oursin | Entries tagged with sex

(Reporting in vaxx-boosted, by the way.)

Have been noting hither and yon stuff about blokes 'looksmaxxing' and 'mogging' (which apparently does not involve cats? is there some reference to tomcats facing off and fluffing out their fur? probably not. Who knows.)

This is yet another of those things That Blokez Do apparently in order to attract the opposite sex and I do not think it is because I am Old, and my tastes were formed in A Different Day, that I feel that there is a significant Failure To Do The Research about What Actually Pulls The Chixx.

Not that this is exactly a new phenomenon, when I was reviewing those books on yoof culture in the 60s/early 70s, I was thinking that various of the paths being pursued by (presumably) cis het men, because Teh Gayz were in separate chapters, did not seem to me necessarily terribly productive - maybe being a great dancer, but not if it was all about him showing off moves, ditto the being A Mod Face.

And after all the idea that women only go for men who look a certain way is to laugh at, cites yet again the instance of The Late Rock Star Historian, who was a scruff who was not perhaps quite at the John Wilkes level of having serious disadvantages in the way of appearance to overcome but was - well, I suppose it depends on the artist you're thinking of and there were painters who would have turned out an excellent oil-painting of him but was hardly of male-model looks. But was if not of universal appeal, considerably popular with the opposite sex.

We are frankly not surprised at reports that young women are eschewing the dating game, because what it turns up is very likely young men blatting on about their self-maintenance regime and probably trying to shill for supplements and peptides.

Am also given to wonder whether the people who follow these creatures are all acolytes of their maxxingmessage, or whether at least some % are treating them as the modern equivalent of the old-style freakshow. (Though for all I know, in the darker reaches of the internet you can find videos of men biting the heads off chickens and so on.)

While I was thinking that it would be preferable for them to contemplate upon the natural world and build bowers for, or offer particularly attractive stones to, the objects of their interest, I also became cynical as to whether female bower birds and penguins are quite so appreciative of these efforts as naturalists would have us suppose. ('Him and his bloody bowers' - 'Not another pebble')

(Okay, I have an essay-review coming out on several works which deal with moral panics around coffeebars and jazz clubs and so forth in the 1960s - 'the monkey walk was good enough for us'....)

But on the one hand wo wo the yoof of today are not even getting into leg-over situations, though the evidence for this as far as the UK goes dates to the NATSAL 2019 report based on survey undertaken 2012.

And if they do, The death of the post-shag sleepover: Why is no one staying over after sex anymore?

Okay, very likely - I dunno, is the '6 people I spoke to in a winebar last week' cliche still valid or has this migrated to some corner of social media, but amounting to pretty much the same thing as far as statistical sociological validity goes?

But while it may be all about anxieties around sleep hygiene rituals, or looks-maxxing practices, which will not sit happily alongside unrestrained PASSION and bonkery -

- there is also mention that, individuals in question are living with room-mates and one does wonder whether they actually have RULES about overnight guests who might hog the bathroom wherein they perform their wellness things (apart from any other objections such as noise....)

Yes, my dearios, I am already doing the hedjog all-more-complicated flamenco about this, and thinking about a narrative theme of the 1960s of young women rising from beds of enseamed lust in order to go home to the parental roof and sleep in their own chaste bed so that they can be plausibly awakened therein. (And is there not a current wo wo narrative about young people still living with PARENTS???)

I, being a historian of reproduction and birth control, not to mention Ye Loathsome Diseases Consequent Upon Immoralitee, was more than a little irked by this article in The Guardian yesterday bigging up the French tradition of being 'family-friendly', mentioning

[T]he many ways the French state already supports families: heavily subsidised creches and childminders, free school for everyone from the age of three and structured holiday clubs that remove many of the headaches working parents face in many other countries.

Though at least there is some indication that this has an agenda of More Babbiez.

And, not mentioned, is part of a very long tradition of French pro-natalism which included the criminalising of birth control and abortion for decades and the persecution of the French neo-Malthusian movement.

I will note that we prudish hypocritical Brits managed to get a birth control movement off the ground and a significant number of clinics running in the first half of the twentieth century; not to mention a successful strategy for the control of STIs which involved a network of free confidential government-funded clinics when Les Francaises were still leaning heavily on the regulation of sex workers (even after massive improvements in the detection and treatment of syph and clap). Which must have had some negative impact on population fertility....

Ooolala?

I also discovered today - goodness knows we get regular reports of various manifestations of the sexual entitlement of the French bloke - France moves to abolish concept of marital duty to have sex:

For campaigners, the notion that wives have a "duty" to agree to sex with their husbands is one that persists in parts of society and needs to be confronted.
....
Since November last year the legal definition of rape in France has also been expanded to include the notion of non-consent.
Previously, rape was defined as a sexual act carried out with "violence, constraint, threat or surprise". Now it is any act where there is no "informed, specific, anterior and revocable" consent. Silence or an absence of reaction do not imply consent, the law says.

I'd like to think, yeah, still got it, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were desperately scratching around for somebody who'd even heard the name of the author of once-renowned and now pretty well forgotten, except by specialists in the field, sex manual. Which has its centenary this year.

Anyway, have been approached by a journo to talk with them about this work and its author -

- on which it is well over 2 decades since I did any work, really, but I daresay I can fudge something up, at least, I have found a copy of the work in question and the source of my info on the individual, published in 1970. Not aware of any more recent work ahem ahem. The Wikipedia entry is a stub.

My other issue is that next week is shaping up to be unwontedly busy - I signed up for an online conference on Tuesday, and have only recently been informed that the monthly Fellows symposium at the institution whereof I have the honour to be a Fellow is on Wednesday - and I still have that library excursion to fit in -

- plus arranging a call is going to involve juggling timezones.

Still, maybe I can work in my pet theme of, disjunction between agenda of promoting monogamous marriage and having a somewhat contrary personal history....

That piece about people having AI spouses is online: As synthetic personas become an increasingly normal part of life, meet the people falling for their chatbot lovers.

NB we note that 'Lamar' says that the breaking point with his actual, RL, girlfriend was when he found her doing the horizontal tango with his best friend, but it's clear that there were Problems already there, about having to relate to another human bean who was not always brightly sunshiny positively reinforcing him....

what would he tell his kids? “I’d tell them that humans aren’t really people who can be trusted …

I'm not entirely persuaded that individuals haven't made up imaginary companions (even way on into adulthood) before - I seem to remember some, was it in Fandomwank back in the day, accounts of people being married on the astral plane to fictional characters?

This is not entirely 'wow, startling news' to Ye Hystorianne of Sexxe: The Phenomenon of ‘Bud Sex’ Between Straight Rural Men.

I am not going to see if I actually have a copy of the work on my shelves, or if I perused it in a library somewhere, but didn't that notorious work of 'participant observation' sociology, Tearoom Trade argue that many of his subjects were not defining themselves as 'homosexual'.

I also invoke, even further back, Helen Smith's Masculinity, Class and Same-Sex Desire in Industrial England, 1895-1957 about men 'messing about' with other men in Yorkshire industrial cities.

And there is a reason people working on the epidemiology and prevention of STIs use the acronym 'MSM' - men who have sex with men - for the significant population at risk who do not identify as gay.

I had, I must admit, a very plus ca change moment when I idly picked up Katharine Whitehorn's Roundabout (1962), and found the piece she wrote on marriage bureaux. In which she mentioned that the two bureaux she interviewed tried to get their subscribers not to be too ultra-specific in their demands - that if they met potential partners in real life they would be more flexible.

Was also amused by the statement that 'Men over thirty are always very anxious to persuade me that they could have all they women they liked, if they bothered'.

Firstly:

So, farewell then, PSC, whose advice to the sexually-bothered (rather than the lovelorn) has so oft provided fodder to oursinial musings. Guardian G2 today includes 23 of the best Sexual Healing columns

Not sure if they are The Greatest Hits rather than molto tipico of the kind of thing she addressed: in particular we note (as she stresses in the interview about the lessons learnt over 10 years of agony-aunting):

The female orgasm is still a mystery to some people
I’m still getting questions that show me people continue to think that the only “correct” type of female orgasm is one that’s purely vaginal and doesn’t involve the clitoris. For people to still think that, or to have that as the ideal, is extraordinary, but there it is. They just haven’t had the education to understand otherwise.

There is a waterspout off Portland Bill (where Marie Stopes' ashes were scattered). Volumes of the Kinsey Report on the Human Female are spontaneously falling off library shelves. The shade of Shere Hite is gibbering and wailing.

We also note the recurrent MenZ B Terribly Poor Stuff theme, what with the one who appears to regard his wife's bisexuality as a USP meaning *3SOMES* and two or three where one feels she did not interrogate sufficiently whether the male querent was actually gratifying his female partner before offering reassurance/solution e.g. 'My stunning wife makes no effort with our sex life' where we should like to know precisely what effort he is putting in, ahem.

