Dan Snow's History Hit - A Curious History of Sex

Episode Date: April 21, 2020

Sex. There's a lot of it about. We talk about war, chaos and atrocities on this podcast a lot although, thankfully, few of us have first hand experience of them. Yet we rarely talk sex. Which is odd. Sex is what got us here in the first place and nearly all of us will experience it in some form through our lives. I talked to Dr Kate Lister about the ways in which society dictates how sex is culturally understood and performed have varied significantly through the ages. Dr Lister runs the brilliant digital project Whores of Yore and has just written the brilliant Curious History of Sex. We chatted about why humans are the only creatures that stigmatise particular sexual practices, and sex remains a deeply divisive issue around the world. This was a fascinating chat.For ad free versions of our entire podcast archive and hundreds of hours of history documentaries, interviews and films, including our new in depth documentary about some of the greatest speeches ever made in the House of Commons, please signup to www.HistoryHit.TV Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/$1.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. I've got a treat for you today. We're talking about sex. We're talking about STX. We're talking about sex, baby. I got Dr. Kate Lister. She's an absolute legend. She's a lecturer at the University of Leeds, Trinity. She curates the online research project, Whores of You. If you're not following Whores of You on Twitter, then what is wrong with you? You have no idea how many attempts I had at recording this introduction. All of my comments and observations about sex either felt horrifically inappropriate

or like some pathetic middle-aged dad trying to be cool. I think it's best if I just let you listen to this podcast and glory in the weirdness that is the human relationship with our own bodies and the sexual act. An act that is so natural that none of us would exist were it not for it. We're proud at History Hit that we cover human history in the widest possible sense, from Roman orgies through to Donald Trump's presidency. If you want to hear more podcasts, of course, they're all available at historyhit.tv. It's our digital history channel. We've got hundreds of documentaries up there.

We've got more and actually a lot more dropping this week, a lot lot more documentaries we're growing fast and we're keen to provide the best service we can especially during the lockdown and we've also got hundreds and hundreds of back episodes of the podcast exclusively available there as well as new podcasts actually new podcasts with exploring different parts of history going live soon as well so please go and use the pod one pod one you get 30O-D one, you get 30 days for free and then you get a month after that for just one pound euro dollar. So two months should take you through most of the lockdown. In the meantime, everyone, enjoy this curious discussion about sex.

Kate, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. What a pleasure to have you. Oh, it's so lovely to be here. Thank you. Your book and, of course, your digital present, you know, work you do on sex history is astonishing. I urge everyone to engage with it, buy the book and everything. We'll tell them how later on.

But when you came to write Sex History, History of Sex, a lot of people get surprised when I tell them I'm doing this podcast or I'm reading your book. Has it been taboo in historiography, just as it has in sort of polite dinner party society? It has. It's a strange subject. I mean, all historical subjects are unique and come with their own set of problems and quirks. But sex history is particularly, it's tricky, right? Because it's a subject that we

still inherently struggle with. So attempting to talk about it in an academic fashion or just, you know, just a chat can be very difficult for some people. A lot of people don't think of it as being quote unquote proper history. There was some research done that suggests that anyone who researches sex in any kind of capacity does suffer a stigma in academic circles, whether that's people kind of giggling or not taking it seriously or kind of raised eyebrows. So there is all of that that you have to kind of get through to get to it. But there's a lot to be said for steering into the skid when it comes for things like this. People have fun reactions to it. And I like that and I play with that. But. But yes, definitely there. It's odd, isn't it? Because if there's one thing that we

should be studying the history of exploring what humans have done, it's in our sexual behaviour, because it can be so radically different over the years, just as the binds that tie us politically are economic models. I mean, the way that we have engaged with each other sexually are so much more complex than say, amongst our primate cousins. Yes. It's something that really sets human beings apart from almost every other living creature on the planet is these rituals and fetishes and kinks and anxieties that we have around sex. But the act of sex has remained pretty much constant all throughout our history as we know what goes where. But the behaviour around it can vary massively like you know if you look at ancient Greece and ancient Rome they had basically institutionalized pedophilia

