis at
any greater angle of erection than that of the Mull of Kintyre against
the coastline of Scotland. But why should an erect penis so offend,
particularly when most people watching it have already seen one?
Post-television watershed, what does it matter?
The dividing line between naturism or nakedness and exhibition-
ism therefore depends to a large extent on the attitudes of the people
around that naked person and where the act takes place. Certain
beaches in parts of Europe have become known over the last few
decades for their leniency towards nakedness, and generally there
is a tendency to accept nakedness where there is an established
tradition. However, this all depends on the morality of the people
on the beach and they could well be within their legal rights to
condemn someone for exhibitionism in an area where everyone
else is clothed. The naked person on a naturist beach would not be
welcomed (or ignored) so easily in a town supermarket. As a result
of this confusion, and the ever more liberal attitudes to nakedness
in countries in the West, cases of nakedness have proved problem-
atic for the police. Nudism lacks a shock element – the nudist does
not have any intention to shock, and the person observing the nudist
is not shocked either. So where then does the law stand?
The Case of the Naked Man

When Stephen Gough decided he wanted to walk naked from Land’s
End to John O’Groats in 2003, the police were at first baffled about
what to do with him. Previously, he had worked as a lorry driver and
had been involved in environmental groups and communal living.
After moving to Vancouver for a year with his partner and children,
he had an ephinany. He revealed, ‘I realised that at a fundamental
level I’m good, we’re all good, and you can trust that one part of your-
self.’ He realized if he was good, his body was good – ‘the human
body isn’t offensive’ he says. ‘If that’s what we’re saying, as human
342
beings, then it’s not rational.’22 On his return to his home town of
Eastleigh, he asked the police if it was legal to walk the streets naked,
but they were unable to give him a definite answer. He was to test the
theory out for himself.
He set out on his quest to walk the length of Britain wearing
only hiking boots and a rucksack. On his first venture, he kept off
main roads and slept in fields and barns, and attracted little atten-
tion. However, on his second attempt, which was undertaken with
his then girlfriend Melanie Roberts in 2005, media attention on
him had increased significantly, and so had the interest of his fol-
lowers and the police. At every stop he was arrested, imprisoned,
fined, told to put his clothes back on and released. Bemused officers
would turf him out of the station on the sly by the back door. On
release, he would undress and carry on with his trek. Frequently
police took him to the border of the next jurisdiction so they would
not have to deal with him. He was usually taken into custody for
Breach of the Peace, for ‘conduct which does, or could, cause the
public to be placed in a state of fear, alarm or annoyance’. Yet the
police found it difficult to rustle up witnesses willing to testify that
Gough’s nakedness had that effect on them.
Scottish sheriffs twice found in Gough’s favour and declared
that no crime had taken place – either appearing naked in public,
or in court (he had decided to defend himself so he could not be
refused permission to enter court naked). Eventually, after further
arrests, he refused to put his clothes on at all, so was not let out of
prison. Because he refused to wear clothes in prison, he was not
allowed to move freely about but was only let out of his cell for 30
minutes a day in order to undertake daily chores – post letters,
empty his rubbish and have a shower. While such a stance for one’s
principals can be admired, the law does not take a similar view and
continues to see naked bodies as potentially threatening to society.
In March 2012, Gough was still in Her Majesty’s Prison in Perth,
Scotland, serving 657 days for Breach of the Peace and contempt
of court. This was his seventeenth conviction in ten years and effec-
tively he had been in custody for six years. He says he will only be
released when he is allowed to walk home naked.
343
Voyeurism
Sexologists described voyeurism as the opposite of exhibitionism:
watching people in the desire to glimpse their sexual organs or to see
them having sex. Voyeurs often benefit from watching people who
are unaware that they are being watched, the very secrecy providing
an added frisson. In ancient Roman friezes and paintings, depictions
of men and women having sex often included someone watching,
standing behind a door or peering through a window; in paintings
from Campania, someone else, usually a servant, is nearly always
around in the pictures depicting couples having sex. The Roman poet
Martial appreciated voyeurism when he advised one woman, ‘Always
with doors wide open and unguarded, Lesbia, you receive your lovers;
you do not hide your vices. The beholder gives you more pleasure than
the lover.’23
Peering through keyholes and gaps in walls seems to have be a
pastime with a long history, if eighteenth-century bestiality and
lesbianism trial reports are anything to go by. Many an upright citi-
zen gave witness to the debauched behaviour of their neighbours
after secretly peering through holes in their walls into adjacent
homes. Richer families shared their homes with a bevy of servants
who might sweep in at any time without a moment’s notice. Domestic
servants were particularly well versed as witnesses at trials because
of their close proximity to the rest of the household. Servants sleep-
ing in overhead garrets were often party to the sexual activities of
the inner sanctum of the boudoir of their mistresses. No doubt this
created a sense of danger; the possibility of being caught in a clan-
destine relationship merely heightened the excitement.
Watching sex was also used as a method of instruction for young
people, who were encouraged to witness couples having intercourse.
John Cleland was worldly enough to have known about the regime
of brothels when he wrote Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748).
He shows how the fictional heroine Fanny Hill began her sexual
experience as a voyeur, watching through a hole in the wall while a
couple had sex in the next-door room at the brothel where she was
living. John Cannon (1684–1743) showed that this was not only a
fiction. At sixteen, he drilled holes in a privy wall so he could mastur-
bate while viewing the genitals of a maidservant living in the house
next door. Similarly, a bunch of eighteenth-century libertines from
344
A man in the background watches a woman as a couple have sex through a glory
hole. Illustration by Paul Gavarni in The Places of Pleasure, c. 1840.
Norwich planned their voyeuristic activities after they had drilled holes
in their guests’ bedrooms in order to watch them. They also peered
through keyholes to watch the sexual activities of others.24
During the twentieth century, voyeurs were sent to psychiatrists
for assessment and treatment,25 but most doctors seemed to consider
345
them harmless (if excessive masturbators). As with exhibitionism,

women were even blamed for men’s problems. One contemporary
commentator of the 1960s exclaimed: ‘Some men provoke complaints
from women; but some women invite such attentions by dressing and
undressing with needless publicity.’26 During the 1950s and ’60s,
voyeurs were thought of as people who hung about parks, beaches and
swimming pools hoping to catch a couple having sex or obtain a
glimpse of genitalia. Others, known as Peeping Toms, peered through
windows under cover of night, lurking in gardens. The term ‘Peeping
Tom’ comes from the legend of Lady Godiva, when in 1044 Leofric,
Earl of Mercia and Lord of Coventry, imposed excessive taxes on
his tenants which his wife, sympathetic to the townspeople, asked him
to remove. He agreed to do so only if she would ride naked through
the town. Lady Godiva did so, but all the townspeople averted their
gaze, except for Tom the tailor, who peeped though his window and
was struck blind as a consequence.27
In the twenty-first century, voyeurism is no longer necessarily
conducted outside the home but can be quietly indulged in while
sitting at a computer. In the comfort of an easy chair, it is possible
to watch adults copulating, overhear schoolgirls chatting with each
other about sex, watch women undress, see men urinate or all
manner of acts which involve a state of undress – none of it illegal.
Housewives have set up webcams to expose themselves and get
paid for their services by the minute. Home videos now compete with
the higher end of the porn market: teenage girls masturbating, single
women having sex with their boyfriends, suburban married couples
sharing partners with their neighbours – all are easily accessible to
view online. The concept of voyeurism has therefore been eroded to
a large extent, although there are still those who seek their pleasures
in a more 3d form. Striptease acts, pole dancing and naked bars all
offer full frontal viewing for the price of a couple of pints. The accept-
ability of voyeurism now comes down to a matter of consent.
One of the most recent forms of displayer/spectator sport can
be seen in a more equitable form of exhibitionism–voyeurism. Called
‘dogging’, this activity takes place in parked cars in public or semi-
public places. It seems to have started in the uk in the 1990s when
people began to visit a particular area such as a car park or lay-by in
order to have sex in the car, but left on their lights so that other
people could watch. This also indicated to other doggers that they
346
The Devil
copulates with
sleeping women
while other devils
watch, by Achille
Devéria, c. 1835.
were part of the scene. The phenomenon has spread all over the West
and several websites have sprung up to organize meetings between
strangers to have sex in public places.
Strangely, non-consensual voyeurism did not become a crimi-
nal offence in the uk until 1 May 2004, and in Canada not until 2005.
These laws also cover the offence of secret filming. In the u.s., the Video
Voyeurism Prevention Act of 2004 amended the federal criminal
code to provide that whoever knowingly videotapes, photographs,
films, records by any means or broadcasts an image of a private area
of an individual, without that individual’s consent, shall be fined
or imprisoned for not more than one year, or both. Increasingly the
laws have had to be amended and updated to take into account new
ways of becoming voyeuristic. Meanwhile, exhibitionists and voyeurs
were to introduce new games to their sex play.
347
Coprophilia and Urolagnia

Coprophilia (or coprolagnia) and urolagnia are among the ‘extras’
that are involved in watching and displaying. Once again Sade tops
the list in the exploration of perversions, describing coprophilic
activities in Justine, Juliette and The 120 Days of Sodom. He was per-
haps the first to mention rimming (licking of the rim of the anus) in
Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795): one character, Dolamance, says,
‘I am going to glide over this pretty little arsehole with my tongue.’28
Sade’s coprophilia has been seen as the ultimate expression of a
sadistic superego, which represents an inversion of moral values,
‘his ultimate challenge to the social order and to the authority of
texts and tradition’.29 Although Sade was said to have personally
indulged in coprophilia, other authors were merely enthralled with
it in their literature.
Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver’s Travels and Dean of St
Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, has had his writings on faecal matter
dissected. Some critics have suggested that his descriptions of
women defecting and urinating not only show Swift’s obsession
with those bodily excrements, but delineates his misogynism. An
example can be seen in his poem ‘The Lady’s Dressing Room’ (1732),
in which Swift writes, ‘Celia, Celia, Celia shits’, as he imagines the
woman he admires defecating. He sets her in her toilet scene in order
to lower her status in his own mind and in the reader’s imagination
– he deflates the idealization of woman by her own bodily functions.
In ‘Strephon and Chloe’ he similarly shows women in a poor light. He
describes the misadventures of a wedding night, in which the bride’s
reticence towards sex results from a need for urination rather than
any maidenly innocence, as is first assumed by her lover. Critics have
suggested that the sound of ‘drippings and droppings’ in Gulliver’s
Travels may have originated from the overly intense preoccupation
with his toilet functions as a child, which then infiltrated his ideas.
But these analyses relied heavily on Freud’s ideas on the perverse.
Freud believed that obsession with faeces and urine stemmed from
childhood events, a fixation taken into adulthood called ‘psychosex-
ual infantilism’. Other critics have suggested that Swift’s misogyny
possibly resulted from a rejection of marriage in 1696 by a woman
he called ‘Varina’, who was thought to be Jane Waring, a respectable
local girl who had inherited a small fortune. Swift wrote to her,
348
John Collier, Lady Godiva, c. 1897.
‘Surely Varina, you have but a very mean opinion of the joys that
accompany a true honourable unlimited love?’30
By the twentieth century, the psychiatrist Albert Moll was out-
lining his patients’ cases of coprophilia; one youth hid in closets in
order to catch young girls defecating, this desire having been with
him since childhood. Another patient of Moll’s described his desire
in more detail, ‘No-one can imagine what demonical joy I am pos-
sessed with at the thought of a beautiful naked boy whose abdomen
is filled as the result of long abstinence from stool. To observe defe-
cation would still further increase this pathological enjoyment.’ He
had the idea that he would feed the boy potable and coarse spread,
which delayed defecation, and would thereby derive greater excite-
ment when at last he watched it emerging from the boy’s anus.
The association between faeces fixation and olfactory enjoy-
ment was first noticed by Wilhelm Fliess (1858–1928), a specialist in
otolaryngology, or enT (ear, nose and throat), who associated many
disorders to the nose. Fliess had developed a theory connecting reflex
nasal neuroses to various pathological disorders, an idea which
influenced Freud. In Freud’s view, smell was most closely linked
with faeces and with the ‘anal phase’ of psychological development.
A few decades later, in the 1950s, Caprio applied the same theory
349
when he analysed a patient who had become fixated on faeces; as a

ten-month-old child, he would smear his legs and thighs with faecal
matter and expose his buttocks through the window. By the time
he was between the ages of six and eight, he had developed a fixa-
tion with buttocks, while playing with little girls. It was then that he
developed his olfactory fetishes, first picking up and sniffing his
sister’s underwear while masturbating, then graduating to sticking
pencils up his anus and sniffing them. He admitted to becoming
sexually aroused when he saw the buttocks of a naked woman. Caprio
perversely labelled this behaviour ‘masked homosexuality’, though
he does not give an explanation as to why homosexuality had any-
thing to do with the case.31 Sexologists were obviously still having
some problems with their categorizing and labelling, even at this
late stage.
More recently, coprophagia, or the eating of faeces, has been
celebrated in an act called the ‘Hot Lunch’, where one person defe-
cates into the mouth of another. There are variations on this activity:
one – devised as a result of the invention of cling film – entails a
person defecating on to cling film which is stretched over some-
one’s open mouth. Then, on masturbating to ejaculation, he bursts
through the cling film, giving the recipient a mouthful of faeces
and sperm. Such coprophilic activities are no longer always regarded
as a sexual perversion but are seen as an experience shared by gays
and straights in sadomasochistic behaviour. Faecal-based activi-
ties may be taken up in adulthood as part of a preferred lifestyle
choice rather than a result of strange childhood experiences: one
study informs us that the ‘participants were socially well-adjusted
and that sadomasochistic behavior was mainly a facilitative aspect
of their sexual lives, most participants being flexible in both sex-
ual activities and sadomasochistic role-taking’.32 Coprophilia is no
longer necessarily always considered a perversion, but an alternative
sexual predilection.
Others have shown an inclination for urolagnia (the love of urine),
either through watching someone urinate or being urinated on.
This activity is now sometimes referred to as a ‘golden shower’ or
‘water sports’. This sort of attraction is evidently nothing new. In
My Secret Life, supposedly written by a ‘Victorian gentleman’ and
privately printed in 1895, the narrator, ‘Walter’, tells of his delight in
watching women urinate. He combined his fetishism with voyeurism,
350
drilling holes in the walls of hotels in order to watch, but frequently

holes were already there, indicating that others had taken up the
pastime before him. Although there were ‘holes in doors as big as
small peas’, the women seemed oblivious to them.33 There was
therefore at least an understanding of such sexual pleasures in the
nineteenth century.
Yet Krafft-Ebing said he had never known anyone who liked
this activity. He had been unaware of the fact that his fellow sexol-
ogist Havelock Ellis was an urolagnist, although most of Ellis’s
women friends seem to have known about it. His companion in later
life, Françoise Lafitte, called Ellis’s urolagnia a ‘harmless anomaly’,
defending it against objectors. Lafitte became his ‘Naiad’ (water
nymph) and they both enjoyed the water play. She told a friend
that Ellis liked to have her urinate as they walked down the street in
the rain, and he once persuaded her to do it in a bustling crowd in
Oxford Circus.34 Unsurprisingly, therefore, Ellis was much more ver-
bose on the subject in his writings. In Analysis of the Sexual Impulse
he explained the special and intimate connection of sexual feelings
and the energy of the bladder; ‘in men . . . distention of the bladder
favours tumescence by producing venous congestion . . . in women
. . . a full bladder increases sexual excitement and pleasure.’35 Ellis
referred to this preference as ‘undinism’ and connected his uro-
lagnia to an incident in his youth. At the age of twelve his mother
took him to a zoological gardens and while walking down a soli-
tary path he heard ‘a very audible stream falling to the ground’.
His mother had urinated on the ground and he instinctively turned
round to see it. He admitted that many of his happiest moments
were associated with being close to women when they urinated. In
his Studies, he explored how a man might manage to urinate while
inside a woman, bringing them both immense pleasure. He devoted
over 100 pages to the subject of urolagnia.36 In his book Fountain of
Life, he eulogized urine when he wrote about the woman H.D. (prob-
ably the poet Hilda Doolittle), as he watched as ‘a large stream gushed
afar in the glistering liquid arch, endlessly it seemed to my wonder-
ing eyes, as I contemplated with enthralled gaze this prototypical
statue of the Fountain of Life.’37
Usually there has been a distinction in sexologists’ writings
between being urinated on and drinking a woman’s urine. Ellis’s own
experiments with urine no doubt led him to a better understanding
351
A case of coprophilia, from Marquis de Sade, Juliette (1797).
The artist as voyeur on a defecating man: Bernard Picart, The Perfumer,
16th century.
The Piss-pot, 17th century.

Woman urinates in pot. Attributed to Peter Fendi, The Sovereign’s Entrance,

c. 1835.
of his patients. He commented on one patient, a healthy young

man who connected sexual excitement with ingesting urine. The
patient was diagnosed as a neurotic who had masturbated until he
was sixteen. By the time he was 30, he had graduated to drinking
women’s warm urine. If a woman left his presence to urinate, he
354
felt compelled to follow her and would become greatly excited and
ejaculate. He was oblivious to the taste; his fascination, according
to Ellis, was based around erotic symbolism. For Ellis, the act took
place when ‘the lover’s attention is diverted from the central focus
of sexual attraction to some object or process which is on the periph-
ery of that focus, or is even outside it altogether’. In other works it
diverts the person away from its true course of ‘sexual conjuga-
tion’.38 This is revealing in that it shows that this was a time when
heterosexual vaginal penetrative sex was seen as the only normal
type of ‘real’ sex – even for the more enlightened sexologist. Anything
other than this was classified merely as a ‘diversion’. Yet drinking
urine was not always necessarily connected to any sexual predilection.
The practice of amardi, or ingesting one’s own urine, has been a form
of therapy for centuries, well known to Yogis. German doctor Johann
Heinrich Zedler listed the many properties of urine: for example,
‘inflammation can be helped by gargling with urine to which a bit
of saffron had been added.’ In the case of Ellis’s patient, though,
drinking women’s urine seems to have been undertaken as a sexual
obsession rather than for any health reason.
Although most of the cases of both coprophilia and urolagnia
involved male subjects, some women indulged in a passion for fae-
ces and urine. One of Albert Moll’s cases was an extremely intelligent
lesbian ‘with various masculine tastes’ and a feminine build. Although
she had lived exclusively with one woman, finding her sexual satis-
faction through cunnilingus, later her tastes developed to include
coprophilia and urolagnia, as well as being bitten and whipped.39
Coprophilia and urolagnia also occurred in paraphilic infantil-
ism, otherwise known as baby role-play or ‘adult baby syndrome’, and
still continues today. This involves the participant dressing up and
acting like a baby, usually donning giant nappies and sucking on
large dummies. Lacy bonnets or romper suits are sometimes worn.
The role-player may defecate or urinate into outsized nappies, there-
by incorporating ‘shits and showers’ into fetish baby play. Adult babies
crawl about on the floor and sometimes large cribs are involved to
cater for their fantasies, which may also involve an adult or ‘parent’
role, played by another willing partner, who may bathe, dress, feed,
scold or nurture the ‘baby’. Paraphilic infantilism has been seen as
reflecting the participant’s underlying need to surrender adult respon-
sibilities and be cared for for a short period of time, and are often
355
seen as a welcome respite for men in high-powered jobs. Renowned

brothel keeper Cynthia Payne reports that she threw ‘specialized
parties’ at 32 Ambleside Avenue in Streatham, London, where judges,
barristers and top professional men were among her best ‘baby’
clients.40 The first public event for adult babies was celebrated at a
‘Baby Week’ occurring in San Francisco in the early 1990s. This sug-
gests that it is a fairly new sort of sexual role-play. The dsM classes
it as sadomasochistic, but the fetish does not necessarily take that
path (although it can). Little is known about it in history but its very
association with nappies and dummies indicates that it is a twentieth-
century phenomenon. So far, no mentions of this activity have come
to light further back in historical records.
Both coprophilia and urolagnia were, and still are, well-known
in pornography. Offerings of ‘golden showers’ or ‘water sports’ are
advertised on calling cards left by prostitutes in public telephone
boxes. This method of advertising services has declined with the
increase in mobile phone use and the corresponding dwindling
numbers of telephone boxes. Now it is more common to meet like-
minded people on the Internet.
The Flagellant and the Supplicant

Spanking or flogging has its own history, with all manner of weapons
incorporated into its application – cat-o’-nine-tails, nettles, birches,
riding crops, leather whips and switches among them. They have been
applied to backs, buttocks, shoulders and loins in equal measure.
Flogging has been used as a medicinal cure, as a penance for one’s
sins and as a punishment for a variety of crimes used everywhere from
the nursery to boarding schools, the British Navy and European
prisons. However, it was also used as a means of sexual gratifica-
tion, with the scenarios involved often connected to religion, childhood
beatings or some form of sadomasochistic fantasy. One of the ear-
liest depictions can be seen in an erotic painting found in an Etruscan
tomb, which shows a man caning a woman while he copulates with
her from behind and she fellates another man. Another group to
the right of the scene depicts a naked man and youth wielding a
whip over a woman. At times of fertility festivals such the Lupercalia,
young men chased women, whipping those who wanted to conceive.41
Although whipping may be classed as part of the perversity of s&M
356
role-play, in the past it could be used with the aim of increasing

fertility or by religious fanatics as a form of self-mortification.
From medieval times, flagellation was used on a regular basis
as a penance for sins. Abbott Peter Damian seems to have inspired
his fellow brothers in self-mortification during the eleventh cen-
tury – so much so that he eventually had to intervene to prevent
them from harming themselves. He was particularly concerned
about sodomitical leanings within his abbey but seems not to have
A man watches excitedly as a woman urinates. From Gathering

Mushrooms, 1930s.
357
recognized that the punishment itself might have the opposite effect
to the one he intended and elicit erotic feelings. Other religious
leaders, such as St Francis of Sales, displayed equal fervour for the
whip. In 1604, he wrote to advise his friend Madame de Chantal, a
member of the French aristocracy,
As a third remedy, it would be good once in a while to take

fifty or sixty strokes of the discipline, or only thirty, depend-
ing on what you can take. It’s surprising how effective this
measure has been for someone I know. Undoubtedly that’s
because the physical sensation distracts from interior suffer-
ing and calls for the the mercy of God.42
Some penitents, however, preferred more public admonishment.

In Spain and Portugal it was common for a procession of flagellants
to walk through the streets wearing high sugar-loaf head coverings,
flagellating themselves as they went. Countess Marie Catherine
D’Aulnoy described them during her trip to Madrid in 1685: ‘They
make terrible wounds on their shoulders, from which the blood
flows in streams.’43 Women gazed on in admiration and it was con-
sidered a blessing if the blood flew from the flagellants and landed
on a lady’s clothes.
Flogging was advocated as a medicinal cure for impotence by
the sixteenth-century German physician Johann Heinrich Meibom
(1590–1655). In his book A Treatise of the Use of Flogging in Venereal
Affairs, first published in Latin in 1629, he explained how the stimu-
lation of the circulation of blood helped no end in encouraging the
penis to engorge. As an example, he related the story of fifteenth-
century Count Pico della Mirandola, who hardened his whip in
vinegar to make it all the more tormenting. The Count declared
that a man has cause for complaint if a woman is ‘too lenient with
him, and is not fully satisfied of his desire unless the bloods flows’.44
By the eighteenth century, the fantasies of the libertine gentleman
were being accommodated in specialized brothels to cater for the
increase in demand for flagellation. One contented customer wrote
commending the actions of the particular flagellants offering their
services – Mrs Brown, whom he found to have ‘a pretty strong arm’,
Mrs Chalmers, who had ‘a very experienced hand’ and Mrs Wilson
of Marylebone, who ‘was no chicken at all’.45
358
Flagellation scene from Marquis de Sade, Juliette (1797).
Flagellation in an illustration from an 18th-century English edition of the works

of Sade.
With such strong connections forged between sex and flagel-

lation, it was unsurprising that pornography harnessed it as a theme.
Marquis de Sade (as with all subjects considered perverse) was the
master of descriptive flagellation in his sadistic novels. In Juliette, a
friend of the eponymous heroine admits her craving for flagella-
tion and points to its benefits, ‘nobody doubts nowadays but that
passive flagellation is of prime efficacy: it is a matchless restorative,
supplying new vitality to the frame wearied by overindulgence.’
Pornographic descriptions grew more torrid and fantasies ran to
the schoolroom as well as to incest with sisters, aunts, uncles and
mothers. The Romance of Lust (c. 1873), spoken of earlier in connec-
tion with incest, also indulged in flagellation fantasies. The narrator
describes how, as a boy, he had been the recipient of many a good
flogging from his governess:
360
I tossed and pushed myself about on her knees in a state

of perfect frenzy as the blows continued to be showered
down upon my poor bottom. At last the rod was worn to a
stump, and I was pushed off her knees. As I rose before her,
with my cheeks streaming with tears, my shirt was jutting
out considerably in front in an unmistakable and most
prominent manner, and my prick was at the same time throb-
bing beneath it with convulsive jerks, which I could by no
means restrain.46
Such scenes became the staple of Victorian erotica.

Victorian prime minister William Gladstone frequently self-
flagellated by way of penance. A godly man, he went out to try to
‘save’ prostitutes on the streets but his obsession was such that he
thought he needed some correction. He wore a hair shirt while about
his business and whipped himself when he came home as a penance
for any lewd thoughts he may have had. Meanwhile, some Victorian
poets found flagellation enjoyable and expressed their feelings in
verse. In his youth, Algernon Swinburne had been thrown out of
Eton for too visibly enjoying his punishments and captured the
scenarios of the whipping of small boys at Eton in his poem ‘The
Flogging Block’. He revelled in Sade and read passages from Justine
aloud to his friends. In 1866, in his poem ‘Dolores’, he wrote about
‘Our Lady of Pain’, which portrayed a dominatrix.
Could you hurt me, sweet lips, though I hurt you?

Men touch them, and change in a trice
The lilies and languors of virtue
For the raptures and roses of vice;
Those lie where thy foot on the floor is,
These crown and caress thee and chain,
O splendid and sterile Dolores,
Our Lady of Pain.
He wrote the poem in reaction to the marriage of his cousin, Mary

Gordon, with whom he was madly in love. Gordon shared the same
sadomasochistic tastes as Swinburne and had been happy to provide
him with a sound whipping – an indulgence that only seems to have
given him a greater taste for the experience.
361
Hannah Cullwick dressed as a slave. A 19th-century birching.
During the nineteenth century, sexologists explored flagellation

as a perversion, grouping it under the category of sadomasochism.
One woman confessed to Krafft-Ebing that when she was only five
she had been placed over the knee of her father’s friend, who play-
fully pretended to whip her. From then on, she had fantasies about
being a slave to the man she loved: ‘I revel in the idea of being
whipped by him, and imagine different scenes in which he beats me.’
Nowadays, such slave-and-master relationships tend to involve
sadomasochistic role-play, but in the past they were a stranger affair.
One such was that of Arthur Munby and Hannah Cullwick. Munby
was an upper-middle-class educated man, a barrister who typified
the respectable Victorian gentleman. However, there was another
side to him. In his spare time, he loved nothing more than to stroll
around working-class areas to meet and to interview shop girls,
rag-pickers, milliners, maids and prostitutes – all were of interest
to him. He particularly liked those who undertook physical labour
that made them dirty – faces, clothes and limbs covered in coal
suited him just fine. Meanwhile, Cullwick was looking for a man
to tell her what to do. Daughter of a Shropshire saddler, she took
362
up menial jobs as a scullery maid. While employed in one large

house in 1853, the cook urged her to see a play of Byron’s called
Sardanapalus, about a king who falls in love with his slave. This was
to have a great influence on Cullwick and for ever after she took a
delight in self-abasement. After she bumped into Munby on the
street on her twenty-first birthday, they quickly became lovers. She
wrote to him, ‘I kissed you first when yo’ axed me. It was to see what
you mouth was like.’ They quickly fell into their self-appointed roles
in which she called him ‘Massa’, her interpretation of how a Negro
slave would address his master. She would wash his feet ‘for being
useful and for showing humility and that I never wanted to be set
up’. She did not want to be ‘set up’ as his mistress; her humility was
her gift to him. Munby’s reaction was to have her black up, naked but
for a slave collar, and take photos of her. Both of them loved dirt. She
took joy in cleaning the toilet, used her bare hands to clean the foot
scraper free of horse manure, and licked Munby’s boots clean while
kneeling between his legs. She wrote: ‘Stripp’d myself quite naked
and put on a pair of old boots and tied an old duster over my hair
and then I got up in the chimney.’47 She loved to clean the kitchen
and sweep the chimney, and he liked to hear about her chores. Their
relationship was based on true affection, however, even though to
the outside world it may have seemed a little bizarre. ‘I showed my
strength with carrying him around the room’, she declared with
gusto. Because of his position, they had to continue their affair
clandestinely, but they married in secret and a deep and lasting
love was established.
Munby and Cullwick enjoyed the roles of slave and master, but
they did not fit the standard type of s&M relationship. Indeed, the
slave-and-master roles were not mere enactments of sadomasochism
play but were embedded in their whole relationship – he was a
Victorian gentleman and she was a domestic servant. Munby was no
sadist, but wanted the best for Cullwick. Nor was beating or vio-
lence part of their relationship, as far as we are aware. Cullwick liked
to undertake subservient behaviour, yet she was a strong character
and was by no means always passive. The class division between
them added a dynamic to their relationship – rather than keeping
them apart, it brought them together.
Sexual role-play is astounding in its diversity and its ability to
brighten up languishing sex lives. Yet most of the applications of
363
exhibitionism, voyeurism, coprophilia, urolagnia, flagellation and

slave-and-master relationships have been considered sexually per-
verse. Surprisingly, though, the supposedly most innocuous of acts
within this book – exhibitionism and voyeurism – were in the past the
ones which were most likely to be practised without consent.
364
twelve
On Body Parts: Fellatio,

Fetishism, Infibulations
and Fisting
Then sticking closely to the Text,
He fairly tipt the Velvet next;
And straight the warm salival Juice,
Did wonderful Effects produce
Her Pulse beats High, her Blood’s inflamed,
Symptoms so plain her Love proclaim’d . . .
The Ladies’ Miscellany (1718)
O ur genitalia are usually the first areas that come to mind when
we think about having sex. The clitoris, labia and penis are all
erogenous zones considered prominent sites of sexual stimulation.
Yet at times in the past, in the Western world, touching these areas
in certain ways was taboo. The ancient Greeks, for example, thought
that fellatio and cunnilingus were unspeakable crimes, particularly
when the object of desire – the clitoris or vagina – was attached to
a menstruating woman. Similarly, in ancient Rome oral sex was
seen as distasteful. Sextus Cloelius, the scribe and secretary to the
Roman politician Clodius Pulcher, was criticized for performing
cunnilingus on menstruating women; and Quintus Apronius, chief
henchman to the corrupt magistrate of Sicily, Gaius Verres, was
accused of having bad breath – in those days, a sure sign of a fellator
or cunnilictor.
A gender distinction existed in relation to oral sex: it was con-
sidered much worse for a man to provide fellatio or cunnilingus than
for a woman to provide the same service. Men should not go down
on other men or women, as it would undermine their status. Yet both
fellatio and cunnilingus, despite being considered vile, commonly
took place. In Pompeii, good fellators were congratulated: ‘Myrtis,
you suck well’, complimented one graffiti writer on the walls in the
365
street; ‘Secundus is an excellent fellator’, declared another, although

in truth these comments may just as well have been intended as
insults. Prostitutes offered fellatio but it was not always cheap – it
usually cost two ‘asses’, an ‘ass’ being the equivalent of an ounce of
silver in ancient Rome. One prostitute, Euplia, thought it was worth
more and requested five asses for her oral expertise.1
By the Middle Ages, oral sex was regarded as sinful both in Chris-
tian pastoralia and canon law, so it was basically off-limits. Any good
Christian had to find other ways of sexual fulfilment. One Irish peni-
tential suggested that seven years of penitence was appropriate for
Fellatio depicted on the rim of an Attic red-figure kylix, c. 510 bc.

