Mural from an ancient brothel in Pompeii.

Some things never change.

Here’s some graffiti from Herculaneum and Pompeii.

For a good time call…

10.4 (near the rear entrance vestibule of the House of Menander); 8356: At Nuceria, look for Novellia Primigenia near the Roman gate in the prostitute’s district.

SHOW US YOUR TITS!

I.2.23 (peristyle of the Tavern of Verecundus); 3951: Restitutus says: “Restituta, take off your tunic, please, and show us your hairy privates”.

Before Kilroy:

I.10.4 (exterior of the House of Menander); 8304: Satura was here on September 3rd

Bragging rights:

II.2.3 (Bar of Athictus; right of the door); 8442: I screwed the barmaid

The lament of the Roman “nice guy,” presumably.

II.7 (gladiator barracks); 8767: Floronius, privileged soldier of the 7th legion, was here. The women did not know of his presence. Only six women came to know, too few for such a stallion.

No shoes, no shirt, no service…

III.5.3 (on the wall in the street); 8898: Theophilus, don’t perform oral sex on girls against the city wall like a dog

HEY LADIES!

V.5.3 (barracks of the Julian-Claudian gladiators; column in the peristyle); 4289: Celadus the Thracian gladiator is the delight of all the girls

Sweethearts:

VI.16.15 (atrium of the House of Pinarius); 6842: If anyone does not believe in Venus, they should gaze at my girl friend

The noteworthy threesome, apparently.

VII.12.18-20 (the Lupinare); 2185: On June 15th, Hermeros screwed here with Phileterus and Caphisus.

Appreciative missives:

VII.12.18-20 (the Lupinare); 2192: Sollemnes, you screw well!

His dad totally owns a dealership, brah:

VII.12.35 (Vico d’ Eumachia, small room of a possible brothel); 2145: Gaius Valerius Venustus, soldier of the 1st praetorian cohort, in the century of Rufus, screwer of women

Curses.

VIII.2 (in the basilica); 1820: Chie, I hope your hemorrhoids rub together so much that they hurt worse than when they every have before!

Presumably some sort of joke about dick size. Because humans.

VIII.2 (in the basilica); 1826: Phileros is a eunuch!

Excellent advice:

VIII.2 (in the basilica); 1882: The one who buggers a fire burns his penis

The ancient version of “wash me” on a windshield.

VIII.2 (in the basilica); 1904: O walls, you have held up so much tedious graffiti that I am amazed that you have not already collapsed in ruin.

They believe in nothing, Lebowski.

IX.8.3 (House of the Centenary; interior of the house); 5279: Once you are dead, you are nothing

True bros:

Herculaneum (bar/inn joined to the maritime baths); 10678: Apelles Mus and his brother Dexter each pleasurably had sex with two girls twice.

Threats of ass beatings.

Herculaneum (on a water distribution tower); 10488: Anyone who wants to defecate in this place is advised to move along. If you act contrary to this warning, you will have to pay a penalty. Children must pay [number missing] silver coins. Slaves will be beaten on their behinds.

i09 has a really cool post on Pompeii.

I’ve been following a series of posts about the violent nature of various deities, and how modern sensibilities sand down the edges on old stories our culture carries around, until we’ve worn them down into something we’re comfortable with.  Nicole Danielle, in particular, wrote something that has stuck with me:

No body wants to be Job, nobody wants to rip their lovers to pieces, no one wants to be torn to pieces themselves, or cut out their own tongues, or sew their eyes shut, or walk in an abyss. No one wants initiation or trial by fire because one has no control over it. None.

And, well, it can’t be too hard to see why some part of me went, “No one?“

Maybe it’s no one, or maybe it’s just socially unacceptable.

Just don’t discount madness and masochism as an essential part of the human spirit.

So, Western culture takes Dionysus and turns him into this guy:

When, really, the myths involve a genderqueer, shape-shifting, foreigner from out there somewhere who went to war in India, had the greatest warrior/poet/lover that ever lived beheaded, and regularly drove women to do things like fuck monsters in the woods and rip off their own children’s heads.

