Slap and Tickle The Unusual History of Sex and the People

Who Have it

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Slap and Tickle
Tom Cutler

Constable • London
 Constable & Robinson Ltd
55–56 Russell Square
London WC1B 4HP
www. constablerobinson.com

First published in the UK by Constable,

an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2012

Copyright © Tom Cutler, 2012

The right Tom Cutler to be identified as the author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act
1988.

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall
not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise
circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is
published and without a similar condition including this condition being
imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in

Publication Data is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-78033-611-4 (hardback)

ISBN: 978-1-78033-836-1 (ebook)

Printed and bound in the UK

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 To the very dear and well-beloved friend
of my prosperous and evil days –

To the friend who, though in the early stages of our acquaintanceship did
ofttimes scream and howl at me, has since become to be my most
harmonious comrade –

To the friend who, however often I may wring his neck, is never (now)
discordant in revenge –

To the friend
who, marked with coolness by all the female members of my household,
and regarded with suspicion by my very cat, nevertheless seems day by day
to be more drawn by me, and in return to more and more impregnate me
with the resonance of his friendship –

To the friend who never tells me of my faults, never wants to borrow

money, and never talks about himself –

To the companion of my idle hours,

the soother of my sorrows,
the confidant of my joys and hopes –

My finest and sweetest guitar,

this little volume is
gratefully and affectionately dedicated.

WITH APOLOGIES TO JEROME K. JEROME

I like my sex the way I play football, one on one with as little dribbling as
possible.
LESLIE NIELSEN
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Let’s keep this short.

Several people who helped me with their true-life stories for this book
have, understandably, asked me to camouflage their identities. Others, who
didn’t care, I’ve mentioned in the text. But who else should I thank? My
parents, who wish I would grow up? My wife, Marianne, who wishes I
would get a proper job? My son, Jed, who thinks I am an old fart? My
friends, who wonder why I never call? My barber, Charlie, who creates the
look of hair from the twelve remaining strands? My agent, Laura Morris,
who looks at me kindly, but askance? My editors, Leo Hollis and Andreas
Campomar, who sighed a lot? All the other guys at Constable, who turned
my rambling shambles into a book? The tea, the Lagavulin and the toast,
which stopped me going bonkers while I wrote? Or those ladies – they
know who they are – who taught me all I know, on the practical side,
anyway, about the delightful subject of this book?
No, mainly I thank myself, for my patience, hard work and exquisite
good taste, for my hours of research in dusty libraries and my superb
interviewing skills. I have found myself so easy to work with, and always
such fun; so witty, wise, thoughtful, kind and handsome.
Who do I think I am kidding? Nobody. But if you can’t flatter yourself in
your own acknowledgements, where can you?
 CONTENTS

Introduction
The History of Sex, 1: From the Rude Giant to stone phalluses
Titbits: A quick look at breasts
The History of Sex, 2: From lizard tails to ‘gross indecency’
Cock of the Walk: A quick look at the penis
The History of Sex, 3: From Krafft-Ebing to the Sexual Revolution
Stuffed and Mounted: A penetrating look at sexual intercourse
Sexuality Under the Microscope: From monkey glands to the ‘copulating
machine’
Wash Your Mouth Out! A concise glossary of filthy language
The Spice of Life: The sexual spectrum, from vanilla to kinky
Fetish Me Sideways! Unusual desires, from rubber to robots
Caught With Their Pants Down: Four front-page sex scandals
A Helping Hand: Dildos, vibrators and sundry sex aids down the years
Fancy That: The science of sexual attraction
Your Sex Life as a Film Title: A diversion for wet Wednesdays
When Things Go Wrong: Sexual dysfunction in a nutshell 209
Dirty Books, 1: A history of sexual literature
Cut That Out! Censorship – a brief unexpurgated history
Dirty Books, 2: An anthology of sexual literature
Glossary
Further Reading
Index
 INTRODUCTION

