It's Always More Complicated

Dept of, what will they think of next (some of this is, as I remarked elsewhere, resuscitating Ye Good Ol' Victorian Quackerie - though, as we concurred, VIBRATORS ARE NOT VICTORIAN!!!): With the menopause dildo, we've officially reached peak menopause bollocks.

(Declaration of interest: I once did a podcast with the author.)

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Dept of, well, on the topic of dildos, or at least, urgent phallicism: I spent a year dating conservative [frothingly alt-right] men:

Something about getting ready to go on these dates made me feel like I was 18 again — except now I had the ability to run professional-level background checks, which I did. Not because I was operating on preconceived notions but because the few peers I told about my mission encouraged me to. Given some of the vitriol against women in online alt-right groups, they felt I should treat every date as if it were a threat to my life. I came up with a routine: before a date, I’d tell at least three people in advance where I was going and what time they should expect to hear from me by. I enlisted a friend who’s a former Navy SEAL to be my unofficial security consultant.

And that's before getting to meet the actual doozies who are, apparently, not even the worst types on the dating apps.

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Dept of, let's have some better news, good news about snails (the snails that one thought had been mown down in the ONward March of Progress, or at least, building much needed housing):

the snails are OK. Nothing bad is going to happen to the poor little Whirlpool Ramshorn Snail, the endangered creature which our Chancellor unfairly blamed for stopping a housing development, causing me to get grumpy on social media. But in following up to try and see what actually happened, I found out a bunch of interesting – and in my view extremely heartening – stuff.
.... it was always a false dichotomy, it was always possible to have the houses and the snails too.

Dept of gilded snails in a very different space: From snails to street signs: Soho’s history revealed on a new digital map - the snails on the facade of L'Escargot Restaurant.

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Dept of, gosh I have met (many years ago) the curator of this exhibition: New York City celebrates the “Gay Harlem Renaissance”

Oft, my dearios, have I complained (they B hearing the whynge from Mars) about spammers thinking my website is a prime spot for pitching their products:

a) not having taken on board that This Is Not A Commercial Operation;

and

b) how they got from what my site is actually about to what they are pitching is often deeply arcane, or else so tangential it is clear they, or their AI, has just picked up a word and failed to examined CONTEXT - as I wrote some years back (and actually this is rather more focussed than most of them are, really):

It's as if I have a page on X, decadent Bohemian bisexual poet of the 1880s, addicted to absinthe and hashish, and what people are sending me are links to bisexuality support sites or 12-step programmes for absinthe addiction or possibly holiday cottages on the seacoast of Bohemia.

Not quite Hysterical, but giggling a bit.

And in other business.

My old mate and fellow historian (I may have mentioned him before around these parts), now first LGBTQ+ Professor at Oxford, interviewed by Guardian, brings Historian's Perspective to current 'debates':

On the trans debate, he said he hoped to bring together scholars and activists to look at it from a historical perspective. “There’s a way of thinking historically about cycles of fear and phobias. So it’s very striking to me the way in which gay men in the 1950s and also the 1980s were vilified as a threat to children, as treacherous, as deceitful. “We can see the same kind of recycling of fear at the moment, in very, very similar terms. So I think in a way history can help us think through, what is it about these particular moments of fear and why?

“The trans people I know currently are facing real daily prejudice that’s misogynistic, transphobic. And I think we need to think very seriously about how we allow everybody in this country to have a livable life, and that includes trans people. Part of that is understanding how people have found ways of living their lives in the past.

“I’m very hopeful that the kind of work that we’ll be doing in Oxford, and is going on in other places, in 10-15 years hence, people say, ‘Oh OK, so this is how trans people have lived their lives historically. And this is how they’ve been part of this cultural society.’

“It doesn’t solve the immediate febrile issue, but hopefully it gives some kind of grounding going forward, for thinking through these issues historically.”

Also in the realm of history of sexuality, but this I found amusing, in a whirligigs of time way: I.e. have I not spent more time than I should like deconstructing the myth of the vibrator as Victorian medical device, well, now: Welcome to the future of vibrators, designed not only for sexual pleasure, but to tackle medical problems such as vaginal dryness, or a painful and inflamed prostate gland in men. Hmmmmmmmm.