366
on body parts
A man performs
cunnilingus on a
woman. Roman
fresco from the
Suburban Baths
in Pompeii,
1st century ad.
those who had committed fellatio. Yet little about actual oral sex is
mentioned in history, although there are a few references in English
sodomy and pornography trials in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. At a time when few people washed regularly and hygiene
was at a low, oral sex was probably not an exciting prospect. A few
jocular references were made to it in bawdy ballads, but these were
usually about the bad smell.
By the nineteenth century, the verb ‘gamahuche’ was used for
oral sex, possibly from the Greek gamo, ‘to fuck’, and the French
hucher, ‘to call’ (‘fuck call’, although just like the English colloqui-
alism ‘blow job’, it does not mean what it says). ‘Gamahuching’ had
become rife in both French and British pornography and although
pornography cannot be taken as actual proof of the practice, it does
mean that there was an understanding that these events were taking
place. According to the pornographic The Lascivious Hypocrite (c.
1891), boys in boarding schools reported ‘plenty of details concerning
mutual friggings, and pointed out pretty boys who could be found
in each other’s beds, and had been detected in gamahuching and every
kind of excess’.2 Likewise, in The Quintessence of Birch Discipline
367
A woman fellates
a man, Roman
oil lamp found
at Pompeii,
1st century ad.
(‘1870’), privately printed in London in 1883, the character Mrs M.

receives cunnilingus from Sir F., ‘gamahuching me most rapturously
as he swallowed every drop as eagerly as a bee sucking honey’.3 The
anonymous Romance of Lust (c. 1876) similarly described the central
characters’ oral activities. ‘We immediately began with a gamahuche,
I taking Mary’s cunt, while Lizzie crossed her legs over her head, and
was gamahuched by Mary.’ Likewise, the Victorian narrator ‘Walter’
in his ‘memoirs’ wrote of gamahuching but did not think it the best
form of activity, claiming, ‘I had early in life and indeed till middle
age as told, been indifferent to having my cock sucked or gama-
huched, had indeed forbidden French women – who do it as a matter
of course, either as a preliminary or finish – to operate on me.’4 His
exception was licking ‘virgin cunts’. There were therefore varied
opinions on just how pleasant or unpleasant oral sex could be.
By the end of the nineteenth century, views had shifted slightly,
but not to any great extent. Like some of the Greeks, Krafft-Ebing
found oral sex repugnant, although he seems to have thought it was
not too disturbing. He declared, ‘Cunnilingus and fellatio (putting
the penis into a woman’s mouth) have not thus far been shown to
depend upon psychopathological conditions’, adding in apparent
disgust, ‘These horrible sexual acts seem to be committed only by
sensual men who have become satiated or impotent from excessive
368
Fellatio and cunnilingus scenes from the Marquis de Sade, Juliette (1797).
Woman fellates man, from Peter Fendi, Die Vorstellung im Theater (1910).
A man fellates a woman in a group sex scene by Achilles Devéria for Alfred
de Musset, Gamiani, c. 1848.
on body parts
indulgence in a normal way.’5 How far his feelings about oral sex
were indicative of those of other Victorian and Edwardian men is hard
to judge, but from the extant sources it is clear that there continued
to be a wide variation of opinion. Certainly for sexologists it was
not seen as befitting behaviour for an upstanding gentleman. Rather,
it was seen to be the practice of men of low morality or those who
were mentally unbalanced or already sexually satiated. Ellis linked
cunnilingus to the activities of foreigners (those from Zanzibar, or
the Slavs from the Balkans) and lesbians. He did, however, concede
that ‘cunnilingus and fellatio as practised by either sex, are liable
to occur among healthy or morbid persons, either in heterosexual
or homosexual relationships’.6 Nonetheless, he warned that these
oral activities became perversions if they were practised to the
exclusion of ‘normal sexual relationships’. Little had changed by the
mid-twentieth century, when one psychiatrist stated of one of his
patients, ‘The wish to degrade women is evidenced in his wanting
to have women perform fellatio which he links up with his incestu-
ous relationship to his mother and sisters.’ It made him feel as
though he was ‘the man and the master’.7 Krafft-Ebing would no
doubt have been surprised at the extent of current-day practice of
oral sex, which is now seen as part of a natural, healthy sex life.
Fetishism
Any obsession with certain parts of the body – such as fat, hair, hands,
feet, neck and so on – was labelled as fetishism by sexologists. These
fetishisms could lead to licking, stroking, sucking, infibulating or
otherwise inserting into or ejaculating on to the focus of lust. Many
fetishists felt a complete lack of the control over their impulses,
and many sought help from psychologists and psychiatrists.
It was the French psychologist Alfred Binet who first identified
sexual fetishism in ‘Le Fétichisme dans l’amour’ (Revue Philoso-
phique, 1887) and saw it as a predominant or exclusive interest in
inanimate objects or a particular body part, a type of deviation in
which ‘the person’s libido becomes attached to something that
constitutes a symbol of the love-object’. He remarked, ‘in the life
of every fetishist, there can be assumed to have been some event
which determined the association of lustful feeling with the single
impression.’ He believed that fetishism was normal, declaring,
371
‘everybody is more or less a fetishist in love’. Identifying between

the petit and the grand fetishism, he saw the latter as a type of ‘geni-
tal madness’. Both Krafft-Ebing and Binet examined many fetishists
and believed that a fetish could be traced back to one’s youth.
Usually, the connection with the love object happened at the time
of first sexual stimulus, or first masturbation. Krafft-Ebing claimed
that in fetishism ‘the pronounced preference for a certain portion
of the body of persons of the opposite sex, particularly for a certain
form of this part, can attain great psychosexual importance.’8 He
also identified two sorts of fetishists: body fetishists, who are
obsessed with particular body parts such as hands, feet or hair; and
object fetishists, who might have an obsession with anything from
shoes, boots, stockings and underwear to materials such as fur,
leather or velvet. He stated that we should not regard the fetishist
as a monster of excess, but a monster of weakness. More often than
not, people were worried about having their fetishes revealed,
which made them feel guilty. The problem often led to depression
and suicidal feelings.
Initially, medico-legal experts opined that fetishism was a hered-
itary predisposition, and that acts were involuntary, impulsive and
overpowering. A fetishist had no option but to follow his inclin-
ations.9 Many sexologists, including Krafft-Ebing, believed fetishism
to result from a psychopathic constitution which could arise in
combination with other paraphilias, such as sadism, masochism
or inversion. As with other acts perceived as perverted by sexolo-
gists, frequently patients’ case notes refer to epileptic sisters, nervous
mothers, insane uncles and domineering fathers. Echoing many of
his fellow psychologists, Krafft-Ebing surmised that ‘pathological
fetishism seems to arise only on the basis of a psychopathic condition
that is for the most part hereditary, or on the basis of existent mental
disease’, although, significantly, he did believe that there was a ‘single
impression which had determined the association of lustful feelings
with the object of desire’.10
While Krafft-Ebing had outlined two kinds of fetishism, Havelock
Ellis went further and described three different classifications of
what he called ‘erotic symbolism’:
1 Parts of the body (normal) – hands, feet, breasts, nates

[buttocks], secretions
372
on body parts
Parts of the body (abnormal), lameness, squinting,

smallpox scars, paedophilia, presbyophilia [love of the
old], necrophilia
2 Inanimate objects – gloves, shoes, stockings, handker-
chiefs, underwear
3 Acts (active) – whipping, cruelty, exhibitionism
Acts (passive) – being whipped, masochism, voyeurism
For body fetishists, sexual intercourse was not necessarily the

main aim. They could ejaculate by merely placing the object next
to their body or their genitals and masturbating. On the other
hand, some male fetishists were despairing that they could not
have ‘normal’ intercourse with their wife because their fetish had
such a hold over them. Some men took the object of their fetishism
to bed with them in the hope that it would stimulate them if they
felt it while having intercourse with their wives. In the case of the
object fetishist, the item did not need to be connected to a particular
person. Further explanations were to come in psychiatry, when
Freud developed an interest in explaining fetishism. He followed the
line that fixations developed in childhood rather than believing
that they developed as a result of inherited family traits, or ‘taints’.
Although the labelling of fetishism occurred only at the end of
the nineteenth century, all kinds of fetishisms have been described
over the years, involving everything from handkerchiefs, corsets
and knickers to shoes, ribbons and buttons. In the medieval period,
people would not have had a name for desires for a particular body
part or object, although they may have experienced them. The Church’s
guide to illicit sexual acts as used in penitentiaries made no mention
of any sort of sexual behaviour which could be identified as fetishism.
Since the Church authorities expressed prohibitions on most other
sexual acts (dorsal sex, fellatio, masturbation, anal sex and so on),
this lack of interest might indicate the Church’s ignorance of such
possibilities. However, the Church often feigned ignorance of some
sexual behaviour of which it disapproved so long as it brought on
‘normal’ vaginal penetrative sexual intercourse between a married
man and woman. This may have been the case with fetishism; if a
man or woman had a fetish, the Church would be unconcerned so
long as the protocol of ejaculation into a vagina was followed and
conception ensued.
373
One constant fetishism, stretching from medieval times to its

labelling, was an obsession with hair. Fetishism around a woman’s
hair can be seen in the legends of King Arthur. Chrétien de Troyes’
Lancelot, or the Knight of the Cart, written in the 1170s, was one of
the first books to describe the story of Lancelot’s adulterous love for
Guinevere, but it also describes his love of her hair. After finding a
comb and discovering that the hair on it is Guinevere’s, Lancelot
nearly faints. He extracts the hairs from her comb, careful not to
break any of them:
Never will the eye of man see anything receive such an

honour as when he begins to adore these tresses. A hundred
thousand times he raises them to his eyes and mouth, to
his forehead and face: he manifests his joy in every way,
considering himself rich and happy now. He lays them in
his bosom near his heart, between his shirt and the flesh.
He would not exchange them for a cartload of emeralds
and carbuncles.11
Can this fascination with a part of the body of his loved one be
called fetishism, or is it merely adoration? Was Guinevere’s hair a
fetish object? In the end, Lancelot was not fascinated with anybody
else’s hair, only Guinevere’s – and the hair only became a love object
when he discovered it was Guinevere’s. From his position as a
knight, he could only love her from a distance, so her hair became
a sexual substitute for the whole of her body (although, of course,
the lovers would break this code of honour). Since the relationship
of Lancelot to Guinevere is the one of a subject to his queen, a
position of subservience should be taken up by him; a knight must
revere his lady. Courtly codes dictated behavioural rules; men were
subject to obeying the seemingly capricious whims of ladies in
order to win their love, and knights were continually given dangerous
quests in order to prove their dedication. Adoration of Guinevere’s
hair could be safely undertaken from a noble knight’s position
without the idea of ‘fetishism’.
Yet similar obsessions with hair were detected in the late 1890s,
when sexologists established a long list of similar sexual focuses
on particular body parts. One of the first people to be recorded as
having a problem with hair fetishism was a patient of Krafft-Ebing’s.
374
on body parts
As a ten-year-old boy, he began to have erotic feelings at the sight

of a woman’s hair, particularly the hair of young girls. He was soon
taught to masturbate by his schoolfriends. His sister’s twelve-year-
old girlfriend would kiss and hug him and her hair pleased him
enormously. The connection between hair and erotic feeling became
established in his mind and grew more powerful with his advancing
years. Thick, black, luxuriant hair made him particularly excited,
especially if he could kiss and suck it. While out on the streets, he
began to kiss women’s heads, then hurry home to masturbate.
Once he was compelled to cut off a lock of a girl’s hair. His obsession
eventually led him into alcoholism, resulting in an epileptic attack,
and he was hospitalized. This patient was something of an anomaly
for his doctor. Previously, Krafft-Ebing had believed that most of his
‘perverted’ patients had to have some sort of hereditary disability,
but this man was from a healthy family.
More easily explained was another of Krafft-Ebing’s cases, a
man who took sexual gratification from despoiling women’s hair. He
fitted perfectly with Krafft-Ebing’s psychological profile for fetish-
ists, as both his parents suffered from mental disabilities – his father
was temporarily insane and his mother was of a nervous disposition.
After suffering a febrile disease, the patient’s nervous system had been
badly affected. Soon after his illness in August 1889, he was arrested
in the Trocadéro in Paris with a pair of scissors in his pocket, forcibly
cutting off a lock of a young girl’s hair. On searching his home,
police found 65 ‘switches’, or tresses of hair, neatly sorted into
packets. He admitted that when he held the tresses he had cut from
the women’s heads, he became sexually excited. Another hair fetish-
ist admitted that it did not matter what a woman looked like so
long as she had ravishing tresses, preferably ‘a woman with over a
yard of jet black hair’. He fantasized about women pulling each
other’s hair and liked to pull his wife’s hair during intercourse. For
the medics, the fact that he performed cunnilingus was proof of
his masochism. Bizarrely, his fantasies of lesbians performing cunni-
lingus were given as evidence of his latent homosexuality.12
A more historically specific fetishism had been in vogue with the
wearing of nosegays and carrying of handkerchiefs. In the eighteenth
century a glove or a flower was enough for a person to be overcome
with sexual desire. Monstrous bouquets of flowers worn on the lapel
could make both men and women swoon. One prostitute known
375
for running a flagellation brothel told of a scene with another woman:

‘Then she began kissing me again, and smelling at my nosegay, or
rather my sweet broom, the scent of which seemed to augment
her lust: she passed her hands all over my body, and in fact acted
with me as men do with women to excite their desire before they
enjoy them.’13 Nosegays were explicitly connected to sex, the larger
the better. Huge bouquets worn on the lapels, known as ‘nosegays
of lechery’, became a sign of the female flagellant.
By Victorian times, ladies’ handkerchiefs were of particular
erotic value, presumably because of their connection with gentility.
Psychiatrist Albert Moll provided an example of the power the
wave of a hanky could produce. One woman told him, ‘I know of a
certain gentleman, and when I see him at a distance I only need to
draw out my handkerchief so that it peeps out of my pocket, and I
am certain that he will follow me as a dog follows its master.’14 One
32-year-old baker’s assistant was more persistent. He admitted to
stealing between 80 and 90 ladies’ handkerchiefs, but cared only
for handkerchiefs belonging to attractive women. When arrested in
August 1890, on searching his house, police found over 400 ladies’
handkerchiefs and he confessed that he had already burned two
bundles of them.15
Foot fetishism is probably one of the most common fetishes
to persist through the ages. Closely connected to obsession with
shoes, it is found more or less exclusively among men (although
the obsession of many women with shopping for shoes has been
the butt of jokes – Imelda Marcos was particularly noted for her
gigantic shoe collection). As with so many other predilections, this
one can be found in antiquity. In ancient Greece, Antiphanes finds
pleasure in a woman rubbing his feet. Lucius, the son of the Roman
emperor Vitellius, carried round one of Messalina’s sandals. Sue-
tonius tells us that Lucius ‘begged Messalina to grant him the
tremendous privilege of removing her shoes; whereupon he would
nurse the right shoe inside his gown, and occasionally take it out
to kiss it’.16 In medieval literature, the courtly poem Le Roman de
la rose, immensely popular in thirteenth-century France, rhapsodizes
about the loveliness of some women’s feet – the ideal foot was
narrow, high-arched and long-toed. The character of the jealous
husband recognizes the delight a woman’s feet can evince when
he berates his wife for showing off her feet to other men, ‘Besides,
376
on body parts
you wear your shoes so tight that you often raise your dress to
show your feet to those knaves.’17
By the eighteenth century, shoe fetishism had taken hold and
many men and women admired other’s perfect feet. Restif de la
Bretonne (1734–1806) admitted to an admiration of girls’ shoes,
and in his first literary success, Le Pied de Fanchette, the narrator is
attracted to a girl he sees in the street sporting charming shoes.
Bretonne traced his fetishism (although he did not call it such)
back to when he was four and found himself admiring the feet of a
young girl where he lived. He preferred his girls neat and clean and
A scene of leather-and-Pvc-clad s&M play.

377
was especially entranced by a young girl from another town ‘whose

shoes were of a fashionable cut, with buckles, and who was a charming
person besides’. The love of his life, Collette Parangon, provided
him with the perfect opportunity for admiration of her feet. She
‘possessed a charm which I could never resist, a pretty little foot;
it is a charm which arouses more than tenderness’. He went into
raptures about her shoes, with descriptions of ‘green heels and a
pretty rosette’. On one occasion it became too much to bear, and when
she left the room he masturbated into her shoe. He confessed, ‘my
lip pressed one of these jewels, while the other, deceiving the sacred
end of nature, from excess of exultation replaced the sex object.’18
By the end of the nineteenth century, foot fetishism had been
categorized by sexologists and was seen as a worthy topic of medical
exploration in its own right. One 29-year-old man described exactly
how his obsession had developed. Like so many others, his family
had a medical history – his mother was a neuropath, his father was
a diabetic and he himself was a nervous man. He remembered
distinctly that at the age of six he had had his first sexual stirrings
when watching women’s feet. By the age of sixteen, he was creeping
into his sister’s bedroom to kiss her feet. At eighteen, he had full
sexual intercourse with a woman. At 25 everything suddenly changed
and he became homosexual. ‘The naked foot was his charm. He
often felt impelled to follow men in the street, hoping to find an
occasion to take off their shoes.’ His doctor saw his constant
masturbation as problematic, suggesting that ‘excessive masturbation
brought about neurosis and invert sexuality’.19 As a cure, the patient
was subjected to hydrotherapy (cold-water treatment) at a specialist
institute and, as a result, regained some of his inclination towards
women. He was advised to use his fetish as a ‘bridge’, which meant
that he was allowed to indulge his fetishism for feet while having
‘normal’ intercourse with a woman, but only if he abstained from
masturbation and ‘perverse connection with men’. Unsurprisingly,
his treatment had no long-term effect and he relapsed into being
irresistibly attracted to farm labourers and tramps ‘whom he paid
for the favour of kissing their feet’.
More sadistic methods of enjoyment were found by employing
feet as a weapon. One man told Ellis how he liked to be stepped on
by a woman’s foot. The desire was not for intercourse but to lie on
the floor and be trampled on. The patient admitted,
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on body parts
The treading should be inflicted for a few minutes all over

the chest, abdomen, groin, and lastly on the penis; which is,
of course, lying along the belly in a violent state of erection,
and consequently too hard for the treading to do damage to
it. I also enjoy being nearly strangled by a woman’s foot.20
Another patient confessed to having been trampled underfoot by

at least 100 women of good social standing who would never have
dreamt of having intercourse with him.
By the mid-twentieth century, a new group of researchers were
questioning these fetishisms and trying to uncover what caused
them. In a study in 1965, sex researchers suggested that the origins
of fetishisms were to be found in restrictive childhood sex play by
female peers, the fetishism developed by way of compensation.
People have different degrees of fetishism, from a slight preference
to a strong extreme obsession which overtakes their lives, where sex-
ual functioning is no longer possible without the fetishistic quality.
The fetishist traditionally was found to be a loner, usually male,
someone who feels inadequate and who is lacking in social skills with
the opposite sex.21 Meanwhile, in the 1980s, societies and clubs were
set up in adoration of the foot, such as The Foot Fraternity, an organi-
zation for homosexual and bisexual foot fetishists. This organization
was the subject of a survey in 1995 in which 262 of its members (all
men) were interviewed. This study is invaluable in that it summed
up many previous studies ranging from the 1950s through the 1980s
tracing the profile of fetishists. It is also important in that it negates
some of the earlier studies. Fetishism was no longer seen to be a result
of hereditary mental disease, but to have emerged through learned
behaviour and experience.22 Other analysts found that in cases of
sexual deviancy, men tended to come from repressive families. A
compulsion overtook them, forcing them to undertake the deviant
behaviour, followed by a feeling of shame, guilt and anxiety, a fact
already revealed in the many cases by earlier sexologists. Yet over
80 per cent of the interviewees believed that foot fetishism did not
relate to negative experiences in childhood; 45 per cent thought
that the fetishism was linked to pleasurable experiences during
childhood. Many men had their first feelings of sexual pleasure with
a member of the family’s feet (fathers, uncles, brothers), the experi-
ence connected to innocent activities such as tickling or washing feet,
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or through experiences with the feet of others in their peer group.

Masturbatory fantasies reinforced their fetish.
Other items of clothing besides shoes could also be the focus of
fetishistic tendencies. Male transvestites have been obsessed with
beautiful dresses since at least the seventeenth and eighteenth centu-
ries.23 However, the item of obsession has changed according to
fashion. What was de rigueur in the nineteenth century – say corsets,
handkerchiefs and gloves – has changed for the modern-day trans-
vestite to stockings, suspenders and knickers from Victoria’s Secret
or similar lingerie stores. Cases of specific underwear preferences –
for example, the wearing of lace knickers, bras and suspenders – were
more common in the twentieth century than in earlier periods. In his
study Transvestites (1910), Magnus Hirschfeld found that transvestites
were often obsessed with items of women’s clothing, such as corsets,
gloves or jewellery. Some collected buckles and belts, or veils. All
had an obsession with women’s clothes in general rather than one
item in particular. Hirschfeld himself saw the obsession of trans-
vestites as dressing as a woman from ‘head to toe’. It was not the item
itself in its abstract form that was the object of attraction, but the
whole ensemble, which was ‘loved as part of themselves’.24
Often various sorts of fetishism were mixed and were not always
confined to one particular item, as seen in Jerome Henry Brudos, who
became both a shoe and an underwear fetishist. His fetishes were
so intense that they resulted in murderous behaviour and he became
known as ‘The Shoe Fetish Slayer’. His problems started from the
day he was born, 31 January 1939, as his mother had wanted a girl.
To indulge her fantasy, she dressed him up in little girl’s clothing,
belittled him, abused him and generally treated him with disdain.
Initially the family moved around but eventually settled in Salem,
Oregon. It was here, when he was only five years old, that Brudos
began to fetishize shoes after finding high heels in a junkyard. He
began to steal underwear from his neighbours and spent his adoles-
cence undergoing psychotherapy in various psychiatric hospitals.
He then moved on to attacking women, choking them and stealing
their shoes and underwear. After threatening to stab a woman if
she did not comply with his orders to perform certain sexual acts, he
ended up in Oregon State Hospital. Doctors concluded that his sexual
fantasies stemmed from his hatred of his mother and he was diag-
nosed as schizophrenic. Despite his mental instability, he was released
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and went on to graduate from high school. When he was about 21,
he married a seventeen-year-old girl who bore him two children. His
eccentricities began to show when he started to make her do house-
work naked except for high heels while he took photographs of her.
He began stalking women, and soon graduated to murder, hiding
the bodies in his garage – he bludgeoned four women between 1968
and 1969 while dressed in women’s clothing. In order to try out the
shoes he collected, he kept the left foot of one of his victims.25 Even
after he was in prison, he continued to collect shoes, writing to
shoe companies to ask for pairs. He died from liver cancer in prison
on 28 March 2006. This sort of murderous extreme is, however,
relatively rare and fetishism is usually an innocuous activity.
The fetish object has often been associated with a particular
time and place. Hence gas masks became a fetish object for those who
had experienced unusual or unexpected sexual experiences during
or just after the Second World War. In the case of fetishism of fur,
leather, rubber, plastic, rubber, Pvc, latex and so on, fetishists revel
in wearing the specific material. Clothing made out of these mate-
rials has become particularly popular in s&M sex play. Such play might
combine multiple fetishisms, such as the wearing of masks made
of leather, shoes of suede and silk underwear.
‘Chubby-chasing’ became a hobby for those obsessed with fat.
Whether this has to do with the after-effects of post-Second World
War rationing or with the current preoccupation with diet has yet to
be ascertained. In certain poorer countries, fatness is connected to
wealth but in the West it is thinness that is usually admired. Some
fetishism for particular body parts is more problematic and can be
dangerous. Neck obsessions, for example, have led to choking or
strangling. Known as hypoxyphilia, strangulation for sexual pleasure
has been classed as a paraphilia in a sub-category of sexual maso-
chism in psychiatrists’ diagnostic manuals. Consenting controlled
strangulation was introduced into s&M role-play as it induces a semi-
hallucinogenic state called hypoxia. Combined with orgasm, it provides
a rush akin to a cocaine high, so pleasurable that it is highly addictive.
Also known as asphyxiophilia, or sexual asphyxia, this potentially
lethal sexual practice refers to sexual arousal that is produced while
reducing the oxygen supply to the brain. These activities have fre-
quently been known to lead to fatalities and can be traced back at
least as far as the eighteenth century.
381
Leather bondage hood.
Studded leather codpiece.

on body parts
Jonathan Swift wrote of ‘Swinging by session upon a Cord, in

order to raise artificial Extasies’, but this seems to have been referring
to non-asphyxial swinging. Sade also wrote about hanging in Justine
where Roland hangs the heroine, wanting her to enjoy the pleasures
he has experienced through strangulation. He declares, ‘it’s the rope
that’s waiting for me: ’tis the same delight I am pleased to have
women savour: that’s the one will serve my undoing; I am firmly
persuaded as I possibly can that this death is infinitely sweeter than
cruel.’ He is still at the stage of experimentation, but appears to
have discovered the method of erotic auto-asphyxiation, ‘I want to
find out whether it is not very certain this asphyxiation impels, in
the individual who undergoes it, the erectory nerve to produce an
ejaculation.’ He insists on hanging himself, assisted by Thérèse, who
describes as she watches as ‘rapid jets of semen spring nigh . . .
without any assistance whatsoever from me’.26
Few cases of real-life auto-asphyxiation have been passed down
to us in history. It is possible that public hanging put people off the
idea of trying it out for themselves in great numbers (the last public
hanging in England was in 1868). Seeing the victims evacuating their
bodily fluids and writhing and jerking could not have been a pleasant
sight. However, there are two interesting cases of self-strangulation
in the eighteenth century. One involved the Czech musician and
composer Frantisek Kotzwara, who famously died after asking a
prostitute to hang him. Unfortunately, she left him too long and he
died. The other case related to a ‘Reverend Manacle’, who admini-
stered to those awaiting death sentences. He showed one female
prisoner how exciting hanging could be, but later died after trying it
one too many times.27 There may well have been more cases of auto-
asphyxiation that were were mistakenly judged to be accidental
strangling of a non-sexual sort. It seems that the practice only took
off in any significant numbers in the twentieth century.28
Sometimes auto-asphyxiation was a shared activity, but even
then it was dangerous. When 62-year-old actor Albert Dekker was
found dead in his Hollywood home on 5 May 1968, he was naked,
kneeling in the bath, with his head in a noose hooked up to the
shower rod. Although the coroner ruled a verdict of autoerotic asphyx-
iation, it is unlikely that Dekker had undertaken the task alone. There
were no signs of forced entry, but money and camera equipment had
been stolen, indicating that he had brought someone to his apartment.
383
Also, he was blindfold, gagged and handcuffed and had sexually

explicit words scrawled on his body in red lipstick, hardly an act of
a solitary man.
Sexual advice manuals such as Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex
(1972) warned against the activity, while magazines like Hustler
published letters from individuals who had tried it out. One woman
wrote in to the ‘Advice and Consent’ column telling how her lover
had taught her to apply pressure to his neck with her knees until he
lost consciousness. The editorial warned against ‘The Orgasm of
Death’ in a two-page article on the subject, saying it ‘kills 200–300
people a year in the u.s.’29
Strangulation to orgasm was often undertaken by men alone in
their apartments or hotels and sometimes involved cross-dressing.
One such case of auto-asphyxiation took place on 7 February 1994
when Stephen Milligan, the Member of Parliament for Eastleigh,
Hampshire, was found dead in his flat in Black Lion Lane, Chiswick.
He had self-bondaged with an electrical flex bound round one
ankle. It ran up his body and was wound around his neck with the
other end close by one hand. He was naked but for a pair of stockings
and suspenders and a cover over his head. A piece of orange was
found in his mouth. Such deaths occur usually as a result of a
failure of the get-out strategy – when people misjudge their dizziness
or state of semi-consciousness and fail to act quickly enough to
release themselves. Generally, at the scene of death, sexual
paraphernalia or pornography has been found – bondage-gear hoods,
masks, blindfolds, gags, enema tubes, electric wires or mirrors in
which to watch what is happening.
Love of Inanimate Objects