it was what we'd recognize it as today but for them this system of older wealthy influential men taking on a quote-unquote apprentice who was a young lad a a young boy, it was not only completely normal, it was aspirational. So, you know, the attitudes around sex vary so greatly dependent on which culture that you're looking at. What do you think when you look at today, given that you know more than anyone about the history of what people have been doing to other people for the last 5,000 years, what strikes you as remarkable about the way we have sex today? It's tricky because it's not until you've been through it and you look back on it. But I think that something that does set us apart, our own culture, especially in the wake of the Me Too movement, I think that's something that will be remembered all throughout history and will be really influential going forward.

I think that it's our scrutiny of consent is something that makes us quite unique and how willing we are to scrutinize what we mean by consent and when does someone consent and it's a lot more complex than somebody just saying no that you know power differentials and all kinds of things play into it. I can't think of any culture that hasn't said that let's say rape for example is okay but what they defined as rape varies extraordinarily from culture to culture. I mean, the Vikings wouldn't have regarded raping slaves as rape because they weren't considered free people anyway. You know, so it's our scrutiny of consent, I think, is something that will be remembered for. one, obviously, the nature of relationships in terms of who we have them with, same sex, all that kind of stuff. Pubic hair is one that's fascinating at the moment, isn't it? Because you said on your social feeds, the discussions around pubic hair are the most energetic,

the most aggressive, the most kind of polarising. Probably, you know, in the wake of Brexit, there's probably been more severe ones. But pubic hair will always create a fuss on the social media, on the twitter site so if i host a lot of vintage erotica and obviously if you're posting nudes and erotica from the 19th century this is pre-hollywood waxing so people's bodies just look very they're just natural bodies aren't they they haven't been plucked and photoshopped and everything and maybe that's something we'll be remembered for as well our own time but it's kind of telling that we have a really big reaction to what is effectively a completely normal healthy body that it's supposed to look like that but

pubic hair and armpit hair is something that people comment on a lot and I do get the odd person who you know voices some kind of disgust or says something really critical about a full bush or you know a little wobbly belly or whatever it is but most most people have the reaction, which is just, oh, my God, I don't remember the last time I saw a body that looks like that. So it's a really interesting thing that's happening at the moment is that we're not used to seeing normal bodies. And when we do, it's worthy of comment and people are still surprised by it. But pubic hair, yep, people aren't used to seeing pubic hair,

especially women with pubic hair. You get a comment on it every single time. Let's take that as an example. You trace the history way back, and it's not as simple as just saying, oh, it's just a strange modern fashion. This is something that you were able to find evidence that there was discussion around trimming and around shaving and waxing throughout history, including some rather interesting recipes. Yes, the recipes for hair removal in the Middle Ages.

It was adding arsenic and lye together and then pouring it on the hair, the area that you want the head to be rid of, and then washing it off, presumably until it takes off all of the skin as well as the hair. For me, the big discussion around sex, and this is what everyone sort of finds with books about the Victorians nowadays, is instinctively people feel that I think people in the past were different to us. And particularly sort of declinists and people on the right say, oh, everything's terrible now, everything's much better than the old days. And yet there's this kind of countervailing idea that actually the Georgians and Victorians were like totally deranged,

you know, like boning all the time and like all over the shop, right? you know, like boning all the time and like all over the shop, right? And there's these two like twin tracks of popular historiography, if that's the right word. And, you know, you're uniquely placed to kind of judge on that. Like, do you think that these periods in our past are famous for being slightly more prudish, like more moral? Do you think that sexual activity would have been pushed into the married bedrooms and single people would have been excluded from it? I mean, over the years, do you think our patterns of sexual behaviour have changed as radically as culture suggests that they have?