This book is about sex, but it is not a how-to book, it is a cheerful history of
the subject. There again, it is not exhaustive, though it may be exhausting
because it’s such a gigantic field. If you don’t believe me, try putting the
word ‘sex’ into an internet search engine. You will find that it brings up
about 2,830,000,000 (two billion eight hundred and thirty million) results in
less than a twentieth of a second. Near the top comes the female deep-sea
anglerfish, a monstrously ugly cross between Vincent Price and a huge and
hideous screwed-up paper bag. The only job the female anglerfish’s tiny
husband has in life is to attach himself to her body and dissolve, leaving
nothing sticking out but his testicles, a single – or rather double – doleful
reminder that he ever existed at all. Luckily, human sexual relations are
more equitable, and it is these with which Slap and Tickle is chiefly
concerned.
Here you will find the unusual history of sex in all its variety as practised
by various human cultures down the years: the Ancient Egyptians, the
Greeks and Romans, the Puritans, the Regency sex maniacs and those
hypocritical naughty Victorians. The book goes right up to, and beyond, the
Sexual Revolution and the freedom-soaked grooviness of the recent past,
before the rise of HIV/AIDS put the kibosh on all that. Stirred into the mix
is the science of sex, from the basic biology to what it is that makes us
fancy certain people and not others. You can discover why women
encourage promiscuity in men, find out all about ‘monkey-gland’
transplants, read about curious and incredible sexual maladies and, for good
measure, learn about Ulysses, the stupendous-sounding, first ever,
‘copulating machine’.
Slap and Tickle covers the sexual spectrum from ‘vanilla’ to ‘fetishistic’,
looking also at sundry sex aids down the years. There is an investigation of
some hilarious front-page sex scandals and a peek at dirty books and filthy
language. At the back, for aficionados, you will find some choice
unexpurgated excerpts from the decidedly saucy erotica of yesteryear.
The volume is arranged in chapters, and the history is chronological, but
you can read it in any order you like without missing anything. In that way
it is more like Midsomer Murders than EastEnders. There is a bit of
technical vocabulary sprinkled about and a few old-fashioned short words
that one is not supposed to shout out in the library, but I’m sure you are
sophisticated enough not to have an attack of the vapours when you read
these terms in context. In case you are puzzled by any of them, there is a
brief glossary at the back of the book.
Digging the golden nuggets from the rich seam of sex has been a labour
of lust and I was obliged to consult a small mountain of books, some of
which you will find mentioned in the ‘Further Reading’ table. My library
researches have been augmented by the stories of various sex-havers,
professional and amateur, who kindly answered my questions on the nitty-
gritty. Talking to them has been a breath of fresh air. As sex worker Kitty
Stryker put it to me, ‘We get so much bullshit in this work I decided I’m
gonna tell it like it is.’
I hope you find it all educational, informative and entertaining. I know I
have.

Tom Cutler
 I
THE HISTORY OF SEX, 1
FROM THE RUDE GIANT TO STONE PHALLUSES

‘Remember, if you smoke after sex

you’re doing it too fast.’
WOODY ALLEN

Cut into a chalk hillside near the village of Cerne Abbas in Dorset stands
the biggest and most famous ‘dirty postcard’ in Britain, the Cerne Abbas
Giant, which was once, but is no longer, supposed to be prehistoric. The
figure is a 180-foot naked person (unmistakably male), holding a knobbed
club. He is sometimes referred to as the Rude Man because of his
stupefying erection, his thing being 120 feet long. His club, I mean. His
penis is much smaller – though, scaled down, it is equivalent to a 10-incher
on your average chap.
 Many people still believe the Giant to be prehistoric but the earliest
written reference to him was made in 1694. In The History and Antiquities
of the County of Dorset (1774), Revd John Hutchins writes that the giant
had only been carved the previous century. So it is most likely that the Rude
Man is a pretty modern earthwork and not an ancient fertility symbol after
all. Still, barren couples traditionally used to dance around a maypole on the
white giant’s thigh in an effort to evoke ancient pagan magic and encourage
conception. Even today hopeful youngsters copulate on the site, points
being awarded for performance by people with binoculars in the nearby
National Trust car park. Not really; I made that up about points. But being
what it is, the Cerne Abbas giant remains a magnetic tourist attraction,
pulling in not only the long-lensed Japanese but also the occasional oddball.
In August 2007 the Dorset Echo reported that a chap visiting the Giant,
calling himself the ‘Purple Phantom’, had painted his penis purple (the
Giant’s penis).