However, there are also some of the wilder shores there.

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Secondly, and could we have a big AWWWW for this: David Attenborough seeks out London’s hidden wildlife:

Filming the wildlife of London requires an intrepid, agile presenter, willing to lie on damp grass after dark to encounter hedgehogs, scale heights to hold a peregrine falcon chick, and stake out a Tottenham allotment to get within touching distance of wary wild foxes.
Step forward Sir David Attenborough, who spent his 100th summer seeking out the hidden nature of his home city for an unusually personal and intimate BBC documentary.

This was in one of my inboxes this am (ironically, Mme C-C-'s):

Nice to connect beyond work
Hi,
We’ve crossed paths around the office a few times, and I’ve been meaning to say hello. I recently joined a dating site and thought it might be easier to connect there outside of work.
If you’re open to it, here’s my profile: [redacted link]
You’ll need to sign up to view it.
No pressure at all—just an invitation to chat in a space that isn’t tied to corporate email.
Either way, wishing you a great week.
Best,
A colleague

How creepy is that? (sending it in to phishing reporting).

(Or maybe run it past Ask A Manager???)

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Actually, it is a bit of an insult to bufo bufo to characterise anyone doing this sort of thing as a toad, no? Especially when the poor things are currently suffering a good deal in their quest for LUHRRVVV: can Britain’s toads be saved from traffic and terrible decline?

(No, they are not zipping around doing dangerous driving in fast cars, parp-parp, like Mr Toad.)

They are trying to get to suitable mating areas:

toads like large ponds. Their ability to stay out of water for longer than frogs, means they can travel further to reach them – sometimes hundreds of metres, Petrovan says. They tend to stick to their ancestral migration routes – it’s common for adult toads to return to their birth pond to mate.

This is why the toad crossed the road.

I think I have heretofore mentioned the people who help toads to do this thing: in fact it's a bit of a recurrent theme.... (going way back).

I do not think these are healthy or useful ways to look at SEX. Notches on the bedpost was bad enough, or how many times per night they could Do It, but really, these are taking the whole thing to new levels.

My boyfriend sees sex as a competition he is losing. How can I change his mind?:

He feels like he doesn’t perform enough (he does) and worries he isn’t big enough (he is!). He grew up without a father – the father’s fault – and I wonder if this has something to do with it. How can I assist him to see sex as non-competitive?:
Response:I assume he doesn’t think he’s losing the competition with you, somehow, but with imagined manly foes, comparisons, symbols of everything he (imagines he) isn’t?

I suppose there isn't actually some scoreboard somewhere out there Rate My Manly Performance but I wouldn't entirely rule that out, alas.

Because of this: Sperm-racing investors blow $10 million on ‘seed round’ for sports venture:

Last weekend, Zhu flew to YouTuber David Dobrik’s slick white Los Angeles mansion, collected the sperm of three influencers, and injected it onto a small race track as a crowd gathered in the living room. The competitors — Harry Jowsey, Jason Nash, and Ilya Fedorovich — watched a video of their swimmers, overlaid with animated tadpoles, zoom to the finish line.

Apparently, 'Zhu insists he has a deeper, more profitable mission: to gamify health and build an empire around male fertility'.

Yeah, well, I'm over here going

a) tortoise and hare, and are those sprinters whooshing right past the ovum in their mad gallop?

b) bit of an assumption that they are actually, you know, viably fertile, which I don't think at all correlates with speed. Motility is one thing, having what it takes to fertilise that ovum is another (and haven't I read something somewhere about It Is The Ovum That Chooses? Heh.)

c) Mary Ellman's image in Thinking About Women: 'the activity of ova involves a daring and independence absent, in fact, from the activity of spermatozoa, which move in jostling masses, swarming out on signal like a crowd of commuters from the 5:15.

Dept of, inventing the city: Fake History: Some notes on London's bogus past. (NB - isn't Nancy murdered on the steps of a bridge in the 1948 movie of Oliver Twist? or do I misremember.) (And as for the Charing Cross thing, that is the ongoing 'London remaking itself and having layers', surely?)

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Dept of, smutty puns, classical division: Yet More on Ancient Greek Dildos:

Nelson, in my opinion, has made a solid argument for his conclusions that, while “olisbos” was one of many ancient Greek euphemisms for a dildo, this was not its primary meaning, nor was it the primary term for the sex toy. Rather, this impression has been given by an accident of historiography.

