Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Sex Advice in the 20th Century

Episode Date: December 20, 2022

What is ‘good’ sex? Why might you need to get your protractor out in the bedroom? And when was foreplay ‘invented’?In this episode, Kate is getting sex advice from Sarah Jones. From handbooks to hardbacks, Sarah shares the different advice that men and women of different backgrounds would receive.Sarah is a social and cultural historian of gender and sexuality at the University of Bristol.*WARNING there are adult words and themes in this episode*Produced by Charlotte Long and Sophie Gee. Mixed by Sophie Gee. Betwixt the Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society. A podcast by History Hit.For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here. If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely bit Twixters. It's me, Kate Lister. I am here with your fair do's warning. Fair do's, this is a podcast of an adult nature. We will be covering adult themes. Actually, we are getting quite naughty today

because this episode is about the history of sex advice. So we're going to be covering some fairly dicey ground. And you just might not want to listen to that, in which case I would advise you to get out now with your precious ears intact. For the rest of you naughtys, let's get into it. From five-cent pamphlets sold in vending machines to racier mail-order pamphlets,

to even racier expensive manuals meant for professionals and academics, to well, to porn, to the final pages of magazines. Have you ever wondered how people found out about sex in the past? If you needed sex advice in the 20th century before the internet, Where would you go? How would you get that? Well, today, Betwixt the Sheets, we are going to flip him well find out. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course.

You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect confidence of whatever my boss needs by just turning it up and pushing the funny. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Hello, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets. scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. Here's a question. What is good sex? Whose responsibility is it to make good sex happen? How often should it happen?

These aren't new questions. I spoke to Sarah Jones to find out what kind of sex advice you might have got in the early 20th century. From 45 degree angles to the invention of foreplay. Let's get into it. Welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Sarah. I'm all right, how are you?

I'm all right, how are you? I am thrilled to be talking to you today. That's how I am. And the subject we are talking about today, sex advice in the 20th century, this is really fascinating because this kind of gets to the nub of a lot of questions that I've always had is,

how did people learn about sex in the past? Before YouTube and TikTok and those things, how did they learn about it? Yeah, and I mean, it's a really good question, and it's tricky, because sex advice is one of those things. actually quite kind of ubiquitous at that point in the 20th century. As people are becoming more literate, as things like censorship are becoming a little bit more lax, let's say it's not totally

lax, but as it's sort of relaxing slightly after the 19th century, it's easier for information about sex to kind of circulate. But like you said, at the same time, we don't have YouTube, we don't have Google. So actually people are relying on lots of different ways of learning about sex. And some of that is definitely a part and separate from sex advice. And I definitely don't want to kind of give the impression that sex advice is the only place that people are kind of learning about this stuff because people are getting information from their mates, their kind of social circles, they're probably getting it from porn, they're sort of picking it up or left, right and centre. But sex advice is this really big booming industry in the kind of early 20th century that I think

has a lot to say and a lot to tell us about how people learn about sex. So this isn't like just asking your mates questions or like your mum and dad taking you to one side or however it is, this is actual printed, manufactured to tell people about sex. And this is different from just random advice that you'd get. Yeah, I mean, some of it's designed for people to have those conversations that were perhaps considered a bit, bit awkward, bit cringy, especially at a time where for some people talking about sex is still quite taboo. So lots of the printed sex advice that you read is about,

this is a guide for parents to educate their children. This is what you should be telling your kids. but then there's lots of it that's designed specifically for people about to get married. I think maybe perhaps even designed some cases to be like a wedding gift, passing you on, you know, let your parents kicking you out of the house and like giving you a guide and being like best of luck to you and sort of sending you off into the world or the bedroom at least. Just giving me his awful image of a husband and bride attempting to have sex on the wedding night

but desperately consult in a manual. I mean, you never know. It's one of the annoying things about doing histories of sex advice. Of course, one of the things we don't know is whether anybody, actually took any of this stuff seriously. This is true. I think now, you know, I look sometimes, you read, I know, Cosmo. I'm not sure if you remember.

They used to do those kind of like sex position of the week with the weird, like, wooden dolls. And you're thinking, how many people are actually kind of getting up to that? You never know. I'm sure someone's giving it a bash. But I'm not sure that it's kind of the bread and butter, if you like, of people's sex lives. No, no, that's a very good point. Yeah, so it's quite tricky to know how much of this stuff people would have taken seriously.