Body of evidence
Few modern people go through life without sex. I mean, if they aren’t
actually getting any, they are probably thinking about it much of the time –
especially if they are men. Indeed, Aldous Huxley characterized chastity –
what people often now call ‘celibacy’ – as ‘the most unnatural of the sexual
perversions’. I think he put his finger on it there, if you will pardon the rude
picture that conjures up.
Although it’s as old as the hills, sex isn’t the method used by all living
creatures to reproduce their genes. Simple organisms like bacteria don’t
bother with it: they just divide, making identical copies of themselves for
ever. This might save on expensive dinners and the fear of sexually
transmitted infections but if humans reproduced non-sexually it would be a
disaster. Just imagine endless identical copies of Piers Morgan or the
Duchess of York replicating down the generations. Absolutely frightful! No,
the chief biological benefit of sexual reproduction is variety of offspring.
But more important, to most of us, is that while you’re propagating your
genes you can have an enormous amount of fun – which people have
known since long before recorded history.
 About four million years ago, which isn’t long in evolutionary time –
some African chimpanzee-like creatures stopped walking on all fours and
began wandering about on their hind legs instead. The sexual organs of
these newly upright walkers (our distant ancestors) now became hard to
spot. The vertical female of the species had no breasts to speak of and the
male’s penis was vanishingly small.
As the creatures evolved, the forest of body hair began to disappear and
breasts took up residence on the female chest. The prominence of these sex
organs indicated a female’s suitability as a mate, but males learned, over
hundreds of thousands of years, that staring at a woman’s breasts was as
dangerous as staring at the sun and could damage your eyes, in the sense
that you could end up with black ones.
Likewise, much larger and more obvious genitalia developed on the
male. Modern men may boast about their small mobile phones and large
penises, but size, it seems, was already becoming important a couple of
million years ago.
Charles Darwin pointed out that losing body hair and walking upright
would be hard to explain from a natural-selection (survival of the fittest)
point of view – you’d be colder and slower – but that they both had ‘sexual-
selection’ (survival of the sexiest) advantages. In essence, our distant
ancestors were finding less hairy partners ‘sexier’, and preferring mates
with larger sexual organs. These upright partners could now use their hands
more easily too, a significant evolutionary (not to say sexual) advantage.
One of the first things the less hairy upstanding male of the species did
was to give the female some prehistoric chocolates and take her out to a
romantic Stone Age restaurant. After the cheese and coffee he banged her
on the head with his club, and dragged her back to his cave for a bit of
postprandial monkey business.
It is of course conjecture just how much fun our sex-having antecedents
were getting from sexual intercourse, but possibly it was a great deal. There
are some primates today who spend much of their time in a kind of sex-
maniacal non-stop orgy which has no reproductive function. For example,
bonobos, so-called ‘pygmy chimpanzees’, have sex a lot. They indulge in
‘French kissing’ and oral sex too, neither of which makes babies. After a big
fight, two bonobo males are inclined to defuse the situation by rubbing their
scrotums together in an apish version of that Truth and Reconciliation
Commission which Archbishop Desmond Tutu (a different kind of primate)
was involved with. Perhaps British pub punch-ups and football riots could
be resolved in the same way.

Modern man and his women

Anyway, as the upright-walking sex-havers reproduced down the
generations they continued to evolve. Modern humans (Homo sapiens,
meaning ‘wise human being’) are believed to have emerged in Africa about
195,000 years ago. The earliest known human art – a sign of intelligence –
doesn’t appear until the Upper Palaeolithic period (Late Stone Age),
roughly between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago, give or take 30,000 years,
but when it does, surprise surprise, sex seems to be one of the major
preoccupations.
Of the few remaining examples of early human art, the Venus of Laussel,
a Stone Age carving, has frankly sexual subject matter, being a naked
woman with the horn – or at least with a horn. This voluptuous (fat) lady
also has prominent sex organs. The Venus of Willendorf, a small stone-
carved female figure from some time between 22,000 and 20,000 years ago
shares the fat figure and large breasts of other ‘Venuses’ of the period, of
which hundreds have been discovered. Although, like the others, her head is
present, her features, interestingly, are not. Political correctness doesn’t
seem to have bothered the artists of the time.
Sexual subject matter is indisputably visible in cave paintings dating
from around 5,000 years ago in the Val Camonica, in northern Italy. These
works clearly depict a man copulating with what looks like a donkey.
Similar odd scenes are also visible in Siberian rock paintings. Quite what
these images of bestiality mean is the subject of vigorous dispute among
archaeological academics with beards. Anyway, sex was quite clearly all
over the place and it looked the same then as it does now – donkeys aside.
Some of the sexual depictions resemble modern-day porn. In a fascinating
piece of Mongolian rock art a lady is to be seen effecting fellatio on one
gentleman while having sexual intercourse with another – one of the earliest
examples of multi-tasking, a skill for which women are now famous.
The carving of small figurines like the ‘Venuses’ lasted into the
Mesolithic period (Middle Stone Age), while huge upright stones from the
Neolithic period (New Stone Age) are still visible today in parts of Britain
and France. These can be suggestively phallic, especially with the sun
behind them. Le Grand Menhir Brisé is a huge one of these, and at some
sixty feet in height was once the largest known standing stone in Europe.
Today it is broken into huge pieces which lie where they fell, possibly at the
moment of unsuccessful erection, if you understand me.