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Dept of, not silently suffering for centuries: The 17th-century woman who wrote about surviving domestic abuse.

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Dept of, another story involving literacy (and ill-health): Child hospital care dates from 18th Century - study:

"Almost certainly she was taught to read and write while she was an inpatient."
He suspects just as part of the infirmary's remit was to get its adult patients back to work, by teaching children to read and write it would increase their employment opportunities.

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Dept of, I approve the intention but cringe at certain of the suggestions: How To Raise a Reader in an Age of Digital Distraction:

Active engagement is crucial. This doesn’t mean turning every book into an interactive multimedia experience. Rather, it means ensuring that children are mentally participating in the reading process rather than passively consuming. With toddlers, this might mean encouraging them to point to pictures, make sound effects, or predict what comes next. With older children, it involves asking questions that go beyond basic comprehension: “What do you think motivates this character?” “How would the story change if it were set in our neighborhood?”

Let's not? There's a point where that become intrusive.

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Dept of, not enough ugh: Sephora workers on the rise of chaotic child shoppers: ‘She looked 10 years old and her skin was burning’

The phenomenon of “Sephora kids” – a catch-all phrase for the intense attachment between preteen children, high-end beauty stores and the expensive, sometimes harsh, products that are sold within them – is now well established.... The trend is driven by skincare content produced by beauty influencers – many of whom are tweens and teens themselves.... skincare routines posted by teens and tweens on TikTok contained an average of 11 potentially irritating active ingredients per routine, which risked causing acute reactions and triggering lifelong allergies.

This is all a bit Dept Groucho Marx here - would anyone who is not of these awful people's leanings want to live within 100 miles of them anyway, and in fact are they not a creepy cult in the making? The settlement sprawls over 160 acres and it's called Return to the Land. Its founders say it is an "intentional community based around shared ancestry". (And I think we can predict what the position of women within it is before even getting to that part of the write-up, no?)

(You can get brucellosis from 'warm fresh goats' milk', you know.)

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Dept, have none of these issues manifested before travelling together??? You be the judge: Should my partner stop obsessively cutting costs when we travel? We discover that although they've been partners for seven years they don't live together, so possibly they really haven't come up against this sort of clash of styles:

I don’t want to share Persephone’s suitcase because she doesn’t pack properly and I find that stressful. I may put all my stuff in one backpack, but it is very well organised. Persephone’s packing style is hectic and she doesn’t have a separate laundry bag for her unclean clothes, she just throws them all in together. I don’t want dirty laundry touching my stuff, thanks very much.

And one is a foodie and one is not, and there's a real clash of priorities going on there that you'd think might have come up in 7 years....

At least last week's YBTJ contestants seem to have discovered the flashpoint of difference fairly early on: should my flatmate start using the spice rack I made: and honestly, what is the point of a poncey hand-carved spice-rack with matching jars that he hasn't got round to labelling? I am team shop-bought packaging that can actually be identified without opening it up and sticking one's nose in.

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Dept, the Fifties were actually quite anomalous: In the longer–term context, then, it is the mid-20th century which looks unusual, and it is worth considering why:

There is no doubt that the percentage of families which are headed by a lone parent has increased since the mid-20th century, and this has often been equated with the breakdown of the nuclear family system. However, it is not clear that the nuclear family is actually in decline. Most children are still living in two parent homes, and the percentage of lone parent families in the 19th century was not very different to the percentage today – although as explained below, such families were very differently formed.

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Dept, the annual PSC deviation into sense: This may seem radical to you, but a woman does not need a penis in order to be satisfied. Okay, it's depressing that the couple come 'from a conservative background; we believe that sex before marriage is a sin and saved ourselves until we got married in our early 30s' but don't seem to have done any due diligence on how to do ye conjugalz - there have been books on how to have a happy fulfilled Christian marriage since the 1920s at least. Sigh.

My attention was recently drawn, as we say, to an early C20th composer, and I thought, that name sounds familiar, so I pottered off to look at my database of notes, and yes, they were hanging out in sex reform circles, interesting, no, especially as they seem generally to be described as 'reclusive' -

So anyway, I went to look up their entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and it is all about The Music (they were also apparently a top-level performer as well as prolific composer) and nothing about this other aspect.

And some while ago I perchanced to look up the ODNB entry for an early C20th lawyer whom I had come across in those same circles, and he was all about anti-censorship, and reforming the divorce laws (and we suspect also handling these sensitive matters for his mates in his professional capacity, no doubt) -

Very worthy.