A desire for a relationship with an inanimate representation of a
human figure is described in the story of Pygmalion, in which a sculp-
tor falls in love with the statue he has carved and names her Galatea.
He prays to Venus, the goddess of love, requesting that she bring
his statue to life, and Venus grants his wish. According to one
anecdote, Klisyphos of Samos was known to have sexually assaulted
the statue of a goddess. The ‘Statue Syndrome’, otherwise known as
agalmatophilia, was recognized when sexologist Krafft-Ebing
recorded a case in 1877 of a gardener falling in love with a statue of
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on body parts
the Venus de Milo and being discovered while attempting coitus with
it. But at least one sex researcher denied that it ever existed, except
in pornographic fantasy.30
The passion for statues was replaced with more pliant models.
Full-bosomed life-size latex or rubber dolls were produced to provide
passive sex for lonely men. The dolls had open spaces for penetra-
tion to take place in either the ‘mouth’ or ‘vagina’ orifices. Perhaps
one of the most ingenious rubber dolls is described in the porn-
ography La Femme endormie (1899), which purports to be the story
of Paul Molaus, a wealthy man of about 40 from Bois-Colombes.
Inspired by the story of Pygmalion, and having become disillusioned
with his mistresses (and with women generally, one assumes), he asks
a designer to make the perfect lover. The creator himself describes
her perfection:
I paid particular attention to her interior, which is fitted with three

basins, several boxes and cylinders, and a number of little
ducts, so as to permit the circulation of all sorts of products that
it would please the experimenter to introduce into the silent
goddess’s body. By pulling certain curls of her hair, her eyes
and lips can be made to move. One can place her in every imag-
inable position: standing up, seated, kneeling, lying prone,
lying on her back. By pushing the navel, one provokes indu-
lations in every part of her body. Her sexual organs are as perfect
as those of any live woman. To warm up her body, all one had
to do is to pour boiling milk or hot water in sufficient quantities
into the different receptacles located under her head, behind
her breasts, in her buttocks, stomach, leg, etc.31
Similar lifelike dolls were recorded by Iwan Block, who knew of

a manufacturer of rubber dolls, both male and female. He claimed,
More especially are the genital organs represented in a manner

true to nature. Even the secretion of Bartholin’s glans is imi-
tated, by means of a ‘pneumatic tube’ filled with oil. Similarly,
by means of fluid and suitable apparatus, the ejaculation of
the semen is imitated. Such artificial human beings are actually
offered for sale in the catalogue of certain manufacturers of
Parisian rubber articles.32
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A basic model of blow-up doll.
A more life-like, silicone sex doll.

on body parts
Since then all sorts of variations of sex dolls have been produced,
from cheap plastic inflatable ones (which barely resemble dolls, let
alone humans) to life-size ones made out of silicone, which appear
amazingly human. They can be brought online from specialized
companies. These ‘real life’ dolls have human hair and are covered
in a material that feels like human skin to the touch.
The relationship between people and rubber dolls was made all
the more poignant in the film Lars and the Real Girl (2007). The lead
male character, the lonely, girlfriendless Lars, invests in a lifelike doll,
takes her everywhere and treats her as a real girlfriend. For the sake
of Lars, everyone in the community treats her as his real girlfriend,
tolerating his taking her for nights out drinking, going bowling with
her and voting her on to various committees. He eventually discards
her when he finds a real girlfriend.
More recently a new kind of sexuality has made the news with
people who call themselves ‘objectum sexuals’ (os), or ‘people who
have loving relationships with objects’. The British television docu-
mentary Married to the Eiffel Tower, directed by Agnieszka Piotrowska
(2008), claimed that there are only about 40 such people in the world,
but this may be because they keep quiet about their inclinations as
a result or from fear of persecution. Three women who classified
themselves as os were interviewed about their sexual orientation in
this documentary, each of them telling how they had fallen in love
with objects. Erika LaBrie became a world-champion archer after
she fell in love with her archery bow, which she called Lance. She
says she was ‘attracted to him because of his looks’. Her close rela-
tionship with her bow allowed her to become a champion archer but
her expertise in archery began to fail when her attraction for her bow
diminished. She then fell in love with the Eiffel Tower and went
through a marriage ceremony with it in 2007, which was performed
on the tower itself in front of a group of her friends. She took the
married name of Erika La Tour Eiffel. Before this she had a three-
year relationship with the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. She
then fell in love with the Berlin Wall. When challenged about her
behaviour on The Tyra Banks Show, she asserted: ‘I am not broken.’33
Objectum sexuals say they have been derided and treated as
if they were mad. In the documentary, all of the women were por-
trayed as profoundly distressed and shown to have suffered some
sort of rejection or familial dysfunction in their childhood. Erika was
387
discharged from the army for post-traumatic stress disorder. In the

programme, she admitted that she identified with the Berlin Wall
and had been built up only to be torn down. She received no love
from her parents and was rejected all her life. To encourage herself,
she says, ‘Stand up and be yourself. I am the Berlin Wall.’ Identifying
with the thing she loves, she tells the Wall, ‘I wish I were an object
like you.’ Aurita from Sweden was at first competition for Erika, as
she was also in love with the Berlin Wall (it had replaced her affec-
tions for a guillotine). However, although they were initially jealous
of each other, Aurita and Erika made friends and, since they are
both polyamorous (having multiple lovers), they have agreed to share
the Berlin Wall as a lover. Another polyamorous objectum sexual,
Amy, fell in love with the Empire State Building and the World Trade
Center, and grieved her loss of the latter as one would a lover. She
also admitted to coming from a dysfunctional family. Her sexual
encounter with a church organ upset one pastor, who banned her from
the congregation, but the succeeding cleric was more understanding
of her love of the church banisters, even allowing her to cut part of
one out and take it home.
Professionals have classified the ‘condition’ as a paraphilia, but the
people themselves prefer to see it as an orientation. Erika has since
gone on to found os Internationale, an organization aimed at edu-
cating people about objectum sexuality and offering support. She
dismissed the documentary as misleading, saying that she was
manipulated into confessing a childhood trauma. She says that her
os was evident before this trauma, which she believes has nothing
to do with her sexual orientation. She continues to strive for an
acceptance of objectum sexuality.34
Infibulations and Insertions

Historically speaking, dildos were perhaps the inanimate objects
most commonly inserted into body parts. Such insertions were
considered sodomy and seen as a perversion of ‘natural’ sex. Given
the responses of judges in lesbian trial reports, such objects were
regarded as the height of obscenity in the eighteenth century. As seen
in the case of Katherina Hertzeldorfer, women ‘acting the male role’
showed ingenuity in designing their own dildos.35 They used wooden
poles wrapped in material, or stitched leather stuffed with old rags.
388
on body parts
One tribade’s self-fashioned dildo was described at some length in

The True History and Adventures of Catherine Vizzani (1755). After
Vizzani’s death, the book tells us, ‘The leathern Machine, which
was hid under the Pillow, fell into the Hands of the Surgeon’s Mates
in the Hospital, who were immediately for ripping it up, concluding
that it contained Money, or something else of Value, but they found
it stuffed only with old Rags.’36 Glass dildos show up in pornographic
depictions, usually consisting of glass injectors, filled with milky,
warm liquid, with a bulb attached to allow for the simulation of
ejaculation. Adverts for machines thought to be disguised vibrators
were sometimes placed in respectable women’s magazines of the
1950s, with pictures of gadgets that looked like Bakelite hairdryers.
A more advanced vaginal manipulator called the ‘Sybian Saddle’ was
invented in the 1980s: it is a machine that simulates sex for women.
A motorized rod protrudes from a hole while the woman sits on the
saddle accepting it. At the cost of £1,265, despite free next-day delivery,
it is one of the more expensive options. One of the most popular
dildos is a vibrator dubbed the ‘Rabbit’, which was introduced in the
1990s and pulses in various ways to give stimulation to the clitoris
at the same time as providing stimulation inside the vagina. Nowadays,
Dildos and a penis assister, 19th century.

389
gone are the perceptions of vibrator use as a perversity, and many

a modern woman keeps one in her bedside cabinet.
Other objects have been used as attachments to the genitals
and erogenous zones for both convenience and pleasure. In the
West, infibulations took a different form. For example, in ancient
Greece, athletes used penis infibulations with string through the
foreskin mainly in order to tie the penis out of the way when they
exercised naked. These were known as kynodesmes, or dog ties.37
Romans used infibulation as a method of preventing an erection,
closing the foreskin off with their equivalent of a large safety pin or
ring, or thread. Singers, athletes and entertainers were often infibulated
to prevent an untoward erection disturbing their artistic performances.
Generally, though, the Greeks and Romans did not go in for body
modification through piercing, tattoos or resculpting. Instead they
went for a more protracted form of body alteration that they inflicted
on small children, confining them in jars or small cages, stunting their
growth and turning them into midgets. Midgets and dwarfs were
considered comical but were also thought to be good at oral sex.
Indeed, Pliny believed a man could easily develop an obsession
with dwarfs.38
The poet Anacreon is depicted with his genitals infibulated. Marble statue,
Monte Calvo, Italy, 2nd century ad.
390
on body parts
A ‘Prince Albert’
piercing.
More recently, infibulation has been seen as a perverse practice

undertaken in s&M as a form of torture, such as stabbing with needles,
hammering in nails or stapling folds of the body. This desire for
the insertion of objects into genitalia has spawned a whole new indus-
try in piercing, tattooing and even surgery. Professional piercings
took off with the ‘Prince Albert’, one of the most well-known infib-
ulations for male sexual enhancement, which involves a ring-style
piercing that extends along the underside of the glans from the
urethral opening to where the glans meets the shaft of the penis.
Clitoral rings and nipple piercing have also become popular. As a
result of their concerns over penis size, some men resort to surgical
enhancements, paying thousands of pounds for penis extensions.
Cutting the ligaments that hold the penis in place so that the penis
hangs lower can extend length; weights are then attached to it for
a few months to stretch the organ to ensure the enlargement is
391
permanent. Men can also extend the girth of their penis with fat
taken from other parts of the body transplanted into its sides –
however, since the penis head cannot be fattened this way, the
results sometimes look a little odd. Silicone injections can also be
used to enhance the size of the penis and can cause amazingly fast
results, increasing the penis girth by up to five times. For this reason,
the procedure has been used in the pornographic film industry,
despite the dangers of damage and desensitization. Surgeons have
on occasion suggested penile implants, which involve inserting a rod
or a pipe in cases where a man may have had difficulty in obtaining
erection. A pump is attached to the groin and the penis is pumped
up when he wants an erection. For women there are all sorts of
methods available to enhance their sexual organs – breast-enlarging
serums such as ‘Lady’s Secret’, vaginal tightening and oestrogen
creams have become money-spinners worldwide.
Surgery for breast augmentation or reduction is now common-
place, with hundreds of thousands of women worldwide undergoing
cosmetic breast procedures. Operations for making the labia look
smaller and ‘tidier’ are now increasingly fashionable. But have obses-
sions developed beyond the interest of the psychoanalyst or sexual
psychologist? Is it a case of mass body dysmorphia, or are we all
merely taking advantage of new opportunities offered to us? People
who have experienced Body Integrity Identity Disorder (biid), a
severe type of body dysmorphia in which people desire an ampu-
tation, have requested the removal of limbs – and in some cases
doctors have complied with their wishes. But is this ethically accept-
able? New fixations and methods of sex develop with new types of
surgery. Apotemnophilia, a paraphilia in which the subject is aroused
by their being or imagining themselves as an amputee, is related to
biid: amputation has now become part of the erotic ensemble, with
stumps of arms and legs being used for penetration (acrotomophilia
refers to an erotic interest in amputees).
John Money and his colleagues examined apotemnophilia in
the Journal of Sex Research in 1977, summarizing as follows:
The findings in two cases show that self-demand amputation

(apotemnophilia) is related to erotization of the stump and
to overachievement despite a handicap. The apotemnophiliac
obsession represents an idée fixe rather than a paranoid
392
on body parts
delusion. It may be conceptually related to, though it is

not identical with transsexualism, bisexuality, Münchausen
syndrome, and masochism. As with most paraphilias it un-
doubtedly occurs more frequently, if not exclusively, in men.
The two patients related apotemnophilia to recalled experi-
ences of childhood which were necessary but not sufficient for
a causal explanation. The precise etiology of the condition is
not known, and there is no agreed upon method of treatment.39
One researcher, F. Tomasini, described the condition biid in an

ethics journal in 2006:
Self-demand amputees are persons who need to have one

or more healthy limbs or digits amputated to fit the way
they see themselves. They want to rid themselves of a limb
that they believe does not belong to their body-identity.
The obsessive desire to have appendages surgically removed
to fit an alternative body-image is medically and ethically
controversial.
He provides a number of normative and professional ethical per-

spectives on whether or not it is possible to justify surgery for
self-demand amputees. He concludes that no explanation can fully
incorporate an understanding of what it is like to be a self-demand
amputee.40 Other researchers, such as Tim Bayne and Neil Levy,
have added to the debate, arguing that request for self-demand
amputations of healthy limbs should be agreed to if patients ‘are
experiencing significant distress as a consequence of the rare
psychological disorder named Body Integrity Identity Disorder’.41
The actual use of amputated limbs in sex for penetration (whether
self-elected amputees or not) has possibly derived from fisting,
but little research has been undertaken on this development.
Fisting
One of the earliest mentions of fisting comes in Aristophanes’
Peace, where he uses sporting metaphors for rough sex. In this
surreal comedy of 421 bc, the hungry vine grower Trygaeus shares
his fantasies of sex with Lady Festival, whom he has just met:
393
Now that you have her, You can straightaway conduct a

very nice athletic competition tomorrow:
wrestle her to the ground, set her on all fours
throw her on her side, bent forward, onto her knees;
then well oiled up for the pancration,
strike out with vigour, fist burrowing in with the cock.
This might well be hitting or spanking her at the same time as

entering her but more likely, since she has been ‘well oiled’, it refers
to intercourse while simultaneously fisting her anus or vagina.42
Another source in history where we can find anal fisting – no surprise
here – is the writings of Sade. In La Philosophie dans le boudoir
(1795) he describes a scene in which the character Dolmance urges
Madame Saint-Ange to insert her fingers into his anus, ‘drive them
in further. To the wrist.’43 There was therefore at least an under-
standing of the act in the eighteenth century, even if was rarely
mentioned. However, if Sade imagined fisting, there is every likeli-
hood that he experimented with it.
Although the term ‘fisting’ (or ‘handballing’) is not used, the
concept was mentioned in 1949 in Larry Flint’s Hustler magazine.44
This practice involved inserting the whole hand or arm into the
anus or vagina. As a commonly practised anal activity, it grew popu-
lar sometime in the 1960s in gay leather biker groups in California.
In 1975, a member of the Fist Fuckers of America opened up one of
the first gay male fisting sex clubs, The Catacombs, in San Francisco
where a person could enjoy everything leather and fisting had to offer:
any night a person might see (by reservation only) ‘40 men variously
hanging in leather slings, tied down on restraint tables with their
legs raised by shackles, or laid back on waterbeds and mattresses
while 40 other men massage Crisco up their fists to start the one
finger march to a full fist gliding up the asshole to the elbow’.45 The
gay male subculture of fisting was also evident in 1960s gay men’s
s&M porn in which naive young men were tortured by rugged
manly brutes with huge penises and ‘even bigger fists which they
sink up to the armpits in our quivering hero’s sweetly puckered
virgin ass’.46 In male gay bondage bars in the late 1970s, finger
hygiene was at its best: ‘You cut your nails, then you cut your nails
again, and then you filed them.’ Then you did it again before put-
ting on your surgical gloves. The cover of a 1983 issue of Anal Sex,
394
on body parts
published in Copenhagen, although aimed at heterosexual men,

showed one woman fisting another. Although the lesbian magazine
Quim featured fisting between women in 1992, the activity was less
well known in lesbian circles.
Discrimination against fisting came out in the form of dvd
censorship in 2011, when it was made illegal in America to film the
act of fisting.47 In response, aficionados of fisting porn banded
together on 25 October for an International Fisting Day. Those against
censorship wondered how the censorship board came to the con-
clusion that it was permissible to film a penis (or even two) in a vagina
but not a hand. Some lesbians and gays saw this as yet another form
An early case of fisting? 19th-century sketch of two figures from Michelangelo’s

Last Judgement.
395
of social control over their private behaviour. More recently, doctors

and surgeons have investigated the problems presenting in those who
enjoy fisting: rupture of the anal sphincter, perforation of the colon,
the spread of rectal and colon disease and disturbance of heart
rhythms due to vagovagal response. With precautions, these risks
can be minimized.48
It is now reasonably common for people to incorporate fellating,
fetishism, infibulating or fisting (or at least one of these activities)
into their usual role-play. What was previously ‘abnormal’ has
become ‘normal’. After conducting interviews in Finland with 164
men and 22 women from two sex-oriented clubs, one researcher
concluded, ‘For many gay men leather is not only a style-item, but
also and especially a sexual fetish.’49 It could similarly be argued
that what was once a fetish is now a fashionable pastime. The only
time any of these activities becomes a problem is when it negatively
affects someone who has not consented to inclusion in the activity.
More often, people go to conferences around their predilection
and celebrate it openly, sharing their particular desires with other
like-minded people. For many people at the beginning of the twenty-
first century, few body parts or activities are seen as out of bounds.
396
Epilogue: A Limit to
Tolerance?
A re we to accept a fundamentalist, oppositional approach towards

those sexual preferences we consider strange, or are we to em-
brace more unusual sex acts wholeheartedly? Is there a way forward
to a more tolerant society, or is there a limit to tolerance?
Some of our old ideas have followed us down the ages and
resulted in the persistent persecution of minorities who are merely
following their inclinations. In many countries, lesbians, homosex-
uals, transvestites and transsexuals continue to be persecuted. Incest
between consenting siblings is still prosecuted in some countries, yet
there is no reason for it to be illegal. Some people might even argue
that it should be acceptable for incestuous couples to have children
despite the risk of disability of the newborn – but is disability such
a crime? After all, older women are in greater danger of producing
babies with disabilities, but they are not forbidden to do so by law.
While the more liberal-minded might be tolerant of sadomaso-
chistic practices (and may even indulge in a little of the milder kind
themselves behind closed doors), it might be more difficult for them
to accept other sorts of sexual acts. Negative reactions to bestiality
and necrophilia have been fairly consistent throughout the ages in
most countries in the West. In the 1980s, paedophiles tried to come
out alongside gays, but they were told to go back in the closet, and
remained criminals. If anything, attitudes towards paedophilia have
hardened in recent years.
There is no doubt that when observing the sexual behaviour of
people in history sexual perversion is found to be mutable. Laws and
punishments have changed throughout the centuries to reflect
shifting opinions on sexual behaviour. The idea of what is and what
is not ‘sexual perversion’ is based on our perceptions of what is
397
right and wrong. Whether these perceptions are created by the

state, the Church or the community, the idea of acceptability is
filtered downwards, with the working classes generally more accept-
ing of ‘different’ behaviours, and the poorest being most often caught
and punished for acting them out. In cases where a ‘perversion’
has been upsetting to these institutions, the method of controlling
it has traditionally been through punishment – hanging, burning,
flogging, the pillory, incarceration or fines. This changed at the
end of the nineteenth century to allow for the introduction of ‘treat-
ment’ for the individual, rather than punishment. Over the last couple
of centuries, in cases where a ‘perversion’ is upsetting to the individual
who undertakes such behaviour, psychiatrists have traditionally
investigated what it was that ‘made’ them this way, and which par-
ticular experience in their past (notably focusing on their family
background, their childhood and their adolescence) made them
‘abnormal’; medics have strived to make those who indulge in these
deviant acts become ‘normal’. Yet if society did not see these sexual
practices as ‘abnormal’, it is unlikely that the person undertaking
the acts would see themselves in this way. A move towards a more
accepting attitude around consensual sexual activities would mean
less persecution of individuals and groups, and greater equality in
their human rights.
Although changes have been made throughout history regarding
what was perverted or not – for example, sodomy, masturbation
and oral sex were thought of as heinous sins in medieval times but
are now accepted sexual behaviour – the long-established Christian
tradition of guilt over many sexual acts has continued. Bestiality,
incest, necrophilia and all those other acts deemed forbidden by the
Church remain taboo. In a secular society, it is time to re-evaluate
the position and consider why any activities between consenting
adults should be criminalized. Where acts are not harmful to others,
there is no reason for legislation.
People have changed their minds about sex from one era to
the next. Nothing, therefore, is set in stone. There is no reason why
people should be marginalized for their desires. However, three
areas of contention need discussing: first, harmful sex, to the degree
of death or bodily harm between consenting adults (sexual canni-
balism or sadomasochism); second, vulnerable adults; and third,
the age of consent.
398
epilogue
A commonly cited example of the first area is that of Armin

Meiwes, who advertised on the Internet for someone to share in his
fantasies of cannibalism. A young man, Bernd Jürgen Brandes,
came forward; they met and discussed what they both wanted to
do. With the young man’s consent, Meiwes cut off the youth’s penis
and cooked it, and they ate it together. Meiwes then stabbed the
man to death, dissected his corpse and ate bits of it over the next
ten months. The whole scenario was videotaped. Meiwes was arrested
in December 2002 after a college student found details of the
killings and an advertisement for a new partner on the Internet.
Since there is no law against cannibalism in Germany, and Brandes
consented, Meiwes was sentenced to eight years imprisonment
for manslaughter.
So what should we do about these sorts of cases? Many people
would suggest that both Meiwes and Brandes were ‘sick’ or mentally
unstable. But there was no proof of this when the case came to court.
If a person is making a rational choice – albeit one thought strange
by society’s standards – should they be left alone? In most societies,
an act which results in the manslaughter or murder of another
individual is against the law, regardless of whether sexual activities
are involved or not. The problem here is first whether the law can
establish that there was consent once the person involved is dead.
If this can be established, the question arises – does society have a
duty to protect people from their own self-destructive urges? But
then what about euthanasia, or assisted killings? While many of
us agree with this in cases of painful terminal illness, we may not
agree with allowing death by sexual cannibalism, even where the
adults are consenting.
However, if we believe people should be stopped from chop-
ping off body parts, then prevention of self-demand amputation is
called for. But amputation of parts of the body is considered accept-
able in law in many cases, such as breast reduction or transsexual
operations. Here the law and medicine in many Western societies
see it as acceptable to chop off a body part; it is considered that an
individual has the right to change their body how they see fit. Yet
some amputations or removal of body parts – such as female circum-
cision – are illegal in the uk and u.s., even when requested by the
patient themselves (though they continue to take place in secret). This
is an area fraught with difficulties; while female genital mutilation
399
is opposed in law, male circumcision is still allowed, with some

private clinics dedicated to its practice.
If we allow the amputation of some parts of the body, what about
the person who demands that a healthy limb be removed? In some
cases of body dysmorphia where doctors have agreed to amputate
an arm or a leg of their patient in favour of their mental health,
they have been severely criticized. This consideration then pushes
us back to evaluate self-harm or consenting harm by another person
for sexual pleasure, as in the Spanner Case discussed in chapter Four,
and whether grievous bodily harm should be permitted in s&M
activities or whether it should be illegal. Should we prosecute or not?
The distinctions become increasingly blurred.
The second outstanding issue is around people with learning
difficulties and the matter of consent. It has been deemed that some
such vulnerable people cannot give consent and therefore they are
prevented from having sex, even though they want to. What about
a 26-year-old couple with Down’s syndrome – shouldn’t they be
allowed to have sex if they both want to? They have the same lusts
as other young men and women of their age, and it is unfair that they
cannot find sexual fulfilment. There is no reason why relationships
between vulnerable adults should not be facilitated so they too
can enjoy sex. The ground may be fraught with problems, but just
because a subject is difficult, it does not mean we should ignore it.
Laws are already in place to protect vulnerable adults or children
from non-consensual acts.
Finally there is the matter of the age of consent. Most people
would agree that there should be a cut-off point when sex is not
acceptable for a child, who is unable to consent as an ‘adult’. The
age of consent has shifted in different periods and between countries.
Usually it has hovered somewhere between the ages of twelve and
21. The difficulty, of course, is that each person matures at a different
age, and that what might be acceptable for one adolescent would
not be for another. The problem occurs when there is an abuse of
power or relationship manipulation. The law rightly comes down
heavily on those who have forced young boys and girls into rela-
tionships against their will.
More worrying are the cases of institutional abuses on a mass
scale which have been ignored for years in places where young
people should have been protected. Such abuses have taken place
400
epilogue
in children’s homes and within the Catholic Church and other

religious organizations, such as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-
day Saints in Utah. Places with a veneer of respectability seem to have
often been the most dangerous. Better communication routes are
needed to ensure that children and vulnerable young adults are
able to complain. Even when there have been grievances aired,
those complaints have often been ignored. There therefore need
to be procedures through which the responsible adults are forced
to follow up these complaints, either by regular inspection from
outside agencies or some other method of protective monitoring.
Meanwhile, for those adolescents in a comfortable relationship
in a secure environment, facilitation of sex makes the experience safer
and more enjoyable. They are less likely to be abused, suffer un-
wanted pregnancy or catch sexual diseases if they are properly
informed and able to protect themselves. Young people should be
taught about all sex methods available to them (not just intercourse).
Coercion, manipulation and bullying is all too easy and education
and support are the keys to its prevention – this means supporting
all young people and vulnerable adults who want to explore sex,
be they heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual or transgender. Dedicated
groups are needed to supply support and advice.
Under the Sexual Offences Act 2003, bestiality and necrophilia
became specific offences in the uk for the first time. Anal and vaginal
penetration of, or by, an animal or of a corpse is illegal, and carries
a sentence of up to two years’ imprisonment. Historically, an unspeci-
fied range of acts was illegal, but the Act, which followed a major
review of all sexual offences in uk law, clarified this, removing ambig-
uities. Possession of extreme pornography was criminalized in the
Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008. The law on pornography
is broader than that of actual acts: it applies to dead animals as well
as living; and images may be illegal even if they are faked. Thus it may
be illegal to possess an image of a legal act. The first prosecutions
for bestiality pornography occurred in 2009.
Yet the ever-expanding vista of sexual exploration in the global
age comes at a time when procreation is no longer a sexual necessity
(or hazard); this equalizes sex acts and renders them all of approx-
imately equal value. With in vitro fertilization, when even vaginal
penetrative sex is no longer needed for conception, the need for
vaginal penetrative sex is no longer there, even if the desire remains.
401
But if sex between men and women is not calculated to produce

children, what is the difference in the value between vaginal
penetrative sex, lesbian oral sex, male–female sodomy, male–male
sodomy or the penetration of men by women using a strap-on
(called ‘pegging’)? It simply becomes a matter of choice which type
of non-procreative sex a person wants.
The end of the twentieth century heralded an era of global sex.
The ease of international travel and world commerce has eroded
national differences; cultures merge in the airport lounges, hotels
and shopping malls that make up the landscape of great cities in
countries from Iceland to Nairobi. The same sexual imagery is avail-
able for viewing online in any part of the world, be it from a village
cyber café in Siem Reap or a lavish home computer in the u.s. Forty
per cent of all traffic on the Internet has to do with sex and porn-
ography. It is not so much that the Internet has contributed to sex
in the twenty-first century; to a large extent it is sex. People who do
not know each other, and never will – except as a series of electronic
impulses – have cybersex, pretending to be what they are not: more
beautiful, richer or even a different gender. The Internet has facili-
tated the possibility of meeting up with like-minded people to share
similar preferences in cities all over the world. In virtually unregulated
Internet traffic, the only boundaries are those which users place
on themselves from time to time: whether today it will be s&M sex;
whether today they will be gay or straight, male or female.
Only so much can be covered in one book, and the history of
sexual perversion is still in its infancy. Greater exploration and dis-
cussion is needed about sexual diversity, both in history and in the
contemporary world, if we are to understand how and why sexual
activities and sexuality have emerged in the ways they have, and how
we are to get rid of prejudices against individuals with sexual desires
that are different from our own. This book is but a small offering to
equal rights in the hope of the creation of a less phobic world.
402
references
Introduction
1 See section on ‘Problems with the Current Diagnostic Criteria’, in
Sexual Deviance: Theory, Assessment and Treatment, ed. D. Richard
Laws and William T. O’Donohue (New York, 1997), p. 4.
1 Taking it Straight
1 The current sociological argument is that heterosexuality is a
learned behaviour, not a natural occurrence. A hetero–homosexual
binary exists, but this framework also categorizes types of
heterosexual behaviour in a hierarchical way. As Ingraham argues,
‘Thinking straight is understanding heterosexuality as naturally
occurring and not as an extensively social arrangement or means
for distributing power and wealth.’ For a more in-depth sociological
understanding of the development of heterosexuality, see Chrys
Ingraham, Thinking Straight: The Power, the Promise and the
Paradox of Heterosexuality (London, 2005).
2 Pseudo-Demosthenes, ‘Oration’, Against Nerea, 59.122.
3 Wilhelm Adolf Bekker, Charicles; or, Illustrations of the Private Life
of the Greeks (London, 1866), p. 463. Although this is not entirely
true as some Roman women have been found to exercise a good
deal of financial independence in practice; see for example Suzanne
Dixon, Reading Women (London, 2003).
4 Suetonius, Tiberius, 43–44; David Mountfield, Greek and Roman
Erotica (Fribourg, 1982), pp. 43.
5 King Priam had many children born of consorts, according to
Homer’s Iliad, but by the classical period, having a concubine
and a wife under the same roof was ruled out; see Susan Lape,
‘Heterosexuality’, in A Cultural History of Sexuality, vol. i: In the
Classical World, ed. Mark Golden and Peter Toohey (London, 2011),
p. 18.
403
6 John Younger, ‘Sexual Variations: Sexual Peculiarities of the