But yeah, there's all sorts of information in there from, kind of wooing and romance all the way through to, in some cases, the real kind of like nitty-gritty of what you should be putting where. So they could be quite kind of complex. I think if you're trying to follow it, it would be quite a complicated thing to, complicated thing to follow. And plus, I have attempted to make flat pat furniture with a man before and I know that they don't follow instructions. Well, you know, there is some of them, I'm thinking in Vanderfeld's ideal marriage, which is at least in the 1920s, there's a whole section in that about how you should be kind of penetrating at a perfect 45 degree angle.

I'm thinking who the hell is getting their protractor out in that particular moment. But I mean, I don't like to presume. But yeah, I mean, it's quite complicated. It sets quite high standard for people to live up to. God, that really does, doesn't it? And then there's the question of like, where did that come from? Why so specific? Was that from personal experience?

Then it's a real mixed bag. So the authority to kind of speak about sex is their authority, at least, they draw from lots of different places. And some of them are doctors. And the claims that they make about this stuff are all very much about science. Science says that we should be penetrating at 45 degree angles or you should put your hand there

or you shouldn't put it there or whatever it is. And actually, of course, most of that is absolute bullshit. There's no real science that says, real science, she says, but no solid reasoning in their kind of view that actually says this is the way that it should be. Lots of it is prescriptive in the way that lots of things is prescriptive is that actually they just think this is the way that it should be. That's a problem when people have got the doctor title and they can just refer obliquely to the

science. Yeah, say what they want. I mean, some of them are pulling from things like older studies of the kind of sexed body. There are a lot of assumptions in there, for example, about the fact that men and women in particular should have very different sexual roles and that women are always going to be passive, that need to be kind of wooed, whereas men are active and vigorous. And lots of that comes from their beliefs about the kind of science of the body and that because women have the potential to produce babies themselves,

that therefore going to be naturally, innately sort of nurturing and quiet and receive energy and that men are the kind of impregnators and the fertilisers of seed and all of this kind of stuff. So they are bringing it from their own assumptions about the way that the body works. So it manifests in stuff like the positions that they assume you should be doing. There was a whole bit, again, to go back to Vanderbilt, that we should be really careful about women being in any position that's on top. He calls that the equestrian attitude or a woman being astride.

And he says, yeah, it's fine, it feels good. It's nice that the man can kind of see his wife's body and all of this. So that's all lovely. But actually it's dangerous because what you're doing is messing with the real organisation of the sexes. And that if you do that too much, it's going to have kind of unfavourable consequences, whatever they might be. So there is a science to it, I suppose. somewhere in there. But let's just say that science is a bit, Dodge. Yeah, it sounds like the kind of gibberish you can find in certain quarters on social media from time to time, doesn't it?

Just a bit, yeah. I mean, I guess for their time, you know, these people believe that they were doing real science. Oh, cutting edge. Yeah, of course, yeah. I mean, when they start talking about hormones as you get into kind of like the 30s and 40s a little bit later, there's so much kind of discussion of this cutting edge science and how we can explain all these behaviors, justify all of these behaviours because of the very particular actions of very particular hormones. And they think they are at the absolute sort of vanguard of studies of sex. And in some ways they were. But now I think with the benefit of hindsight,

we can see that those things are being imbued with some very particular assumptions about what people should be doing that are very much a product of their time. Perhaps that's a nicer way of putting it. That's very delicately powerful. Thank you very much, yeah. So what are some of the earliest examples of like actual books being published for sex advice? As opposed to porn, and I suppose there's actually quite a lot of slippage between the two, is that you can often get forms of pornography that are masquerading and scientific books.

Yeah. Because that kind of almost makes it okay to read. But like, when are we talking about this is a sex manual? That's a tricky, because like you say, it's such a grey area and it's so messy. And actually, I'm not sure there's ever a really clear point where we can say that those sort of things are very, very separate. You get in some of the medical manuals that are being published and sold for, quite a lot of money in the kind of early 20th century. They include very specific medical sort of descriptions of bits of the body,

all of this science stuff, whatever. But then they also have these images, these sometimes pencil drawn images of bits of the body that are, shall we say, provocatively positioned in a way you think, if you really wanted to learn about physiology, I'm not sure that is how I would have gone for it. So there's that kind of grey area that's always in there. And we know there are some great work,

people like Sarah Ball and Jake Gertsman, have written about the fact that there is always this slippage, there is always this kind of grey area. There is a change that goes on because like you say in earlier time periods, there is printed, there's always printed stuff about sex, of course, and we never know how people are going to be learning from that stuff. But because of things like censorship, lots of the manuals that you get in say the 19th century are quite, but certainly not very explicit at all. There's a lot of discussions of kind of be gentle or, and then you will spend the night together, but it's very opaque. There's no real sort of detail there.