He was also, I have come across indications in correspondence and biographies, rather a Not Safe In Taxis kinda guy, or at least, the handsy menace of the 1917 Club.

I don't actually know if there's a procedure for saying to editors of ODNB 'Hi, I have Further Info', let alone 'by the way, it's dishing the dirt'.

'Toad he went a-pleasuring': Toads risk their lives crossing a Somerset road to mate. This year, a patrol rescued thousands:

Charlcombe Lane is closed annually for six weeks in February and March as volunteers patrol every night from dusk to help toads, frogs and newts on their journey to their breeding lake. This toad patrol is one of more than 200 across the country that take part in the national Toads on Roads project run by the amphibian and reptile conservation charity, Froglife. Across the six weeks, more than 50 volunteers on the Charlcombe Toad Rescue group spent more than 648 hours in high visibility jackets, armed with torches, buckets and special gloves, walking slowly up and down the road.
Toads, frogs and newts are carefully picked up and taken safely in buckets to five drop off points to help them on their journey towards the lake.

Awwwww, bless.

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A rather grimmer tale - modern high-tech version of 'ooops the hospital mixed up the babbiez in the nursery and sent the wrong ones home with the parents': Legal and ethical ‘nightmare’ after woman gives birth to stranger’s child due to Monash IVF mistake:

“The evidence of it being an isolated incident is really only because they’ve never had to check or disclose,” said Dawson. “One in 18 births are IVF-conceived children, [and] if these checks and balances are being missed as recently as last year, there needs to be more record-keeping and more information.”
Leading Australian IVF specialist and former Monash IVF director Prof Gab Kovacs said there were over 100,000 IVF cycles in Australia annually, so every few years a mistake is made. “There have been mistakes recognised in the past, it’s more often that the wrong sperm is used when the sperm and the egg are put together,” he told ABC Radio Melbourne.

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More on the problems generated by MODERN SCIENCE!!! in this case: Genetic descent: a new challenge for the management of human remains in museums:

Over the past year, an increasing number of UK institutions have received enquiries from customers of commercial DNA companies about individuals in their care who have been sampled for ancient DNA analysis.
Typically, ancient DNA results are published open-access and the data deposited with online databanks.
International commercial DNA companies who focus on ancestry are now using these datasets to match their customers with archaeological human remains – and advising them that they are a ‘direct descendant’ of this past individual.
Some customers, curious about their ancestry, are accessing the publications and then contacting the institutions curating the human remains. Typically, these enquiries ask for more information about the individual and their archaeological context – a request not too dissimilar from the usual range of questions received by an institution about their holdings.
But these new type of enquiry poses several challenges – foremost, that existing guidance and advice about the management of human remains published by (among others) the Advisory Panel on the Archaeology of Burials in England, does not specifically deal with this issue.

Plus, ongoing impact of budget cuts:

Most institutions in the UK do not have a curator dedicated solely to human remains, and many do not have an archaeology curator.
Institutional knowledge about holdings and research activities has been lost due to staff-cuts, and less well-funded institutions have been unable to continue their membership of specialist networks or other professional bodies, who can provide advice and support.
The situation is compounded by rapid developments in the methods and reliability of ancient DNA studies, which means that without specialist knowledge and access to that scholarship, understanding the issues raised by these enquiries may be impossible without help.

I.e. It's All More Complicated (like most of the issues thrown up by the data produced by these companies).

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Dept, 'More Money Than Sense' x 2:

Influencers 'new' threat to uncontacted tribes, warns group after US tourist arrest:

Social media influencers pose a "new and increasing threat" for uncontacted indigenous people, a charity has warned after the arrest of a US tourist who travelled to a restricted Indian Ocean island.
Mykhailo Viktorovych Polyakov, 24, allegedly landed on North Sentinel Island in an apparent attempt to make contact with the isolated Sentinelese tribe, filming his visit and leaving a can of coke and a coconut on the shore.

And

‘Rachel Reeves is making us move to Italy’. This person is an 'entrepreneur' with 'an MBA and PhD in finance' as well as being a reality TV star, and yet she is terrified that Italian waiters will somehow compel her to ingest pasta and pizza. (Apart from anything else, this suggests a woefully limited knowledge of the range of Italian cucina, no?) Awww, diddums.