Ancient Greeks and Romans’, in A Cultural History of Sexuality,
vol. i: In the Classical World, ed. Golden and Toohey, i, pp. 71–3.
7 It must be noted that not all the works ascribed to Hippocrates
were actually written by him. Helen King, ‘Sex, Medicine and
Disease’, in A Cultural History of Sexuality, vol. i: In the Classical
World, quoting Virgil 8.468l. See also Helen King, Hippocrates’
Woman: Reading the Female Body in Ancient Greece (London,
1998); and Helen King, ed., Health in Antiquity (London, 2005).
8 Hippocrates, On the Diseases of Women, Book 1.
9 Aristotle, Generation of Animals, 1, 1, 730a25.
10 These ideas were circulating at least as late as the seventeenth
century; see Helkiah Crook, Misocosmographia (London, 1615),
p. 216.
11 Peter Lewis Allen, The Wages of Sin (Chicago, il, 2000), p. 11.
12 John Davenport, Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs (London,
1869).
13 See Virginia Burrus, The Sex Lives of the Saints: An Erotics of
Ancient Hagiography (Philadelphia, Pa, 2004), pp. 12–13; Joyce
Salisbury, Church Fathers, Independent Virgins (London, 1991).
14 St Augustine, De bono coniugali, c. 1 (Pl 40, 373); c. 3, n. 3
(Pl 40, 375).
15 St Jerome, Against Jovinian, quoted in Vern L. Bullough and James
A. Brundage, Handbook of Medieval Sexuality (New York and
London, 1996), p. 86.
16 See Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica, article 1, 12.
17 Louise M. Sylvester, Medieval Romance and the Construction of
Heterosexuality (Basingstoke, 2008).
18 Pierre Bayle, Letters of Abelard and Heloise, trans. John Hughes, at
www.gutenberg.org.
19 See Judith M. Bennett, ‘Writing Fornication: Medieval Leyrwrite
and its Historians’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, xiii
(2003), pp. 131–62; quote from Faramerz Dabhoiwala, The Origins of
Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution (London, 2012), p. 10.
20 Martin Luther, ‘The Estate of Marriage’, trans. Walther I. Brandt, in
Luther’s Works, vol. xlv (Philadelphia, Pa, 1962), 9.13.
21 According to Lawrence Stone, the shift from parental decision-
making to a couple’s own choice in marriage had already taken
place by 1660, except among the highest ranks of aristocracy:
Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England,
1500–1800 (London, 1977), p. 183.
22 Thompson mentions around 400 cases of wife sales: see
E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (Harmondsworth, 1993),
404
references
pp. 404–62; Pro, National Archives, Kew, ho27/1 Criminal Register

for England and Wales 1805.
23 For examples see Julie Peakman, Lascivious Bodies: A Sexual
History of the Eighteenth Century (New York, 2005), pp. 46–72;
and Julie Peakman, Mighty Lewd Books: The Development of
Pornography in Eighteenth-century England (London, 2003).
24 See Julie Peakman, Whore Biographies, 1700–1825 (London, 2008).
25 Jonathan Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality (Chicago, il, 2007),
p. 17.
26 Quoted ibid., p. 86.
27 R. J. Brodie and Co., The Secret Companion: A Medical Work on
Onanism or Self-Pollution [1845] (London, 1985), p. 37; Richard
Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, reprint of 12th
edn [1903] (Berkeley, ca, 1999), p. 15. This is the edition used
throughout.
28 Others, such as H. J. Löwenstein in 1823, Joseph Häussler in 1826 and
Heinrich Kaan in 1844, all made early contributions to the subject.
29 Harry Ooserhuis, ‘Richard Von Krafft-Ebing’s Step-children of
Nature’, in Sexualities in History, ed. Kim M. Phillips and Barry
Reay (London, 2002), pp. 271–91.
30 ‘Foreword’, in Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, p. xxi.
31 Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, p. 418.
32 Ibid., pp. 420–21.
33 Chris White, ed., Nineteenth-century Writings in Homosexuality
(London, 1999), pp. 66–7.
34 Quoted in Chushichi Tsuzuki, Edward Carpenter, 1844–1929:
Prophet of Human Fellowship (Cambridge, 1980), p. 72.
35 Havelock Ellis, My Life (London and Toronto, 1940), p. 269; see also
Phyllis Grosskurth, Havelock Ellis: A Biography (New York, 1985).
36 Ellis, My Life, p. 289.
37 Kinsey dedicated Sexual Behavior in the Human Male ‘to the 12,000
people who have contributed to this data’; and dedicated his Sexual
Behavior in the Human Female ‘to the nearly 8,000 females who
contributed to the data on which this book is based’.
38 As well as my own research below, see Liz Stanley, Sex Surveyed,
1949–1994 (London, 1995).
39 ‘A British Sex Survey’, File Report 3110b, Mass Observation Records
(Mo), University of Sussex Archives.
40 Mo, diary of female teacher born in 1891, living in Chepstow,
Monmouth, Wales, 1941.
41 Mo, diary 5010, 1939, Image 20, p. 36.
42 Ibid., Image 25, p. 48.
405
2 From Onanism to Spending

1 See Rachel Maines, The Technology of Orgasm (New York, 1998),
but her ideas have been criticized: see Lesley Hall, ‘Maines’
Martyrdom and Vibratory Censorship’ (July 1999), at www.
lesleyahall.net; and Helen King, see reference 4 below.
2 Frig: ‘To move about restlessly. To agitate the body or limbs; to
rub, chafe’: Oxford English Dictionary. In one eighteenth-century
case, the word was used when one young boy reported that an
older man had attempted to seduce him, the man asked him if
‘I never frigged myself.’ The boy confessed, ‘I did not know what it
meant’ – but then denial, in this case, was of course to his benefit,
since sodomitical acts were still a capital crime. The word became
more commonly used in the nineteenth century. Randolph
Trumbach, Sex and the Gender Revolution (Chicago, il, 1998), p. 59.
3 Plutarch, Morals, 1044b.
4 Helen King, ‘Sex, Medicine and Disease’, in A Cultural History of
Sexuality, vol. i: In the Classical World, ed. Mark Golden and Peter
Toohey (London, 2011), pp. 107–24; Helen King, Hippocrates’
Woman: Reading the Female Body in Ancient Greece (London,
1998), pp. 221, 233; Helen King, ‘Galen and the Widow: Towards
a History of Therapeutic Masturbation in Ancient Gynaecology’,
EuGeStA: Journal on Gender Studies in Antiquity, i (2011), pp. 205–35.
5 King, Hippocrates’ Woman, pp. 221, 233; King, ‘Galen and the
Widow’, pp. 205–35.
6 King, ‘Sex, Medicine and Disease’, p. 113.
7 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, ii–iiae, q. 154 a. 11 co. (in Latin).
8 Walter O. Bockting and Eli Coleman, eds, ‘Masturbation as a
Means of Achieving Sexual Health’, Journal of Psychology of Human
Sexuality, xiv/2–3 (2002), pp. 5–18.
9 Pierre Hurteau, ‘Catholic Moral Discourse on Male Sodomy and
Masturbation in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’,
Journal of the History of Sexuality, iv/1 (July 1993), pp. 1–26.
10 Quoted in Jean Stengers and Anne Van Neck, Masturbation:
The History of a Great Terror (Basingstoke, 2001), p. 19.
11 David Stevenson, ‘Recording the Unspeakable: Masturbation in the
Diary of William Drummond, 1657–1659’, Journal of the History of
Sexuality, ix/3–4 (July 2000), pp. 234–9.
12 Ibid.
13 Peter Wagner, Eros Revived: Erotica and the Enlightenment in
England and America (London, 1998), p. 11.
14 Laurence Stone, Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800
(London, 1977), p. 513.
406
references
15 On Beggar’s Benison, see Julie Peakman, Lascivious Bodies:

A Sexual History of the Eighteenth Century (New York, 2005),
pp. 129–47; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions, quoted in Vernon
A. Rosario, The Erotic Imagination: French Histories of Perversities,
(London, 1997), p. 3
16 Nicolas Venette, Tableau de L’amour [1686] (London, 1818), p. 134;
‘La femme n’a pas la puissance de se polluer comme l’homme, ni de
se décharger de la semence superflue: elle la garde quelquefois fort
longtemps dans ses testicules ou dans les cornes de sa matrice, où
elle se corrompt et devient jaune, trouble, ou puante, de blanche et
de claire qu’elle étoit auparavant.’
17 Roy Porter and Lesley Hall, Facts of Life: The Creation of Sexual
Knowledge in Britain, 1650–1950 (New Haven, cT, and London,
1995), pp. 6–7.
18 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy [1621] (London, 1855),
p. 555.
19 Jean-Paul Guillebaud, The Tyranny of Pleasure (New York, 1998),
p. 178.
20 Peter Wagner, Erotica and the Enlightenment (Frankfurt, 1991),
pp. 17–19.
21 Tom Laqueur, Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation
(New York, 2003), p. 32.
22 Stolberg also argues that the date previously assumed by historians
of 1710 is incorrect and the correct date is 1716. I have used the
date as given in the British Library catalogue. Michael Stolberg,
‘Self-pollution, Moral Reform, and the Venereal Trade: Notes on
the Sources and Historical Content of Onania (1716)’, Journal of
the History of Sexuality, ix/1–2 (January–April 2000), pp. 37–61;
Peter Wagner, ‘The Veil of Medicine and Morality: Some
Pornographic Aspects of the Onania’, Eighteenth-Century Studies,
v (1983), pp. 179–84; ‘A Clergyman’, Onania; or, The Heinous Sin
of Self-pollution, and All Its Frightful Consequences in Both Sexes
Considered with Spiritual and Physical Advice to Those Who
Have Already Injured Themselves by this Abominable Practice
and Seasonable Admonition to the Youth of the Nation of Both
Sexes, 8th edn (London, 1723).
23 MacDonald believed this eighteenth-century book to have been
pivotal in altering thinking about masturbation, whereby the act
came to be seen as a cause of mental and physical disability.
He asserts that its author had been influenced by Jen Frederick
Osterwald, The Nature of Uncleanliness (1707). Robert H.
MacDonald, ‘The Frightful Consequences of Onanism: Notes
on the “History of a Delusion”’, Journal of the History of Ideas,
407
xxviii/3 (July–September 1967), pp. 423–31. Lancashire physician

Edward Baynard also advocated cold baths.
24 ‘A Clergyman’, Onania.
25 Onanism Display’d was another anonymous pamphlet, the only
copy being the second edition kept in the National Library of
Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland.
26 Robert James, A Medical Dictionary (London, 1743–5), vol. i,
pp. 153–63.
27 Critical Review, xviii (1760), pp. 304–05.
28 Paul-Gabriel Boucé, ‘Imagination, Pregnant Women and Monsters
in Eighteenth-century England and France’, in Sexual Underworlds
in the Enlightenment, ed. George Rousseau and Roy Porter (Chapel
Hill, nc, 1988), pp. 86–100.
29 Laqueur has suggested that the sudden eruption of anxiety about
masturbation in the eighteenth century was because it became
related to the imagination, privacy and solitude, yet desire was at
the heart of the commercial system. Masturbation was therefore a
threat. The question was ‘whether sociability, or indeed any form of
public virtue, could survive the frenzy of private desire and private
gain’. But this is perhaps an over-complication – the issue was
always about self-control throughout history, just that now it was
new medics rather than old clerics who were setting the standards.
Laqueur, Solitary Sex, p. 277.
30 S.A.D. Tissot, Onanism; or, A Treatise Upon the Disorders Produced
by Masturbation (London, 1766), pp. 41–2.
31 Rousseau cites various French editions, two in 1771; one each in
1772, 1778 and 1784; a French edition that appeared as ‘Published
in London’, 1789; and two English translations for 1775 and c. 1840;
G. S. Rousseau, ‘Nymphomania, Bienville and the Rise of Erotic
Sensibility’, in Sexuality in Eighteenth-century Britain, ed. Paul-
Gabriel Boucé (Manchester, 1982), pp. 95–119. I have found eight
French-language copies and three English copies in the British
Library catalogue, one for 1775 and two for 1840; I have used the
former. Another English language copy for 1766 has been destroyed.
There is also one Italian and one German edition for 1760.
32 Ibid., p. 50.
33 M.D.T. Bienville, Nymphomania, or, a Dissertation Concerning the
Furor Uterinus (London, 1775), p. 36. Tissot met with Rousseau and
was aware of his novel Emile, and the physician sent him a copy of
his own treatise.
34 Peter Lewis Allen, The Wages of Sin: Sex and Disease (Chicago, il,
2002), p. 97.
35 Benjamin Rush, Medical Inquiries and Observations Upon the
408
references
Diseases of the Mind (Philadelphia, Pa, 1812).

36 Dictionnaire des sciences médicales, xiii, 2nd edn (Paris, 1878), p. 732.
37 Allen, Wages of Sin, p. 97.
38 Reveillé-Parise, Revue medicale française et étrangère, iii (1828),
p. 98.
39 Dr J. B. Fonssagrives, L’Education physique des garçons (Paris,
1890), pp. 302, 313.
40 For a more in-depth look at French attitudes, see Stengers and
Van Neck, Masturbation, pp. 1–36.
42 Lallemand, A Practical Treatise on the Causes, Symptoms, and
Treatment of Spermatorrhoea, trans. and ed. H. J. McDougall, 2nd
edn (London, 1847), p. 2.
43 See Lesley A. Hall’s assessment in her article ‘Forbidden by God,
Despised by Men: Masturbation, Medical Warnings, Moral Panic,
and Manhood in Great Britain, 1850–1950’, Journal of the History of
Sexuality, ii/3, Special Issue, Part 2: The State, Society, and the
Regulation of Sexuality in Modern Europe (January 1992), pp. 365–87.
44 Michael S. Patton, ‘Masturbation from Judaism to Victorianism’,
Journal of Religion and Health, xxiv/2 (1985), pp. 133–46.
45 Samuel Bayard Woodward, ‘Remarks on Masturbation: Insanity
produced by Masturbation; Effections of Masturbation with Cases’,
Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, xii (1835).
46 P. R. Neuman, ‘Masturbation and Madness, and the Modern
Concept of Childhood and Adolescence’, Journal of Social History,
viii/3 (Spring 1975), pp. 1–27.
47 Quoted ibid.
48 Priscilla Barker, The Secret Book: Containing Information and
Instruction for Young Women and Girls (Brighton, 1889), p. 25.
49 Alan Hunt, ‘The Great Masturbation Panic and the Discourse of
Moral Regulation in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-century
Britain’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, viii/4 (1998),
pp. 575–615.
50 Ibid.
51 Joseph William Howe, Excessive Venery, Masturbation and
Continence (London, 1883), p. 63.
52 Edward Kirk, Talk with Boys About Themselves (London, 1905),
p. 3.
53 Robert Anderson, ‘Speech at a Purity Rally’, Alliance of Honour
Record (January 1911), quoted in Hunt, ‘Great Masturbation’,
p. 203.
54 J. H. Kellogg, Md, Plain Facts for Old and Young: Embracing the
Natural History and Hygiene of Organic Life (Burlington, ia, 1892).
409
55 Alfred Kinsey et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human Male

(Philadelphia, Pa, 1948), p. 499; Sexual Behavior in the Human
Female (Philadelphia, Pa, 1953), p. 142; Michael S. Patten,
‘Twentieth-century Attitudes to Masturbation’, Journal of Health
and Religion (1986), pp. 291–302.
56 John Hunter, A Treatise on Venereal Disease (London, 1786), p. 200.
57 Sir James Paget, ‘Sexual Hypochondriasis’, Clinical Lectures and
Essays (London, 1879), p. 292.
58 Ralcy H. Bell, Self-amusement and its Spectres (New York, 1929), p. 39.
59 M. Gerressu, C. H. Mercer, C. A. Graham, K. Wellings and A. M.
Johnson, ‘Prevalence of Masturbation and Associated Factors in a
British National Probability Survey’, Archives of Sexual Behavior
(2007), http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/198459.
3 From Ganymedes to Gays

1 D. Halperin, ‘Sex Before Sexuality’, in Hidden from History, ed.
M. Duberman, M. Vicinus, M. and C. Chauncey (London, 1989),
p. 39. This theory has been queried by Simon LeVay, who wrote, ‘It
seems to me quite artificial to make the existence of homosexuality
dependent on the coinage of a term to describe it.’ In LeVay’s view,
people can formulate the concept of homosexuality without the
word, and even the ability to formulate the concept is irrelevant
to the existence or nonexistence of homosexuality; see his Queer
Science: The Use and Abuse of Research into Homosexuality
(Cambridge, Ma, 1996), pp. 56, 297. Broader coverage of the social
constructionism versus essentialism debate has been covered in
Edward Stein, ed., Forms of Desire: Sexual Orientation and the
Social Construction Controversy (London, 1990).
2 This simplistic version of the older penetrator and the receptive
youth has been questioned by James Davidson, The Greeks and
Greek Love (London, 2007). He believes that there was much more
variety of relationships between men than previously thought.
3 Aeschylus, Myrmidons, fr. 135 Radt.
4 Plato, Symposium, 178a–180b; Homer, Iliad, 11.78b; W. M. Clarke,
‘Achilles and Patroclus in Love’, Hermes, 106 (1978), pp. 381–9.
5 Aristotle, Physiognomonica, 808a12–6.
6 Suetonius, Galba, 22, in Roman Sexualities, trans. and ed. Judith
Hallett and Marilyn B. Skinner (Princeton, nj, 1997), p. 56.
7 St Peter Damian, Rule 15, Book of Gomorrah [c. 1048] (Waterloo,
Ontario, 1982).
8 See articles by Bernd-Ulrich Hergemöller, ‘The Middle Ages’, and
Helmut Puff, ‘Early Modern Europe, 1400–1700’, in Gay Life and
410
references
Culture: A World History, ed. Robert Aldrich (London, 2006),

pp. 57–77 and 79–102.
9 This was written by Geoffrey le Baker of Swinbrook, c. 1350. Stowe
in his Annales (1605) and Stubbs in 1883 both believed that Baker’s
Chronicon was a translation into Latin of a French chronicle by
Thomas de la More, one of Baker’s patrons. More was witness to
Edward’s deposition but not his death. No one knows what actually
happened; just that Edward was murdered. Rumours about his
death continued to abound, especially after Marlowe’s play about
the king. G. P. Cuttino and Thomas W. Lyman, ‘Where is Edward
ii?’, Speculum, liii/3 (July 1978), pp. 522–44.
10 Hergemöller, ‘The Middle Ages’, pp. 66, 70.
11 Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male
Culture in Renaissance Florence (Oxford, 1996), p. 24.
12 Hergemöller, ‘The Middle Ages’, p. 74
13 Helmutt Puff, ‘Early Modern Europe, 1400–1700’, p. 87.
14 Titus Oates was a renegade Anglican priest who accused the
Catholic Church of a plot to assassinate Charles ii, assisted by
Thomas Osborne, the Earl of Danby. Oates had been expelled from
a couple of colleges, probably for sodomy – the case would have
been known to readers. Rictor Norton, ed., ‘The He-Strumpets,
1707–10’, in Homosexuality in Eighteenth-century England:
A Sourcebook (1 December 1999, updated 15 June 2008), at www.
rictornorton.co.uk; also Rictor Norton, Mother Clap’s Molly House:
The Gay Subculture in England, 1700–1830 (Stroud, 2006), p. 19.
15 A. D. Harvey, ‘Prosecutions for Sodomy in England at the
Beginning of the Nineteenth Century’, Historical Journal, xxi
(1978), pp. 939–48; Netta Murray Goldsmith, The Worst of Crimes:
Homosexuality and the Law in Eighteenth-century London
(Aldershot, 1998).
16 Samuel Pepys, diary entry for 1 July 1663.
17 Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (New York, 1982),
p. 48.
18 John Dunton, The He-Strumpets: A Satyr on the Sodomite Club
(1707). No edition survives, but it is included in Dunton,
Athenianism (1710). He refers on p. 96 to ‘Jermain, late Clerk of St
Dunstan’s in the East, who being charg’d with S—d—y, cut his
Throat with a Razor.’ Dunton is actually talking about a mass arrest
of sodomites in 1707, but it seems he made a mistake, and is misre-
membering an event from 1701 in his reference to Jermain. Jermain
and Germain are of course synonymous. There is no trial record
because the man never went to trial. My thanks to Rictor Norton,
who kindly supplied this information.
411
19 Tim Hitchcock, Robert Shoemaker, Clive Emsley, Sharon Howard

and Jamie McLaughlin et al., The Old Bailey Proceedings Online,
1674–1913, www.oldbaileyonline.org, ref. t17211206–20 and
t17220228-18, accessed 20 February 2009.
20 Norton, ‘He-Strumpets’, p. 107; see Old Bailey Proceedings Online,
ref. t17350522–38; Henry Wolf, Sexual Offences, assault with
sodomitical intent, 22 May 1735.
21 Norton, ‘He-Strumpets’, p. 107.
22 Trumbach argues that before 1700, most sexual relations
which took place between men were in relationships where the
passive partners were boys or permanent transvestites; by 1700,
the situation had changed and adult men were meeting together
in parks, in latrines and in taverns throughout the major cities
in Europe. They recognized each other with slight indications
of the head, or through verbal codes and signals; Randolph
Trumbach, ‘Prostitution’, in A Cultural History of Sexuality,
vol. iv: In the Enlightenment, ed. Julie Peakman (London, 2011),
pp. 183–202.
23 Michel Rey, ‘Parisian Homosexuals Create a Lifestyle, 1700–1750:
The Police Archives’, Eighteenth-century Life, ix (1985), pp. 179–91.
For further insight into homosexuality in France, see the collection
of essays in Jeffrey Merrick and Michael Sibalis, eds, Homosexuality
in French History and Culture (London and Oxford, 2001).
24 Michel Rey, ‘Police and Sodomy in Eighteenth-century Paris: From
Sin to Disorder’, in Male Homosexuality in Renaissance and
Enlightenment Europe, ed. Kent Gerard and Gert Hekma (London,
1989), pp. 129–46.
25 Quoted ibid.
26 Theo van der Meer, ‘The Persecution of Sodomites in Eighteenth-
century Amsterdam’, in Male Homosexuality, ed. Gerard and
Hekma, pp. 263–307. ‘Between 1730 and 1811, at least two hundred
and twenty-eight men and women, suspected of sodomy, sodomiti-
cal acts or of compliancy, stood trial in 236 cases’ (p. 264).
27 The event has been meticulously documented by Norton in Mother
Clap’s Molly House, pp. 54–7.
28 Polly Morris, ‘Sodomy and Male Honor; The Case of Somerset,
1740–1850’, in Male Homosexuality, ed. Gerard and Hekma,
pp. 383–406.
29 H. G. Cocks, Nameless Offences: Homosexual Desire in the
Nineteenth Century (London, 2003), p. 7.
30 Jonathan Katz, Love Stories (Chicago, il, 2001), p. 194.
31 This quote is attributed to Dr Charles E. Nammack, police surgeon
of New York, speaking about perverts, homosexuals and child
412
references
molesters (he did not appear to differentiate between them).

E. B. Foote Md, HomeCyclopedia: Popular Medical, Social and
Sexual Science [1901] (London, 1912), p. 652.
32 William James, Principles of Psychology, ii, p. 439.
33 Ellis quoting Albert Moll’s The Sexual Life of a Child (New York
1919), chap. 4 in Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex
(New York, 1942), vol. i, Book iv, ‘Sexual Inversion in Men’, p. 80.
34 Ibid., p. 77.
35 Matt Houlbrook, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual
Metropolis, 1918–1957 (Chicago, il, 2005), p. 60.
36 Ibid., p. 97.
37 Ibid., p. 1.
38 Ibid., p. 185
4 From Female Friendships to Lipstick Lesbians

1 See Alison Oram and Annmarie Turnbull, The Lesbian History
Sourcebook: Love and Sex Between Women in Britain from 1780
to 1970 (London, 2001); Judith Bennett has argued for a search
for ‘lesbian-like’ behaviour as a way to try and understand poorly
documented female same-sex desire in medieval history, since
there is often no outright proof. Judith Bennett, ‘“Lesbian-Like”
and the Social History of Lesbians’, Journal of the History of
Sexuality, ix/1–2 (January–April 2000), pp. 1–24.
2 Fragment no. 82. For female homosexuality in the Greek world,
see Bernadette Brooten, Love Between Women: Early Christian
Responses to Female Eroticism (Chicago, il, 1996), pp. 29–186;
N. S. Rabinowitz and L. Auanger, eds, Among Women: From the
Homosocial to the Homoerotic (Austin, Tx, 2002); Martin E. Kilmer,
Greek Erotica on Attic Red-figure Vases (London, 1993), pp. 26–30.
See also Daniel Ogden ‘Homosexuality’, in A Cultural History of
Sexuality, vol. i: In the Classical World, ed. Mark Golden and Peter
Toohey (London, 2011), pp. 37–54.
3 Plutarch, Lycurgus, 18.4; Sarah Pomeroy, Spartan Women (Oxford,
2002), pp. 29, 136, 165.
4 Lucian, Dialogues of the Courtesans: Meret: 5; Kate Gilhuly,
‘The Phallic Lesbian: Philosophy, Comedy and Social Inversion
in Lucian’s Dialogue of the Courtesans’, in Prostitutes and
Courtesans in the Ancient World, ed. Christopher A. Faraone
and Laura K. McClure (Madison, wi, 2006), pp. 274–91;
see also Seneca, Epistles, 95.21.
5 Sister Wilfrid Parsons, trans., Fathers of the Church: Saint
Augustine: Letters (Washington, dc, 1956), Letter 211, p. 50; see
413
Bernadette Brooten, Love Between Women: Early Christian

Responses to Female Eroticism (Chicago, il, 1996), pp. 350–51.
6 John Boswell, Marriage of Likeness: Same-sex Unions in Pre-modern
Europe (London, 1994), p. 244.
7 Burchard of Worms, cols. 924, 967–8. See Robert Mills,
‘Homosexuality: Specters of Sodom’, in A Cultural History of
Sexuality, vol. ii: In the Middle Ages ed. Ruth Evans (London, 2011),
pp. 56–79.
8 Helmut Puff, ‘Female Sodomy: The Trial of Katherina Hertzdorfer
(1477)’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, xxx/1 (2000),
pp. 41–61.
9 Julie Peakman, Lascivious Bodies: A Sexual History of the Eighteenth
Century (London, 2004), pp. 181–4; the full case is described in
Judith Brown, ‘Lesbian Sexuality in Renaissance Italy: The Case of
Sister Benedetta Carlini’, Signs (Summer 1984), pp. 751–8.
10 Helmut Puff, ‘Homosexuality: A Beast with Many Backs’, in
A Cultural History of Sexuality, vol. iii: In the Renaissance, ed. Bette
Talvacchia (London, 2011), p. 70.
11 William Henry Whitmore, The Colonial Laws of Massachusetts:
Reprinted from the Edition of 1660, With the Supplements to 1672:
Containing Also, the Body of Liberties of Fred B. Rothman & Co.
(Boston, Ma, 1889).
12 George Androutsos, ‘Hermaphroditism in Greek and Roman
Antiquity’, Hormones, v/3 (2006), p. 214; James Diggle, Characters
by Theophrastus (Cambridge, 2004), p. 366; George Androutsos,
Aristidis Diamantis, Lazaros Vladimiros, Emmanouil Magiorkinis,
‘Bisexuality in Ancient Greek-Roman Society’, International Journal
of Medicine, i/2 (April–June 2008), p. 67. For an excellent assess-
ment of hermaphrodites in history, see Alice Domurat Dreger,
Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex (Cambridge, Ma,
1998).
13 Vern L. Bullough and Bonnie Bullough, Cross-dressing, Sex, and
Gender (Philadelphia, Pa, 1993), p. 29.
14 Kathleen P. Long, Hermaphrodites in Renaissance Europe
(Farnham, Surrey, 2006); Ruth Gilbert, Early Modern
Hermaphrodites (Basingstoke, 2002); Ambroise Paré (1510–1590),
On Monsters and Marvels (Chicago, il, 1982); Casper Bauhin,
De hermaphroditorum monstrosorumque partuum naturae (1614).
15 Jane Sharp, The Midwives’ Book; or, The Whole Art of Midwifery
Discovered Directing Childbearing Women How to Behave
Themselves in Their Conception, Breeding, Bearing and Children
(London, 1671), pp. 40–42.
16 Ibid., p. 40.
414
references
17 James Parsons, A Mechanical and Critical Enquiry into the Nature of