It often says a lot more about ourselves than it does about the people that we're trying to research. I think that we take a lot of pleasure in othering ourselves to the Victorians, of making them out to be really prudish and repressed, because then by comparison, we're really liberated and free sexually. But things were different. And it's important that when you're looking at something, especially like sex history, is there isn't one single narrative. So you can't say that all of the Victorians were really sexually repressed any more than you could say that today people are really sexually repressed. Some people are. Some people today think that sex is something that's just happening between a man and a woman and in a marriage. And then there are other people that think radically different to that. It is the same in the 19th century. So you're not dealing with one narrative going through, you're dealing with multiple. By and and large the kind of

forward-facing front of victorian society is more prudish than ours is but that doesn't mean that that's filtered down to to real life you know they um if you start looking more polite society what's socially acceptable they did frown more on sex than we would today or at least they were more easily offended but they also had an explosion in pornography so just because you know you don't get a lot of porn in let's say Jane Austen novels for example doesn't mean that it wasn't there and that people weren't enjoying it and just because you found documents where doctors are saying that masturbation can be terminal does not mean that that filtered down into popular consciousness and people were paying attention to

it so you've got to be really careful when you're looking at this stuff to try and construct what an entire group of people over 100 years thought about sex. They were different from us, but you have to be careful trying to make the point that, well, everybody must have thought like that then. One of the more disturbing parts of your book is issues around control over a woman's body, and particularly concerns of a woman deriving pleasure from sex. And we talked today about female genital mutilation. I was amazed how sort of mainstream in the Christian West it was over preceding centuries. I mean, tell me a little bit about that.

Yes. So the clitoris is, I mean, it's had a pretty appalling history, the poor thing. So throughout most of Western history, it's been understood that that was where sexual pleasure derived from a woman. And therefore, it became under attack, basically, with the idea that if it was too large, or if it was quote, quote, misused, that that would inflame a woman's desires, and she'd become kind of sexually uncontrollable. There's also sort of references to perhaps the clitoris can cause lesbianism, if not properly controlled. So what you've got is this kind of anxiety around female sexuality in general, that's being misdirected at this one part of the body, the clitoris. And you

can see that going right back into the ancient world where there's awful descriptions of medics and doctors trying to cut out the clitoris or trim it back or some hideous operation on it to try and curtail women's sexual desires. And I'd love to say that that stayed in the ancient world, but it didn't. It still happens today. Female genital mutilation around the world. One of the reasons for that is to try and control female sexuality. But it was with us in the West right up to the 19th century and then beyond that as well with Freud. All right, he wasn't cutting out clitorises,

but all his work that a clitoral orgasm is somehow, quote-unquote, immature, sexually immature, led to all kinds of crazy medical theories that women were sexually frigid if they couldn't orgasm through penetrative sex. So it's really been misunderstood and abused all throughout history. Where did our shame come from? It's the question that I think hangs on every page of your book, you know, whether it's Mr. Kellogg, inventor of Kellogg's Corn Flakes, trying to create boring food to suppress our sexual appetite. Where is the idea that being sexually ambitious,

or if that's the right word, you know, wanting to have sex is dangerous, is bad for our health, is shaming, is evil. Like, why is that? And is that our culture? Or do we see that across other cultures as well? You see it all throughout other cultures. You see it, like, all cultures have got rituals and behaviours and systems of control around sex, even ones that we might look at and say that, oh, they're really sexually liberated. There's always something somewhere that is shameful. And it's a really, really tricky question as to where does the shame come from? And my own thought around this is that it's to do with control and it's to do with controlling what are ultimately quite primitive urges. I think that we feel a lot of anxiety around that at any point

where we feel out of control. And I think that sexual desire can sometimes make us feel like that. Sexual desire has the power to make you act in ways that perhaps common sense says that you should not. And I think that that is an area where we feel weak and we feel vulnerable because we can't control it. it's like this thing just takes takes hold not that everybody's sex quiz lunatics but you know what i mean is it it can make us act in ways that that will get us in trouble that we don't think that we should do and i think that anywhere that we feel like that can make us feel vulnerable you sort of feel like the same shame around food a lot of the time this This idea that if you eat too much, that you're somehow gluttonous or that you can't control yourself.