The Bacchae of Euripides gives us the most vital picture of the wonderful circumstance in which, as Plato says in the Ion, the god-intoxicated celebrants draw milk and honey from the streams. They strike rocks with the thyrsus, and water gushes forth. They lower the thyrsus to the earth, and a spring of wine bubbles up. If they want milk, they scratch up the ground with their fingers and draw up the milky fluid. Honey trickles down from the thyrsus made of the wood of the ivy, they gird themselves with snakes and give suck to fawns and wolf cubs as if they were infants at the breast. Fire does not burn them. No weapon of iron can wound them, and the snakes harmlessly lick up the sweat from their heated cheeks. Fierce bulls fall to the ground, victims to numberless, tearing female hands, and sturdy trees are torn up by the roots with their combined efforts.

Yeah. That’s some scary stuff, even by modern standards. That’s some “Oh, noes, the ladies with their uncontrolled emotions are going to use their primordial black hole vaginas of terror to take us all back, back, back, to infancy, to the dark, to humans as animals, where surely The Great Mother will devour us all” type of scary stuff.

I suppose there’s an argument that the West belittles dead Gods and foreign Gods, because we’re asserting that the “our” guy is omnipotent.

Only, the same thing happens to Jehova, particularly in the modern Christian version. He is under attack, poor thing. He is taking the wheel.  He’s a lovely, attractive, non-threatening white man hanging out under a rainbow, laughing with little children.  He/his son is the perfect, chaste boyfriend for someone who’s completely terrified of sex. He’s your best friend, with whom you have a loving relationship. Or, increasingly… he doesn’t exist at all–you ditch the God altogether, and just stick with the little happy light in your heart.

⁴ Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. ⁵ It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. ⁶ Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. ⁷ It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

1 Corinthians 13:4-7 (NIV)

God is love.

Love is life.

Attaining transcendence, getting at the point of life, is basically boiled down to floating high on a big old wave of unconditional love.

Love as highest purpose. Love as an object of worship. Love as the defining aspect of life.

Romantic and familial love probably tops the list–these are our milestones: falling in love, the birth of children. Those are supposed to be your biggest moments.  Followed by love of country or an in-group of some sort–going into soldiering, athletics, healing professions and teaching; lives of “service.”  We also collectively admire love of life, particularly if accompanied by, say, the discipline of physical exceptionalism or the poignancy of terminal illness. Or, both at the same time. These are what we define as beautiful and noble love. We tolerate love of money and self, as those at least give the outward appearance of productivity. You can be a masochist, but you better be a figurative one for love–self sacrifice for your partner, for your children, for the impoverished masses. You can be temporarily insane, but it better be falling in love. You can commit a crime of passion, with some measure of sympathy.

We’re not so keen on those that really define their lives with hate or fear or wrath, even if that’s a common enough occurrence.

And we are absolutely intolerant and very skeptical of “transcendence,” of tapping into bigger than bodily feeling, that happens in unacceptable ways. There’s a very, very narrow path to getting outside yourself, at least so far as society is concerned. Even within religion–tongue-speaking, self-flagellation, stigmata, and even fasting are controversial. We’ve literally made a lot of routes to transcendence illegal–the drug war being a prime example, and with it, the hoops and hurdles and corporate attachment involved in any sort of festive gathering. We still frown on and/or mock genres of music, for crying out loud–most recently dubstep, that I’ve noticed, and I don’t think it’s any coincidence that it came out of the rave scene.

We’ve made some methods of bodily tribulation very taboo.

Second, S&M, by its nature, hurts people. Mild bondage is no big deal. But for sadomasochists, pain is the whole idea. Some stick to spatulas and wooden spoons, but others move on to electric shocks, skewers, knives, and butterfly boards.

What the hell is a butterfly board?

We don’t really own our bodies. Society has decided we can’t be trusted with them.

If you come close to losing control over yours, letting it run amok, society will issue the smackdown.

What it comes down to is that there’s very little room in our collective Ideal for personal experience where you’re not fully in control of your facilities, whether you want to lose control and stare down that scary id place or not.

There’s no room for maenads.

The assumption seems to be that any road that might lead to pain needs to be avoided at all costs. You might hurt yourself. You might hurt others.

Love is the avoidance of pain.

Don’t discount madness and masochism as an essential part of the human spirit, though.

It’s there. It’s always there.

A copper knife handle depicting a couple having sex and an animal bone carved into the shape of a penis with wings are among thousands of artefacts unearthed across Britain by amateur treasure hunters.

The erotic art is part of a huge haul of almost 25,000 Roman artefacts – mainly coins – discovered in England and Wales and documented as part of the Portable Antiquities Scheme.

