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  1. Kate Lister
  2. A Curious History of Sex
This is not a comprehensive study of every sexual quirk, kink and ritual across all cultures throughout time, as that would entail writing an encyclopaedia. Rather, this is a drop in the ocean, a paddle in the shallow end of sexhistory, but I hope you will get pleasantly wet nonetheless. The act of sex has not changed since people first worked out what went where, but the ways in which society dictates how sex is culturally understood and performed have varied significantly through the ages. Humans are the only creatures that stigmatise particular sexual practices, and sex remains a deeply divisive is sue around the world. Attitudes will change and grow – hopefully for the better – but sex will never be free of stigma or shame unless we acknowledge where it has come from. Drawing upon extensive research from Dr Kate Lister’s Whores of Yore website and written with her distinctive humour and wit, A Curious History of Sex covers topics ranging from twentieth-century testicle thefts to Victorian doctors massaging the pelvises of their female patients, from smutty bread innuendos dating back to AD 79, to the new and controversial sex doll brothels. It is peppered with surprising and informative historical slang and illustrated by eye-opening, toe-curling and hilarious images.

Kate Lister

A CURIOUS HISTORY OF SEX

For SWOP NSW

For my family (sorry!)

INTRODUCTION

Three excellent sources to read more about Tudor slander courts are Dinah Winch, ‘Sexual Slander and its Social Context in England
‘Oxford English Dictionary’,
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Early writers such as Hi
Finding Egy
For a full discussion on FGM in the Ancient World, see Mary Knight, ‘Curing Cut or Ritual Mutilation? Some Remarks on the Practice of Female and Male Circumcision in Graeco-Roman Egy
Even the
For further reading about the clitoris being used as an obscenity in the Ancient World, read Melissa Mohr,
For a really excellent overview of the medieval medical understanding of the clitoris, read Karma Lochrie,
For further reading, see Mark D. Stringer and Ines Becker, ‘Colombo and the Clitoris’,
Antecedents to ‘clitoris’ had been in circulation in Latin and Greek since Rufus of E
A really great source to read about eighteenth-century
Des
An excellent source of nineteenth- and twentieth-century medical
Not everyone was ha
The word ‘Hottentot’ dates to the late seventeenth century and was the name white Euro
For a detailed history of race and the
Des
The Minangkabau of West Sumatra, Indonesia, the Mosuo of Tibet, the Ghanese Akan, the Bribri of Costa Rica, the Garo of Meghalaya, India and the Nagovisi of New Guinea are all regarded as matriarchal societies and all share matrilineal inheritance lines. When
Other
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In
See ‘Looking for the Boy in the Boat’ for a detailed discussion on Dr Isaac Baker Brown. The 1872 state re
For further reading about the develo
This is a debate that continues to this day. According to research from the University of California, women who regularly cycle enjoy ‘better sexual function’ than non-cyclists, which directly contradicts
For further reading on early bicycles, see Andrew Ritchie,
The
It should be acknowledged that access to clean water, sewage infrastructures and chea
The best book on the history of washing is Katherine Ashenburg,
Physicians such as Soranus (
It’s worth
Really do get to know your smells, because a sudden change in smell can indicate a vaginal infection such as bacterial vaginosis. This does not require douching, but it might require an a
A cave in France known as the
The origins of sy
During an excavation at Dudley Castle in the 1980s, a
It’s often said it was named after a ‘Dr Condom’ or ‘Colonel Condom’, but there is no evidence of that at all.
In the eighteenth century ‘abortion’ was used interchangeably with ‘miscarriage’ and did not necessarily mean the deliberate termination of a
In 1973, the remains of a newborn baby were found in an eighteenth-century
Keith Chen, Venkat Lakshminarayanan and Laurie R. Santos, ‘How Basic are Behavioral Biases? Evidence from Ca
The historian leading the charge against the existence of sacred sex work is Ste
Some online sources identify Miss Fernande as Fernande Barrey (1893–1960), but there is no evidence to su