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Did I post this before? Seized Books! An online exhibition:

LGBTQ+ books and censorship in 1980s Britain.
On 10 April 1984, Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise raided Gay’s the Word bookshop in London’s Bloomsbury.
'Operation Tiger' saw officers seize over 140 titles, worth thousands of pounds.
Bookshop staff and directors were charged with conspiracy to import so-called ‘indecent or obscene’ material.
But Gay’s the Word and their supporters fought back...

Limited edition catalogue available from Gay's The Word.

We are given to understand that Gwyneth Paltrow is boggled, on her return from the wilds of wellness-promotion to movie-making, by the advent of intimacy coordinators:

she would feel "very stifled" by someone telling them what to do.

(We wonder about the feelings of her considerably younger co-star who is probably used to them....)

And on the one hand, she is, after all, famed for being so attuned to her yoni-power that she was about candles emitting its odour, and touting steaming it (which you should, actually, only do if that bad puppy your womb has taken to careering madly about your body) and inserting jade eggs which aroused certain concerns about cleanliness and hygiene....

And on the other, I can recall her coming over all blushing Victorian maiden when asked whether she had personally field-tested the extremely pricey super-vibrator she was touting a few years ago.

So maybe the implication that she is a raunchy up-for-it wanton has more to do with promoting her appearance in a somewhat erotic movie, Wot, me, cynical, perish the thort.

No, really what're the odds?

In 3 different fora over the past couple of days, I have been strutting Mi Xpertise on:

Cartoons relating to birth control, abortion, etc. (I do know of a few, including a very early one featuring Bertrand Russell's father.)

Victorian courtesans (English/French differences, definitions, etc).

In connection with which, this video of Hardy's 'Ruined Maid' poem:

Watch on YouTube

(while she's clearly improved her lifestyle, hasn't really risen to the ranks of courtesans!)

Condoms as STI prevention in UK, was this illegal (no, but advertising was a murky area, is my take on this, and the law was rather vaguely written but actually meant to be about spurious cures).

(Does that there Dr oursin ever shut up???)

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Ponds that were dried up, shaded over or dominated by brambles have been opened up to sunlight and dug out, and are now burgeoning with rare aquatic plants, dragonflies and great-crested newts – also providing food and water for birds and bats. “It’s ideal for farmers,” says Emma Gray. “You get a lot of biodiversity bang for your buck in a marginal area for farming – you’re not taking productive land out but quickly you build up a network for species to hop across a landscape. It’s a no-brainer.”

Spotted this the other day: Major show to celebrate UK’s forgotten female trailblazer of abstract art.

I Am Not An Art Historian but the name Paule Vézelay did seem vaguely familiar.

Vézelay has a... versatility in what she did: paintings, sculpture, textiles, illustrations and poetry. She was dextrous and constantly reinvented herself[.]

Again, not an art historian but my general acquaintance with modernist women suggests they were out there exploring different media all the time, and did not spurn the commercial.

(E.g. the Dora Maar exhibition a few years ago and prior to that the Sonia Delaunay one.)

Plus, okay, Moore and Hepworth are mega, but how many British artists have institutions named after them, plus we observe that Vézelay got a Tate retrospective in 1983, even if she had to live into her 90s (like a lot of women artists) to get there.

Okay, totally spurning the commercial and generally retreating from the world, come on down, Hilma af Klimt, currently at the centre of a ding-dong over ownership of her work, and dismissed as 'crazy', for her interest in theosophy - though one of those pieces says Rudolph Steiner's anthroposophy, not the same thing. But either way, hardly the only artist at the time interested in those movements or involved in some kind of occultism/mysticism. (Casts guilty glance at so far unread work on Ithell Colquhoun....)

There were also some fairly weird allotropes of more mainstream religious traditions going on among les artistes, e.g. Eric Gill's RC craft communities including lay orders and cassock wearing:

Gill's religious beliefs did not limit his sexual activity, which included several extramarital affairs. His religious views contrast with his deviant sexual behaviour, including, as described in his personal diaries, the child sexual abuse of his adolescent daughters, an incestuous relationship with at least one of his sisters, and also sexual experiments with a dog.

Does anyone else read this: Thicknesse [née Ford], Ann (1737–1824), writer and musician, and besides going yay for her standing up for having a career as public performer and dissing on lecherous aristo, are we not going hmmmmm over 'a friend, Elizabeth Thicknesse' and 'her close friend Sarah Cooper'. Even if she did marry the former's widower in betweentimes.