It's only really when you get into the kind of first half of the 20th century, for lots of different reasons, that you get specific books that are being published. And not just books, pamphlets, ephemera, small sort of texts, things in magazines. They're being published specifically to give advice about sex. And that is part of this bigger kind of shift around the way that people are thinking about the role of sex in marriage that takes place early 20th century. What is that shift? I mean, there was a load of stuff going on, wasn't there? World Wars, Spanish flu, dictators.

like industrial revolution, like the list goes on and on and on. But when it comes to this, like people's changing attitudes around sex, what was it? What's changing? So the early 20th century, late 19th into early 20th century is a really kind of interesting moment. Because like you say, there's so much going on. All of this global stuff, sure. But even if you just think about places like Britain or America, well, the women are starting to revolt.

Do you know, they're becoming more and more of a pain in the ass, which is great. But, you know, like they're becoming more sort of troublesome. feminism is starting to bubble. By the time you have the First World War, women are going, into work a bit more and starting to challenge gender roles, which of course upsets lots of people, all of that kind of stuff's happening. There's a bit of a crisis of masculinity that starts to make people panic because of all of these kinds of things. And there's also concerns linked to things like eugenics, that people are having fewer babies, that fewer people are getting married.

You get flappers in the news and everyone's worried about young women going having loads of sex or becoming lesbians or whatever. So people are starting to kind of panic. And at the same time that's happening, you get the rise of what has been called variously, the rise. The rise of companion at marriage is one way that it's been sort of put. And that's this idea that in advice in particular, instead of sex and romance being slightly peripheral to what marriage is meant to be about, before this it's more diffuse. It's a bit more about kind of raising families, running a home. It's that kind of stuff. But by the time you get to the first couple of decades of the 20th century, it starts to become a lot more about sex and romance and pleasure,

according to the advice anyway, that what you should be doing and what should be at the centre of a good married life is a fantastic sex life and that if you don't have a fantastic sex life, you've got kind of a crap marriage basically, or at least your marriage could be in trouble. Oh, the pressure. Yeah, huge amounts of pressure. But it sounds good on the surface, doesn't it? Yeah, it sounds better than don't have sex. Right, or lie back in think of England or whatever the kind of tropes and myths are.

Sounds great. And in theory, it is a nod to the fact that the position of women is changing in society at that time, saying, hang on a minute, maybe everyone should be having orgasms. Maybe this is a thing that should feel good. Maybe this is a thing that people should be enjoying together. That sounds quite progressive. Right? That sounds like orgasms for everyone.

Hurrah. Lovely. I mean, in theory, absolutely. But when you kind of push it a little bit, if you scratch the surface, that nice story does get a little bit more complicated. It's always the way. Of course. I mean, it's never going to be that good, isn't it?

But, you know, if you look at the advice that they're giving, kind of scratch the surface, you get the rules that are being set are actually really quite conservative and really quite restrictive in places. Really? Even under that everyone gets an orgasm header. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Essentially, yes. I mean, perhaps, again, perhaps we're being slightly unfair because that is in itself a progressive thing, saying, yeah, everybody is entitled to pleasure, of course, is a thing that feels good. But if you sort of break that apart, the stuff I said earlier about different sexual roles

for men and women, this idea that women need to be passive and men need to be active. If you read that with a kind of optimistic lens, it's saying men need to be working harder to make sure they're pleasing their wives. Sure, great. It says that everyone should be having orgasms

and in theory, preferably mutual orgasms so everyone is coming together literally at the same time and that will make you kind of happier, great. Right. But all of that is predicated on the idea that a man is the one that's going to provide pleasure that a woman should only really be roused should only be kind of sexual enough

when her husband sort of spurs that in her. There's this line in one of the manuals that says that masculinity is the innate impulse to dominate to be the creative factor and to be productive, while femininity is the impulse to be dominated, to be led, to be influenced, to be given emotions by direct action. So there's an assumption that she needs to be sexual enough to respond, but that it isn't her job to really have any sexual agency of her own,

but she needs to be wooed by a kind of skilled, a sexually skilled husband. Brilliant. So all of a sudden, we've scratched away a little bit at that nice progressive-looking tint on the top and said, Okay, that doesn't feel great. And even then when you look at the kind of whole orgasm stuff, if then you are not achieving that, if you are not having these kind of gold standard,

mutually orgasmic sexual experiences, then you're doing it wrong. It's a huge amount of pressure on men because they're expected to be able to, I don't even know, all the bells and whistles in order to kind of just, yeah, job done. And she's expected to respond so quickly and so perfectly to his come-ons every time

that it's this perfect balance, sex stuff. That is so difficult to achieve for anyone, let alone people who sometimes obviously don't have any sexual experience. I wonder if this led anything to people faking orgasms, presumably people have been faking orgasms for as long as there's been orgasms, but this pressure to like, you know, we know from the research that women fake orgasms a lot more than men fake orgasms. And there are various reasons around that, at least what the research shows, ranging from, they wanted it to end, through to they just thought that it would make it more erotic through to almost like a sexual cheerleader of like, go on, sunshine. Well done you.