Hermaphrodites (London, 1741), pp. 13–14, 21.
18 Alan Bray, The Friend (Chicago, il, 2003), p. 220.
19 Henry Fielding, The Female Husband: or the Surprising History of
Mrs Mary, alias George Hamilton (London, 1746). This was a 23-
page pamphlet priced at sixpence.
20 These cases and others are described in Peakman, Lascivious
Bodies, pp. 174–200; and Emma Donoghue, Passions Between
Women: British Lesbian Culture, 1668–1801 (London, 1993).
21 Ophelia Field, Sarah, the Duchess of Marlborough: The Queen’s
Favourite (London, 2002)
22 Helen Whitbread, ed., I Know My Own Heart: The Diaries of Ann
Lister, 1791–1840 (New York, 1992), p. 201.
23 Denis Diderot, Memoirs of a Nun, trans. Francis Birrell (London,
1992), p. 129.
24 These cases have been uncovered by Theo van der Meer, ‘Tribades
on Trial: Female Same-sex Offenders in Late Eighteenth-century
Amsterdam’, in Forbidden History: The State, Society and the
Regulation of Sexuality in Modern Europe, ed. John C. Fout
(Chicago, il, 1992), pp. 189–210.
25 Edward Carpenter, Love’s Coming of Age (London, 1915),
pp. 114–34.
26 Nelljean McConeghey Rice, A New Matrix for Modernism: A Study
of the Lives and Poetry of Charlotte Mew and Anna Wikham
(London, 2003), p. 35.
27 Penelope Fitzgerald, Charlotte Mew and Her Friends (London,
1984), pp. 137, 108.
28 Leila J. Rupp, ‘Loving Women in the Modern World’, in Gay Life
and Culture: A World History, ed. Robert Aldrich (London, 2006),
pp. 223–47, 234.
29 New York Times, 26 January 1892.
30 Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex [1897] (New York,
1942), Book iv, Sexual Inversion, p. 201.
31 Ali Coffignon, Paris vivant: La Corruption à Paris (Paris, 1889),
p. 301.
32 Ellis, Sexual Inversion, pp. 250–51.
33 Ibid., p. 256.
34 Robert Latou Dickinson and Lura Beam, The Single Woman:
A Medical Study in Sex Education (London, 1934), p. 212.
35 For more on the New Woman, see Angelique Richardson and Chris
Willis, eds, The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact: Fin-de-siècle
Feminisms (London, 2001); Sally Ledger, The New Woman, Fiction
and Feminism at the Fin-de-siècle (Manchester, 1997).
415
36 Diana Southami, Wild Girls: Paris, Sappho and Art: The Lives
of Natalie Barney and Romaine Brookes (London, 2004).
37 Women’s Life, 10 January 1920.
38 Alison Oram, Her Husband Was a Woman: Women’s
Gender-crossing in Modern British Popular Culture (London, 2007).
39 Hansard Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons, 5th series,
cxlv, 1804–5.
40 Nigel Nicholson, Portrait of a Marriage (London, 1974), pp. 106–7.
41 Lesbian Herstory Educations Foundation pamphlet from The
Archives, ‘Radclyffe Hall’s 1934 Letter about The Well of Loneliness’
(New York, 1994), p. 2.
42 Sunday Express (19 August 1928), p. 10.
43 Frank Caprio, Variations in Sexual Behaviour (London, 1957),
pp. 160–61; Frank Caprio, Female Homosexuality: A Psychodynamic
Study of Lesbianism (New York, 1954), p. viii. Others were in a
greement; according to Dr William G. Niederland, many lesbians
suffered from a masculinity complex that could lead to serious
difficulties if left unchecked. He suggested psychoanalysis as
the answer.
44 Caprio, Variations, p. 177.
45 Eric Oakley, Sex and Sadism Throughout the Ages (London, 1965),
p. 43.
46 Margaret Otis, ‘A Perversion Not Commonly Noted’, Journal of
Abnormal Psychology, viii/2 (1913), pp. 113–16.
47 Bernard Hollander, The Psychology of Misconduct, Vice and Crime
(London, 1922), pp. 141, 144; C. Esther Hodge, A Woman-oriented
Woman (West Sussex, 1989), pp. 26–8.
48 Oram and Turnbull, Lesbian History Sourcebook, p: 212; Alkarim
Jivani, It’s Not Unusual: A History of Lesbian and Gay Britain in the
Twentieth Century (London, 1997), pp. 71–2.
49 See ‘One Million Moms Drops Protest Against Ellen Degeneres
and JC Penney’, 8 March 2012, www.gossipcop.com.
5 From Transvestites to Transsexuals

1 Herodotus, Histories, 5.10; John Younger, ‘Sexual Variations: Sexual
Peculiarities of the Ancient Greeks and Romans’, in A Cultural
History of Sexuality, vol. i: In the Classical World, ed. Mark Golden
and Peter Toohey (London, 2011), pp. 80–83.
2 Mary M. Innes, trans., The Metamorphoses of Ovid [1955]
(Harmondsworth, 1961), p. 315.
3 Martijn Icks, The Crimes of Elagabalus: The Life and Legacy of
Rome’s Decadent Boy Emperor (London, 2011), p. 99.
416
references
4 Ibid.
5 Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, Nero, 28.
6 Elaine Bradtke et al., Truculent Rustics: Molly Dancing in East
Anglia Before 1940 (London, 2000). For further discussions and
examples of cross-dressing, see Vern and Bonnie Bullough, Cross-
dressing, Sex and Gender (Philadelphia, Pa, 1993); Marjorie Garber,
Vested Interests: Cross-dressing and Cultural Anxiety (London,
1992).
7 Gregory of Tours, History of the Franks (Middlesex, 1974), p. 570;
reported in Nancy F. Partner, ‘No Sex, No Gender’, Speculum, lxvi-
ii (1993), pp. 419–43; see also ‘The Revolt of the Nuns at Poitiers’, in
the History Collection at http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu, accessed
17 June 2012.
8 Ibid.
9 Barbara Sher Tinsley, ‘Pope Joan Polemic in Early Modern France:
The Use and Disabuse of Myth’, Sixteenth Century Journal, xviii/3
(Autumn 1987), pp. 381–98.
10 See ‘Fifth Private Examination’, www.stjoan-center.com, accessed
5 April 2013.
11 Norwich Gazette (8–15 August 1741).
12 See Julie Peakman, Lascivious Bodies: A Sexual History of the
Eighteenth Century (London, 2004), pp. 174–200 and 219–35; and
Emma Donoghue, Passions Between Women: British Lesbian
Culture, 1668–1801 (London, 1993).
13 Theo Van der Meer, ‘The Persecutions of Sodomites in Eighteenth-
century Amsterdam: Changing Perceptions of Sodomy’, in The
Pursuit of Sodomy, ed. Kent Gerard and Gert Hekma (New York,
1989), p. 281. On the persecution of tribades and other similar cases
in the Netherlands, see Theo van der Meer, ‘Tribades on Trial:
Female Same-sex Offenders in Late Eighteenth-century
Amsterdam’, in Forbidden History: The State, Society and the
Regulation of Sexuality in Modern Europe, ed. John C. Fout
(Chicago, il, 1992), pp. 189–210.
14 See Peakman on D’Eon and De Choisy in Lascivious Bodies,
pp. 201–18.
15 Katherine M. Brown, ‘“Changed into the Fashion of a Man”:
The Politics of Sexual Difference in a Seventeenth-century
Anglo-American Settlement’, in The Devil’s Lane: Sex and Race
in the Early South, ed. Catherine Clinton and Michele Gillespie
(London, 1997), pp. 39–56; see also Wendy Lucas Castro,
‘Stripped: Clothing and Identity in Colonial Captivity Narratives’,
Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vi/1
(Spring 2008), pp. 104–36.
417
16 E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (London, 1991), p. 475.

17 The sense of ‘women’s clothing worn by a man’ is said to be 1870s
theatre slang, from the sensation of long skirts trailing on the floor;
or from Yiddish trogn ‘to wear’; or from German tragen, Online
Etymology Dictionary, www.etymonline.com, accessed 15 April 2013.
18 Matt Houlbrook, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual
Metropolis, 1918–1957 (Chicago, il, 2005), pp. 26, 80, 244–5.
19 From personal recollection of the 1970s and ’80s.
20 ‘Eddie Izzard: The Tough Transvestite Who Can Take Care of
Himself’, Independent (23 May 2004).
21 Dr Magnus Hirschfeld, Transvestites, trans. Michael A. Lombard-
Nash [1910] (New York, 1991), Case 3, p. 131.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid., Case 17, Case 13 and Case 19 respectively.
24 Ibid., Case 15, p. 99.
25 R. Blanchard, I. G. Racansky and Betty W. Steiner, ‘Phallometric
Detection of Fetishistic Arousal in Heterosexual Male Cross-
Dressers’, Journal of Sex Research, iv (22 November 1986),
pp. 452–62.
26 Hirschfeld, Transvestites, p. 187.
27 Ibid., p. 191.
28 Letter from TS [R An] to Harry Benjamin, 18 Mar 1969, Box 1, Series
iic, Harry Benjamin Collection, Kinsey Institute, Indianapolis.
Because of confidentiality, the names of the writers cannot be
specified.
29 Letter from TS [NA] to Harry Benjamin, 30 May 1969, Box 1, Series
iic, Folder 1, Harry Benjamin Collection, Kinsey Institute.
30 Letters from TS [HA] to Harry Benjamin, 16 October 1967–9 May
1968, Box 1, Series ii C, Harry Benjamin Collection, Kinsey Institute.
The letters are filed in alphabetical order.
31 Letter from TS [HeA] to Harry Benjamin, c. 12 April 1968, Box 1,
Series iic, Harry Benjamin Collection, Kinsey Institute.
32 Letter from TS [JA] to Harry Benjamin, c. February 1969, Box 1,
33 Ibid.
34 Letter from TS [HA] to Harry Benjamin, 27 January 1975, Box 1,
35 Christine Jorgensen, A Personal Biography (New York, 1967), p. 231.
36 Ibid.
37 Edythe Ferguson Transvestite Manuscript: 1951–55; Edythe
Ferguson Scrapbook, One Box, Kinsey Institute, Indianapolis.
38 See Lecture No. 15, ‘The Subtle Influence of Feminine Attire’,
Edythe Ferguson Scrapbook, One Box, Kinsey Institute.
418
references
39 Lecture No. 62, Edythe Ferguson Scrapbook, One Box, Kinsey Institute.
40 Ibid.
41 David Batty, ‘Mistaken Identity’, Guardian (31 July 2004).
42 Daily Telegraph (21 April 2010).
6 A Man’s Best Friend: Bestiality

1 Lucius Apuleius, Metamorphoses; or, The Golden Ass, Book x,
chaps 21 and 22; see also Priapea, trans. Leonard Smithers and
Richard Burton [1890] (London, 2007), p. 169; Ephraim Lytle,
‘Apuleius’ Metamorphoses and the Spurcum Additamentum
(10.21)’, Classical Philology, xcviii/4 (October 2003), pp. 349–65.
My thanks to Helen King for referring me to this article.
2 For these and various other bestial myths, see Robert Graves,
New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology (London, 1985).
3 Herodotus, The Histories, Book ii, 46.
4 Plutarch, Discourse on the Reason of Beasts, p. xvii.
5 Alexander, Work, 4:259.
6 Robert E. Lee Masters, The Hidden World of Erotica: Forbidden
Sexual Behaviour and Morality (London, 1973), p. 62.
7 Malcolm Jones, ‘Sex, Popular Beliefs and Culture’, in A Cultural
History of Sexuality, vol. ii: In the Middle Ages, ed. Ruth Evans
(London, 2011), pp. 139–40.
8 See Old Bailey Proceedings Online below; see also Julie Peakman,
Lascivious Bodies: A Sexual History of the Eighteenth Century (London,
2004), pp. 256–62, and Sexual Perversions (London, 2009), pp. 9–10, 16.
9 Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World (London, 1983); see The
Old Bailey Proceedings Online, 1674–1913, www.oldbaileyonline.org
for examples.
10 Case quoted in Midas Dekkers, Dearest Pet: On Bestiality
(London, 1994), p. 121.
11 See A. F. Niemoller, Bestiality and the Law, quoted in Masters,
The Hidden World of Erotica, p. 38.
12 Old Bailey Proceedings Online: ref. t16770711–1, accessed
26 December 2008.
13 Old Bailey Proceedings Online: ref. t17040426–42, accessed
26 December 2008.
14 William Naphy, Sex Crimes: From Renaissance to Enlightenment
(Stroud, 2002), pp. 157–77.
15 Old Bailey Proceedings Online: ref. t16770711–2 accessed
26 December 2008
16 Old Bailey Proceedings Online: ref. t17760417–28 , accessed
26 December 2008.
419
17 Jonas Liliequist, ‘Peasants Against Nature: Crossing the Boundaries

between Man and Animals in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-century
Sweden’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, i/3 (1999), pp. 393–423.
18 Governor John Winthrop, History of New England, 1630–1649
(Boston, Ma, 1825), ii, pp. 48–9. Winthrop was first governor of
Massachusetts Bay.
19 Whitehall Evening Post (13–15 October 1789); London Evening
Post (30 April 1772–2 May 1772).
20 Courier and Evening Gazette (23 July 1799); True Briton (27 July
1799) reports him as James Drewry (with a different spelling of his
surname).
21 Liliequist, ‘Peasants Against Nature’.
22 Bury and Norwich Post: Or Suffolk, Essex, Cambridge, Ely, and
Norfolk Telegraph (26 February 1823).
23 Bury and Norwich Post (31 March 1824).
24 ‘Summary of Prisoners for Trial at the York Assizes’, Hull Packet
and Original Weekly Commercial, Literary and General
Advertiser (14 March 1826).
25 Morning Post (31 August 1830); Liverpool Mercury (16 August 1833).
26 Jacob de Bondt, Historiae naturalis et medicae Indiae orientalis
(1631).
27 Ambroise Paré, On Monsters and Marvels [c. 1510], trans. Janis
L. Pallister (Chicago, il, 1982), pp. 67–8.
28 Sir Richard Manningham, An exact Diary of what was observ’d
during a close attendance upon M Toft, the pretended Rabbet-
Breeder of Godalming in Surrey, from Nov 28 to Dec 7 following
Together with an account of her confession of the fraud (London,
1726), pp. 16–17; A philosophical enquiry into the wonderful Coney-
Warren, lately discovered at Godalming near Guildford, being an
account of the birth of seventeen rabbits born of a woman [Mary
Toft] at several times, and who still continues in strong labour, at
the Bagnio in Leicester Fields (London, 1726); J. Shaw, ‘Mary Toft,
Religion and National Memory in Eighteenth-century England’,
Journal for Eighteenth-century Studies, xxxii/3 (2009), pp. 321–38.
29 G. S. Rousseau, ‘Imagination, Pregnant Women and Monsters in
Eighteenth-century England and France’, in G. S. Rousseau and
Roy Porter, Sexual Underworlds in the Enlightenment (Manchester,
1987), pp. 86–100.
30 Ronald Hyman, Marquis de Sade: Genius of Passion (London, 2003),
p. 151.
31 Reported in Alienist and Neurologist, p. 204; see Havelock Ellis,
Studies in the Psychology of Sex (New York, 1942), vol. i, Part 2,
‘Love and Pain’, p. 151.
420
references
32 Dekkers, Dearest Pet, p. 18.

33 ‘Masters on Zoo’, www.animalzoofrance.net, accessed 16 April 2013;
also see Major Steven Cullen, ‘Prosecuting Indecent Conduct in the
Military: Honey, Should We Get a Legal Review First?’, Military
Law Review, clxxix (2004), p. 142.
34 Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex (New York, 1942),
vol. ii, Part 1, ‘Erotic Symbolism’, p. 84.
35 Jens Rydström, ‘Sodomitical Sins are Threefold: Typologies of
Bestiality, Masturbation and Homosexuality, in Sweden, 1880–1950’,
Journal of the History of Sexuality, ix/3 (2000), pp. 240–76; see also
Jens Rydström, Sinners and Citizens: Bestiality and Homosexuality
in Sweden, 1880–1950 (Chicago, il, 2003).
36 Masters, Hidden World of Erotica, pp. 40, 148–50.
37 Mark Matthews, The Horseman: Obsessions of a Zoophile (New
York, 1994), pp. 110–11.
38 Liliequist, ‘Peasants Against Nature’.
39 Alfred C. Wardell, B. Pomeroy and Clyde E. Martin, Sexual
Behaviour in the Human Male (Philadelphia, Pa, 1948),
pp. 667–678; Alfred C. Kinsey et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human
Female (Philadelphia, Pa, 1953), pp. 502–9.
40 The exact figures are 4.9 per cent for males and 1.9 per cent
for females; Morton M. Hunt, Sexual Behavior in the 1970s
(New York, 1974).
41 See David J. Rust, ‘The Sociology of Furry Fandom’ (2001),
www.visi.com/~phantos/furrysoc, accessed 27 April 2012.
42 See ‘Sexual Offences Act 2003’, www.legislation.gov.uk, accessed
27 April 2012.
43 Sunday Times (12 November 2008).
44 Liverpool Echo (15 February 2011); The Sun (22 February 2011).
7 The Ties That Bind: Sadomasochism

1 According to the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition, sadism is
automatically connected to the sexual.
vol. i: In the Classical World, ed. Mark Golden and Peter Toohey
(London, 2011), pp. 55–86.
3 Leslie Kurke, ‘Inventing the “Hetaira”: Sex, Politics, and Discursive
Conflict in Archaic Greece’, Classical Antiquity, xvi/1 (April 1997),
pp. 106–50; Mark Golden, ‘Slavery and Homosexuality at Athens’,
Phoenix, xxxviii/4 (Winter 1984), pp. 308–24; Sarah B. Pomeroy,
Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves (New York, 1975), p. 82.
421
4 Otto Kiefer, Sexual Life in Ancient Rome (London, 2000); Judith

P. Hallett, ‘Roman Attitudes Towards Sex’, in Civilizations of the
Ancient Mediterranean, ed. M. Grant and R. Kitzinger (New York,
1988), pp. 1265–78.
5 Suetonius, Gaius Caligula, 10–11, 27.
6 Suetonius, Nero, 26–28.
7 Ovid, Art of Love, 1.673–80.
8 Jacco Hamman, ‘The Rod of Discipline: Masochism, Sadism and the
Judeo-Christian Religion’, Journal of Religion and Health, xxxix/4
(Winter 2000). See Donald Capps, The Child’s Song: The Religious
Abuse of Children (Louisville, ky, 1995).
9 Marquis de Sade, Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other
Writings, trans. Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse (New
York, 1965), p. 449.
10 Laurence L. Bongie, De Sade: A Biographical Essay (Chicago, il,
1998), p. 109.
11 Francine du Plessix Gray, At Home with the Marquis de Sade
(London, 2000); Neil Schaeffer, The Marquis de Sade (London,
1999); Maurice Lever, Marquis de Sade: A Biography (London, 1993).
12 Robert Eisler, Man into Wolf: An Anthropological Interpretation of
Sadism, Masochism and Lycanthropy (London, 1948), p. 74.
13 James Cleugh, The Marquis and the Chevalier (New York, 1951),
p. 183.
14 Wanda von Dunajew (pseud.), Meine Lebensbeichte (1906), pub-
lished in translation as Wanda von Sacher-Masoch, The
Confessions of Wanda von Sacher-Masoch, trans. Marian Phillips
et al. (San Francisco, ca, 1990), p. 11.
15 Ibid., p. 30.
16 ‘Foreword’, in Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis,
reprint of 12th edn [1903] (Berkeley, ca, 1999), p. 79.
17 Schiebinger Londa, ‘Skeletons in the Closet: The First Illustrations
of the Female Skeleton in Eighteenth-century Anatomy’, in The
Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth
Century, ed. T. Laqueur (Berkeley, ca, 1987), p. 53; Ludmilla
Jordanova, Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine
between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York, 1989).
18 Ivan Crozier, ‘Philosophy in the English Boudoir, Havelock Ellis,
“Love and Pain”, and Sexological Discourse on Algophilia’, Journal
of the History of Sexuality, xiii/4 (2004), pp. 275–305.
19 All the quotes from Ellis here and in the previous paragraph come
from Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. i, Part 2,
Section 2: ‘Love and Pain’ [1903] (New York, 1942), pp. 66–188.
20 Ibid.
422
references
21 Ibid.
22 Charles Féré, The Evolution and Dissolution of the Sexual Instinct
(Paris, 1904), pp. 163–4.
23 Among them Krafft-Ebing, Ellis and the French physicians Féré and
naval surgeon Dr R. L. Laserre.
24 Moll cited by Ellis, ‘Love and Pain’, p. 105.
25 Albert Eulenburg, Algolagnia: The Psychology, Neurology and
Physiology of Sadistic Love and Masochism [1902] (New York, 1934),
p. 25.
26 Ibid.
27 Eric Oakley, Sex and Sadism Throughout the Ages (London, 1965),
p. 18.
28 Dr Magnus Hirschfeld, Transvestites, trans. Michael A. Lombard-
Nash [1910] (New York, 1991), p. 172.
29 Reports of the further attacks came from Charlotte von Schiller to
Knebel but appear not to have been true.
30 Eulenburg, Algolagnia, p. 112.
31 Frank S. Caprio, Variations in Sexual Behaviour (London, 1957),
p. 34.
32 William Renwick Riddell, ‘A Case of Supposed Sadism’, Journal of
the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology, xv/1 (May
1924), pp. 32–41.
33 Eulenburg, Algolagnia, p. 104.
34 Gilles Deleuze, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty (New York, 1989),
p. 33.
35 A. B. Heilbrun Jr and David T. Seif, ‘Erotic Value of Female Distress
in Sexually Explicit Photographs’, Journal of Sexual Health, xxiv
(1988), pp. 47–57.
36 bbc 1 News, 7 December 2001; more recently the University of
Michigan has undertaken tests to find that the brain’s ‘pleasure’
chemical dopamine is released during pain. David J. Scott, Mary M.
Heitzeg, Robert A. Koeppe, Christian S. Stohler and Jon-Kar
Zubieta, ‘Variations in the Human Pain Stress Experience Mediated
by Ventral and Dorsal Basal Ganglia Dopamine Activity’, Journal of
Neuroscience, xxvi/42 (18 October 2006), pp. 10789–95. For the
article, see www.jneurosci.org, accessed 16 April 2013.
37 Edmund Burke, On the Sublime and Beautiful [1756], Part 1, Section
ii (London, 1909–14).
423
8 Loving the Dead

1 For the pupose of this book, I have taken necrophilia to specifically
mean desiring or acting out sexual activity with the dead, although
I also explore it in terms of attitudes towards death in broader society
and culture. Other historians have made inroads into extending the
exploration of necrophilia to a broader base, for example, literature,
politics, theatre and art: see Lisa Downing, Desiring the Dead:
Necrophilia and Nineteenth-century French Literature (London, 2002);
Lisa Downing, ‘Death and the Maidens: A Century of Necrophilia in
Female-authored Textual Production’, French Cultural Studies,
xiv/2/41 (2003), pp. 157–68; Adam Wilson, ‘Democratic Necrophilia:
The Eighteenth-century’s Anxious Disease’, Anamesa, v/1, The
Democracy Issue (Spring 2007), pp. 42–66; J. Roach, ‘History,
Memory, Necrophilia’, in The Ends of Performance, ed. P. Phelan and
J. Lane (New York, 1995), pp. 23–30; Carol Christ, ‘Painting the Dead:
Portraiture and Necrophilia in Victorian Art and Poetry’, in Death and
Representation, ed. Sarah Webster Goodwin and Elisabeth Bronfen
(Baltimore, Md, 1993), pp. 133–51; A. Aggrawal, ‘A New Classification
of Necrophilia’, Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine, xvi/6 (2009),
pp. 316–20; A. D. Murray, ‘The Reclassification of Extreme Porno-
graphic Images’, Modern Law Review, lxxii/1 (2009), pp. 73–90.
2 Herodotus, Histories, Book ii, 89.
(London, 2011), p. 86.
4 Herodotus, Histories, Book v, 91–93.
5 Jean Benedetti, The Real Bluebeard: The Life of Gilles de Rais
(Stroud, 2003), p. 113.
6 Ibid., p. 115.
7 James Penney, The World of Perversion: Psychoanalysis and the
Impossible Absolute of Desire (New York, 2006), p. 55.
8 Marquis de Sade, Juliette [1797] (New York, 1968), p. 539.
9 Philippe Aries, L’Homme devant la mort (Paris, 1977), p. 373.
10 Julie Peakman, ‘Introduction’, Sexual Perversions (Basingstoke,
2009), p. 38.
11 Elizabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the
Aesthetic (Manchester, 1992). See also Camille Naish, Death Comes
to the Maiden: Sex and Execution, 1431–1933 (London, 1991); Janet
Todd, Gender, Art and Death (New York, 1993).
12 Rebecca May, ‘Morbid Parts: Gender, Seduction and the Necro-
gaze’, in Peakman, Sexual Perversions, pp. 167–201.
424
references
13 Ludmilla Jordanova, Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science

and Medicine Between the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
(London, 1989), p. 55.
14 See Christ, ‘Painting the Dead’.
15 See May, ‘Morbid Parts’.
16 Cited in R.E.L. Masters and Eduard Lea, Sex Crimes in History
(New York, 1964), p. 120.
17 Dr Léon Henri Thoinot, Attentats aux moeurs, et perversion du sens
génital (Paris, 1898), pp. 477–85.
18 Henri Marie Beyle [Stendhal], The Life of Henry Brulard (Paris,
1890).
19 William Stekel, Sadism and Masochism (London, 1953).
20 H. H. Remsen Whitehouse, A Revolutionary Princess: Cristina
Belgiojoso Trivulzio: Her Life and Times [1906] (New York, 2009);
Antonio Fabris, ed., Cristina Belgiojoso Trivulzi: An Italian Princess
in the Nineteenth-century Turkish Countryside (Venice, 2010).
21 For quotes below see Ben Harrison, Undying Love: The True Story
of a Passion that Defied Death (London, 2001), pp. 88, 105, 104, 233.
22 J. P. Rosman and P. J. Resnick, ‘Sexual Attraction to Corpses:
A Psychiatric Review of Necrophilia’, Bulletin of the American
Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, xvii/2 (1989), pp. 153–63.
9 Too Close for Comfort: Incest

1 In a letter to Maria Gisburne, quoted by Elizabeth Archibauld,
Incest and the Medieval Imagination (Oxford, 2003), p. 8.
2 Sophocles, The Theban Plays [translator E.F. Watling]
(Harmondsworth, 1974), p. 64.
3 Tatum, Patrician Tribune, pp. 41–2.
4 Suetonius, Gaius Caligula, 24.
5 Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, Nero, 28.
6 Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage, Handbook of Medieval
Sexuality (New York, 2000), p. 338.
7 Arthur Brandeis, ed., Jacob’s Well: An English Treatise on the
Cleansing of Man’s Conscience (London, reprint, 2009), p. 48, at
Internet Archive, www.archive.org, 15 April 2013.
8 T. F. Hoad, ed., Oxford Concise Dictionary of Etymology (Oxford,
1996), p. 232; Elizabeth Archibauld, ‘Incest Between Children and
Adults in the Medieval World’, in Children and Sexuality, ed.
George Rousseau (Basingstoke, 2007), p. xiv.
9 Irina Metzler, ‘Sex, Religion and the Law’, in A Cultural History of
Sexuality, vol. ii: In the Middle Ages, ed. Ruth Evans (London, 2011),
pp. 101–19.
425
10 Marion Turner, Chaucerian Conflict: Languages of Antagonism in

Late Fourteenth-century London (Oxford, 2007), pp. 52ff, 61.
11 Tommy Bengtsson and Geraldine P. Mineau, Kinship and
Demographic Behavior in the Past (New York, 2008), p. 206.
12 Quoted in Adam Kuper, Incest and Influence: The Private Life of
Bourgeois England (Cambridge, Ma, 2009), pp. 61–2.
13 Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage, 1500–1800 (London,
1990), p. 96.
14 Transcript online at www.folger.edu, accessed 6 July 2012.
15 The 32 private letters are held at the Folger Shakespeare Library,
Washington, dc. For a modern account of the DuGard cousins
(Samuel and Lydia) as well as Samuel DuGard’s (printed) defence
of the marriage of cousins, see the following publication from the
Arizona Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies: Nancy
Taylor, ed., ‘Cousins in Love: The Letters of Lydia DuGard,
1665–1672’, Renaissance English Text Society, xxviii (Arizona, 2003),
p. 140, on incest; Adam Kuper, ‘Incest Cousin Marriage’, Past and
Present, clxxiv/1 (2002), pp. 158–83.
16 R. I., A Most Straunge, and True Discourse, of the Wonderfull
Judgement of God: Of a monstrous, deformed infant, begotten by
incestuous copulation, betweene the brothers sonne and the sisters
daughter, being both unmarried persons (London, 1600); Robert
Hole, ‘Consanguinity and a Monstrous Birth in Rural England,
January 1600’, Social History, xxv/2 (2000), pp. 183–99.
17 The Rambler, clxx (2 November 1751).
18 The Rambler, clxxi (5 November 1751).
19 Adam Kuper, Incest and Influence: The Private Life of Bourgeois
England (Cambridge, Ma, 2009), p. 27; Leanore Davidoff, Thicker
than Water: Siblings and Their Relations, 1780–1920 (Oxford, 2012).
20 Edgar J. McManus, Law and Liberty in Early New England, 1620–1692
(Amherst, Ma, 2009), p. 25.
21 Polly Morris, ‘Incest or Survival Strategy? Plebeian Marriage within
the Prohibited Degrees in Somerset, 1730–1835’, Journal of the
History of Sexuality, ii/2 (1991), pp. 235–65.
22 Oracle Bell’s New World, l (28 July 1789).
23 Oracle Bell’s New World, lxxxii (3 September 1789).
24 Kuper, Incest and Influence, p. 55.
25 Ibid., pp. 54–5.
26 Histoire de Dom Bougre, portier des Chartreux, trans. Howard
Nelson as The Lascivious Monk (Wiltshire, 1993), p. 286.
27 Marquis de Sade, Incest [Eugénie de Franval, 1800], trans., Andrew
Brown, London, 2003), p. 48.
28 Anon., A New Description of Merryland (London, 1741), p. 20.
426
references
29 Donald Thomas, ‘Preface’, in The School of Venus [L’Ecole des filles,

1655] (London, 1972), p. 20.
30 Bryan Strong, ‘Toward a History of the Experiential Family: Sex and
Incest in the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Marriage and Family,
xxxv/3 (August 1973), pp. 457–66.
31 Anon., The Romance of Lust [1883–7] (London,reprint, 1995), p. 7;
also at www.gutenberg.org.
32 Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (London,
1864); William Acton, The Functions and Disorders of the
Reproductive Organs in Childhood, Youth, Adult Age, and Advanced
Life: Considered in Their Physiological, Social, and Moral Relations
(London, 1862); Charles Booth, Labour and Life of the People
(London, 1891–1903).
33 Andrew Mearns and W. C. Preston, The Bitter Cry of Outcast
London (London, 1883), p. 12.
34 Lewis Henry Morgan, Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the
Human Family (Washington, dc, 1871).
35 Edvard Westermarck, in The History of Human Marriage (London,
1891), p. 433.
36 Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, reprint of
12th edn [1903] (Berkeley, ca, 1999), p. 513.
37 Ibid., pp. 513–15.
38 Havelock Ellis, ‘Eonism’, in Studies in the Psychology of Sex (New
York, 1942), p. 24.
39 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (New York, 1913),
p. 296.
40 James L. Peacock and A. Thomas Kirsch, The Human Direction:
An Evolutionary Approach to Social and Cultural Anthropology
(New York, 1970), p. 100.
41 Conrad P. Kottack, Cultural Anthropology (New York, 1994), p. 22.
42 As Davidson has pointed out, Maureen Quilligan has argued
recently that ‘the interdiction against incest is a constant in all
human societies, pivotal at all periods and in all places.’ Michel
Foucault has also suggested that incest was not seen as a major
problem before the nineteenth century, which is not the case, as
we can see by the number of medieval laws on the subject. Foucault
says that the assumption that its prohibition was universal in earlier
times was no more than a reflection back on the past of modern
preoccupations. See N. S. Davidson, ‘Sex, Religion, and the Law:
Disciplining Desire’, in A Cultural History of Sexuality, vol. ii:
In the Renaissance, ed. Bette Talvacchia (London, 2011), p. 93.
43 Lloyd DeMause, ‘The Universality of Incest’, Journal of
Psychohistory, xix/2 (Autumn 1991).
427
44 Old Bailey Proceedings Online, 1674–1913, www.oldbaileyonline. org:

ref. t19091012–67; t19100718–44; t19130204–70, accessed
4 February 2013.
pp. 189–218.
46 M. C. Canavan, W. J. Meyer and D. C. Higgs, ‘The Female
Experience of Sibling Incest’, Journal of Marital and Family Therapy,
xviii/2 (1992), pp. 129–42; Vernon Wiehe, Sibling Abuse: Hidden
Physical, Emotional, and Sexual Trauma (Lexington, ky, 1997);
H. Smith and E. Israel, ‘Sibling Incest: A Study of the Dynamics
of 25 Cases’, Child Abuse and Neglect, xi (1987), pp. 101–8; E. Cole,
‘Sibling Incest: The Myth of Benign Sibling Incest’, Women and
Therapy, i/3 (1982), pp. 79–89. Sibling incest was roughly five times
as common as other forms of incest, according to P. Gebhard,
J. Gagnon, W. Pomeroy and C. Christenson, Sex Offenders:
An Analysis of Types (New York, 1965).
47 Guardian (15 April 2012).
48 Toni A. H. McNaron and Yarrow Morgan, Voices in the Night:
Women Speaking About Incest (Minneapolis, Mn, 1982), p. 11.
49 Anna Meigs and Kathleen Barlow, ‘Beyond the Taboo: Imagining
Incest’, American Anthropologist, civ/1, pp. 38–49.
50 Beryl Satter, ‘ The Sexual Abuse Paradigm in Historical Perspective:
Passivity and Emotion in Mid-Twentieth-Century America’, Journal
of the History of Sexuality, xii/3 (July 2003), pp. 424–64.
51 See ‘Sexual Offences Act 2003’, www.legislation.gov.uk, accessed
27 April 2012.
52 See ‘Incest: An Age-old Taboo’, 12 March 2007,
www.bbc.co.uk/news.
10 Child Love or Paedophilia?