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Another goodie from the Cambpop lot: Did anyone have sex before marriage in the past?, though I did raise a query about the Registrar-General's claim in 1938/9 that a third of brides were pregnant on their wedding day, which suggests some of the figures in that post are a little under-estimated. (I have always found that interesting, because it's by no means clear whether it's SHOCKING MODERN WAYS or the persistence of old traditions.)

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My 12-hour Babylonian crawl in search of old Soho’s louche magic: me and a historian mate have been snarking off on bluesky about Latest Entry in the Recurrent Cycle of Soho Ain't Wot It Useterbe as by no means in the class of past entries going back to C19th or so.

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I don't think I've linked this rather lovely reminiscence of Ursula Le Guin before? Alison Smith on the week she spent with Ursula K. Le Guin.

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Good article (in the Church Times) by Helen King, Uncovering the history of women’s bodies, about her new book (Immaculate Forms). She seriously knows her stuff.

But really, BLUD THIKT WITH COLD at reading this:
'A provocative journey through human sexual history, packed with fun factoids and forgotten stories'
by somebody who is still in the process of doing their PhD (on what looks like a fairly staid niche topic) and does a TikTok series on This Sort of Thing.

Contrary to popular belief, our predecessors had all sorts of obscene hobbies long before Christian Grey hit the scene. In this enlightening romp, learn about the first instances of homosexuality on record from the ancient world and the diverse history of nonbinary gender; encounter a thousand years’ worth of hilarious and horrifying contraceptive methods.

Ugh ugh ugh to the max.

I suppose this sort of thing may serve a purpose but I suspect that it is a lot less about 'educating ourselves about the weird, wonderful, and varied spectrum of human sexuality and experience' and normalising and destigmatising and so on, and more about feeding people the same old myths and factoids and snippety bits. And that that is what they will take away.

Do not consider myself particularly po-faced and have a suspicion that there are even those who consider that there Dr oursin rather lightminded, citing for example some of the 'before the colon' quotations that adorn her papers and that she had not always eschewed the odd snarky line.

But I do rather bar 'fun' 'romp' and 'hilarious' as USP and using the phrase 'dirty little secrets' applied to historical personages as a come-on.

‘I thought of the church as a friend and it slapped me in the face’: historian Diarmaid MacCulloch on the Church of England’s hypocrisy

For the past four years, since his retirement from university teaching, he has applied that lifelong erudition to a comprehensive and richly entertaining history of the ways in which, for 3,000 years, the church has tied itself in knots over sex (and love and marriage).

And he has been running it past someone whose work on this topic is top-notch:

MacCulloch asked the classics professor Helen King to read his book pre-publication. King is just publishing a book on women’s bodies through the ages. “She said lots of complimentary things,” he says, “but felt there was a major omission: I hadn’t mentioned the clitoris much.”
“I was embarrassed,” MacCulloch says, “to realise that was true.”

***

Wow, this is terrifying: Like Jay Gatsby, He Threw Parties to Get Her Attention. It Finally Worked.:

Mr. Quintero first noticed Ms. Babai in a mutual friend’s Instagram story in 2016, when he was a freshman at Quinnipiac University and she was a freshman at the State University of New York at Albany. He asked that friend, Janice Murphy, for an introduction, but it would take four years for that moment to come. So Mr. Quintero, who became affectionately known as “Gatsby” among Ms. Babai’s friends, began hosting lavish gatherings in hopes of meeting her.

It was creepy when Gatsby did it, and it's even creepier when it starts with seeing someone on INSTAGRAM.

Mr. Quintero found ways to stay in touch. Most notably, he had Ms. Babai introduce him to her boss, Joseph Calabrese, the owner of a lighting design and fencing company, to talk about opportunities to work with his business, Quintero Enterprises. “Little did I know at the time, this was just another step to get closer to me,” said Ms. Babai, who coordinated their phone calls and joined business dinners.

And just wait for the proposal scene:

Mr. Quintero wanted to do something “big,” he said, for the proposal in October 2023, so he rented out Barclays Center and convinced Ms. Babai to join him for what he said was an awards ceremony for women in business. As Ms. Babai entered the empty arena, she was greeted by pictures of them together on jumbotrons, flowers and a group of singers performing “Say Yes to Heaven” by Lana Del Rey. As Mr. Quintero got down on one knee, he said, “I have been waiting for this moment since the day I met you.”

Does the Witness Protection Programme offer advice in such circumstances?

***

Anthony Comstock arrived in Washington, D.C., in January 1873 with a collection of pornography and big plans for what to do with it.
Alas, it was not to engage in trade with it.

