“Clitoris” in Victorian – or Edwardian – literature?

Posted on October 23, 2012 by jaime

in the 1980s Grove Press published what they said were volumes two and three of “A Man with a Maid”. They claimed that all three volumes were written in the late Victorian age, or perhaps early Edwardian in the case of the last two volumes.

I think Volume 1 really is an Edwardian bdsm classic, but I suspect that the second and third volumes are modern fakes, written for Grove Press by some anonymous forger.

If it is a modern(ish) pastiche, it’s a good one. It feels more authentically in period than the book “Beatrice” did. “Beatrice” was published as a long out-of-print piece of Edwardian porn, but turned out to be written by a guy who wrote for Penthouse. It’s not a bad hoax, or a bad book, but I was never convinced that it was Edwardian, or written by a woman.

But the supposed second and third volumes of “A Man and a Maid” feel reasonably credible as Edwardian writing, to me. Or they did until a sequence in Volume 3 in which the hero, the redoubtable “Jack”, is buggering some freshly tawsed and obedient girl, keeping her happy by stroking her “clitoris”.

The word “clitoris” did exist at the time, but it was a medical term. If a porn writer wanted to mention a clitoris, he’d write “her little bud”, or some other indirect phrase, letting context do the rest.

I don’t know of any other instance of the word “clitoris” popping up in an erotic scene, until the 1970s.

“Clitoris” probably escaped the medical textbooks and got into pop culture through the Masters and Johnson books on human sexual response, big sellers in the 1970s. Writers felt they should mention clitorises in sex scenes, to show they were up to date, but they were still a bit awkward with it. For example, there’s a scene in some pulp thriller from the early 1970s in which the hero plays the heroine’s body like a beautifully tuned violin, as chaps in books tended to do in those days, before he triumphantly “entered her clitoris”. Yeow!

So: it is likely that we’d find an accurate and casual reference to a “clitoris” in Edwardian erotic fiction? Probably not. So volumes 2 and 3 of “A Man with a Maid”, published by Grove Press, are forgeries.

I could be wrong. Does anyone know of any examples of the word “clitoris” appearing in fiction written before, say, 1970?

Lust and death #2

Posted on September 26, 2012 by jaime

I was back at work a couple weeks or later. Someone who knew I’d been punctured (I got harpooned with a great metal rod, like Moby Dick; not a long story, but some other time) said it was great to see me up, walking about and looking cheerful.

I said I felt great, but it was only because I had a couple of litres of someone else’s blood sloshing around inside me.

She said, “Um.” Then she turned pale and wan, and walked away. Probably not a vampire fan.

Actually, I’m not a vampire fan either. Vampires aren’t remotely scary, partly because I can’t suspend disbelief in them for a second (see also werewolves, zombies, etc), and partly because, like the original Daleks, they’re too rule-bound.

You’re being pursued by a vampire? Well, cross running water: they can’t. Go home and don’t invite them in; they can’t enter your home, the first time, without an invitation. Vampires originated in a traditionally Catholic part of Europe, so they’re scared of crucifixes. So get your silverware, make the sign of the t, and wave it at them. They don’t like garlic. I do.

If I met a vampire, I’d probably just tell him to go back home and listen to his Nosferatu and Cradle of Filth records. And to take those silly red contact lenses out, unless he was going to meet another vampire fan through Fetlife, in which case he shouldn’t be loitering around anyway.

Anyway, I was going to say something sententious in this post, about sex and death. But all I found is that there’s a period after you’ve nearly died when you can’t fuck. You haven’t got the blood, I suppose, and you’re concentrating on other things.

A little bit later, lust comes in with a vengeance. I wanted to fuck anything – hospital sheets, nurses, passers-by. I got talking to a night nurse, who knew lust when she saw it. This isn’t some porno movie, so we didn’t have wild sex behind the curtains, and so forth. But we got chatting about injuries, and life, and lovers, and such, and for some reason by the third night she knew I’d like to see the bruises on her thighs. That involved wriggling pantihose about halfway down her thighs and shimmying the skirt up, so curtains were involved.

The bruises were put there by a bicycle accident, not a lover. But she was right; I thought her bruised thighs were … life-affirming. She had a boyfriend. And she didn’t want her thighs kissed better. Or new bruises. She was just reminding me of life’s pleasures.

So sex beats death, at least in the skirmishes. Life is good.

Wax (a travel tale)

Posted on June 17, 2012 by jaime

A few years back, in India, I took a girl to a shop specialising in depilation.

Because this is a story about something that happened in India, I guess I should say that she was a woman over thirty with social and economic power.

So why “girl”? When I was growing up, I was taught always to call any female person over 16 a “woman”. I did for a while, because I like girls and I like women, and for slightly different reasons I want both classes of person to be safe and happy. But as soon as I started fucking, many women showed me that they were more pleased with me when I called them girls, whatever they might claim about their preference. (I mean in sexual contexts: not in academia, work, and so on.)

And my powerful girl in India preferred to be called a girl.

Anyway, that day she’d shaved her pubic hair for me. So I pretended I was displeased with her effort.

I took her to a depilator, in a part of town where all the hair-removers had congregated. We taxied through the marketplace, with people looking in to see a girl with her hands on her head and her legs under a blanket. And a man’s hand under the blanket. Once we were out of the taxi I led her through the district with my finger and thumb pinching her ear, taking occasional whacks at her bottom.

There were people who used creams and razors and even in some cases lasers, though they drew the line at tasers, and there were people who used traditional methods involving tightly twisted lengths of string. That looked painful, so I took her to the cleanest one of those, that offered private space.

The woman who ran the shop knew why I insisted on staying to watch, and she seemed to know that the girl on her back on the table, with her knees up and spread, was a girl under discipline. She knew something was up, anyway. If anything it made her more ruthless.

Afterwards my girl was pleasantly subdued. She said she felt very submissive and service-oriented, and very sensitive. I could make her moan just by blowing on her lips.

Later, she made other noises.

And later still, talking about her day, she said the woman’s ministrations, waxing and pulling her, being watched by me, knowing that I’d smack her in front of this stranger if she wasn’t cooperative, made her feel “absolutely violated”.

She said “absolutely violated” with wonder and awe. And she said it three times.