The finds, reported in 2011 and dating back between 1,600 and 2,000 years, also include a copper bust of a bare-chested man – thought to be Antinous, the male lover of the Roman emperor Hadrian – and an unusual silver and gold brooch in the shape of a leaping dolphin.

The Wind Beneath Your Wings

In which I roll my eyes at Great Thinkers.

We owe a lot to the Greeks.  Sometimes what we owe them is a kick in the junk.

Just saying.

First off, we’ve got Aristotle.

The female is, as it were, a mutilated male.
– from Generation of Animals

I don’t happen to believe that’s the case, but I’m a woman that reads a lot, so it might my wandering uterus talking.

Galen knew about the clitoris, and he took the Aristotelian notion of “vital heat” straight to the genitals.

Before the eighteenth century, ideas about sexual difference were based on the Galenic notion that males and females basically had the same genitals. Women were considered essentially as “men in whom a lack of vital heat—of perfection—had resulted in the retention, inside, of structures that in the male are visible without.”

Kind of makes men sound like magic hot air balloons.  It also equates the vagina with the penis, completely ignoring the clitoris. This scrotal inflationary theory lasted until, ohhhh, the 1700′s or so, during which time the clitoris was “discovered” on a repeated basis.  As late at the 1500′s, though, scholars argued over whether or not it even existed, including Andreas Vesalius, the “Father of Modern Anatomy.”

Aren’t you glad you’re not that guy’s wife?

Vesalius, the Snarkster: ”It is unreasonable to blame others for incompetence on the basis of some sport of nature you have observed in some women and you can hardly ascribe this new and useless part, as if it were an organ, to healthy women.”

So, for 2000 years or so, elite, educated men had all the anatomical sophistication of Anastasia Steele.

It was, at least academically, just “down there.”

Let’s just blame the whole, wide world.

There’s a running notion that Western sexual repression can be laid fully on Paul and Augustine.

Asceticism is a Greek word which originally applied to athletic training. It’s not a Jewish tradition. The kind of self-denial you see in the Judeo-Roman world around the time of Christ resembles Hindu and Buddhist practices.  Alexander was a bad ass; the Greeks made it to India, and trade routes spread knowledge as well as wealth. (This is how you end up with mouth breathers in Bible-based megachurches using words like agape in their men’s Bible study groups, as short-hand for the “no-homo” version of having a “relationship” with a Loving Christ.)

The ascetic impulse applies not just to sex, but all physical indulgence. Food. Clothing. Shelter. Speaking, in some cases.

Out into the desert with you, to wrestle with demons and inner narrative.  Give up your attachments to worldly pleasure. Live on Spirit. (Starving saints have traditionally been female. Interpret that however you want.)

The Judgement of Paris, Simonet, 1904. Helen. Cassandra. Aphrodite. Eve and the Magdalen didn’t exactly have the market cornered.

So, you’ve got this new(ish) Indo-Hellenic aversion to corporeal existence, mixed in with long-standing Greek ideas (read: homosocial) about the nature of “true” affection and magic-balloon-peen, and a Jewish male God that is dead-on obsessed with human reproduction. Add that to Roman constructs of “sex” as being primarily class constructed and entirely penetration-focused, with a number of taboos concerning who did what to whom.  Finish off with a heaping helping of apocalyptic fervor.  The world is always just about to end.

Paul was just a product of his times.

But, really, it’s less about Christianity being specifically anti-sex, than it is about Christian theology being opposed to the human body. Some denominations over the years pretty much advocated for voluntary human extinction.  But, in perspective? Lust is only the first level of hell in Inferno. 

Doctrine solidified. Rome fell.

There’s a dark age for Western orgasms. At least, orgasms on the record.

Mostly, it’s a dark age for record keeping.

By the early modern period, you still have those same insatiable vaginas, throwing a monkey wrench into male plans. Blodeuwedd. Guinevere, Morgan, Isolde.  The Wife of Bath. Witches, even. Women were still perceived as the lustier sex.  The ones that pick the apple and believe the serpent.  Since they, apparently, wanted to steal all that vital heat from male sperm, or at least that’s what doctors thought.

Then, the tide started to turn.

Still to be continued…

The Female Orgasm: A Brief History, Part 1

The Female Orgasm: A Brief History, Part 3
The Female Orgasm: A Brief History, Part 4

A series.

This week shall be all about orgasms.

Or, at least, the history of orgasms.

You can blame this on the porn. I am going to.