1 Xenophon, Constitution of the Lacedaimonians, ii.1; A. V.
Yannicopoulos, ‘The Pedagogue In Antiquity’, British Journal
Of Educational Studies, xxxiii/2 (June 1985), pp. 173–9.
2 Pseudo-Demosthesenes, Against Neaera, 59.18–19.
3 Sandra R Joshel, ‘Nucturing the Master’s Child: Slavery and the
Roman Child-nurse’, Signs, xii/1 (1986), pp. 1–22; see also Amy
Richlin, ‘Invective Against Women in Roman Satire’, Arethusa,
xvii/1 (Spring 1984), pp. 67–80, esp. pp. 71–2; and Richlin, The
Garden of Priapus (New Haven, cT, 1983), pp. 113–14.
4 Suetonius, Tiberius, 44.
5 Phillipe Aries, Centuries of Childhood (Harmondsworth, 1962),
p. 98.
428
references
6 Barbara A. Hanawalt, Growing Up in Medieval London (Oxford,

1993), p. 5.
7 18 eliz. 1, C.7, cited in Sir W. Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws
of England (Oxford, 1769), p. 212.
8 Old Bailey Proceedings Online, 1674–1913, www.oldbaileyonline. org:
ref. t16781211e–2, accessed 16 April 2012.
9 Anthony E. Simpson, ‘Vulnerability and the Age of Female
Consent’, in Sexual Underworld of the Enlightenment, ed. G. S.
Rousseau and Roy Porter (Manchester, 1987), pp. 181–206.
10 Quoted in Phillipe Aries, Centuries of Childhood (Harmondsworth,
1962), p. 237.
11 Ibid., pp. 234, 253.
12 Ibid., p. 114.
13 See Joseph William Howe, Excessive Venery, Masturbation and
Continence (London, 1883), mentioned in chapter Two.
14 Although Ariès cited above had argued that children did not exist
in the medieval period and were treated as mini-adults, this theory
has essentially been questioned by other historians: for example,
see Albrecht Classmen, ed., Childhood in the Middle Ages and the
Renaissance (Berlin, 2005); Barbara A. Hanawalt, Growing Up in
Medieval London (Oxford, 1993); Shulamith Shear, Childhood in the
Middle Ages (London, 1990); Linda Pollock, A Lasting Relationship:
Parents and Their Children Over Three Centuries (London, 1987);
Linda Pollock, Forgotten Children: Parent–Child Relations from 1500
to 1900 (Cambridge, 1983).
15 Sir John Fielding, A Plan for a Preservatory and Reformatory, for the
Benefit of Deserted Girls (London, 1758), p. 5.
16 See bibliography for Louise Jackson, Rictor Norton, Randolph
Trumbach and other cases mentioned elsewhere in this book.
17 Old Bailey Proceedings Online: ref. t17510523–35, accessed 28 July 2011.
18 Old Bailey Proceedings Online: ref. t16800421–5, accessed 28 July 2011.
19 Weekly Journal or British Gazetteer (5 August 1727); Weekly Journal
or Saturday’s Post (6 January 1722).
20 Daily Courant (13 April 1730).
21 Weekly Journal or British Gazetteer (16 January 1731).
22 Daily Gazetteer (12 February 1737).
23 See Jenny Skipp, ‘The Hostile Gaze: Perverting the Female Form,
1688–1800’; and Jennie Mills, ‘Rape in Early Eighteenth-century
London: A Perversion “so very perplex’d”’, in Sexual Perversions, ed.
Julie Peakman (London, 2009), chaps 5 and 6; Julie Peakman,
Lascivious Bodies: A Sexual History of the Eighteenth Century
(London, 2004), chaps 5 and 6; Tassie Williams, ‘Female Fraud:
Counterfeit Maidenheads in the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of the
429
History of Sexuality, vi/4 (April 1996), pp. 518–48; Anna Clark, ‘The
Politics of Seduction in English Popular Culture, 1748–1848’, in The
Progress of Romance: The Politics of Popular Culture, ed. Jean
Radford (London, 1986), pp. 47–72.
24 London Evening Post (25–27 July 1738).
25 Weekly Journal or British Gazetteer (19 June 1736).
26 Daily Gazetteer (28 September 1736).
27 Old Bailey Proceedings Online: ref. t16781211e–2, accessed 28 July
2011; Alfred Swaine Taylor, Elements of Medical Jurisprudence
(London, 1844), p. 575.
28 H. G. Cocks, Nameless Offences: Homosexual Desire in the
Nineteenth Century (London, 2003), p. 32.
29 Louise Jackson, Child Sexual Abuse in Victorian England (London,
2000), pp. 20, 29.
30 Old Bailey Proceedings Online: see under headings ‘Crime, Justice
and Punishment/Sexual Offences/Rape’, www.oldbaileyonline.org,
accessed 16 April 2013.
31 Jackson, Child Sexual Abuse in Victorian England (London, 2000),
pp. 71–89.
32 Auguste Ambroise Tardieu, Etude médico-légale sur les attentats
aux moeurs [1857] (Paris, 1995), p. 173.
33 Fielding, A Plan for a Preservatory and Reformatory.
34 Leslie Mitchell, Lord Melbourne, 1779–1848 (Oxford, 1997).
35 There are far too many ‘scientific’ studies on the subject to mention
here but for some views from the late 1970s and ’80s, see K.
Howells, ‘Some Meanings of Children for Pedophiles’, in Love and
Attraction, ed. M. Cook and G. Wilson (Oxford, 1979): K. Howells,
‘Adult Sexual Interest in Children: Considerations Relevant to
Theories of Aetiology’, in Adult Sexual Interest in Children, ed. M.
Cook and K. Howells (London, 1981); D. Finkelhor and S. Araji,
‘Explanations of Pedophilia: A Four Factor Model’, Journal of Sex
Research, xxii/2 (1986), pp. 145–61; James Horley, ‘Cognitions of
Child Sexual Abusers’, Journal of Sex Research, xxv/4 (November
1988), pp. 542–5.
36 Jad Adams, Madder Music, Stronger Wine: The Life of Ernest
Dowson (London, 2000), p. 56.
38 Jackson, Child Sexual Abuse in Victorian England (London, 2000),
pp. 39, 62, 84.
39 Ibid., pp. 4–5.
40 W. T. Stead, ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon i: The Report
of Our Secret Commission’, Pall Mall Gazette (6 July 1885).
41 Letter in the Shield (May 1880).
430
references
42 Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, reprint

of 12th edn [1903] (Berkeley, ca, 1999), p. 465.
43 Ibid., pp. 418–19.
44 Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. ii, ‘Erotic
Symbolism’ (New York, 1942), p. 14.
45 Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, ‘Sexual Inversion
in Women’, vol. i, p. 260.
p. 251.
47 This is from my own recollections of childhood, as well of those
of my cohorts.
48 As a timeline guide, Okami points out that there were no such index
categories as sexual abuse, sexual harassment, sex offences, rape,
incest, paedophilia and sexual sadism in ‘Psychological Abstracts’,
but they had emerged by 1989: P. Okami, ‘Child Perpetrators of
Sexual Abuse: The Emergence of a Problematic Deviant Category’,
Journal of Sex Research, xxix/1 (1992), pp. 109–30, 117.
49 For studies, see particularly Calderone from 1979 and Levine from
2002, cited in Richard D. Laws and William T. O’Donohue, Sexual
Deviance: Theory, Assessment and Treatment (New York, 2008).
50 This data relates to pre-adolescent orgasm in Alfred Kinsey et al.,
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Philadelphia, Pa, 1948),
pp. 175–81.
51 Paedophile Information Exchange, Paedophilia: Some Questions
and Answers (London, 1978).
52 Rev. Thomas Doyle, ‘A Very Short History of Clergy Sexual Abuse
in the Catholic Church’, at www.crusadeagainstclergyabuse.com,
accessed 24 May 2013.
53 Andrew Osborn, ‘Belgium Still Haunted by Paedophile Scandal’,
Guardian (25 January 2002), www.guardian.co.uk; and ‘Dutrous
Affair Haunts Belgium Police’, 22 January 2002,
www.bbc.co.uk/news.
54 Frank D. Fincham, Steven R. H. Beach, Thom Moore and Carol
Diener, ‘The Professional Response to Child Sexual Abuse: Whose
Interests Are Served?’, Family Relations, xliii/3 (July 1994),
pp. 244–54.
55 ‘Paper Defends Paedophile Campaign’, www.bbc.co.uk/news,
27 July 2011.
56 Rebecca Allison, ‘Doctor Driven out of Home by Vigilantes’,
Guardian (30 August 2000), www.guardian.co.uk.
57 Patrick A. Langan and Caroline Wolf Harlow, ‘Child Rape Victims’,
Crime Data Brief, Department of u.s. Justice (June 1994),
www.prisonpolicy.org.
431
58 ‘Incest’, National Center for Victims of Crime and Crime Victims

Research and Treatment Center (Washington, dc, 1992). See
www.ncvc.org, accessed 24 May 2013.
59 Jane F. Gilgun, ‘We Shared Something Special: The Moral
Discourse of Incest Perpetrators’, Journal of Marriage and Family,
lvii/2 (1995), pp. 265–81.
60 Nancy L. Fischer, ‘Oedipus Wrecked? The Moral Boundaries of
Incest’, Gender and Society, xvii/1 (2003), pp. 92–110; Diane D.
Broadhurst, ‘Executive Summary of the Third National Incidence
Study of Child Abuse and Neglect’ (1996), www.childwelfare.gov;
David Finkelhor and Jennifer Dziuba-Leatherman, ‘Children as
Victims of Violence: A National Survey’, Pediatrics, xciv/4 (1994),
pp. 413–20, www.unh.edu; E. Driver and A Droisen, Child Sex
Abuse: Feminist Perspectives (Basingstoke, 1989); Catharine A.
McKinnon, Feminism Unmodified: Discourse of Life and Law
(Cambridge, Ma, 1987).
61 Supporter Gayle Rubin stated, ‘Youth Liberation has argued for some
time that young people should have the right to have sex as well as
not to have it, and with whom they choose. The statutory structure of
the sex laws has been identified as oppressive and insulting to young
people’; Gayle Rubin, ‘Sexual Politics, the New Right, and the Sexual
Fringe’, The Leaping Lesbian (February 1978). On research, see Theo
Sandfort, Boys and Their Contact with Men (Elmhurst, ny, 1987).
62 For a full age of consent table, see Stephen Robertson, ‘Age of
Consent Laws’, in ‘Children and Youth in History’, Item #230, at
www.chnm.gmu.edu, accessed 8 July 2012.
11 The Games People Play

1 Herodotus, The Histories, trans. Aubrey de Sélincourt
(Harmondsworth, 1977), Book ii, 63, p. 153.
2 Malcolm Jones, ‘Sex, Popular Beliefs and Culture’, in A Cultural
History of Sexuality, vol. ii: In the Middle Ages, ed. Ruth Evans
(London, 2011), p. 163.
3 See E. E. Evans Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among
the Azande (Oxford, 1976), p. 238.
4 T. B. Howell, A Complete Collection of State Trial, 1726–43, vol. xvii
(London, 1816), p. 156.
5 Observer (7 July 1799).
6 The Vagrancy Act 1824, Cap. 83, p. 699, at www.legislation.gov.uk,
accessed 24 May 2013.
7 Old Bailey Proceedings Online, 1674–1913, www.oldbaileyonline. org,
refs t18430102–451; t18431023–3081; t18490702–1411; t18570105–183;
432
references
t18600227–287, accessed 24 July 2006.

8 Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, reprint of 12th edn
[1903] (Berkeley, ca, 1999), Case 210 (1886).
9 Ben Karpman, ‘The Psychopathology of Exhibitionism’,
Psychoanalytic Review, xiii/1 (January 1926).
10 Sigmund Freud, On Metapsychology (Harmondsworth, 1984); the
theme of the rise of individualism was taken up by Gordon Rattray
Taylor, Sex in History (London, 1959, reprint 1965), chap. 13,
pp. 248–61.
11 Michael Mason, The Making of Victorian Sexual Attitudes (Oxford,
1994), pp. 67, 132; Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People
England, 1727–1783 (Oxford, 1999).
12 Porter Davis [pseud.], Sexual Perversion and the Law (El Segundo,
ca, 1950) p. 10.
13 See, for example, E. E. Evans Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and
Magic Among the Azande (Oxford, 1976).
pp. 221–8.
15 Ibid., p. 228
16 Anthony Storr, Sexual Deviation (Harmondsworth, 1964), p. 95.
17 Ibid., p. 92.
18 Davis, Sexual Perversion and the Law.
19 All the above studies are mentioned in Philip Firestone, Drew A.
Kingston, Audrey Wexler, John M. Bradford, ‘Long-Term Follow-up
of Exhibitionists: Psychological, Phallometric, and Offense
Characteristics’, Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and
the Law, xxxiv/3 (2006), pp. 349–59.
20 D. Richard Laws and William T. O’Donohue, eds, Sexual Deviance:
Theory, Assessment, and Treatment (New York, 1997), p. 62.
21 Erin Hatton and Mary Nell Trautner, ‘Equal Opportunity
Objectification? The Sexualization of Men and Women on the
Cover of Rolling Stone’, Sexuality and Culture, xv/256–78 (2011), at
www.thegeenadavisinstitute.org; also references therein.
22 Andrew Anthony, ‘The Naked Rambler is Making Us Look Silly’,
Guardian (17 January 2010); Neil Forsyth, ‘The Naked Rambler, The
Man Prepared to Go to Prison For Nudity’, Guardian (23 March
2012).
23 Quoted in John Younger, ‘Sexual Variations: Sexual Peculiarities of
the Ancient Greeks and Romans’, in A Cultural History of Sexuality,
(London, 2011), pp. 53–78.
24 Tim Hitchcock and Michèle Cohen, English Masculinities (London,
1999), p. 28; Lawrence Stone, ‘Libertine Sexuality in Post-Restoration
433
England: Group Sex and Flagellation among the Middling Sort in

Norwich in 1706–07’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, ii/4 (1992),
pp. 525–51.
26 Storr, Sexual Deviation, p. 96
27 First recorded by Roger of Wendover, who died in 1236, in his
Flores Historiarum; Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable
(London,1981), p. 489.
28 Marquis de Sade, Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom and Other
York, 1965), p. 257.
29 Lucienne Frappier-Mazur, ‘Sadean Libertinage and the Esthetics of
Violence’, Yale French Studies, xciv, ‘Libertinage and Modernity’
(1998), pp. 184–98.
30 John O’Connor, ‘Attitude Toward Women’, Notre Dame English
Journal, ii/2 (Spring 1967), pp. 13–22.
31 Louis S. London and Frank S. Caprio, Sexual Deviations
(Washington, dc, 1950), pp. 557–75, on coprophilia.
32 N. Kenneth Sandnabba, Pekka Santtila and Niklas Nordling,
‘Sexual Behavior and Social Adaptation Among Sadomasochistically-
oriented Males’, Journal of Sex Research, xxxvi/3 (August 1999),
pp. 273–82.
33 There have been arguments about whether this is a work of fiction
or fact and who wrote it. According to John Patrick Pattinson,
‘Walter’ was the engineer who built the Holborn viaduct in his
article ‘The Man Who Was Walter’, Victorian Literature and
Culture, xxx (2002), pp. 19–40; Vern Bullough, ‘Who Wrote My
Secret Life’, Sexuality and Culture, iv (2000), pp. 37–60; Ian Gibson,
The Erotomaniac: The Secret Life of Henry Spencer Ashbee (London,
1988), pp. 163–234; Eberhard and Phyllis Kronhausen, My Secret
Life: Walter the English Casanova (London, 1967).
34 Phyllis Grosskurth, Havelock Ellis: A Biography (New York, 1980),
pp. 286–7.
35 Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, i/2, ‘Analysis of the Sexual
Impulse’, p. 59.
36 Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, ii/2, ‘Undinism’,
pp. 376–476.
37 Havelock Ellis, My Life (London and Toronto, 1940), pp. 68–9;
Havelock Ellis, Fountain of Life: Being My Impressions and
Comments, series 3, ‘A Revelation’ (London, 1924), pp. 359–60.
38 Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, ii/1, ‘Erotic Symbolism’, p. 1.
39 Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, ii/1, ‘Sexual Inversion in
Women’, p. 258.
434
references
40 Cynthia Payne, An English Madam: The Life and Work of Cynthia

Payne (London, 1982).
(London, 2011), pp. 70–71.
42 Francis de Sales, Jane de Chantal: Letters of Spiritual Direction,
trans. Péronne Marie Thibert (New York, 1988), p. 134. On early
modern flagellation see also Peakman, Mighty Lewd Books: The
Development of Pornography in Eighteenth-century England
(London, 2003), pp. 161–85 and Lascivious Bodies: A Sexual History
of the Eighteenth Century (London, 2004), pp. 236–50. Also see
Niklaus Largier, In Praise of the Whip: A Cultural History of Arousal
(New York, 2007).
43 Countess Marie Catherine D’Aulnoy, Realation du voyage d’Espagne
(n.p., 1692), vol. ii, pp. 158–64.
44 Johann Heinrich Meibom, A Treatise of the Use of Flogging in
Venereal Affairs (London, 1761), p. 36.
45 Theresa Berkeley, Venus School-Mistress; or, Birchen Sports
(London, c. 1810).
46 Anon., The Romance of Lust (Paris [?], 1895, reprinted Ware, 1995),
p. 18.
47 Diane Atkinson, The Marriage of Arthur Munby and Hannah
Culwick (London, 2003); Barry Reay, Watching Hannah; Sexuality,
Horror and Bodily De-formation in Victorian England (London, 2002).
12 On Body Parts: Fellatio, Fetishism, Infibulations

and Fisting
(London, 2011), p. 75.
2 A copy of the The Lascivious Hypocrite (‘1790’) is in the Dawes
Bequest at the British Library, London; Ashbee cites the book
entitled La Tartufe [sic] Libertin ou Le Triomphe du Vice (Par Le
Marquis de sade) En Holland Chez Les Libraires Associés 1789; see
Henry Spencer Ashbee [‘Pisanus Fraxi’], Bibliography of Prohibited
Books, vol. ii, Centuria Librorum Assconditorum (London, 1877; New
York, 1962), p. 268. Translations announcing themselves as ‘true and
accurate’ were frequently freely altered, if not completely spurious.
3 The Quintessence of Birch Discipline (London, privately printed,
‘1870’ [real date of publication February 1883]; see Henry Spencer
435
Ashbee [‘Pisanus Fraxi’], Bibliography of Prohibited Books, vol. iii,

Cantena Librorum Tacendorum, p. 258), p. 21; Anon., The Romance
of Lust (Paris [?], 1873–6); Ashbee, vol. iii, p. 183.
4 ‘Walter’ [pseud.], My Secret Life, vol. v, chap. 6 (reprint Ware,
1996), p. 1820.
5 Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, reprint
of 12th edn [1903] (Berkeley, ca, 1999), p. 322.
6 Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex [1897] (New York,
1942), vol. i, ‘Sexual Inversion in Women’, pp. 206, 258; ‘Sexual
Selection in Men’, p. 21.
8 Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, p. 187.
9 Ibid., Case 99 and Case 102, pp. 205–8.
10 Ibid., p. 189.
11 Chrétien De Troyes, Arthurian Romances, ed. and trans. W. W.
Comfort (London, 1968), pp. 288–9; quoted by Cory James Rushton
‘Sexual Variations’, in A Cultural History of Sexuality, vol. ii: In the
Middle Ages, ed. Ruth Evans (London, 2011), pp. 84–5.
12 Louis S. London and Frank S. Caprio, Sexual Deviations
(Washington, dc, 1950), p. 463.
13 Theresa Berkeley, Venus School-mistress; or, Birchen Sports (London,
c. 1810), pp. 45–6. See also Julie Peakman, Mighty Lewd Books: The
Development of Pornography in Eighteenth-century England (London,
2003), pp. 183–5; Julie Peakman, Lascivious Bodies: A Sexual History
of the Eighteenth Century (London, 2004), pp. 250–54.
14 Quoted in Jonathan Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality
(Chicago, il, 2007), p. 23.
15 Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, Case 110, p. 216.
16 Suetonius, Vitellius, 2.
17 Translation of Le roman de la rose at http://margot.uwaterloo.ca,
accessed 24 November 2011.
18 Restif de la Bretonne, Le Pied de Fanchette (Le Haye, 1769); see
Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, ii/1, ‘Erotic
Symbolism’ (New York, 1942), pp. 19–20.
19 Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, Case 91, pp. 196–8.
20 Ellis, ‘Erotic Symbolism’, p. 33.
21 Martin S. Weinberg, Colin J. Williams and Cassandra Calhan, ‘“If
the Shoe Fits . . .”: Exploring Male Homosexual Foot Fetishism’,
Journal of Sexual Research, xxxi/1 (1995), pp. 17–27.
22 A. J. Giannini, G. Colapietro, A. E. Slaby, S. M. Melemis and R. K.
Bowman, ‘Sexualization of the Female Foot as a Response to
Sexually Transmitted Epidemics: A Preliminary Study’,
Psychological Reports, lxxxiii/2 (1998), pp. 491–2.
436
references
23 As seen in Chevaliers de Choisy and D’Eon; see Peakman,

Lascivious Bodies, pp. 201–18.
24 Dr Magnus Hirschfeld, Transvestites [1910], trans. Michael A.
Lombard-Nash (New York, 1991), p. 159.
25 Ronald M. Holmes, ‘Sequential Predation: Elements of Serial Fatal
Victimization’, Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity, iv/1 (January
1997), pp. 33–42.
26 Marquis de Sade, Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom and Other
York, 1965), pp. 686–7.
27 Both tales are told in depth in Peakman, Lascivious Bodies, pp. 266–9.
28 R. Haywood, P. E. Diete and A. W. Burgess, Autoerotic Fatalities
(Toronto, 1983).
29 R. Milner, ‘Orgasm of Death’, Hustler, viii (August 1981), pp. 33–4.
30 Murray J. White, ‘The Statue Syndrome, Perversion, Fantasy,
Anecdote?’, Journal of Sex Research, xiv/4 (1978), pp. 246–9.
31 The original is in French, part of the Dawes Bequest at the British
Library, London. It is said to be ‘par Madame B*** (Avocat)’, La
Femme Endormie (Melbourne, 1899), pp. 10–11. Despite the imprint,
nothing suggests an Australian origin; it looks like a perfectly pro-
duced French book.
32 Iwan Bloch, The Sexual Life of Our Time (London, 1908), p. 660.
33 All of these documentaries are posted on YouTube, accessed 25
May 2013.
34 My sincere thanks to Erika La Tour Eiffel for sharing her thoughts
and opinions on os.
35 See chapter Three.
36 G.P.S. Bianchi, An Historical and Physical Dissertation on the Case
of Catherine Vizzani, containing the adventures of a young woman
who for eight years poised in the habit of a man . . . with some curi-
ous and anatomical remarks on the nature and existence of the
hymen . . . On which are added certain needful remarks by the
English editor (London, 1751); G.P.S. Bianchi, The True History and
Adventures of Catherine Vizzani (London, 1755).
37 Eva C. Keuls, The Reign of the Phallus (Berkeley, ca, 1985),
pp. 68–9.
38 John Younger, Sexual Variations: Sexual Peculiarities of the Ancient
Greeks and Romans’, in A Cultural History of Sexuality, vol. i: In
the Classical World, ed. Mark Golden and Peter Toohey (London,
2011), pp. 63–5.
39 John Money, Russell Jobaris and Gregg Furth, ‘Apotemnophilia:
Two Cases of Self-demand Amputation as a Paraphilia’, Journal of
Sex Research, xiii/2 (1977), pp. 115–25.
437
40 F. Tomasini, ‘Exploring Ethical Justification for Self-demand

