epublishing store: Intro

Sexual Health eBook Volume3
Chapter 5

Sex in America. From Below the Victorian Belt to the Start of Modern Dating, Paul Joannides

There are all kinds of ways to learn about sex, from downloading porn on the Internet to taking your clothes off with someone you love. Each lights up a different part of your brain and feeds a different part of your sexual curiosity.

Of all the ways to learn about sex, the chances are excellent that you’ve never read about the ways our forefathers and foremothers did it in the 1800s. This chapter invites you into a lovemaking time machine. You’ll get to look at how our great-great-great-grandparents got it on when they were young. You will see how prostitution was a vital part of American culture long before men and women started going out on dates. (Time and technology would need to intervene for dating to evolve.) You will be able to see the evolution of pornography as we know it today, and examine the popular high-water condoms of the 1800s that only covered the head of a man’s penis.

Just like today, sex in the 1800 s had its contradictory ups and downs and ins and outs. For example, let’s take a brief look at two things that you wouldn’t think would be happening in the same century at the same time: live sex shows and concerns about women on bicycle seats.

If watching live sex shows is what turns you on, it was much easier to find one in the 1800s than it is now. Consider the Busy Fleas, a trio of young women who made up one of New York City’s most famous live sex shows. For $5.00, you could stand close by and watch the three Fleas get very busy, sexually speaking. Unlike today, there were no windows to look through or booths to enter, and no one carded you at the door. You would watch the girls give each other oral sex, do themselves with dildos, place cigars in their vaginas and rectums, suck on each others’ breasts, and lick freshly poured beer off of one another’s vulvas while their legs were tucked behind their necks. At the show’s conclusion, you might be one of the lucky audience members who would get to have sex with one of the performers while the other men in the audience watched and cheered you on. As sexually explicit as this might sound, the Busy Fleas sex show was tame and downright virginal when compared to the live Sex Circus shows at Emma Johnson’s brothel in Storyville, the legal red-light district of New Orleans.

At the same time that there were explicit live sex shows, America’s professional journals were waiving flags of caution about American women who were starting to ride bicycles. A number of feminists and medical experts were concerned that the shape of the bicycle seat would leave America’s women sexually aroused. They cautioned that the bicycle seat would promote “libidinousness and immorality” in the fairer sex, and that raising a leg in public to get on a bicycle might scandalize women of the better classes.
So how do you judge sexuality in America during the 1800s —by the uninhibite live sex shows or concerns about bicycle seats for adult women? For that matter, how do you judge it today—abstinence-only sex education or porn-filled Web sites on the Internet? Perhaps it’s a bit of both.

Sexual Health eBook Volume3 Chapter 5 $20 http://www.1shoppingcart.com/app/netcart.asp?MerchantID=104436&ProductID=3537171

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