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‘Magical’ wildlife-rich rainforest being planted in Devon:

A temperate rainforest, a magical, wildlife-rich place of mosses, lichens and ferns, is being planted on the slopes above a West Country river, tumbling almost to the doors of one of the UK’s most green-minded towns. Tree species including sessile oak, birch, rowan, holly, alder, willow and hazel are to be introduced to the 30-hectare (74-acre) site above the Dart valley and close to the Devon town of Totnes in the south of England. In time, the habitat, also known as Atlantic or Celtic rainforest, should become home to mammals such as stoats and pine martens, and threatened birds including wood warblers, redstarts, and pied flycatchers. Wet conditions should support an abundance of mosses, liverworts, lichens, and ferns – many of which grow on the trees or cover boulders and ravines. The dampness will be ideal for fungi, including globally rare species such as hazel gloves fungus.

Ann Summers supremo Jacqueline Gold dies aged 62:

[Her father gave] her work experience at Ann Summers in 1979, when she was 19, having bought the four-store sex shop business a few years earlier. Unimpressed by the men-only atmosphere, she went on to take the brand into women’s homes, organising Tupperware-style selling parties, bringing vibrators into the sitting rooms of middle England and giving women a chance to earn their own money.

Jacqueline Gold’s proudly smutty Ann Summers changed the UK high street. Well, maybe, but:

[R]ecognising there was a big untapped market of women who wanted the goods but would not step inside the shops, Gold created the party plan as soon as she arrived: basically Tupperware parties, except with sex toys, underwear, my guess is quite a lot of prosecco or, back in the day, Babycham. By 2003 there were 4,000 parties a week in the UK. They were eventually capsized, partly by the internet, partly by the growing realisation among party planners that it was quite hard to make a living. But the brand had more to gain from the worldwide wonder web than it lost: the year after it went online, it sold 1m units of its own-brand vibrator, the Rampant Rabbit, in the UK alone.

That sex toy trajectory, where vibrators went from being a thing women were too embarrassed to be caught shopping for, to a thing they would give each other as a gift, is often put down to the Sex and the City effect, one episode in particular, The Turtle and the Hare, where Miranda lends Charlotte her Rabbit. But more influential in the UK was the grassroots effect, thousands of women a week, over two decades, talking about sex toys quite freely in a social setting. Or who knows, it could have been started with second-wave feminist consciousness-raising groups, but I do not get the sense they centred pleasure in quite the same way.

And there was a point when they were also to be found in the small ads at the back of more mainstream magazines like Cosmopolitan.

Certainly they were mentioned in CR groups. There were also feminist workshops specifically on sexuality in which they featured.

So there were these other stories around. (Not, alas, I thought, told in Rachel Wood, Consumer Sexualities: Women and Sex Shopping (2019))

But it does seem like an entirely different story from the US one in Lynn Cornella's Vibrator Nation (2017)

I was predisposed in favour of this book because Lieberman co-authored an article which showed on what very specious evidence Maines had based her dubious contentions in her notorious and unfortunately influential work.

The book does indicate that the whole Victorian doctors and 'hysterical paroxysms' and vibrators is a MYTH, but in a fairly muted fashion in the main text although goes into a fair amount of detail in endnotes, for those of us that get that far...

However, does rather imply that women themselves were repurposing widely sold massage implements for personal pleasure, which I think is rather a reach, especially when you get to her chapters on sexual liberation and second-wave feminism and the discourse around masturbation and female sexual pleasure and how much hesitation and stigma there still was even by then.

(I also, ahem, have my doubts based on Kinsey and other sexologists who - apart from one whom I consider a very dubious source - did not consider mechanical devices a significant statistic in female modes of self-pleasuring, well into C20th.)

But to look at the book as a whole, I felt it was simultaneously trying to do too much while not doing quite enough. So that it was covering a lot of really, really diverse ground, that perhaps one wanted explored in more depth.

Okay, kudos for an amazing amount of research into the people who in the days when this was not spoken of made sex toys - or, sexual devices, as one of them was in fact devising prosthetics for people with various disabilities that created problems around sex - and the various channels by which they came to be distributed.

(Possibly more could have been made of those entirely reputable household-health massagers sold in electrical departments of department stores and drugstores and so on?)