Yeah, and actually a couple of the advice books, most of them assume or sort of are based on the idea that a man who is skilled enough will do a good enough job that they will both have an orgasm anyway. It's never sort of doubted that a man is going to have an orgasm, of course. That's seen as inevitable. But the woman's orgasm always hangs in the balance and is depending on him. But there is a couple of examples as a guide by a, um, American neurologist called William Robinson in which he says, if you are not getting there, that is something that's wrong with you. You might have a touch of frigidity.

Cheers, Robinson. Yeah, cheers for that, Will. So what you should do there is essentially fake it. But then that is so counter to all the other advice that had been given. Because all the other advice is saying, yes, you need to be having these orgasms. Yes, pleasure should be at the centre of a good marriage. But if there's something wrong with you and you're not coming when you're meant to come, actually maybe just fake it because that's obviously a you problem.

Fuck. So there is these weird little kind of, again, that progressive overview that seems so good doesn't quite hold up to scrutiny. No, it doesn't. It's falling apart quite quick now, isn't it? It is. And there's many more. I mean, there's such big problems with it, not least the fact that a woman who doesn't

want sex enough is frigid. A woman who wants sex too much is either categorized as being slightly like, a nymphomaniac that language is kind of bandied around. You also get to go back to my friend William Robinson. He talks about the woman vampire who has too high a sort of sexual desire and will sort of sap the virility and the kind of energy out of her husband. So there's this such, oh goodness, such a fine line. Yeah, how'd you get this right?

But then this is essentially it, isn't it? And actually, I'm not sure there's really... You can't, can you? No, not really. That's kind of the point, I think, is that it's this constant aspiration this thing to strive towards, which means you're always trying to be better, always trying to do more,

to have this particular kind of sex. And in doing so, that creates such a very particular kind of way of living. It means you are straight. It means you are married. It means you are having penetrative sex. It means, okay, you're having orgasms. But that means that anything that doesn't fit into that,

the unmarried, anyone counted as frigid, but anyone who just has a particular kind of sex drive or not or whatever, anyone who's queer in any way, it just does not fit into this very particular version of what good or normal sex should be. And at this time where there's so much chaos, there's so much change, especially around sex, around the roles of men and women in society, this is, and I think it can be read, at least in part, there are definitely kind of progressive elements to it. But in part, I think we should read it as a fairly conservative backlash to a kind of radical moment in terms of sex and gender.

So it's kind of like, it's great that people are talking about sex, and there's actually people trying to get advice out there. But really what it's doing is it's now putting another impossible standard on people and a mechanism for control that if you aren't prepared to lie there and wait for your husband to sexually excite you and orgasm at the exact moments that he orgasms and have no sexual desire outside of that,

but just the right amount so that you're not frigid but not too much so that you're not a nymphomaniac and you're not a sexual vampire. That's what we're aiming for, is it? Yeah. Yeah. You know, in the Venn diagram of all of those things, I imagine the middle of that is very, very small. Ridiculously small.

The possibility is tiny. But yeah, I think that's exactly. I mean, it's a huge amounts of pressure on men too. Yes, it isn't it? Yeah, and if we're being told now in this advice that you should be having all of these orgasms and sex should be perfect, like you say, all of those things are coming together,

this tiny sweet spot that people should be and women particularly should be kind of living up to. And it's entirely his job to make that happen. Both partners in this sort of relationship are now, under huge amounts of pressure to get sex right in a way that, okay, in previous time periods, perhaps sex advice is not telling you all this stuff about orgasms, perhaps there isn't the pressure to do that, which I'm sure meant people had some really dull sexual encounters, perhaps. But what it does mean is now there's these people who are panicking about how

their sex lives should be. You see in letters, for example, to advice writers, there's one called William Fielding that I've looked at his archives, and there's letters from people who are writing very specific letters about, am I? entering my penis at the right angle. My technique, I just kind of put it in and I leave it there. Should I be moving it? And all of these like, yes. Yes, you absolutely should be.

But there's all these really panicky letters about the angle or the bend in men's penises or you find as well copies of these texts with marginalia, kind of notes written in the margins, about things to ask their doctors. Oh, my wife doesn't do this. Should I be concerned? And you can feel the anxiety sometimes through these texts sort of ramping up. So yeah, sounds good, sounds great. Orgasms for all, but best of luck to you out there trying to make it happen.

