Put What Where?: Over 2,000 Years of Bizarre Sex Advice. John Naish
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without ejaculating, then after seven days the disease will be cured. When his body is so fatigued that he cannot continue the act, the man should let his penis rest in the woman’s vagina and he will benefit all the same. If this disease is not treated as indicated here, the victim will die in a few years.
If one wishes a proof of the existence of incubi, one has but to repair alone to a marsh place far away in the mountains, in spring or autumn. One should stay there in a condition of complete tranquillity, staring into space and concentrating one’s thoughts on sexual intercourse. After three days and three nights, the body will suddenly become alternately cold and hot, the heart will be troubled and the vision blurred.
Then, a man engaging in this experiment will meet a woman, and a woman a man. During sexual intercourse with such an incubus one will experience a pleasure that is greater than ever felt while copulating with an ordinary human being. But at the same time one will become subject to this disease which is difficult to cure.
Evil women can contain iron
Albertus Magnus, De Secretis Mulierum (The Secrets of Women) (c. 1478)
O my companions you should be aware that although certain women do not know the secret cause of what I shall describe, many women are familiar with the effect, and many evils result from this. For when men have sexual intercourse with these women it sometimes happens that they suffer a large wound and a serious infection of the penis because of iron that has been placed in the vagina, for some women or harlots are instructed in this and other ill deeds.
Post-climax calamities
Havelock Ellis, Psychology of Sex: a manual for students (1933)
So profound is the organic convulsion involved by the process of detumescence that serious effects have sometimes followed coitus. Especially in men, not only death itself, but numerous disorders and accidents have been known to follow immediately after coitus, these results being mainly due to the vascular and muscular excitement involved by the process of detumescence.
Fainting, vomiting, involuntary urination and defecation have been noted as occurring in young men after first coitus. Epilepsy has been not infrequently recorded. Lesions of various organs, even rupture of the spleen, have sometimes taken place.
In men of mature age the arteries have at times been unable to resist the high blood pressure and cerebral haemorrhage with paralysis has occurred. In elderly men the excitement of intercourse with young wives or with prostitutes has sometimes caused death. Such results are, however, exceptional. They tend to occur in persons who are abnormally sensitive or who have imprudently transgressed the obvious rules of sexual hygiene.
Sex during the monthlies causes ...
The Treasury of Natural Secrets (anon., Italy, 16th century)
Physical weakness
Ten years’ premature ageing
Simple-mindedness
Loss of libido
Aches and pains in stomach, feet, eyes, brain, head
Ringing in ears
High fevers
Tremors
Weak nerves
Poor eyesight
Baldness
Backaches
Kidney and bladder pains
Bad breath
Foul body odour
Just put the Hoover down
Dr Alex Comfort, The Joy of Sex (1972)
Never fool around sexually with a vacuum cleaner.
In archaeology, as in life, if you want to find sex books, look in the son’s room.
The first lovemaking guides in human history may well be in the form of 4,000-year-old cave paintings found in countries such as France, Peru and Japan, showing women or couples in various positions, naked or wearing strange headgear. But without any words to accompany the pictures, we simply don’t know: they could have been educational, religious or ceremonial, or simply prototypes of readers’ wives. The earliest actual written sex books we have were only discovered in 1973. They date from around 2,400 years ago and were hidden in a Chinese family tomb, in the section where the son was interred. The books were greatest-hits compilations of Chinese wisdom that had already been around for a century. The questions they raised have proved extremely persistent – if you read a modern sex manual, glossy magazine or newspaper advice column, they will still be there.
If the advice these ancient books contain were written in the form of modern magazine coverlines, it would read:
FOUR SEASONS OF SEX:
AND WHY AUTUMN IS HOT, HOT, HOT
Your 100 thrusts to happiness
Wild new positions: tiger roving, gibbon
grabbing ... and fish gobbling
Sexplanation: read your partner’s writhing
From your wrists to your peaks – the ultimate
in-the-mood massage
Aphrodisiacs to keep you up all night!
And
Exclusive: your love route to immortality
The manuscripts were among a treasure-house of ancient books discovered in Mawangdui Tomb Three, in the city of Changsha in the Hunan province of China. The tomb was a horseshoe-shaped mound of earth about 30ft high and 90ft in diameter that contained the bodies and possessions of the Hou Family. It took two years, from 1972 to 1974, to excavate the 2,100-year-old Han-period tombs, which contained more than 3,000 cultural relics and a complete female corpse. In among 28 silk books were seven medical manuscripts, which together constitute mankind’s first Joy of Sex.
The tomb’s occupants, Dai Marquis Licang, his wife and son, were part of the local political elite. Licang was the King of Changsha’s prime minister for seven years from 193 BC. Each body lay in its own tomb, inside a set of coffins stacked like Russian dolls, one inside another. The Number Three Tomb-the book room – is now restored to its original state. The son was called Li, and his skeleton indicates that he was about 30 when he died in 168 BC, though most of the medical manuscripts seem to have been copied in 200 BC. References in them indicate they are from earlier texts that must have circulated around 300 BC.
Li was an avid book collector whose hobby covered several specialist fields, including medicine. He would have been a whizz on Mastermind. We can only guess why his extensive library was buried alongside him: perhaps it was thought to have magical powers, or maybe the books were simply there to show his new pals in the afterlife what a wise and wealthy guy he’d been. The sex books were written on silk or on strips of wood or bamboo, and were found on top of a pile of silk manuscripts stored in the side compartment of a lacquer box.
Two of the texts focus on the bizarre mystical practice of ‘sexual cultivation’, which promises that if a man spends years having intercourse with hundreds of women (preferably virgins) without ejaculating, he will have received so much yin energy from female orgasms, and conserved so much of his male yang energy by not orgasming, that he will become immortal (either that, or his testes would explode). The idea was attributed to Ancestor Peng, who is said to have died at the age of 300, some time around