There were some very colourful tales (and I do feel there was probably more of a narrative involving organised crime in some of them, just saying).

There's also perhaps a feeling of more stories to be told not just about the conflicts within feminist circles between radical feminism and the sex-positive strand, but what comes over as some rather unsisterly feelings among the latter over ideas being taken over, etc, and upheavals within the various businesses that got set up.

(It's doing very different work to Comella's Vibrator Nation which must have come out much about the same time.)

There's also a lot about how there was a distinct trending towards branding sex-toys as 'marital aids' and subsuming them into supporting heterosexual monogamy, and selling them alongside 'pleasing the husband' stuff.

So, yes, it is telling a complex story and not trying to over-simplify it, but I think it is not quite as great as it could have been. This might because I am a big old academic nerd and this is really being pitched to The General Reader.

(ETA Should probably mention that it's very much the USA story with all the various legal/societal attitudes angles that involved, that would pertain, or pertained with different emphasis, in e.g. European settings.)

What I read

Had a vague recollection that I had heard fairly well of Heyer's Frederica (1965), and I will give it points for being able to see the Alpha Hero growing and changing under the impact of the older and sensible heroine (and her brothers), but even so, there were rather annoying aspects, like again, She Is Not Like Other Women, who are femme and ditzy &C. (Also, yet another recurrence of getting somebody sick or injured and having to be nursed away from home...)

Years ago I read Teresa Nielsen Hayden's Making Book (1994) and finding her later compilation of blog posts etc Making Conversation (2016) hard to source in the UK discovered that it was available as ebook. Quite interesting/entertaining but perhaps not quite as much so?

There was a very enthusiastic piece in the most recent Slightly Foxed on Isabel Colegate's The Shooting Party (1980), so I acquired a copy. However, I was fairly meh about it, and considered that though back in the day I occasionally, I think, got Colegate's books from the library, I don't think I ever read this one before, and it is, I think, A Sign, that I never actually went out and bought any of her oeuvre (except possibly once from a charity shop).

How different, I say, the case of Alison Lurie. I was actually not looking specifically for Foreign Affairs (1984) but a couple of her more recent novels which I know are somewhere in the book maelstrom. But this was what surfaced and, boy, it is good, I enjoyed that.

On the go

I discovered, somewhat tangentially via a mention on Twitter, Hallie Lieberman's Buzz: The Stimulating History of the Sex Toy (2017), and although it's very much the C20th USA story, for general interest/research purposes I have downloaded it and am reading. A few boggles - wot they were only just having the equivalent of Ann Summers parties in the 90s???? - and quibbles - I really don't think it was impossible to get birth control if you were unmarried - but it is certainly Of Interest, and does not have any truck with the Maines Myth-Making, which gains it considerable merit points.

Up next

I have actually managed to acquire at a very low price one of the pseudonymous category romances written by Jane Haddam/Orania Papazoglou as Ann Paris. I also have Miranda Seymour's bio of Mary Shelley.

(Please do comment below if you have any further questions you would like me to address over the course of the month.)

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silveradept asks 'I wonder what things are the most common things people get wrong when trying to write about the period of time in which your scholarship is most well known'.

Hmmmmm.

Well, much to my gratification, the Victorian vibrator myth is increasingly being recognised as just that and I believe even its perpetrator has rather walked it back by saying it was only a hypothesis... So that if it does pop up somebody not me will quite often jump up to smack it down.

I'm often quite surprised at the extent to which people who should know better - not just historical/romance novelists but actual historians - get things like the terms of the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act or the Contagious Diseases Acts wrong, or at least present them in a very misleading way. (You could not get a divorce on the grounds of cruelty alone in England and Wales until 1937. Between 1857 and 1923 Divorce Court judges sympathetic to women were at least broadening the definition of what constituted 'matrimonial cruelty' to include things like infection with A Loathsome Disease so that, added to a husband's adultery, a woman would have grounds for dissolution.)

I'm also fairly irked by people who don't really get that the Victorian age was Very Long and subject to a lot of change over six and half decades and the 1840s were very different from the 1880s.

