history of sex – Going Medieval

On women’s anatomy and the power of paying attention

Pretend you are me – the nicest, cutest, sweetest person who deserves a relaxing little Sunday, where she just goofs and maybe reads a ghost book ever. Nice right? Well, I also will have to imagine it as well because unfortunately my Sunday was irrevocably disfigured by the rantings of an idiot on the internet, and I was forced to think about my job. Yes, that’s correct no one has suffered in the way that I do. Thank you for noticing. What can you do to help? Well you are going to have to look at this right here:

On secret romantic communications

It’s the commercial day of love, and you know what that means – it’s time to buy things to prove your emotions, or something. And look, we all know that Valentine’s Day is made up and has nothing to do with St Valentine. Did people sometimes pass love notes around St Valentine’s Day? Yes. I mean, at least from the fifteenth century onward. Did people buy chocolates and book restaurants? Not so much. Anyway, other people have written about the oldest Valentine and the commercialisation of a forgotten saint’s day and I don’t need to add to that. Instead, I thought I would talk a little about fancy medieval people and their various ways of communicating about love.

On dating advice and men

Of late I have noticed that ever since that one sex trafficker guy got himself arrested there has been a recurrent theme down the old discourse mines: who on the left is talking to young men about relationships?

The answer is of course, friend of the blog BISHUK.com, thanks.

Yet not content with a simple and straightforward answer, the discourse machine moves forward, driven by a bunch of people who have literally never paid attention to who is doing sex and relationships education and therefore think they need to ask a question which has already been answered.

On disavowing sexual assault

Content Note: this post discusses the existence of sexual assault. It does not go into any detail, but does talk about it as a sociological and legal construct.

By now you have probably seen that there is a new show set in the Game of Thrones/ASOIAF universe coming up called House of the Dragon. This is OK news if you are me, because I am extremely going to watch that garbage one way or another. This is because of who I am as a person. I am not, however, gonna, like, get my hopes up that it will be good after … the unpleasantness of the ending of GoT. ANYWAY that is not what I am here to talk about today. Instead, I want to talk about the statement of one of the showrunners Miguel Sapochnik, who when asked why there was so much sexual assault in the upcoming series was heard to remark that, “You can’t ignore the violence that was perpetrated on women by men in that time”. And man, do I have something to say about this.

On semen retention

Mostly because my life is cursed/an unending nightmare, I have been subjected to a lot of takes about semen retention lately. Part of this has to do with the fact that it is a specific alt-right talking point, with certain nazis going so far as to make statements like, “The (((elites))) [Jewish people] fear men who practice semen retention”, which…IDK man I don’t even know where to start with that one. Also, like, whatever the hell this is, which made me take psychic damage earlier this week:

On the power of pushing back against the marginalisation of sex workers

So over the course of the course of the last week OnlyFans decided that they were going to suddenly ban adult content from their site. This may be seen as an inexplicable decision given that this is, actually, the thing that they make all of their money from. It is especially odd, given that a majority share of the company was bought in 2018 by Leonid Radvinsky, who has for over twenty years been working expressly in the porn industry. It would seem like he knew what he was getting into and exactly what it is that people were using OnlyFans for.

Podcast alert – Medieval Contraception at Medievalists.net

Medieval Contraception with Eleanor Janega

On putting sex work on the map

I have written before about the Agas Map of London (which you can find a fun zoomable version of here!) and how we can use it to find ordinary people and think about how medieval and early modern people thought about the world around them. Today, however, I have been thinking once again about how these same maps either show or hide sex work from us.

On pickup lines

This week, I was very pleasantly alerted to the world of AI generated pickup lines via the medium of Janelle Shane’s substack. There were any number of beautiful, bonkers, lines from, “Hey, my name is John Smith. Will you sit on my breadbox while I cook or is there some kind of speed limit on that thing?” to “I’m losing my voice from all the screaming your hotness is causing me to do.” I was, however, struck by the very good pickup line by one AI called Babbage which was heard to remark, “You’re looking good today. Want snacks?” and I am still in awe.

Anyway, I was posting away about my now blossoming relationship with Babbage over on twitter when Kara wrote to ask me to write something about pickup lines in the medieval period, and I will be damned if that is not a great idea. Don’t we all deserve a little light diversion on a Friday in the midst of all of the pandemic, ships stuck in the Suez canal, and police brutality? So, here is one for Kara.

On treating sex with the utmost reverence

For my last post of this garbage year I wanted to write you something festive. Maybe about commemoration, or compilation, or Christmas traditions of some kind. Then I logged into twitter and well lord forgive me, but it is time to go back to the old me.

You see, the first thing I was presented with as my poor tired eyes struggled to adjust to the weak light of a December morning was this: