Sexting might seem a recent invention, but in today’s pick for #ThrowbackThursday, Joshua Adair reminds us that it is nothing new.
Find the 2016 article on Adair’s grandparents’ sexual endeavours here: https://wp.me/p6JJ6S-24n
According to this 1909 pamphlet from the American Medical Association: if one of your friends talks to you about masturbation, you should beat the crap out of him.
Some of you are having more fun listening to sermons than anyone realised.
"The thought of coition in the imagination induces orgasm and ejaculation in such women... These voluptuous day-dreamers, not needing any self-manipulations, may masturbate while conversing with their friends or listening to a sermon."
-- "Woman: A Treatise on the Normal and Pathological Emotions of Feminine Love." Bernard Simon Talmey, 1908. https://archive.org/details/womanatreatiseo00talmgoog/
#historyOfSexuality
This #ThrowbackThursday let’s talk dirty! Today, we’re focusing on porn in the NOTCHES archive, and what better place to start than with Whitney Strub in conversation with Jeffrey Escoffier in Constructing the Pornographic Object of Knowledge.
Read it here: https://wp.me/p6JJ6S-4lG
We’re celebrating #LGBTplusHM25 this month here at NOTCHES. Last Thursday, we looked back at music within our past articles, and today we’re moving our focus onto style.
Fashion and self-styling have an intrinsic link to sexuality, particularly in how they are read by onlookers, as highlighted in Julia Laite’s 2014 article Beards, Real Men, and Poseurs: male sexuality and fashion since around 1900.
Social media has been in the news and on our minds here at NOTCHES as we transitioned over to Bluesky this week. So we thought it only right that this week’s #ThrowbackThursday focused on past articles about social media in the #historyofsexuality.
Let’s discuss a couple of articles from our archive in this vein. Firstly, we have the creation of a course archive in Bianca Murillo’s Teaching with Tumblr: Building a Digital Archive of Gender, Race & Empire.
From Blake on "physical debility", 1848. The third one is the best bit.
Note that this was not how people spoke at the time: the writer is just pompous.
https://archive.org/details/blakeonphysical00cogoog/page/n4/mode/2up
![Read this treatise, therefore, Ye Children of the Lonely Sin, ye who have wasted the sap of life in solitary excess, who have underminded [sic] your health in secret till your attenuated form tells too plainly that nature has nothing left to destroy; Read, while yet reason is not shaken from her throne, for assuredly the garden of your mind shall become a dreary waste if ye pause not and learn, And you, ye “Children of Night,” whom solitude initiated and multitude perfected— Read ye also, for the taint of the one sin is in you, and nothing but confidence can save you from destruction.](https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/113/176/779/916/269/459/original/f15c1dc92378b13a.jpg "Read this treatise, therefore, Ye Children of the Lonely Sin, ye who have wasted the sap of life in solitary excess, who have underminded [sic] your health in secret till your attenuated form tells too plainly that nature has nothing left to destroy; Read, while yet reason is not shaken from her throne, for assuredly the garden of your mind shall become a dreary waste if ye pause not and learn, And you, ye “Children of Night,” whom solitude initiated and multitude perfected— Read ye also, for the taint of the one sin is in you, and nothing but confidence can save you from destruction.")
![Medical experience has shown that one of the principal causes, if indeed it be not the only one, of consumption [i.e. tuberculosis], is the insidious, attractive, and fatal habit of Self-Pollution— which attracts, as the serpent is said to fascinate its victim, only to destroy. There can be little doubt that, were it possible to arrive at proofs of the existence of this propensity, it would at the same time be irrefragably evidenced that it has always produced not only consumption in the principal, but the germs of it in his offspring. Let the benevolent minded look around at the casual passengers through any great thoroughfare: how many will not afford some signs of premature decay— the flushed cheek, the hollow eye, the haggard brow, the wasting frame, meet the gaze, and stand as witnesses of the damning deed! Let the philanthropist mix in society; how many will he find ill without any recognised disease, with minds unsettled, spirits depressed, memory failing and intellect warped! These are the victims of the practice of Self-Pollution, which undermines the health, destroys the strength, impairs the mental faculties, and leads to loathsome madness, moping idiotcy [sic] and death.](https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/113/176/779/880/159/731/original/7263fe45a2b1d80a.jpg "Medical experience has shown that one of the principal causes, if indeed it be not the only one, of consumption [i.e. tuberculosis], is the insidious, attractive, and fatal habit of Self-Pollution— which attracts, as the serpent is said to fascinate its victim, only to destroy. There can be little doubt that, were it possible to arrive at proofs of the existence of this propensity, it would at the same time be irrefragably evidenced that it has always produced not only consumption in the principal, but the germs of it in his offspring. Let the benevolent minded look around at the casual passengers through any great thoroughfare: how many will not afford some signs of premature decay— the flushed cheek, the hollow eye, the haggard brow, the wasting frame, meet the gaze, and stand as witnesses of the damning deed! Let the philanthropist mix in society; how many will he find ill without any recognised disease, with minds unsettled, spirits depressed, memory failing and intellect warped! These are the victims of the practice of Self-Pollution, which undermines the health, destroys the strength, impairs the mental faculties, and leads to loathsome madness, moping idiotcy [sic] and death.")