Because, I mean, really, we're still really orgasm-focused in our own culture today. It's still like the gold standard of whether or not sex has been good. And that's actually quite detrimental to the entire process, you know, because it's kind of like, you know, if you're going on a journey, you've just missed all the scenery, you're just focusing on the destination. And sometimes you don't even get there? And we still have that, don't we? Absolutely. And it's really a factor of sex advice all the way through the 20th century.

In the earlier period, of course, that you say, the orgasm is that moment. It's the real apex of the whole experience, the only point, really. And even as things start to change and some advice writers talk about the importance of foreplay, which again not talked about really in previous periods and advice, at least not explicitly, but becomes much more at the forefront of advice by the time you get to the 20s. But even that is only ever talked about as preliminary to the sexual act proper. And the idea that what will happen is at some point, a woman will be penetrated and she will have an orgasm.

And then that doesn't really go away, even as you get into later sex advice by the time you get to the 60s, things like everything you always want to know about sex, but we're too afraid to ask, that kind of classic, the joy of sex in the early 70s, all of those still based on the idea that the only end goal here is to have an orgasm. And even, I mean, in everything you want to know about sex, but we're too afraid to ask, there's a much more recognition than the earlier texts about sex for fun, stuff about oral sex about masturbation, but even that still works on it and the idea that what

you will get to eventually is penitative sex, orgasm. It follows the same old script, but with different preliminaries. So we've got a situation where men are kind of being told your penis is going to do all of this amazing stuff. Yeah, magic. You're just going to put it in and then the earth

will move and stars will light up, etc. But was there information around foreplay or did they just expect them to just instinctively know this stuff? Like, was there advice on how to make your partner orgasm. Yes, there was. And again, in increasingly explicit ways sometimes, depending on the type of text that you're looking at, of course, the sort of cheaper, more accessible texts, because you could buy sex advice for pennies in vending machines, in news agents, but that would tend to

be less explicit, but the more you pay, the bigger it gets, the more explicit it becomes. So even in those kind of more expensive texts, there are explicit discussions of foreplay by the time you get to sort of the 1910s, 1920s, some of it is quite. opaque. There's an amazing quote in one of them. I think it's Walter Robby's book where he talks about if the fountains of her mouth are dry, then look lower and all of this sort of stuff. So some of that is going to be airy, fairy, flowery. That's not very helpful. Whereas other bits talk specifically about what to touch, when to touch it, and really focus on foreplay as what is often called the sort of art of love. It's really at this point that it becomes a skill that men are

told that they need to be learning and that time and attention and sometimes money needs to be spent on encouraging this. So even by the time you get later into things like the joy of sex in the 70s, a good friend of mine, Ben Meachan has written about the joy of sex and actually how it's really difficult to do all of the things that they want you to do without having a fairly large budget, a decent size house, a load of kit. It's not quite that bad earlier on. But yeah, there are sometimes step-by-step instructions. Put your tongue there, put your fingers here. If that hasn't happened, try that. But lots of them are fairly, shall we say, procedural. And perhaps don't always reflect the realities of what those real situations might have been like. So yes,

there is advice about foreplay. But not good advice. No, rarely. Rarely. You said it not me. But yeah, rarely, rarely great advice. Lots of it's quite vague or weirdly practical. Put that there, that'll happen. Brilliant. That's great. Yeah, great. I'll be back with Sarah after this short break. Hi there, I'm Don Wildman, the host of the brand new podcast, American History Hit. Join me twice a week as I explore the past to help us understand the United States today. You'll hear how codebreakers uncovered secret Japanese plans for the Battle of Midway. Visit Chief Poetan as he prepares for war with the British. See Walt Disney accuse his former colleagues of being communists and uncover the hidden history

that lies beneath Central Park. from pre-colonial America to independence, slavery to civil rights, the gold rush to the space race. I'll be speaking to leading experts to delve into America's past. New episodes dropping every Monday and Thursday. So join me on American History Hit, a podcast by History Hit. Masturbation, because I'm sort of aware that, especially in the 19th century and just coming out of the 18th century, there's a real anti-masturbation thing going on. This kind of weird idea emerges, especially for men. I mean, women were not encouraged to this by any stretch of imagination,

but this idea that if a man loses too much of his vital essence, that it'll suffer some horrendous terminal, it'll just waste away to absolutely nothing, and oh, he ranked himself to death. Yeah. And that'll be the end of him. Oh, yeah, always a threat. Always a threat, a perennial threat, absolutely.