Early sex books

As civilization progressed, sex remained, along with the weather, a main
topic of conversation amongst gentlemen around the globe, as well as a few
ladies. Ancient Indian, Greek, and Roman texts overflow with sex, and
some were lavishly illustrated. The Bible is famously stuffed with sex, and
violence too, and the subject was clearly on everybody’s mind, as well as in
nearly everybody’s bedroom. Indeed, since our forebears started walking
upright, sex and hunger have been the two vital motivating forces. Things
haven’t changed much either: food and sex continue to sell very well. I was
in Wardour Street recently and I saw a man selling hot dogs outside a porn
cinema.
Although examples of sex books are fairly few before the Classical
period, India has long had a reputation in this area, taking a practical
approach to sex education through literature as well as art. Among the
oldest books in the world are the Vedas, a large body of Sanskrit texts from
Ancient India, dating from around 1500–1000 BCE, roughly the period of
the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age. These Hindu writings show that in
Ancient India sex was regarded as a marital duty. They also reveal
differences in moral attitudes and sexual practices between the rich and
powerful and the man in the street. Polygamy, for example, was practised
by the rich but not by the poor, which is interesting as I find few men
survive one wife, let alone two, three or more.
The Kama Sutra, the best known of the old Indian sex books, contains
practical advice on sexual intercourse in many different positions. Its
separate parts were written between about 400 BCE and 200 CE, though
many of the sex positions look to me like recipes for slipped discs and
twisted quadriceps. After doing some of the more acrobatic ones I think a
large tin of Ralgex would be on the cards, though care would be required. A
rugby-playing friend of mind once sprayed his thigh with the stuff but
overshot the runway, liberally squirting his nether regions. He told me he
suddenly felt as if his scrotum was on fire and found himself performing an
involuntary dance – with noises – around the changing room.
In case you are wondering, ‘Kama’ means sensual pleasure, and ‘Sutra’
may be translated as ‘a collection of aphorisms in the shape of a manual’.
It’s not just about sex, though; it also concerns thoughts on virtue, the
nature of love, family life and how to start your car on a cold morning. (Not
really.) The Kama Sutra was first translated into English in 1883 by the
exotic not to say Byronic Sir Richard Burton, an intrepid explorer and fan
of sex and sex books. Burton was a funny chap, who recorded the length of
the natives’ penises in the various places he went to and then put them down
in his travel books – a sort of Hitchhiker’s Guide to Knobs. He was helped
in the translation of the Kama Sutra by his chum F. F. Arbuthnot, an
orientalist and phallus expert. The book was privately printed by the Kama
Shastra Society, an entirely made-up body consisting only of the strange
couple, Burton and Arbuthnot. By this sleight of hand the pair dodged the
obscenity laws of the time.
In China the I Ching, an ancient and rather inscrutable text, deals
surprisingly straightforwardly with sex, at one point describing heaven
metaphorically copulating with earth. The size of the condom required for
that one boggles the mind. The Chinese Taoist tradition, beginning some
time around the sixth century BCE, extolled something called ‘The Joining
of the Essences’. The theory was that by practising this, you would do your
‘energetic substances’ a world of good and be healthy and possibly even
immortal. But the cost seems to have been high. For example, one of the
Taoist ‘energetic substances’ is jing, and once this has all been used up, say
through the loss of body fluids, the body dies, or so they reckon. The fluid
claimed to contain the most jing is, wait for it, yes, semen, so Taoists
recommended decreasing the frequency of, or complete avoidance of,
ejaculation so as to conserve ‘life essence’. Assuming, for argument’s sake,
the truth of the Taoist assumptions (which are plainly crackers), there can’t
be many chaps who would sign up to have their assets frozen in this way.
The Chinese thinker Confucius (551–479 BCE), who had a thing or two
to say about sex, prefigured the thinking that developed later in the
Christian church, proposing for example that marriage should be a