![There is a vast difference between the sexual act, as between male and female connected, and the lonely enjoyment. In the former, the very contact with the denuded body, nay, the play of the imagination as to the charms to be unveiled,— the well turned ankle, the snowy bosom, the rounded fully in the production of the natural and necessary excitement: and during the act, the voluptuous heavings, the enraptured contortions, the lascivious brace, contribute still further to second the imagination ; thus the parties mutually influencing each other, bring about the required crisis [i.e. orgasm] in a way least injurious, because most natural, least weakening, because in accordance with the instinct implanted by Providence. In the solitary act the case is widely different; there, imagination must do all, and must itself supply the visionary images of its fancied beauties; there the body has to operate on itself; nature receives no aid from nature; passion is not heightened by passion; the heavings of the one are not answered by the contortions of the other, and the drain on mind and matter is great in proportion as each is strained from its legitimate function.](https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/113/176/779/990/419/192/original/762f673eb2b75cc7.jpg "There is a vast difference between the sexual act, as between male and female connected, and the lonely enjoyment. In the former, the very contact with the denuded body, nay, the play of the imagination as to the charms to be unveiled,— the well turned ankle, the snowy bosom, the rounded fully in the production of the natural and necessary excitement: and during the act, the voluptuous heavings, the enraptured contortions, the lascivious brace, contribute still further to second the imagination ; thus the parties mutually influencing each other, bring about the required crisis [i.e. orgasm] in a way least injurious, because most natural, least weakening, because in accordance with the instinct implanted by Providence. In the solitary act the case is widely different; there, imagination must do all, and must itself supply the visionary images of its fancied beauties; there the body has to operate on itself; nature receives no aid from nature; passion is not heightened by passion; the heavings of the one are not answered by the contortions of the other, and the drain on mind and matter is great in proportion as each is strained from its legitimate function.")
![The proof of this may be found in the fact, that while Onanists, when they first practice their disgusting habit, effect their purpose with difficulty because of the opposition of nature; they ultimately produce such an enervation of body, and so morbid a state of mind, that emission takes place on the slightest friction, nay, even at the sight of a beautiful face or fine figure. The case of the youth wha, suffering from a pulmonary disease, suddenly died in his bed while apparently listening to a female relative reading to him, is too well authenticated to require. His disordered imagination suggested to him his depraved practice, and nature, unable to bear the shock, gave way. When the covering was removed from the corpse, the position of the hand afforded too damning a proof of his criminality to leave room for charity [i.e. kindness] to suggest a doubt.](https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/113/176/780/080/395/218/original/41d61a51aabcb899.jpg "The proof of this may be found in the fact, that while Onanists, when they first practice their disgusting habit, effect their purpose with difficulty because of the opposition of nature; they ultimately produce such an enervation of body, and so morbid a state of mind, that emission takes place on the slightest friction, nay, even at the sight of a beautiful face or fine figure. The case of the youth wha, suffering from a pulmonary disease, suddenly died in his bed while apparently listening to a female relative reading to him, is too well authenticated to require. His disordered imagination suggested to him his depraved practice, and nature, unable to bear the shock, gave way. When the covering was removed from the corpse, the position of the hand afforded too damning a proof of his criminality to leave room for charity [i.e. kindness] to suggest a doubt.")
Clark also discusses the frustrating process of locating useful information within sources – something many academics can relate to – as well as some of her other works. A great interview to look back on this Thursday morning!
We have an exciting new post for you today – an interview with Marie-Amélie George on her book, Family Matters: Queer Households and the Half-Century Struggle for Legal Recognition.
You can find it here: https://wp.me/p6JJ6S-4HV
Fancy some queer rodeo this Tuesday morning? Today we bring you a new NOTCHES post: an interview with Elyssa Ford and Rebecca Scofield about their book, Slapping Leather, Queer Cowfolx at the Gay Rodeo. Find it here: https://wp.me/p6JJ6S-4GM
1/3
How to wear your hair down there might not be the question on everyone’s mind, but in today’s new NOTCHES article, Hauke Branding highlights the importance of this ‘pubic politics’.
Looking at Osnabrück in the 1970s, Branding brings to light how local context shaped provincial homosexual action groups in Germany.
Find the article here: https://wp.me/p6JJ6S-4Gh
The Sentimental State: Book Talk
https://digpodcast.org/2024/05/05/the-sentimental-state-book-talk/
#ElizabethBookSentimentalState #19thCentury #gender #HistoryOfSexuality #reform #sentimentalism #welfare #WomensHistory #podcast #histodons #history @histodons
Let’s get physical (and clinical) this #ThrowbackThursday.
This week, we look back on Donna Drucker’s 2019 article, “Clinical Demonstration by Two Expert Intellectuals”: Robert Latou Dickinson’s Representations of Sexual Intercourse.
Find it here: https://wp.me/p6JJ6S-3LT
(1/3)
#ThrowbackThursday has come back around, and today we’re thinking about sexuality and geography in Clayton Howard’s The Closet and the Cul-de-Sac. Looking at San Francisco from the post-war period, Howard examines sexual politics across the city and its peripheries.
You can find it here: https://wp.me/p6JJ6S-4ek
Into your calendars! @MonashCMRS seminars run selected Fridays 10am (Melb time). #postgraduates get first floor for Q's, a great way to practice smothering that inner imposter. First is next Friday with @donaphy on the #historyofsexuality of #pregnant women.
If you’re enjoying #LGBTHistoryMonth, why not get involved with more history? NOTCHES is looking for a new Layout Editor to join the team.
Find out more about the volunteer role here: https://wp.me/p6JJ6S-4Gb
"It is a curious fact that the habit of self-pollution is invariably followed by a diminution in the size of the penis." (1876) - no, really?
(Joking aside: he also thinks it makes your testicles small. Also, he can tell by the way you walk.)
https://archive.org/details/drbatestruemarri01bate/page/110/mode/2up
They further explore how this marks an ‘important instance in which trans folks were visibly supported by lesbians.’
‘Together, they entered the festival, marching forward, united as trans folks of all sexualities, non-trans lesbians, and trans lesbians.’
Read the full article here: https://wp.me/p6JJ6S-4vN
#HistSex #HistoryofSexuality
2/2