So where's masturbation in these early sex advice manuals? Are they still saying don't do it? Yeah, pretty much. And actually, it's interesting you brought that up because in some ways these fears about masturbation are not well. totally, right? But by the time you get into the 20th century, we normally talk about those are starting to kind of relax a little bit, the fears around masturbation, and at least of wanking yourself to deafness or blindness or death or syphilis or whatever they think it's

going to do to you. But actually, it's in there, it's in the sex of vice-text, in lots of them at least, in slightly different ways. There's real anxiety or derision for things like the withdrawal method, for example, because that is seen as nothing but a form of masturbation, because what you're essentially doing is using your wife's body, to masturbate yourself and then because you're not climaxing within her body and therefore doing it properly, having real sex, that what you're doing is just using as a masturbatory aid. So it's not seen as exactly the same as masturbation, but there's definite links between things like that. The same, again, with types of foreplay that might lead to an orgasm outside of penetrative sex. Bad idea, according to sex advice writers, because what you're doing is essentially masturbating. And that's bad for a couple of reasons. A, because it'll deplete the body reflecting those older ideas that you were discussing, which you say, it's actually quite strange because they're really hanging on here in ways that they're not hanging on in some other arenas. But also it's bad because what it will do is it will upset your wife. The idea of women

masturbating will come back to, but this is the idea of men, that if you are having an orgasm on your own, that what you're doing is leaving her behind and that therefore this whole thing again, gold standard, mutual, simultaneous orgasm, that if you're not doing that what you're doing is actually damaging your marriage. You're literally depleting the amount of love she will have for you because you are not providing her with pleasure by penetrating and having orgasms with her. So bad idea for men, for lots of different reasons, apparently.

It'll hurt his body, it'll hurt his wife, it'll ruin his marriage. And then for women, of course, if you're going to be masturbating, there's just an assumption that there's something slightly wrong with you, that you're either some sort of strange nymphomaniac with two things, or perhaps that your husband's not been doing his job and that therefore you've been forced to have a wank when he should be doing his job. Oh, dear.

Yeah, so it's all, again, wrapped up in this whole idea that the only sex you should be having is heterosexual, penitative, orgasm. Sex for babies, really? Yeah, basically. Yeah, well, yeah, for babies, but without always the actual babies. Do they mention birth control in these things at all?

Because, I mean, if the advice is you've got to leave it in, basically, then I'm assuming the pregnancy is an inevitable risk at this point. Yeah, absolutely. And it's in sex advice that you get some of the first sort of mainstream discussions of birth control. So Mary Stopes is the famous example that most people have heard of, who is responsible as well for the kind of founding of the Mary Stopes clinics, which still provide things like abortion services today.

So people maybe have heard of Mary Stopes. And it's in Marys Stopes's Married Love that you get real discussions of birth control in the mainstream sort of for the first time. Because exactly, as you say, there is a recognition that if we're now saying that sex is important for pleasure, for connection, for love, for physical health and fitness, all of these things that say come with a good marriage, that actually if you're popping out a baby every time you do it, that's just not going to be good for anybody. It's just not possible. So there is more of a recognition that birth control is a thing that people are going to need to achieve this

wild ideal of perfect or fantastic sex or whatever they want to call it. So yeah, early versions, Marie Stopes pioneered things like the cervical cap, which didn't always go well, considering they were uncomfortable to fit these big rubber numbers that you had to sort of get up and insert at some point that were, yeah, quite uncomfortable. Things like douching sponges with strange, various spermicides. Not great. That's not the sexiest thing that could possibly have happened to people. But at the same time, there was a new recognition that people are going to need some form of birth control if you want them to have, you know, mind-blowing orgasmic sex without, you know, the consequences of doing so.

I think what I love about this particular period in sex history is that we're just coming out of the industrial revolution, the 19th century, and scientific progress has sort of exploded in a way that it hadn't done before. Like, it's kind of hard for us to comprehend just how much changed in such a short period of time. So what you kind of get by this stage is you've got genuine scientific curiosity and proper research that's still really muddled up with absolute cobbler's, just utter, utter gibberish bullshit nonsense that's kind of, and it's somehow got mixed in. in there, and that's when you start getting science advice that's just bonkers, isn't it? Like, some of them, you're about, tell me about this, but like, could you have sex with a pregnant woman in some of these books? Or it depends who you asked. Lots of them said yes, and there was this recognition, especially as, as you say, because

science is doing its bit and is growing and is definitely gaining traction and gaining authority to be the people that are being turned to, science and medicine, become the authorities or matters of sex. perhaps not the authorities because I mean religion is still obviously knocking about it's not like they're the only ones but it's definitely gaining traction and because of that lots of the reasons that you're told that you should