Amputation’, Ethics Med, xxii/2 (Summer 2006), pp. 99–115; see
also Nikki Sullivan, ‘Integrity, Mayhem, and the Question of Self-
demand Amputation’, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural
Studies, xix/3 (2005), pp. 325–33. The discussion is too broad to go
into further here but there are many articles on the subject online,
found under the search heading ‘self-demand amputation’.
41 Tim Bayne and Neil Levy, ‘Amputees by Choice: Body Integrity,
Identity Disorder and the Ethics of Amputation’, Journal of Applied
Philosophy, xxii (2005), pp. 75–86.
42 For translation, see Marguerite Johnson and Terry Ryan, Sexuality
in Greek and Roman Society and Literature: A Sourcebook (London,
2005), pp. 150–51.
43 Sade, Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom and Other Writings, p. 257.
44 Barry Reay, New York Hustlers: Masculinity in Modern America
(Manchester, 2010).
45 Jack Fritscher, ‘The Catacombs: Fistfucking in a Handball Palace’,
Drummer, xxiii (July 1978), http://jackfritscher.com. This feature
article is based on an interview of 7 December 1977 by Jack
Fritscher, of his friends Steve McEachern and Michael Shapley,
partners at the original Catacombs.
46 Gayle Rubin, ‘The Catacombs: A Temple of the Butthole’, in
Leatherfolk, ed. Mark Thompson (Dublin, 2005), pp. 119–41; Linnea
Due, ‘Blackbeards Lost’, in Opposite Sex, ed. Eric Rofes and Sara
Miles (New York, 1998), p. 8.
47 Huffington Post: Gay Voices, www.huffingtonpost.com,
20 October 2011.
48 Helen Navin, ‘Medical and Surgical Risks in Handballing’, Journal
of Homosexuality, vi/3 (1982), pp. 67–76.
49 Quoted in Thomas S. Weinberg, ‘Sadomasochism and the Social
Sciences: A Review of the Sociological and Social Psychological
Literature’, in Sadomasochism: Powerful Pleasures, ed. Peggy J.
Kleinplatz and Charles Moser (London, 2006), p. 21.
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454
acknowledgeMenTs
M y thanks must go to all the scholars who have worked in all the
separate areas of the history of sexuality – from bestiality to sado-
masochism. Without them, I would have been unable to build on my
original research here and make a broader picture of sexual perversion in
the West. I have tried to mention all who have had an impact on this
book in the References, but there are many more who have influenced
my work in the history of sexuality over the years, particularly all the
contributors to the Cultural History of Sexuality project.
My thanks go to the librarians at the Harry Ransom Center, Texas;
to those at the Kinsey Institute, Indiana, for their assistance; and to those
at Sussex University Library, for their help on the Mass Observation
Surveys. As usual, the librarians in the British Library have continued to
be invaluable, particularly on the eighteenth-, nineteenth- and twentieth-
century primary sources.
I thank the members of the H-Histsex@H-Net forum who assisted in
many a query, and the continued support from friends and colleagues at
Birkbeck, University of London. Among other friends and colleagues
who helped were barrister Rosie Burns and Rictor Norton. Thanks also
to Professor Mark Golden, Professor Helen King and Dr Anna Katharina
Schaffner for reading parts of the book on the classical work and the
sexologists respectively.
Without a great team at Reaktion Books, especially Aimee Selby, my
editor, this book would not have been as good. My thanks go to them
and to Michael Leaman for spotting a good title when he sees one and
for letting me keep so many images in the book.
Most of the images come from my own collection of books, postcards
and photographs and are my personal choice. While I enjoyed undertaking
the picture research, I know I gave Harry Gilonis some trouble and less
fun trying to obtain some of the more hard-to-find alternatives I requested.
I thank him very much for all his hard work and assistance in attempts to
455
retrieve the images I wanted. I also thank the Wellcome Library for the use
of their images.
Most of all, as usual, my ultimate gratitude must go to my friend and
partner Jad Adams, who cooked me many dinners, travelled with me on
various research trips and helped me with the exploration on home turf.
To him, I owe most happiness in life.
456
PhoTo
acknowledgeMenTs
The author and publishers wish to express their thanks to the below
sources of illustrative material and/or permission to reproduce it. (Some
locations uncredited in the captions for reasons of brevity are also given
below.)
Afrodisias Müzesi, Afrodisyas, Turkey: p. 270; from Ulisse Aldrovandi,

Monstrum Historia (Bononia, 1642): pp. 193 (left), 195; Amon Carter Museum,
Fort Worth, Texas: p. 100 (foot); from Anon, Histoire de Dom Bougre, porti-
er des Chartreux (France, 1741): p. 283; from Aristotle’s Compleat Master
Piece in Three Parts: Displaying the Secrets of Nature in the Generation of
Man . . . (n.p., 1753): p. 21; Ashmolean Museum, Oxford: p. 298; author’s
collection: p. 70; author’s photographs: pp. 200, 258, 259, 389; Bargello
Museum, Florence: p. 85; Berlin Sex Museum: p. 389; from Giovanni
Boccaccio, Opus de Claris Mulieribus (Berne, 1539): p. 150; The Black Room,
Las Vegas (www.theblackroomlasvegas.com): p. 382 (top); from Jean-
Baptiste de Boyer (attrib.), Thérèse Philosophe (n.p., 1785): pp. 59, 126;
British Library, London: pp. 29, 83; from British Medical Journal, i/1484
(8 June 1889): p. 278; British Museum, London: pp. 77, 112, 240, 303, 316;
photos © The Trustees of the British Museum: pp. 112, 150, 160, 196, 198,
217 (foot), 231, 250, 254, 303, 316; from R. J. Brodie, The Secret Companion
(London, 1845): p. 62; from Nicolas Chorier, L’Académie des dames (n.p.,
1680): pp. 44, 115, 116; from Mary Cowden Clarke, World-Noted Women
(New York, 1883): p. 111; from F. J. Cole, Early Theories of Sexual Genera-
tion (Oxford, 1930): p. 55; from The Rev. Wm. M. Cooper, B. A. [James
G. Bertram], A History of the Rod . . . (London, n.d.): pp. 81, 302; from
Donatien-Alphonse-François de Sade, Justine, ou les Malheurs du Virtu
(published ‘en Hollande’, 1791): p. 217 (top); from Donatien-Alphonse-
François de Sade, Justine, ou les Malheurs du Virtu (published ‘en
Hollande’, 1797): p. 218; from Donatien-Alphonse-François de Sade,
Histoire de Juliette, ou les Prosperités du Vice (published ‘en Hollande’,
457
1797): pp. 220, 330, 352, 359, 369; from The ‘De Ss. Martyrum cruciatibus’
of the Rev. Father [Antonio] Gallonio . . . (London, Paris: printed for the
subscribers, 1903): p. 215 (right); from Achille Devéria, Diabolico Foutro
Manie (Paris, 1835): p. 347; from John B. Ellis, Free Love and its Votaries
(New York, n.d.): p. 38; Galleria Borghese, Rome: p. 87; Gemäldegalerie,
Berlin: p. 86; from Conrad Gesner, Historiae Animalium (Zürich, 1551–8):
p. 193 (right); from Kenneth Grahame, The Golden Age (London, 1895):
p. 314; from Le Grand Kalendrier et Compost des Bergiers . . . (Troyes, 1529):
p. 215 (left); Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, Coventry: p. 349; from
Magnus Hirschfeld, Sexualpathologie (Bonn, 1921): p. 167; Hunterian
Museum, London: p. 251; from The Illustrated London News, 21 July 1877:
p. 157; from Invocation a l’amour Chant philosophique (London, c. 1825):
p. 54; Josef Mensing Gallery, Hamm-Rhynern: p. 328; The Josephinium,
Vienna: p. 258; Richard Von Krafft-Ebing Collection: p. 166; Kunst-
historisches Museum, Vienna: pp. 144, 272 (foot); Kunstmuseum, Basel:
p. 257; from Jean-Charles Gervaise de Latouche (attrib.), Dom Bougre oú
Le Portier de Chartreux (Frankfurt, 1741): p. 92; ‘Choisy Le Conin’ (Franz
von Bayros), Erzahlungen am Toilettentische (privately published, 1908):
p. 178; Library of Congress, Washington, dc: p. 304; Library of the Royal
College of Physicians, Edinburgh: p. 251; from the London Illustrated
News (1843): p. 161; reproduced by courtesy of the Master and Fellows of
Trinity College, Cambridge: p. 362 left); from John Laws Milton, On the
Pathology and Treatment of Spermatorrhoea (London, 1887): p. 64; from
Albert Moll, Handbuch der Sexualwissenschaften (Leipzig, 1921): p. 67;
Musée du Louvre, Paris: pp. 74, 119 (left), 213, 281, 366; Musée d’Orsay,
Paris: p. 185; Museo Nazionale Archeologico, Tarquinia: p. 108; from
Alfred de Musset, Gamiani, ou deux nuits d’excès (Brussels, 1833): pp. 65,
370 (foot); Naples Archaeological Museum, Italy: pp. 16, 17, 182, 367, 368;
National Archaeological Museum, Madrid: p. 210; National Museum
Stockholm: p. 119 (right); New York Historical Society: p. 159; ny Carlsberg
Glyptotek, Copenhagen: p. 390; Palazzo Farnese, Rome: p. 272 (top);
from James Parsons, A Mechanical and Critical Enquiry into the Nature of
Hermaphrodites (London, 1741): p. 120; private collections: pp. 181 (foot),
241, 295, 311; Rijsmuseum, Amsterdam: p. 273; Shibden Hall, Yorks: p. 124;
La Specula, Florence: p. 259; Staatliche Antikensammlungen, Munich: pp.
78, 212, 242; Staatliches Museen, Berlin: p. 23; State Pushkin Museum, St.
Petersburg: p. 18; Tate, London: pp. 260, 312; from Léo Taxil, Les Prostitutes
Contemporarie (Paris, 1884): p. 133; from S.A.D. Tissot, L’Onanisme; ou
dissertation physique sur les maladies produites par la masturbation (Paris,
1836): p. 61; from S.A.D. Tissot, L’Onanismo ovvero Dissertazioni sopra le
malattie cagionate dalle Polluzioni voluntarie (Venice, 1785): p. 60; from
The Unexplained, vol. 12 (London, 1980): p. 153; Universitätsbibliothek
Heidelberg Cod. Pal. germ. 848 (Codex Manesse): p. 147; from Antonio
458
photo acknowledgements
Vallisneri, Istoria della generazione dell’uomo e degli animali (Venice, 1721):

p. 56; from Martin van Maele, La Grande Danse Macabre des vifs (Paris,
1907-08): p. 201, 203, 284, 307, 331; Venice Sex Museum: p. 200; Versailles
Museum: p. 245; from Frances-Marie de Voltaire, Candide (Paris, c. 1803):
p. 194; photos courtesy Wellcome Images: pp. 46, 54, 55, 56, 61, 62, 64, 120,
133, 166, 167; from The Women-Hater’s Lamentation . . . (London, 1707): p. 89.
DF5KX, the copyright holder of the image on p. 386 (top), and Dpmath,
the copyright holder of the image on p. 382 (foot), have published these
online under conditions imposed by a Creative Commons Attribution-
Share Alike 3.0 Unported license; and Kookarocha79, the copyright hold-
er of the image on p 391, has published it online under conditions
imposed by a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported,
2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license.
Readers are free:

to share – to copy, distribute and transmit these images alone
to remix – to adapt these images alone
Under the following conditions:
attribution – readers must attribute either image in the manner specified
by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that these
parties endorse them or their use of the work).
share alike – If readers alter, transform, or build upon this image, they
may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license
to this one.
459
index
Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations
Abélard, Pierre 26–8, and His Daughters 272 Apollodorus 13

404, 439 Amenhotep iii 271 apotemnophilia 392–3
Aboriginal Australians American Psychiatric see also amputation
193, 288 Association 10–11, 106, apprentices 53, 84,
abstinence 22, 64, 179, 237, 268 90–93, 186, 201–2,
348–9 amputation, amputee 245–6, 297–8
Academie des dames, L’ sex 84, 210, 392–3, Apuleius, Lucius, The
(Nicolas Chorier, erot- 399–400 Golden Ass 179, 181
ica) 44, 52, 115–16 Anacreon 390 Aquinas, Thomas 25,
Achilles 78–9, 145, 239, anal intercourse 15, 25, 49–50, 81
242, 410 76, 80, 94, 96, 168, Ardisson, Victor 263–4
Acton, William 64, 66, 373–4 aristocracy, aristocrats
286, 427 see also sodomy 84, 95, 152, 216, 223,
The Functions and Analysis of the Sexual 248, 277, 358
Disorders of the Impulse (Havelock Aristophanes 393
Reproductive Organs Ellis) 351 Aristotle 19, 79
64–5 anatomy, anatomists 54, Generation of Animals
adultery 24–5, 41, 54–5, 61, 249–59 19
224, 275, 281 Anatomy Act of 1832 254 Aristotle’s Masterpiece
Agamemnon 145 Anatomy of Melancholy, (erotica) 21, 53
age of consent 295, The (Robert Burton) 54 Arrowsmith, Stephen
299–301, 317, 327, 398, Anderson, Sir Robert 69 300
400, 432 animal rights 206 Atkinson, George 307
Agrippina 270, 274 animal sex farms 206 Aurelius, Marcus 146
Akhenaten 272 animals see bestiality auto-asphyxiation 237–8,
alcohol, alcoholism 202, Anne, Queen of England 383–4
210, 233–4, 287, 355, 122–3, 159 Autopsy (television
375 anodyne necklaces 57 series) 265
Aldrovandi, Ulisse, anus 16, 22, 25, 207, Avicenna 21
Monstrorum historia 231–2, 332, 348–9, 350, avisodomy 199–202
193, 195 394 Azande 331–2
algolagnia 225–9, 237 see also anal inter-
see also pain course; sodomy baby play, adult 329,
Allen, James 306 anxiety 65, 70, 72, 138, 355–6
Allen, Thomas 112 290, 379 Balzac, Honoré de A
Al-Razi 21 Aphrodite, Aphroditus Passion in the Desert
Altdorfer, Albert, Lot 110, 118 197
460
index
Barends, Trijntje 157 Deuteronomy 22 British Sex Survey 40

Barker, Priscilla 68 Genesis 49, 161, 274 Brooks, Rebekah 324
Barney, Natalie Clifford Leviticus 22, 80, 113, Brooks, Romaine 132–5
132–4, 117–18, 179–80, 184, 243, Browning, Robert 260
barracks 102, 111, 141–2, 274, 276 Brudos, Jerome Henry
156, 262 Numbers 243 380–81
Barrie, J. M. 312–13 Bienville, M.D.T., Brygos Painter 298
bachelors 50, 64 Nymphomania 60 buggery see anal inter-
Bayros, Franz von 178 Binet, Alfred 8, 36, 371–2 course, sodomy
Beam, Lura Ella, One birth control see contra- Burke, Edmund, On the
Thousand Marriages 38 ception Sublime and Beautiful
Beard, George M. 69 bisexuality 40, 76, 102, 238
Beardsley, Aubrey 127, 129 134, 138, 146, 165, 168, Burke, William 251–255
beatings 21, 139, 161, 206, 379, 393, 401 see also Hare, William
186–7, 210–11, 213–16, Black Death 29, 243 Burney, Fanny 280
222, 224, 228, 235–6, Blandy, Mary 256 Burrell, Jonathan 191
301, 305, 309, 356, Bloch, Iwan 8, 34, 102, 336 Burton, Robert, The
362–3 Boccaccio, Giovanni 28, Anatomy of Melancholy
Beaufort, Lady Margaret 150 54–5
299 Body Integrity Identity Butler, Eleanor 123, 125
Bedborough, Thomas 36 Disorder (biid) 392–3 Butler, Josephine 315–16
Beggar’s Benison 52 Bondt, Jacob de 192–3 buttocks, bottoms 230–31,
Benjamin, Dr Harry 145, Bonny, Anne 156 332, 334, 338–9, 340,
170–72, 174 Book of Gomorrah (Liber 350, 356, 361, 372, 385
Bennet, Charles 290 Gomorrhianus, Peter Byron, Lord George
Bernard of Gordon 21 Damien) 80 Gordon 281, 363
Lily of Medicine 21 Booth, Charles 286
Bernis, François-Joachim Bora, Katherine von 30 Cage aux Folles, La 164
de Pierre, Cardinal de Borel, Antoine, illustra- Caligula 211, 274
301 tions to Thérèse Cameron, Julia Margaret
Besant, Annie 38 philosophe 59, 126 317
bestiality 7, 11, 17–18, 25, Boswell James 31–2, 52 Cannon, John 344
33, 51, 179–208, 240, Boucher, François, Capel, Richard 55
268, 276, 344, 397–8, Hercules and Ompahle capital punishment
401 18 49–50, 115, 188, 276,
with birds see avi- bourgeoisie 55, 68, 285 306
sodomy Boulton, Ernest 95–7 burning 75, 82, 84,
with bulls 17, 180, 182 Bradlaugh, Charles 38 86–8, 94, 155, 184–7,
with cows 17, 185, Brandon, Lady Elizabeth 247–8, 274, 276, 398
189–90, 192, 202–3 309 hanging 75, 93, 96, 256,
with dogs 178, 185, Brady, Ian 320 265, 383–4, 398
187–9, 194–5, 202–4, Brandes, Bernd Jürgens public executions 243,
207, 319 399 256
with donkeys (asses), breasts 68, 70, 124, 130–31, Caprio, Frank 137–8,
jennies 179, 186 164, 171, 176, 256, 263–5, 231–2, 320, 338–9,
with horses, mares, 282, 318–19, 335, 337, 349–50
ponies 175, 180–2, 372, 374, 385, 392, 399 Caravaggio 88
186–8, 197, 204 breeches roles 156 Amor Vincit Omnia 86
Bête, La (The Beast, film, Bretonne, Restif de la 377 Boy with a Basket of
dir. Walerian Bride of Frankenstein Fruit 87
Borowczyk) 197 (film, dir. James Carlini, Bernadetta 114
Bible 22, 80, 113, 147, 161, Whale) 255–6 Carpenter, Edward 36,
243, 274, 314 Briqueville, Robert de 245 98, 131
461
Carpoz, Benedict 50–51 and masturbation congenital or hereditary

Carracci, Annibale, Zeus 48–50 defects and disease 36,
and Hera 272 and sex 22–5, 299, 373 62, 98–9, 101–2, 130–31,
Carroll, Lewis (Charles and sodomy 80–82, 87 137–8, 226, 227–8, 236,
Dodgson) 310–11 see also Christianity 339, 372, 375, 379
Carry On (films) 164 Church of Jesus Christ of see also degeneration;
Cassius Dio 146 Latter-day Saints, The tainted families
castration 28, 64, 84, 146, 401 Contagious Diseases Act
152, 324 Churchill, Sarah, Duchess 67, 315
Cathars 81–2 of Marlborough 122–3 contraception 37–8, 41–2,
Catte of Ingoldmells, Cicero 273 64, 165, 295
Matilda 28 circumcision Cooper, Stephen 307
Charcot, Jean-Martin 69 male 400, 146 coprophilia 348–50, 352,
chastity 8, 22, 29–30, 57, female 399 355–6, 364
155, 286, 297, 300 Clap, ‘Mother’ 94–5 Corinthians 22
see also virgins Clary, Julian 164–5 Cornbury, Edward Hyde,
Chaucer, Geoffrey, The Cleland, John 122, 344 Lord 158–9
Canterbury Tales 28, Cleopatra vii 271 Coroners and Justice Act
332 clergy (incl. priests) 25, 2009 322
child abuse 213, 275, 28, 30, 40, 56, 82, 85, corsets, corseting 67, 167,
291–2, 305–10, 314–15, 148, 152, 219, 243, 280, 173, 229, 373, 380
319–25 283, 337 Cosel, Carl von 265–7
Child, Elizabeth 307 Cleveland Street raid 95 Cotton, John (Puritan) 117
childbirth 43 clitoris 58, 118, 120–22, Courbet, Gustave, Nude
childhood 99, 101, 134, 138, 156, 170, 319, 365, 389 Woman with a Dog 185
167, 222, 228–9, 236, clitorodectomy 64 courts, trials 275, 279–80,
248, 261, 288, 291–2, clubs 52, 88, 103, 105, 134, 295, 297, 303–7, 320,
295–8, 301–5, 310–18 163–5, 237, 306, 341, 322, 334, 340, 343, 399
children 11, 13–14, 24–5, 379, 394, 396 courtesans see prostitutes
28, 38, 57, 63–6, 68–9, coitus interruptus 49 courtly love 374, 376–7
76, 78, 82, 99, 126, 197, Coke, Sir Edward 300 cousins 271, 275–9, 281,
213, 215, 221, 228, 233–4, Collier, John, Lady Godiva 293
236, 244–8, 275, 285, 349 Couston, Thomas Smith
288–93, 295–327, 335, Comerre, Léon-Françoise, 69
341, 390, 400–02 Leda and the Swan 181 Cranach, Lucas the Elder
Christianity, Christians Comfort, Alex, Joy of Sex 22, 198
22, 29, 80, 179, 189, 192, 384 Criminal Justice and
211, 215, 243, 274–5 Committee for Research Immigration Act 2008
see also Church on Problems of Sex 268, 401
Christina, Queen of (u.s. National Research Criminal Law
Sweden 109 Council) 39 Amendment Act 1885
Church Fathers 48–9 companionate marriage 317
Church 30 Crivelli, Bartolomea 114
and bestiality 184–5 Comstock Laws (Anti- Crocker, William Henry
and children 301, 322, Obscenity Act 1873) 37 334
401 conception 19–20, 25, 310, Cromwell, Oliver 281
cross-dressing (Joan of 373, 401 cross-dressing see trans-
Arc) 153–5 see also generation; vestism
and the dead 249 procreation Crusades 82
and incest 275–6 concubine see mistress Cruikshank, George 302
and lesbians 113–17 Condorçet, Nicolas de 93 Cruikshank, Isaac Robert,
and marriage 28–30, confessional 25, 30, 224, The London Monster
141 291 231
462
index
Culam, Claudine de 187 Disorders (dsMd) Dutroux, Marc 322–3

Cullwick, Hannah 362–3 10–12, 106, 381 dwarfs, midgets 390
cult of girl child 310–11 Dick Cavett Show, The Dyke, Antony van,
cunnilingus 205–6, 264, (television series) 173 George Villiers and His
285, 320, 355, 365–9, Dickenson, Latou Robert, Brother 294
371, 375 One Thousand dysmorphia
see also fellatio; oral sex Marriages 38 bodily 392–3, 400
cutting see stabbing and Diderot, Denis 123–4 sexual 169–70
cutting Dietrich, Marlene 134, 136
dildo, penis substitutes, Eakins, Thomas,
D’Arcy, Ella 127 48, 114–15, 248, 388–9, Swimming 99
D’Aulnoy, Countess 402 East India Company 197
Marie Catherine 358 Dioclese 79 Ecole des filles, L’
Damian, Peter 49, 80, Diogenes the Cynic 47 (erotica) 52
357–8 Dionysus 145, 181 Edward ii, King of
Daniel, John 290 divorce 30–31, 290, 339 England 82–3
Daniels, John 334 dogging 346–7 Egbert, King of Wessex
Darwin, Charles 35, 196, domestic servants 68, 93, 184
279 297, 301, 344 ego-dystonic homosexu-
David, Rape of the Sabine dominatrix 329, 361 ality 12
Women 213 Donatello, David 85, 88 ejaculation, ejaculate
Davis, Dr Katherine 70 Donnisthorpe, Revd 31–2, 49–50, 57, 63, 199,
Davis, Porter 337 George 91 202, 246, 308, 337, 350.
Davy, Meredith 90 Dorland’s Medical 355, 371, 373, 383, 385,
Debreyne, P.J.C. 63 Dictionary 33 389
Decameron (Giovanni Douglas, Lord Alfred see also orgasm
Boccacio) 28 96–7 Elagabalus 145–6
Deceased Brother’s Douglas, James 137 Electra complex 288
Widow’s Marriage Act Dover, Kenneth 77 Ellis, Havelock 8, 36–8,
1921 282 Dowson, Ernest 310–11 69, 101–2, 130–2, 174,
Deceased Wife’s Sister’s drag 103, 134, 162–4 199, 202, 226–7, 288,
Marriage Act 1907 282 see also transvestism 318–9, 351, 354–5, 371–3,
defecation 349, 352–3 Drucilla 274 378–9
defloration, cult of 306 drugs Analysis of the Sexual
degeneration 63, 101 hormone 169 Impulse 351
Dekker, Albert 383 for paedophiles 321, Fountain of Life 351
Delacroix, Eugène, The 324 Sexual Inversion in
Bride of Abydos 281 for pain 210 Men 36
Delamarre, Marguerite 123 for recreation 105, 237 Sexual inversion in
Deleuze, Gilles, Drummond, William 51–2 Women 130–31
Masochism: Coldness Drysdale, Sir George, Studies in the
and Cruelty 236 Elements of Social Psychology of Sex 36,
Demetrius of Apamea, Science 64 351
On the Signs of Duffus, George 90–91 Ellis, John B., Free Love
Diseases 47 DuGard, Samuel and and Its Votaries 38
Denning, Abraham 189 Lydia 277 Emile (novel, Jean-
depression see melancho- Dunton, John, He- Jacques Rousseau) 53,
lia Strumpets: A Satyr on 301–2
Devéria, Achille 65, 347, the Sodomite-Club Endore, Guy, The
370 88–9 Werewolf of Paris 197
Dewey, Joseph 191 Dürer, Albrecht, Entertainments National
Diagnostic and Statistical Martyrdom of St Service Association
Manual of Mental Catherine 213 (ensa) 164
463
epilepsy 61, 264, 336 Femme endormie, La Galen 19, 47–8, 54