As did the Ancient Caveladies of Ye Olden Tymes

There are a handful of evolutionary theories out there about female orgasm.

Now, some scientists think that women only have orgasms because they have “vestigial organs.”  The clitoris is embryonic penis debris, and female orgasm isn’t evolutionarily adaptive.

It’s an exploitable bug, more than a product feature.

Some scientists think that female orgasm has some “useful” functions–it increases female libido, it ups the odds of conception through cervical spasms, and it encourages heterosexual pair bonding. That sort of thing.

But my personal favorite is the Cave Lady Group Sex idea.

Because some scientists nick the whole “pair bonding” thing altogether.

Real Time Photo of Ancient Cave Lady

So, some scientists have suggested that women orgasm, not just the one time per session, but potentially many times because we used to be big old group sex-aholics.

Basically, if a cave-lady didn’t get satisfaction the first time, she could move onto another partner, and then maybe another. Like chimps do.  It’s possible that the orgasm ‘gender gap’ serves a purpose.

And, seeing as we all lived in bands and there were no privacy screens or Tin Lizzies or single-family detached homes, basically all sex was what we’d call exhibitionist.

It’s possible that our ancestors were horn-dog orgy experts who whittled huge-boobed ladies with giant vulvas. It has some potential adaptive advantages, most notably in a theoretical decrease in infanticide and a boost in group cohesion.

You have to admit. The theory has a certain charm, right?

Multiple orgasms: solace for the risk of being trampled to death by woolly mammoths.

Homo sapiens have been around less than half a million years, and anatomically modern humans are about 200,000 years old.  Our oldest cave paintings go back about 40 thousand years.  Permanent human settlements linked to agriculture appear to date back about 10 thousand years.  So, you know, that’s about 190 thousand years of potential cave orgies.

Alas, after we do things like “run out of megafauna” and “invent property rights” this notion that women are insatiable becomes a big problem.  When hunting and gathering stops sustaining, and you’re all on little bits of land, you’ve got three new problems: 1.) who do you assign property rights to, 2. ) who’s going to work the land, and 3.) who are you going to pass it on to?

So, humanity invents the Orgasm Police.  And, guess who’s orgasms need the most policing?

Woman as libidinous and insatiable has been the dominant human sexual narrative for much, much longer than the current notions about “frigidity” and “dysfunction.”  Ovid actually had Juno and Jove argue over who got the most pleasure out of sex.  Women won. In a lot of places, it’s still the assumed truth.  Granted, in a lot of places, the notion still does an enormous amount of harm.

Scientifically speaking, women are the more visual sex.  Women physically respond to a wider variety of erotic imagery than men, and they do it, in a lot of cases, completely unconsciously.  When we say things like “men are just visual creatures,” and “women crave emotional connection,” and we intend for those two statements to represent polar opposite approaches, we are repeating myths, and we’re doing it on faith.

You have to wonder why.

I wish I could remember the link, but about a month ago, I saw novelist compare the “climax” in pornography to the “climax” in erotic romance.

The climax in porn is, as we all know, a woman coated in semen–generally a woman apparently sated. The climax in romance, erotic or otherwise, is a declaration of eternal(ish) devotion from a man that’s recognized a woman’s unique awesomeness.

On the surface this looks like “dudes want orgasms” and “chicks want true love!”

Of course, it’s also possible that this looks like some sort of Age of Anxiety manifesto.  ”Dudes want assurance they’re adequate in satisfying a bottomless pit of female sexual want (also: assurance that semen isn’t actually icky)” and “chicks want proof that someone attractive has found them bewitching, over and over and over.”

Romance novels are like those potato chips or methamphetamine.  Once you’re hooked, you don’t stop at one.

Women don’t necessarily “want true love.”  They want “falling in love.”  Tension. Lust.  The gaze. With men. With two men. Men with men.  Men with space aliens.  Women with Vampires. Vampires with werewolves. Werewolves with humans.   Werewolves with vampires AND humans AND Australian Catholic Priests.  Over and over.

And, it doesn’t change the measurable fact that women are still easier to visually arouse than men are.  Which is to say that women get off on all of it.

Yet, somehow, here we are in 2012, with the supposed shock of “Mommy porn” and a whole new way to tell women their orgasms are inadequate.

I told you I was blaming porn.

To Be Continued…

The Female Orgasm: A Brief History, Part 2
The Female Orgasm: A Brief History, Part 3
The Female Orgasm: A Brief History, Part 4