have all this fantastic sex is some of it's social and romantic it's to maintain your marriage but lots of it's because it'll make your body healthier there's a lot of kind of comments about this that if you have all the good orgasms and yada yada yada all of that kind of stuff that you'll be fitter and stronger and it'll just be good for you

so in part if you're a pregnant woman and your husband wants to have sex and you want to have sex, there's a recognition that actually, as long as you're not having sex too much, whatever the hell that is, that actually, yeah, that would probably be quite good for you. In fact, you might even absorb some of the kind of masculine vitality that comes with, especially the idea they have a whole thing about how fantastic semen is for you and that as it enters your body, you get that kind of rush of energy that comes with all of that stuff. Who amongst us has not?

Not my bad, Kate, but good for you. But yeah, that it's going to be like desperately good. good for you and good for your baby and you know and all of that kind of stuff but there's also of course the standard concerns that a woman might become with all of those hormones that are raging during pregnancy that she might become a little bit too much woman vampire we might get a little bit over the top yeah so it's your job as a husband to decide what is an appropriate amount of sex to be having and to basically dish it out so it's say it depends on who you're reading because there are some different ideas about this some people say no it's dangerous you shouldn't be she should

be busy nurturing new life and all of that kind of rubbish. But other people are saying it's good for the body, so why wouldn't it be good for a baby? One of my favourite all-time sex ed cranks is Dr. William Acton. Ah, yeah. You can never knock out on him to just have come out with some utter, utter insane crap somewhere. Yeah. Does he feature in these magazines?

He's still dolling out of vice into the 20th century? Less so. Acton's one of those ones. Every generation of sex advice writer, makes them claims by saying, oh, I'm leaving the advice, the taboo, the Victorian prudishness behind, and I'm bringing you into the light. It's my job to sort of enlighten you

and all of this sort of stuff. So you get Acton popping up occasionally in terms of people saying, we're leaving the Acton's of the world behind, and we're now stepping into the light. Oh, interesting. Okay. Some people do use him, because Acton's quite famous, of course, for that line

where he says something, are not much troubled by sexual feeling or something like that. Yeah, happily for them, most women are untroubled by sexual feeling. Yeah, that's it. So that crops up occasionally when there are discussions in these texts, especially the ones that frame themselves as more scientific pieces of work, where they talk about the sexual nature of women. And some of them will say, well, Acton said this,

and perhaps he was on to something a little bit because they are less troubled, whereas other people essentially are like, No, women are actually quite powerfully sexual beings, only when their husbands tell them that it's right, but essentially he was wrong. So he is still knocking about, but less so. Didn't he also have ideas about how often you could have sex? Wasn't that one of his? Yeah, quite a few of them have those ideas. Some of them are, especially the genre of advice that's written with letters from people, and again, whether they're real or not, who knows.

But you get these so-called letters from readers. And one of the question that crops up the most is how often should we be having sex? And some people will put a number on it, you know, a couple of times a week or whatever. Most people, especially by the time you get into the sort of the 20s and the 30s, are saying, well, you should have sex as much works for you as a couple, which again sounds sort of progressive on the surface, but also doesn't really hold up too much to too much scrutiny, shall we say. No.

And some of my favourite sex advice from the Victorian period comes from concerns about hair. Yeah. About grooming and all of that kind of stuff. Yeah, do you know, there is a decent chunk of stuff in the more specific sex manuals. And they do very strange things with it, actually. There's some sections that are about, again, preparing your body, especially as a woman, to be attractive to your husband, to sort of make him want to. But there are some strange sort of sections of books that talk about hair and aspects of the body

in terms of things like evolution and actually sort of suggest that good civilized, i.e. white bodies should be fairly well groomed, they should, you know, sort of be hairless. And actually, if you're not maintaining particular standards, there's this fairly dog whistle racist undertone here that says that, again, good women, civilised women are essentially white. Julian Carter has actually written a fantastic book called The Heart of Whiteness that talks about ideas about normal sex throughout the 20th century. And he has read sex advice in that kind of vein, not just about hair, but there's loads of stuff about the sexual behaviours of different kind of cultures, especially in the global south. Lots of, again, very, especially from the Victorian and early