Bearing a veritable grab bag of explicit images, books, pamphlets, contraceptives, and sex toys that he had ordered expressly for the purposes of shock, he set up displays, first in the private homes of legislators and then in the office of the vice president inside the congressional building.As congressmen trooped by to gawk, Comstock spoke to them about the “nefarious business” of obscenity.

The results still resonate.

***

I feel I've heard of this, er, colourful character before, but I can't quite place them: Charlotte Bach (born Karoly Hajdu; 1920–1981) was a Hungarian-British impostor and fringe evolutionary theorist.L 'Her alternative theory of evolution acquired a cult following among prominent writers and scientists in London during the 1970s, who remained ignorant of her original identity until after her death.'

***

More fun insights from The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure: Why were Hansel and Gretel not English?:

These types of stories about hunger and famine abound in the folklore of most European societies, and embody folk memories of food scarcity. However, as the historian John Walter noted, these tropes are curiously absent from English fairy tales. Why?
Walter speculated that this reflected the exceptionally early disappearance of famine from England, centuries before the risk of famine had subsided in the rest of Europe. Famine remained a threat in most of Europe until the mid-18th century, and persisted in some areas into the 19th century and even the 20th century, especially in association with war. In England, on the other hand, the last national famine occurred in the 1590s, and the last regional famine in the 1620s.

(I am not sure whether this accords with the narrative in English Food, which is still rather languishing on my reading pile.)

Yes, I know 'English teeth' are deemed unaesthestic, but perhaps that's better than wildly changing one's gnashers to accord with what turns out to be a constantly changing dental aesthetic: Jawbreakers Young patients want beautifully imperfect veneers. They’re getting pain, debt, and regret.

I may have had a fair amount of dental interventions (some of which have probably been due to overtreatment in earlier days), but at least I have not gone in for dental veneers:

[D]ental veneers are invasive medical prosthetics, and in many cases they alter patients’ teeth drastically and permanently. The most common form are porcelain veneers, which typically need to be glued onto a rough surface, created by shaving off a layer of the patients’ teeth. There is no dental procedure that can replace the lost enamel. Composite veneers, which allow for a resin to be applied directly onto teeth, can in theory avoid this damage, so long as there are no complications. In the very best cases, porcelain veneers need to be replaced every 15 to 20 years; composites last roughly half as long. But veneers done poorly are a different story altogether: They can lead to major and irreparable health consequences, including rotting teeth, gum infections and disease, TMJ disorders, and other chronic conditions, including unresolvable pain and degradation of the jawbone.

And the people seeking them don't have major defects, they just want what are really minor cosmetic tweaks. While a lot of dentists doing them sound like what we call among my people 'cowboys'.

***

I am even more, 'So glad I grew up when and where I did', when I come across this: going WHAT? WHAT? Erotic asphyxiation has become mainstream among under-35s. How did we get here?

I remember having a journo contact me about the history of this a few years ago and it used to be very very niche and usually only really emerged when a case came up of auto-erotic strangulation.

Surprise 'surviving Victorian vaults, a labyrinthine forest of carefully handbuilt arches and columns' under Smithfield Market, a positively recursive discovery when excavating for the new Museum of London premises:

Part of the new museum, due to open in 2026, will be situated underground, at the same level as former Roman streets, the passing Thameslink trains (which will be visible to visitors through a window) and the hidden River Fleet that flows behind thick brick walls just metres away.

***

13 Historic London Cats (including Dr J's Hodge) (some of them are lions and leopards).

***

Gender, Sex and Class in East End History (I strongly recommend Laura's London walks to anyone visiting).

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It's Always More Complicated

The wandering thoughts of a wandering hedgehog

Entries tagged with sex

What IS the point

'The present generation is doing mating habits all wrong!!!'

Depends on what you mean by 'family' and 'friendly'

Possibly scraping around for someone

Humanz B weerd ('throughout the whole of history', or at least, seldom for the v first time)

This icon is doubly appropriate

Amorous toads

Menz B Weeerd

Assorted things and stuff

Well, questions/all more complicated here....

It's the kind of additional info I might offer that bothers me, is this SALACIOUS GOSSIP....

A variety of things

Hmmm - cougar alert???

Right up my street x 3

Women artists, woo-wooery and versatility

Hotchpotch

Okay, call me a miserable ol' academic historian

Seen hither and yon

Getting my o tempora o mores on

For there is in London, all that life can afford