erastes 76–80 (erotica) 385 Galvani, Luigi 254–5
Eriksson, King of Norway Fendi, Peter, 354, 370 Ganymede 74–5, 88
and Sweden 83 Féré, Charlesm The gas masks 381
erōmenos 76–80 Evolution and Gauthe, Father Gilbert
Eronania (book) 45, 57–8 Dissolution of the 322
erotica (in text) 9, 52–4, Sexual Instinct 227 Gavarni, Paul, The Places
56–7, 124, 282–6, 285, Ferguson, Edythe 173–5 of Pleasure 345
309, 358–61 Féron, E. F., Gilles de Rais Gay Pride 105, 107
Esquire (magazine) 170 245 Gazette Médicale
eugenics 35, 62 fertility 356–7 (magazine) 199
Eulenburg, Albert 228, see also infertility generation, 19, 35, 57
234, 237 fetishism 11, 33–4, 237, see also conception,
Eustathius of 350, 365, 371–84, 396 procreation
Thessalonica 239 Fèvre, Thomas Le 186 genitalia 121
Evans-Pritchard, Edward Fielding, Henry 122 see also labia; penis;
331–2 Fielding, John 303 vagina
Everything You Always First World War 134, 141, Gentleman’s Magazine
Wanted to Know About 163 250
Sex . . . (film, dir. fisting 394–6 gerontophilia 11, 221
Woody Allen) 197 flagellation, flagellants, Gesner, Conrad,
evolutionary theory 34–5, flogging, whipping 22, Historiae animalium
197, 227–8, 288–9 33, 80–81, 213, 238, 338, 193
exhibitionism 33–4, 356–64, 376 Giese, Karl 165
329–44, 346–7, 364, 374 flashers see exhibitionism Gillray, James 31–2
Exner, Max 70 Fliess, Wilhelm 349 gladiatorial games 210–11
Formby, George 164 Gladstone, William 361
Factors in the Sex Life of Fountain of Life Glazemark, Richard 280
2,200 Women (survey) (Havelock Ellis) 351 Gloeden, Wilhelm von
71 Frankenstein (Mary 99, 326
fairy tales 197 Shelley), 255 Godiva, Lady 346, 349
false memory syndrome free love 37–8, 127 golden showers 237–8,
292 Freud, Sigmund 8, 36, 69, 329, 356
Fanny Hill see Memoirs of 99–101, 198–9, 228–9, see also urolagnia
a Woman of Pleasure 288, 319–20, 336, Goltzius, Hendrik, Lot
fantasies 98, 168–9, 209, 348–9, 373 and His Daughters 273
216, 222–4, 228–9, 248, Three Essays on the Gordon, Mary 361
261, 263, 286, 319, 325, Theory of Sexuality Gough, Stephen 342–3
355, 356, 358, 360, 362, 198–99, 229 Grahame, Kenneth 312,
375, 380, 385, 393, 399 Totem and Taboo 288 314
see also sexual fantasies Freundin, Die (magazine) Green, Richard 172
Favorinus 296 134 Gregory of Tours 148
fellatio, fellators, fellating Freyer, Hans 337 Grenfell, Joyce 164
356, 365–71, 373, 396 frigidity 15, 138 Grien, Hans Baldung
see also cunnilingus; frotterism (rubbing) 121, Death and the Maiden
oral sex 339–40 (Hans Baldung Grien)
female friendships 109, Fulbert, Canon 26–8 255, 257
122–3 furor uterinus 58 Three Witches, The
see also lesbians see also nymphomania Grien, Hans Baldung
female husbands 110, furries see plushophilia (art) 117
121–2 Gueulette, Simon 186
feminism, feminists 126, Galba, Roman emperor Guinevere 374
264, 325 80
464
index
Hall, Radclyffe 137, 138–9, the Skimmington 160 impotence 17–18, 22, 37,
142 Cunicularii . . . 196 61, 71, 121, 149, 150, 152,
The Well of Loneliness The Four Stages of 318, 358, 368
137, 138–9, 173 Cruelty 250 incest 7, 10–11, 33, 262–3,
Hall, Thomas 158–60 Hogg, Thomas 190 270–93
Hamill, Katharine Forrest Holloway, John 91 infibulations 388–93
312 Homer 78–9 infertility 57, 273
Hammond, Charles 95 homosexuality (general) see also fertility
Harding, William 305 11–12, 165, 16, 175, 227, insanity 21, 54, 56, 58,
Hare, William 251–5 290, 350, 394–5, 402 60–62, 66, 70, 72, 128,
see also Burke, William homosexuality (male) 7, 134, 224, 372
Haworth, John 192 12, 33–4, 36, 75–107, Institute for Sex Research
Hawtrey, Charles 164 109, 131, 134, 139, 164, 165
Hello Dolly (play) 164 168, 234–5, 268, 290, intercrural sex 16, 77, 79,
Héloïse d’Argenteuil 26–8 350, 375, 384, 394–6 101, 246
Herbert, Henry 306 see also anal inter- International Statistical
herbs 18, 209 course; sodomy Classification of
Herculaneum 10, 182 homosexuality (female) Diseases and Related
hereditary disease 62, 339, 137–8 Health Problems (icd)
372, 375, 379, 399 see also lesbianism 10–11, 268–9, 325
see also tainted families homunculi 55–6 Internet 402
hermaphroditism, her- Hopkins, Elizabeth 300 inversion
maphrodites 110, hormones 170–72, 176, female see lesbianism
118–22, 171 392 male see homosexuali-
Hermes 47 hospitals 62, 380 ty
Herodotus 182–3, 239, Hot Lunch 350 Isherwood, Christopher
242, 330 Howe, Joseph 68 103
Herridge, George 333 Hudson, Rock 103 Izzard, Eddie 165
Hertner, Elisabeth 114–17 Hue, Felix 334
Hertzeldorfer, Katherina Hunt, Arabella 121 James, Robert, Medical
114, 388 Hunt, Morton 205 Dictionary 58
He-Strumpets . . ., The Hunter, John 71 James, William 98–9
(poem, John Dunton) Hunter, William 249 Jepson, Edgar 310
88–9 Hustler (magazine) 384, Johnson, William 307
hetairai 211, 296 394 Joiner, William 334
see also prostitutes Huxley, Thomas Henry, Jorgenson, Christine
heterosexuality 7, 13–43, Man’s Place in Nature 172–3
76, 102 197 Jung, Carl 288
Hickey, William 31–2 hybrids 192–9
Hiller, Kurt 165 Hygienic Methods of Kaprovitsh, Ivan 230
Hindley, Myra 320 Family Limitations Karolewski, Susan 291
Hippocrates, On Diseases (Sanger and Haire) 38 Keller, Rosa 219
of Women, 19, 48 hypersexual disorder 12 Kellogg, John Harvey 70
Hirschfeld, Magnus hysteria 70, 319–20 Kertbeny, Karl Maria 33,
165–70, 229, 380 75
Sexualpathologie 167 idiocy 286, 335 Kierman, James G. 33
Histoire de Dom Bougre, see also insanity kinaidoi 79
portier de Chartreux illegitimacy 41 Kinsey, Alfred C. 13,
(erotica, attrib. J.-C. G imagination 58, 60, 122, 39–40, 71–2, 170, 175,
de Latouche) 282, 283 150, 196, 247, 248 204–5, 321
Hoare, William 303 immorality 25, 35, 38, 162, Kinsey Scale 40
Hogarth, William 249–50 180, 315 Kirk, Edward 68–9
Hudibras Encounters Morgan, Lewis Henry 287 Knights Templar 81–3
465
Knowlton, Charles, The Levi, Michael 303 marriage 15, 29, 110, 121,
Fruits of Philosophy 38 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 289 126, 128, 135, 138, 146,
Knox, Dr Robert 251–5 libertines 31–2, 51–3, 88, 204, 224, 263, 265, 295,
Kottak, Conrad P., 289 286, 306, 332, 344, 358 297, 299–300, 348, 361,
Kotzwara, Frantisek 383 Liddell, Alice 310, 313 387
Kraepelin, Emile 72 Liébault, Jean 54 incestuous 271–82, 287,
Krafft-Ebing, Richard von Lister, Anne 123–4 289–90, 292
8, 33–5, 69, 101, 109, London Committee for medieval period 25–30
139, 141, 199, 200–02, the Suppression of the Enlightenment 30–32
225–6, 263, 287–8, Traffic in British Girls . Marriage Act of 1835 282
317–19, 335, 339, 351, . . 315 Marriage Act of 1949 290
362, 368–75, 384 London Monster 230–31 Married Love (Marie
Psychopathia Sexualis London Society for Stopes) 38
109, 263, 335 Prevention of Cruelty Marsham, Abigail 123
Kronfeld, Arthur 165 to Children (nsPcc) 314 Marten, John 56
kynodesme 390 Los Angeles, Municipal Martial 183, 344
Code of 175 martyrdom, martyrs 22,
La Rue, Danny 164 Lot 272, 273, 274 214, 215, 222, 224
La Tour Eiffel, Erika Love and Pain (Havelock masochism 24, 34, 209,
387–8 Ellis) 226–7 216, 221–9, 234–7,
labia 319, 342, 365, 392 love sickness 20–21 372–3, 375, 393
Ladder (magazine) 142 Lucian 111–13, 183 Mass Observation 40, 455
‘Lady’s Dressing Room, lunatic asylum 62, 72, Masters and Johnson
The’ (Jonathan Swift) 139, 339 (William H. Masters
348 lust-murders 34, 233–4, and Virginia E.
Ladyboys 176 261 Johnson) 42
Laffite-Cyon, Françoise see also rape masturbation 25, 33,
37 Luther, Martin 29–30 45–73, 94, 101, 118, 170,
Lamb, Ralph 29 Lycomedes 145 184, 205, 262–3, 372–3,
Lancelot 374 Lysistrata Haranguing 378, 398
Lars and the Real Girl the Athenian Women Matrimonial Causes Act
(film, dir. Craig (Aubrey Beardsley) 127, 30
Gillespie) 387 129 Maudsley, Henry 66
Lascivious Hypocrite, The Max, Mon Amour (film,
(erotica) 367 Mackenzie, Sir George 51, dir. Nagisa Oshima)
Lasègue, Charles 335 188 197
Lateran Council 25–6, 81, madness see insanity Mearns, Andrew, Bitter
275 Mäele, Martin van, La Cry of Outcast London
Le Sueur, Eustache, The Grande danse macabre (pamphlet) 286
Abduction of Ganymede des vifs (The Great Mechanical and Critical
74 Danse Macabre of the Enquiry into the Nature
Leader, Nicholas 90 Quick Prick) 201, 203, of Hermaphrodites, A
Lees, Edith 37 284, 307, 331 (James Parsons) 119,
Leeuwenhoek, Anton van Mahew, Henry 286 120, 120
55 Mailly, Jean de 150 Megilla 112–13
Leno, Dan 162 Malthusian League 38 Meibom, Johann
Lenoir, Police Lieutenant Manningham, Sir Richard Heinrich 358
93 196 Meiwes, Armin 399
lesbianism, lesbians 7, 9, Marie Antoinette, Queen melancholia (and
33, 37, 58, 98, 105, of France 109 depression) 17, 19–20,
109–43, 165, 176, 268, Mark Matthews, The 54, 60, 138–9, 171, 229,
285, 319, 344, 355, 371, Horseman (book) 179, 372
375, 388, 395, 397, 402 204 Melbourne, Lord 309
466
index
Memoirs of a Woman of My Secret Life (‘Walter’, O’Grady, Paul 164

Pleasure (Fanny Hill, erotica) 350–51 objectum sexuality (os)
John Cleland) 344 Myrmidons (Aeschylus) 384–8
menstruation 19, 114, 300, 78 obscenity 36–8, 69–70,
365 mythology 17, 180–83, 193, 204, 230, 333, 388
mental asylum see 239, 272–3 Oedipus 273
lunatic asylum Oedipus complex 228–9
mental deficiency see Napoleonic Code 53, 94, Of the Crime of Onan
idiocy, insanity 301 (book) 57
mental disorders Nast, Thomas, Free Love Offences Against the
Merzbach, George 336 39 Person Act 1828 308
Mew, Charlotte 127–8 Nazis 35, 165 Offences Against the
Michelangelo, Last necking 42 Person act 1861 96, 191
Judgement 395 necrolagnia see Ogle, Sir Thomas 332
midwifery, midwives 48, necrophilia Old Bailey 187–9, 289–90,
118–19, 121, 158, necrophilia 7, 33–4, 221, 308
Milagro de Hoyos, Maria 234, 239–69, 373, older men see
Elena 265–7 397–8, 401 gerontophilia
Millais, John Everett 259, Neaira 296 Onan (biblical story)
310 Nefertiti 272 48–9
Ophelia 259, 260 Nero 80, 146, 181, 211, 270, Onania; or, The Heinous
Cherry Ripe 310, 311 274 Sin of Self-pollution
Milligan, Stephen 384 Nesbitt, J. M. 312 (book) 56
microscope 55 neurology 228, 230 onanism see masturba-
mistresses 13, 24, 137, 146, neurosis 69, 378 tion
222–4, 282, 309, 344, New Description of Onanism; or, a Treatise
363, 385 Merryland, A (erotica) upon the Disorders . . .
Mitchell, Alice 130–31 282, 426 (Samuel Tissot) 60,
Molay, Jacques de 82 New Woman 126–31 60, 61
Moll, Albert 99, 227, 264, newspapers 9–10, 109, 135, Onanism Display’d
349, 355, 376 137, 156, 191–2, 280, 315, (pamphlet) 57
mollies 94–5 322, 332 Onanism Examined and
Money, John 172, 392–3 Nikarete 296 Detected (pamphlet) 57
monks, monasteries 28, nipples 183, 337 oral sex 365–71
30, 80–81, 92, 213 nocturnal emissions see also cunnilingus;
monogamy 22 49–50 fellatio
Montorgueil, Bernard, see also ejaculation orgasm 20, 47–8, 50, 72,
illustration of bondage North American 199, 209, 225, 227, 232,
226 Man/Boy Love 261–2, 318, 321, 381, 384
mooning 334 Association (naMbla) Oschophoria 145
see also exhibitionism 326 Oshima, Nagisa 197
Morley, William 290 nosegays 91, 375–6 Otis, Margaret 139
Most Straunge and nudism, nakedness, Ovid 52, 145
true discourse . . . of naturalists 334, 338–9, The Art of Love 52,
incestuous copulation 341–3, 338 211–12
(pamphlet) 277 nuns, nunneries 8, 26–8, Metamorphoses 145
Munby, Arthur 362–3 30, 113–14, 116, 123–4,
Murder Act of 1752 251 139, 148–50, 152, 213 Paedophile Information
Murphy, John Enoch 31 Nymphomania; or, Exchange (Pie) 321
music halls 163 Treatise on Uterine Fury paedophilia, paedophiles
Muybridge, Eadweard, (M.D.T. Bienville) 60 7, 11, 33, 107, 221, 233,
Animal Locomotion nymphomania 58–60, 118, 244, 293, 295–327, 373,
319 127, 297 397
467
Paget, Sir James 71 Pied de Fanchette, Le Prince Albert (piercing)

pain 64, 209–15, 224–9, (Restif de la Bretonne) 391
232, 235–8, 361 377 Principles of Psychology
see also algolagnia pilgrimage 30 (William James) 98
Painter of Berlin 77 pillory 90–91, 95, 306, 398 prisons 139, 186–7,
Pall Mall Gazette 315 pirates 156 190–92, 196, 207,
pamphlets 10, 37, 57, 109, plague 63, 243, 273 215–16, 219, 233–4, 262,
156, 254–5, 277 Plato 79, 110, 318 267, 291–2, 300, 306,
Pan 47 Platter, Thomas 301 319, 323, 327, 332, 337,
papacy 81, 151, 152 Pliny 390 343, 347, 356, 381, 383,
see also popes plushophilia, plushies, 401
paranoia 66, 392 furries 204–8 procreation 19, 24, 38,
paraphilia 11, 267–8, 325, Plutarch 111, 183 49–50, 55, 271, 276, 401
339, 372, 380, 388, 392–3 Polari 103 see also conception;
Paré, Ambroise 118, 193 Poltavchenko, Georgy 106 generation
Park, Frederick 95–7 Pompeii 10, 16–17, 365–6, prostitution, prostitutes
Parsons, James 119–20 368 13, 15, 24, 32, 41, 48, 53,
passivity 259, 261, 325 Ponsonby, Sarah 123, 125 67, 77, 79, 85, 88, 93–5,
Patroclus 78–9 Poor Law 162 105, 111, 125, 131, 133, 138,
patronage 277, 297 popes 151, 152, 195 162, 176, 199, 210–11,
Paul of Aegina 19 Gregory iii 275 216, 219, 223, 251–3, 273,
Payne, Cynthia 356 Gregory ix 84 278–9, 296, 303, 315–16,
pederasty 7, 77, 233, 298 Innocent iii 82 335, 356, 361–2, 366, 375
peep-holes 344, 351 Joan 150–52 psychosis 69, 219, 268
Peeping Toms 346 Leo ix 49 psychiatry, psychiatrists
Peloponnesian War 296 Pascal ii 33, 61, 66, 98, 106, 170,
penance 25, 49, 113–14, Porn of the Dead (film, 198, 219, 227, 229, 231,
184, 276, 356–7, 361 dir. Rob Rotten) 255 237, 241, 261, 267–8,
penetration 16, 25, 114, pornai 211 287, 320, 345, 349, 371,
207, 229, 243, 268, 308, pornography see erotica 373, 376, 380–81, 398
392–3, 401–2 Poulter, Amy 121 psychoanalysis, psycho-
penis 17, 22, 48, 64, 112–4, Practical Treatise on the analysts 33, 36, 99, 101,
118–9, 121, 156, 158, Causes . . . of 229, 288, 320, 338, 392
169–70, 172, 175, Spermatorrhoea, A Psychopathia Sexualis
199–203, 207, 231, 337, (Claude François (Richard von Krafft-
339–42, 358, 365, 368, Lallemand) 63 Ebing) 109, 263, 335
379, 389–92, 394, 399 pregnancy 18–19, 41, 43, Ptolemy xiii 271
penitentials 10, 24–5, 49, 196, 236, 401 puberty 41, 64–5, 99,
184, 275 pre-marital sex 25, 28–9, 297–8, 300–01
Pepys, Samuel 9, 31, 52, 41, 65 see also prepubescent,
90, 332 prepubescent, pre- pre-puberty
Percival, Thomas, puberty, 310, 325 Pugno, Giuseppe 334
Medical Ethics 308 Pre-Raphaelites 310, 259 Pulcher, Clodius 365
Perkins, Ellen E., 68–9 see also Millais, John Punishment of Incest Act
Pettigrew, Rose 310, 312 Everett; Rossetti, 1908 289
petting 42, 45 Dante Gabriel; Siddal, punishment see capital
Philip the Arab 79 Elizabeth punishment
Philolaus 79 Present for a Papist; or, Puritans 55
Philosophical The Life and Death of Pygmalion 384
Transactions (Royal Pope Joan, A (book) 151
Society) 196 priapism 47, 54, 57 quacks 56, 58
Picart, Bernard, The Price, Mary 188 Queensberry, Marquess
Perfumer 353 priests see clergy of 97
468
index
Quintessence of Birch Royal College of sadism 11, 34, 138, 199,

Discipline (erotica) Surgeons 249, 253 209–11, 215–16, 219, 221,
367–8 Royal Society 120–21, 196, 225–37, 248, 268, 285,
249 319, 336, 348, 360, 363,
Rais, Gilles de 244–8, rubber dolls 385–6, 287 378
300–01 Rue, Antoine de La 186 Sadism and Masochism
Rambler, The (magazine) Rush, Benjamin, Medical (Albert Eulenburg) 228
278 Inquiries and sadomasochism 7, 11, 33,
Rampling, Charlotte 197 Observations 61 209–38, 268, 329, 350,
rape, rapists 25, 80, 91, Ryan, Michael, Handbook 356, 361–3, 397–8
145–6, 151, 179–80, of Medical safe sex 72
211–13, 216, 228, 233, 247, Jurisprudence 308 saints 22, 24, 213
290, 300, 303, 305–8, Rychard, Philip 297 St Antonius 50
314, 318–19, 322–5, 340 Rydström, Jens 202 St Augustine 24, 48,
Read, Mary 156 113, 275
Rebecca Riots 161 sadomasochism (s&M) 7, St Ambrose 275
Reformation 29–30, 94, 11, 33, 139–40, 209–38, St Catherine 214
118, 151, 300, 336 268, 356, 362–3, 377, St Columbanus, the
Reformation of Manners 381, 391, 394, 398, 394, penitential of 49
94 400, 402 St Francis of Sales 358
reproduction see Sacher-Masoch, Leopold St Jerome 24, 184
conception; generation; von 221–5, 236 St Joan (of Arc) 152–3,
procreation Angelika Aurore 244, 248
Restoration 156, 281 (Wanda) Rümelin 224 St John 195
Riddle of Male-Male Love Anna von Kottowitz St Juliana of Nicomedia
(Karl Heinrich Ulrichs) 221–2 22
98 Fanny von Pistor 222–3 St Paul 24
Riddell, William Renwick The Heritage of Cain St Radegund 149
233–4 224 Saltpêtrière hospital 62
Roe, Erica 335 The Separated Wife 222 Sanchez, Ricardo 200
Rolandina 85 Venus in Furs 221, 224 Sanger, Margaret 37–8
role-play 206, 209, 237, Sackville-West, Vita Sapphist 109–10, 118
268, 329, 355–7, 362–3, 136–7 see also lesbianism
381, 396 Sade, Marquis de 75, 199, Sappho 110–11, 142
Roman de la rose 27, 376 209, 215–21, 248, 282, satyriasis 54
Romance of Lust (erotica) 329–30, 352, 359–60, satyrs 47, 184
285, 360, 368 369 Saunders, Christopher
romantic love 25–6, 191, Aline et Valcour 216 189–90
277, 374, 376 Juliette 216, 220, 221, Scalbert, Jules, The
see also courtly love 248, 330, 348, 352, 359, Bathers 328
Rose, Robert 191 360, 369 Scared Silent (television
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Justine 216, 217, 218, documentary) 232
259–60 348, 361, 383 School of Venus 285
Roufon, George 306 Les 120 journées de schoolgirls 346
Rouge, Nicolas le, Sodome (The 120 Days schoolmistresses 141, 318
Christian Idea of the of Sodom) 216, 221, 248, schools 68, 139, 254, 301,
Torture Wheel 215 329, 348 356,
rough music 160 La Philosophie dans le boarding 68, 110, 139,
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques boudoir (Philosophy in 301, 356, 367
53, 301 the Bedroom) 75, 216, Schreiner, Olive, The Story
Rowbottom, Joseph 192 394 of an African Farm 37
Rowlandson, Thomas 31, Eugénie de Franval Schrenck-Notzing, Albert
249–54, 333 (Incest) 282 von 225, 227, 236–7
469
Schreuder, Anna 124 sexual fantasies 168, 209, sodomitical subcultures

Scientific Humanitarian 224, 380 93–107
Committee 165 see also fantasies sodomy 10, 25, 50–51, 55,
Scofield, Paul 164 sexual frustration 47 76, 80–84, 87–96, 109,
scrofula 62 sexual inversion see 114, 117, 122, 179, 187,
Scouting for Boys (Robert homosexuality; les- 199, 206, 226, 268, 276,
Baden-Powell) 68 bianism 285, 300, 303, 307–8,
Second World War 35, Sexual Inversion in Men 367, 388, 398, 402
42, 141, 164, 203, 381 (Havelock Ellis) 36 see also anal inter-
Secret Book: Containing Sexual inversion in course
. . . Instruction for Women (Havelock Soille, Jean de la 186
Young Women and Ellis) 130–31 soldiers 78, 94, 103, 145–6,
Girls, The 68 Sexual Offences Act 2003 152–3, 156, 197, 199–200,
sede stercoraria 151–2 207, 268, 292, 401 203, 244
Sedley, Sir Charles 332 Sexualpathologie (Magnus Somerset, Lord Arthur 95
seed see seminal fluid; Hirschfeld) 167 Sophocles, Oedipus Rex
sperm sexual perversion 8–12, 273
self-control 14, 24, 77, 79 18, 33, 35, 73, 199, 225, Southy, Sarah 305
self-harm, cutting 232 228–9, 233, 247, 281, Spanner case 234–5, 400
self-pollution see 285, 318, 335, 337, 340, sperm 20, 48–9, 55, 63–5,
masturbation 350, 397, 402 246, 267, 290–91, 350
seminal fluid, seed 20, sexual positions 14–16 spermatorrhoea 63–4
47–9, 53, 55, 57, 94, missionary position 13, 24 Spitzka, Edward Charles
190, 194, 274 Shakespeare, William 155, 66
servants see domestic 157 Sporus 146
servants Sharpe, Jane, Midwives Spranger, Bartolomeus,
Seven Books of Medicine Handbook 118–19 Hercules and Omphale
(book) 19 Shelley, Mary 255 144
sex education 41–2, 165, Shelley, Percy Bysshe 271 Springer, Jerry 204
325 shit, shitting see stabbing, cutting 230–32
sex games 329–64 coprophilia Stafford, Margaret 334
Sex Offender’s Act 1997 Shuvalov Painter 15 Stead, W. T. 315–17
323 siblings 128, 292–3, 397 Steer, Philip Wilson
sex manuals 19, 53 Siddall, Elizabeth 259–60 310–12
sex surveys 39–43 Sillé, Gilles de 245 Stein, Gertrude 134
sex toys 45, 237 sin 25, 29–30, 45, 48–51, Stekel, William 72, 263
sexology, sexologists 55, 69, 73, 80, 87, 114, Stendhal (Henri-Marie
8, 33–6, 98, 101–2, 147, 179–80, 188, 192, Beyle) 262–3
131–2, 137, 168, 225–9, 213, 273–4, 280, 285, Stephenson, Robert
231–6, 264, 287, 289, 301, 356–7, 366, 398 Louis, Strange Case of
318–19, 335–9, 341, 344, skimmington rides 160 Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
350–51, 362, 371–4, slaves 78, 210–11, 296, 315 197
378–9 Sleeman, William Henry sterility 53, 70
sexual assault 139, 186, 197 Stretton, Samuel 191
212, 230, 235, 246, 248, Smiles, Samuel 66 Stocker, Johannes 87
290, 297, 300, 304, 308, Smit, Maria 124 Stoker, Bram, Dracula 197
314, 340–41, 384 Smith, Bessie 134 Stonewall 105
Sexual Behavior in the social purity movements Stopes, Marie 38
Human Female (Alfred 66–7, 315, 317 Strabo 15
Kinsey et al.) 39 Sodom; or, The straight sex see hetero-
Sexual Behavior in the Quintessence of sexuality
Human Male (Alfred Debauchery (erotica, streaking 334
Kinsey et al) 13, 39 John Wilmot) 88 see also exhibitionism
470
index
Studies in the Psychology (Sigmund Freud) Trosse, George 52

of Sex (Havelock Ellis) 198–99, 229 Troyes, Chrètien de 374
36, 351 Tiberius 296 tumescence 351
Stübing, Patrick 291 Tilley, Vesta 163 Turnpike Trust 161
submission 58, 212, 216, Tischbein, J.H.W, Death
225–6, 259, 278 of Penthesilea 241 Ulrichs, Karl Heinrich 36,
Suetonius 80, 146, 181, Tissot, S.A.D. 60 98, 165
274, 296–7 Onanism; or, a Treatise unnatural acts 8, 18, 83
surgery (and operation) upon the Disorders . . . uranism 34, 36
146, 149, 169–73, 173–6, (Samuel Tissot) 60, 60, urolagnia, urination 237,
206, 391–3, 399 61 348, 350–55
Susini, Clemente (wax Toft, Mary 195–6 urning 98, 168
model maker) 258–9 toilets, bathhouses 94, uterus 53
Swedish Animal Welfare 103, 105–6, 133, 103
Agency 207 Toklas, Alice B. 132–4 vagina 13, 16, 20, 25, 31,
Swift, Jonathan, 348–9, Torah 22, 179 73, 146, 158, 169, 171–2,
383 torture 24, 84, 114, 117, 175, 180, 183, 195, 202,
Swinburne, Algernon 209, 211, 215, 220, 236, 204, 206–7, 267, 332,
Charles 361 244, 247–8, 261, 291, 342, 355, 365, 373, 385,
Swinscow, Charles 95 391, 394 389, 392, 394–5, 401–2
Sybian Saddle 389 Totem and Taboo vaginal penetrative sex 13,
Symonds, John (Sigmund Freud) 288 31, 73, 211, 355, 373,
Addington 36 Toulmouche, Adolphe 401–2
308 Vagrancy Act 1824 333
Tableau de l’amour conju- Tournier, Jean-Marc 189 ‘vanilla’ sex 13
gal (Mysteries of transsexuality, transsexu- see also heterosexuality
Conjugal Love Reveal’d, als 145–6, 167–77, 393, vapours 60
erotica, Nicolas 397, 399 venereal disease 56, 57,
Venette) 53 transvestism, transves- 64, 67–8, 137, 211, 222,
taboo 146, 180, 241–4, 267, tites 11, 33, 89, 95–6, 233–4, 305
271, 275, 288–92, 342, 103, 109–10, 121–2, 127, Venette, Nicolas 53
365, 398 144–77 , 229, 274, Tableau de l’amour
tainted families 127, 380–81, 384, 397 conjugal 53
286–7, 302, 318, 337, Transsexuals and Sex Venus in the Cloister
339 Reassignment (Richard (erotica) 124
Talk with Boys about Green and John Vere Street case 95
Themselves (Edward Money) 172 Verschuur, Hendrikje
Kirk) 68 Treatise of the Use of 156–7
Tardieu, Auguste Flogging in Venereal Vicary, John 90
Ambroise 261, 308–9 Affairs, A (J. H. Victoria, Queen of
Taxil, Léo, La Prostitution Meibom) 358 England 309
contemporaine 133 Trenender, Robert 297 Video Voyeurism
Taylor, Benjamin 303–4 trials 9, 36, 38, 87, 90, Prevention Act 2004
Taylor, Alfred Swaine, 93–4, 97, 103, 107, 114, 347
Medical Jurisprudence 121, 125, 154, 185–90, violence 93, 161, 211–21,
308 203–4, 233, 247, 253, 215–16, 227–8, 233–4,
Testard, Jeanne 216 256, 300, 306, 344, 367, 236–7, 307, 363
thanatophilia see 388 virginity, virgins 15, 24,
necrophilia tribades see lesbians; 28, 137, 158, 211, 297,
Thérèse philosophe Sapphists 306, 315, 317, 368, 394
(erotica) 59, 126, 383 Triptolemos Painter 14 virility 22, 45, 52
Three Essays on the Trivulzio di Belgiojoso, Vizzani, Catherine 122,
Theory of Sexuality Princess Cristina 264 389
471
Vollot, Andé, Le Voyeur 70 (Guy Endore) 197 Lamentation, The

Voltaire, Candide 194 Westermarck, Edward, (pamphlet) 89, 90
Vos the Elder, Maarten History of Human Women’s Army Corps 141
de, engraving of Satyr Marriage 287 Women’s Life (magazine)
and Venus 183 Westphal, Carl 96 135
voyeurism 33–4, 207, 329, Die Konträre Woodliff, Daniel 191
340, 344–8, 350, 64, 373 Sexualempfindung 98 Woodward, Samuel
wet-nurse 296 Baynard 64
Wade, Rebekah see whipping see flagellation World Health
Brooks, Rebekah 324 wife sales 30–31 Organization 10
Ward, Freda 130 Wilde, Dolly (niece of World-Noted Women
Wedgwood family 279 Oscar) 134 (Mary Cowden Clarke)
Wegener, Gerda, Les Wilde, Oscar 96–7, 103 111
Délassements d’Eros Wilkinson, John 191 Worms, Burchard, Bishop
200 Willet, Andrew 277 of 25, 114
Weinberg, Dr S. Kirson Williams, Elizabeth 334
290 Williams, Kenneth 164 Xenophon 79, 183, 296
Weininger, Otto, Sex and Wilmot, Earl of
Character 36 Rochester, John, 88 Yellow Book, The 127
Well of Loneliness, The Winchester College 301
(Radclyffe Hall) 137–8, witches 114, 117, 122 Zeus 75, 180, 272
173 Woffington, Peg 156 zodiac 20
werewolves 21, 198 Wolf, Henry 91 zoophilia 199
Werewolf of Paris, The Women Hater’s see also bestiality
472

Pleasure's All Mine A History of Perverse Sex

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t he p l e a sur e’s al l mine

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Published by Reaktion Books Ltd

First published 2013

Copyright © Julie Peakman 2013

All rights reserved

Printed and bound in China by Toppan Printing Co. Ltd.

isbn 978 1 78023 185 3

epilogue: A Limit to Tolerance? 397

o ne person’s perversion is another’s normality. If we strip sex back

that people from the past had a completely different viewpoint or

them have since shifted). However, many of these sexual behav-

Because the source material is patchy, we know more about

deviation is called ‘Disorders of Sexual Preference’ (dsp) and given

But it is not merely a scientiﬁc diagnosis – personal, political and

M ost people believe they have an understanding of what

Face-to-face sex. Detail from a red-ﬁgure cup by Triptolemos Painter,

sturdy, reliable and masters of self-control, while women were ﬁckle,

Sex sitting in a lap. Detail from a red-ﬁgure jug by Shuvalov Painter,

relationships were usually between older male mentors and their

Sex from behind depicted in a fresco at Pompeii, 1st century ad.

Part of the Greek mythology, however, included sexual activities

François Boucher, Hercules and Omphale, 1735.

might become erect, a women’s blood be brought to ﬂow and a

Sex, Health and the Body in the Ancient World

for melancholia is coition’. Luckily for women, many people believed

Zodiac man, illustra-

Frontispiece from the 1753 edition of Aristotle’s Masterpiece (1684).

They would suffer from dramatic rages, sleeplessness, irritability and

sleep. However, sexual intercourse seems to have been the favoured

Sex and the Church

because of her successful attempts to thwart potential suitors. For her

regarding sins and suitable penances for unruly ﬂock. Originally,

on masculinity and femininity. It depicted men and women in situ-

Héloïse and Abélard in the Roman de la rose, 14th century.

pilgrimage and confession so he was well positioned to understand

James Gillray, Harmony Before Matrimony, 1805.

method of transferring from one partner to another. However, this

disease (he thought he had caught it at least fourteen times but

James Gillray, Matrimonial Harmonics, 1805.

The Making of the Heterosexual

The cause of perverted behaviour was seen to lie both in a per-

Were strange sexual behaviours inherited or acquired, biological

Cartoon from John

for producing abortion, for any indecent or immoral use’. Nonetheless,

aimed to provide education for married couples rather than single

The Sex Surveys

aiming to uncover their sexual practices and orientation.37 Examining

When asked where they had gleaned their sexual knowledge,

provides us with an emotional example of how people felt about

After having given it some thought, he obviously went through

From Onanism to Spending

Sanoﬁx hand vibrator, 1913.

Ancient Spilling of Seed

applicable to single women and widows since, without a man, there

The Sin of Onan

the sperm intended for procreation useless. The Church’s stance

nocturnal emissions in his discussion on the subject. In his Summa

hands, his thoughts turned to sex. Writing in semi-code, he recorded