The most famous sexual myths in history

"We hide to make love and war is practised in broad daylight".. It is said that John Lennon once said these words with great wisdom, and deep down, the two concepts are more closely related than they seem.

We would all agree that sex moves the worldespecially in our age of entertainment, it is therefore essential to review the sexual myths that go with it. If we ask ourselves why it is possible to affirm that it is sex that moves the world, several answers may come to mind. For example: provides powerand, moreover, historically has caused great empires to be reduced to ashes, o that high-profile public figures lost their prestige and prestige for having made their sexual relations public. As we have seen in several cases in our ArgentinaXP articles, achieved that people who were neither recognised nor with royal blood, could become the king's mistress, as it is the case of Madame de Pompadour, or even to Empress of the most important empire in history as Theodora did as an actress and prostitute. 

Of course, since the human being is a sexual animalsex has always accompanied him. Since we come from natural generation, sex, one could say, is our foundation as existents. But in addition to sex being a condition of possibility for the birth of all humans in history (non-sexual forms of generation have only now come into existence with technology), there are questions of how we can be born. rituals in sexuality. 

It is clear that the ritual of interaction between sexual humans not only serves for procreation, as the ultimate power to perpetuate the species, but also to establishes intimate bonds, provides pleasure and releases endorphins. These ties already involve relations of domination and dominated, i.e. power. And, like all of our history, it also plays a central role among the myths of our culture, as of all cultures.

Sexual myths: The clitoris was discovered long ago

Kate Lister, great sexual historianThe film, which gives a voice to those who lived in the past, brings us closer to what life was like for our ancestors through sex. He tells us: "We tend to think that orgasm is something new that only matters to us today, and historians know that this is a lie.

He adds that "the discovery of the clitoris, of course, was vital. In 1559 two Italian anatomists (Gabriel Fallopio and Matteo Realdo Colombo) discovered it practically at the same time.

The Englishman Joseph Mortimer Granville invented in 1870 the first electric vibrator to give doctors' hands a break. Yes, the doctors also had the function of masturbation in pursuit of the elimination of what was then called hysteria. Freud went so far as to say that women who only climaxed through clitoral stimulation were immature and had problems stemming from childhood trauma. Of course, it was a different time, and every great transformer of thought has been recorded in some phrase that, as history goes by, becomes obsolete. 

¿Vibrator as a product of sexual myths?

It should be known that the dildo as such has existed for millennia.. The history of dildos and sex toys in ancient Egypt, which are still found in excavations, is very popular. However, when it comes to the origin of the electric dildo The aforementioned historian told the BBC: "There's quite a preconceived idea of the Victorian era. "It is true that their double standards are still with us today, and we often think of sex as a bad thing, but the Victorians were not idiots. They knew what orgasms were. The fascinating story of the inventor of the vibrator is a case in point.“. 

It was during the Victorian era that marriages tended to be arranged and even though masturbation was considered to be 'an obscure vicefemale hysteria was the order of the day. Sexual myths dominated the cultural and even the scientific sphere. Well, speaking of sexual myths, doctors, as we said before, tended to cure it by stimulating the genitals of the lady in question, as this 'released' repressed sexual desire.. Women were then considered to be suffering from hysteria when they had headaches, insomnia, irritability or a tendency to cause trouble.

The Englishman Joseph Mortimer Granville was the one who in 1870 invented the first electric vibrator in the face of an 'epidemic of hysterics'.', a crude characterisation of the period. However, despite being a fascinating story, there is virtually no information about it. "It was Rachel P. Maines who told it in more detail in her book 'The Technology of Orgasm'," says Leister. "In fact, a film was made a few years ago, but the few records about it show how the Victorians behaved about sexuality. They knew what orgasms were, but they didn't want to hear about them. So we would need to get away from that morality and go back to the idea of sex in the Middle Ages," she says.

Ancient orgies

We have already made a article on Roman bacchanalsBut when we think of orgies, we tend to go back to the hippy era at best. They still seem to the common society as something new and transgressive. But the truth is that, as we have already worked out, in Ancient Greece, great orgies were already being practised. They had a ritual character and yet it is undeniable that in some way they still do.. The most famous ones in particular were those performed as a cult of Dionysus, orgies nowadays have a secular character, but it involves a transgression of the boundaries of individuality that anthropologists could certainly include in the ritual character.. They have changed a little, but back then they consisted of 'unbridled' dancing by torchlight and the dismemberment of animals.

Myths about masturbation

Many do not know that the term 'onanism' comes from Onan, the biblical son of Judah. Of course, there are many today who defend the benefits of masturbation, but it is important to emphasise that until not too long ago was very different. In order to prevent some young people from accessing these practices in the seminaries, it was often lied to them that it caused blindness or baldness. 

Short stature, loss of sensitivity or even excessive hair growth, particularly on the hands. The great thinker Michael Foucault, in his course "The Abnormal", explained how the judiciary was linked to psychiatric knowledge in the 18th and 19th centuries, and how certain punishments, such as amputations for masturbation, were carried out. 

Sexual traditions: the colour red

"Roxanne / you don't have to put on that red light"- says the great theme song of 'The Police'. Of course the colour red has always been linked to prostitution. It is not for nothing that the famous red light districts (also known as Chinatowns or tolerance zones) are those where prostitution is concentrated. However, this detail has less to do with sexual myths.

Where can we trace this custom back to and why? It is worth noting that the most widespread legend on the subject dates back to the end of the 19th century in the United States. The main protagonists are railway workers, as they have also been in our other article on prostitution in the old west. At that time, they had train signalling lamps in two colours, white and red. It happened that when they went to the brothels, they would leave them on and hang them outside the brothel. The red would point to the street and the white would light up the inside of the premises, making that part of the city a real red light district.

Source:

elconfidencial