Anywhere that it's like you can't, you've lost control over your quote unquote base urges will create shame. I think that's where it's from. When you're at conferences, when you're talking about the history of sex, I mean, you mentioned that there is some stigma. Do you feel that your work is taken seriously or is people just people find it a kind of laughing matter i think that it is taken seriously i like to think that it's taken seriously but i can't deny that it is also something that people feel very uncomfortable around but there are more and more sex historians coming through i mean fernard reddell's done some brilliant work and Mary Beard with her, The Shock of the Nude and all these things. So we're getting there, we're moving forward. But it's also a subject that people want to know about. It's a subject

that people are interested in. So you've got to kind of focus on the good things. The reason that people want to know and the reason they want to read the book is because they are inherently interested and fascinated and slightly embarrassed by these things. I hope that people take my work seriously, but I'm also aware that it is fun and is that I use a lot of humour. But if you look at something like the book, I try and use a lot of humour, but it's also put a lot of footnotes in there and try and make sure that everything is meticulously referenced so you can go and look it up yourself but i can't pretend that this isn't something that any scholars working in the field of sex studies have to contend with is that people often don't take it as seriously as they would while studying trains for example trains yeah they can't joke

about trains this is an embarrassing follow-up because i hope that doesn't sound like i'm taking seriously but what examples of sexual practices we come across it's like what is going on with that and like that where there's just no trace of it in the modern world i think that everything does endure everything we invent new technology to um around sex that enables what looks like new behavior but but it's not really. It's just different expressions of old things. But I think like sex robots, they confuse me going forwards. And that's probably what I don't see the appeal, but I wouldn't want to yuck on someone's yum. I think that everything's been rooted. There's nothing new under the sun. Everything's been rooted. Nice. Pun intended. When you're looking back at these really intimate

moments that have been captured in fragments of diaries sources poems bawdy songs whatever it might be is what strikes you difference or is what strikes you the kind of sense of common humanity in our common urges and behaviors i think i always look for the the commonality is i know that like it's kind of the difference i suppose is where the where the humor comes from. But that's one of the things I really love about studying sex history is that it is one of the great universal levelers that we have. And you have it in common with Henry VIII and Mother Teresa and any historical figure that's ever existed has had a sexuality, a sexual... even people that identify as asexual that's still a sexuality it's something that we all have in common it cuts across class boundaries and time and it's a real unifier and it's something that you can absolutely relate to so when you're reading you know mad medieval accounts of bread dildos and all kinds of mad stuff is it sounds crazy but it gives us the ability to relate to that so it's always the commonality that i look for and i think is really really precious

but it's a difficult subject to research sex history because most of the time you don't get first-hand accounts people just don't do that they don't write down and i urge anyone listening please do please start a sex diary write it down and then put it somewhere. Leave it for future generations, because we just it's so rare that we have that. We have analysts as diaries, which are just incredible. But the Dead Sea Scrolls of sex history. But most of the time, the sources that you're looking at are things like medical journals, legal records, actual firsthand accounts are so rare and precious. records, actual first-hand accounts are so rare and precious. It's a great point. I think my sex diary would be of fairly limited interest now to future generations. Well, listen, Kate, you are an absolute hero. It is astonishing, astonishing

work right across publishing and digital publishing as well. Tell everyone just quickly about the digital side. How can people stay in touch with you? So you can follow my Twitter ramblings at at whores of yore uh the website that you can go to and read kind of all kinds of things that people have written sex workers activists and historians and that's the whores of your.com and um yeah that's how you can get hold of me and i hope to see you there and the book is called a curious history of sex yeah brilliant stuff thank you very much for coming on kate good luck with it thank you hi everyone it's me dan snow just a quick request it's so annoying and i hate it when

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