Edwardian period, and stuff about quote unquote savage tribes is quite regular and saying that's what they're doing over there. Obviously, that's really problematic and we wouldn't want to fall into that. So what's actually happening is they're coding normal as white so that these discussions of the sex that you should be having are not just about upholding all of those conservative moors that we talked about earlier. It's also about upholding white supremacy in one way or another. So now we're at the point where it's great to have orgasms, but you have to be white, married, heterosexual, hairless, having sex in some positions, not others at a 45 degree angle, always having penetrative sex, leaving it in, birth control's a bit crap, and you've got to

come at the same time. Yeah, and adding that just to, you know, really make it a little bit harder again, is you've got to be middle class, basically, because there's a lot in there about, privacy and having kind of private spaces to have sex and oh god of course yeah yeah you'll own your own home and things like that so again if you're reading what normal or good sex is it gets smaller and smaller and more restrictive again and again and again and to an extent there might be a more optimistic story here where some people were reading these and we're having better sex we're having more pleasurable experiences we know that it was making husbands care about their wives there was a lot in there about not being violent or cruel, not demanding too much,

which for some women may have been a genuine relief in terms of their sex lives. But broadly speaking, the norm here, the ideal here, is incredibly restrictive and actually incredibly exclusive to a very particular kind of people living in society at that time. Really is. My favourite piece of John Caron advice from the 1880s is a warning about women wearing like hair piled up on their heads because he had this theory that it would put too much stress on the brain. Oh, poor lady brains. Which would then turn them all into nymphomaniac.

Oh, well, perhaps that explains it. Hashtag science. It's really, I mean, the science of normal sex, honestly, is fascinating. By the time you get to Masters and Johnson and all of their experiments about normal sex that are going on in the 70s, and they're getting women to masturbate with cameras in their lab in a room full of people, sometimes with a bag on their head,

and using that, Using that as a way to measure what a normal women's sexual response will be. And you think, oh, dear. Fascinating. At no point during this process did they think, maybe this isn't the most normal way of... How did they even get that through an ethics committee? Because you even imagine the paperwork that would entail today?

Oh, it's a 70. Who cares about ethics? This is what... I want a woman to masturbate in a room full of students with a bag on her head. Yeah, yeah. At one point, there was a viewer who was... was so close because they invited spectators in. Oh, no, they did not. Oh. Yeah, one of them got so close. He got hit in the face with the penis camera because he was so close to the action. So, yeah,

as science goes, again, to go back to my earlier point about some of it being a little bit, shall we say, dodgy around the edges. Yes, lots of the scientific attempts to study what normal is are questionable at best. So I suppose that we're going to have to finish up by me asking for the obvious question, which is, well, where are we up to now? with sex education because it's been sort of enforced these sex manuals and sex advice and people trying to tell you what is the right sex for, well, forever,

but particularly for the last hundred years or so. But we still seem to be incredibly anxious about it. We still don't seem to have quite got this right. Like the issue of what you can tell people is still quite fraught, isn't it? Yeah, and I think there's something about advice. The idea of being prescriptive about

sex, there's a line from a scholar called Ian Hacking that says, the idea of being normal of setting a norm is one of those powerful ideological tools that's existed. Because if you are going to set a norm, you're essentially imposing a requirement. You're saying this is what you should be doing. You're setting a benchmark and you're expecting people then to live up to it one way or another. So actually, advice as a genre can do brilliant things. It can offer advice to people who are anxious or frightened or who are looking for new and exciting things to try it. It can do lots of

good. But actually, I think at the heart of advice, at least, rather than education or other forms of it, there is something that is prescriptive. It is judgmental. It is exclusive in one way or another. And that doesn't mean it's impossible to do good advice and lots of people do. And it's really heartening someone who listens to podcasts like this, but also some of the other fantastic podcasts that you get, things like Project Pleasure, these really great projects that are talking about sort of sex in the modern age. There are good ways to do it. But as a scholar of advice, it always feels a little bit that there's these little standards that are in there somewhere. So I wonder whether what will happen is the idea of being prescriptive about sex. Maybe that's

where things might go is we might, I suppose we are, we look for advice in different places now, I suppose. We can search it out ourselves in different ways. We can talk to each other in ways that perhaps were not as easy to do so back in the 1920s. And maybe that is a slightly better future for sex advice rather than the prescriptive overtures of the dodgy scientists knocking about in the 1920s. Oh, Sarah, you've been just amazing to talk to. Thank you so much. If people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? You can find me knocking about on Twitter. I'm at Calling Dr Jones underscore. Little Aqua reference for the fans there. But yeah, you can find out more about me there. Oh, thank you so much. You have just been an absolute treat to talk to. Not at all.

Always a pleasure. Thank you so much for listening. And thank you to Sarah. I hope you found that as enlightening as I did. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like, review and subscribe wherever it is that you get your podcasts. Join me again Betwixt the Sheets,

The History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast includes music by Epidemic Sounds.