But I would say my biggest annoyance is not actually period-specific, and it's that thing where people assert that women could not/did not do X at more or less any given time in history. Okay, there are some things that they couldn't do, but a lot of the assumptions about the private and domestic sphere, etc, angels in the house, be good sweet maid and let who would be clever (written by a man who was actually a serious supporter of female education and women in medicine!) are just plain wrong. (Also goes, of course, for racial diversity of population assumptions.)

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And love meme thread here

What I Read

Finished The Reinvention of Humanity which was very good: clearly the author thought these people were doing important work around race and culture that we needed to be reminded of and was still of value, but he did not glide over the unexamined attitudes around race and sex that they still retained. But as far as saying people from, oh, the 20s-30s-40s were 'of their period' in having noxious racist and eugenicist attitudes, no, there were other people 'of their period' who were contesting that. Even if some of their research methodology is not along what we would now consider entirely the best ethical practice lines... And boy, Edward Sapir does not come over as anything but a creepy loathsome old sexist (it certainly reads as if he wanted Margaret Mead to be his MidLife Renewal Babe and have his baybeez and presumably do all those things that go in the acknowledgements as 'to my wife, who' and when she was not having it was toxically misogynist all over her and her work).

Rachel Wood, Consumer Sexualities: Women and Sex Shopping (2019). I was rather disappointed in this, which was heavy with theory and possibly over-use of the term 'neo-liberal', and a really small sample size (and given that Wood was doing participant-observer stuff, think we might have had more about her, ahem). I was hoping for something just a bit more like Lynn Comella's Vibrator Nation, only looking at the rather different UK history of marketing sex toys.

Was also a bit underwhelmed by Catherine Clay, Time and Tide: The Feminist and Cultural Politics of a Modern Magazine (2018). I liked her British Women Writers 1914-1945: Professional Work and Friendship (2006), but this struck me as a bit dry by contrast - doing different things, okay, and possibly trying to cram in rather a lot of things about the way Time and Tide was positioning itself over the interwar period. I felt somehow the personalities and relationships got a bit lost.

On the go

Still London Clubland on the e-reader - I'm not sure that it's yet told me anything terribly new and startling about Victorian men's clubs, but I'm still not that far into it.

Up next

Possibly I should take a break and read something a bit lighter and fluffier?

One should merely be extremely grateful that more and more people are recognising that A Certain Work which has gained far too much cultural credence when in fact it was Making Shit Up was based on dreadfully shoddy research -

Because what is important is that Error Is Overthrown and people give more attention to historical accuracy and do not perpetuate salacious myths.

But nonetheless one feels a certain chagrin when one's own critique of said work, originating practically at the point when one looked up from its pages and went WOT????!!!! NO WAI!!!! during one's first reading much regretting having spent money on the thing, is nowhere mentioned, possibly due to a certain snobbery about webpages and blogposts, although online journals are apparently acceptable (and I may add that I have incorporated my critique into conventionally published works).

So I am feeling just slightly in a bit of a sulk, even though I am gratified that the mills of scholarship are finally grinding this canard into pulp.

What I read

Finished Point of Hopes - quite good, but boy, what becomes the central m/m relationship as the series progresses is a bit muted.

Diana Block, Clandestine Occupations: An Imaginary History (Spectacular Fiction) (2015) - one of the PM Press ebook sale books I took a punt on, novel about intertwined lives of various activists and their associates in the US since the 70s: very good, worth reading.

Ursula K Le Guin, The Telling (2000) - which I don't think I'd reread since it first came out, and I didn't remember that much about it in detail, just general feel. Perhaps not one of the top ones, but still pretty good.

I pass over the m/m romance that I bailed on with the RC priest and deacon scoffing delicious pastries on the way to Mass; also bailed rather further in on another freebie, Amy Jo Cousins, Off Campus (2014), because of the relentless angst-angst-angst, and the sense that there was a lot more to come.

John D MacDonald, The Lonely Silver Rain (1984): that was the last one and that was probably a good place to end them even if it wasn't intended as The End.

On the go

Sofia Samatar, The Winged Histories (2016) - had been sitting for some while on my e-reader. V good so far.

Lynn Comella, Vibrator Nation: How Feminist Sex-Toy Stores Changed the Business of Pleasure (2017) - only just started.

Up next

Maybe the new collection of Marilynne Robinson essays? (out this week).