Sex in history

[Tamoo]

Apologies in advance for lowering the tone.

It occurred to me reading the Henry VIII thread (someone mentioned Anne Boleyn introduced him to oral sex) how awful sex must have been pre-modern era standards of hygiene.

Thinking of, say, 500 years ago, when only the wealthy had regular access to hot baths, and even then perhaps only used them a couple of times a year?

How could anyone bear the smell of intimate physical contact with someone who never washed?

And the rotten teeth. Imagine full-on snogging with someone before toothpaste was invented.

I'm aware they didn't know any different but still.

Just a few historical musings for the day

Oh my, that's quite the grossest thing I've heard about in a long time since the last time I googled anything mentioned on MN

No - but - it's fascinating. It could be seen as the body having a self-cleaning function. Or self-abluting.

at doctrine.

They used to share beds with complete strangers, NAKED, except for a nightcap.

But going back to the smell thing...why are we expecting people from Olden Times to have had precisely the same attitudes towards hygiene and desire as we did? They might have found a rather, erm, "riper" odour to be erotic - crammed with hormones, after all- and, if transported to the modern day, may have found the lot of us pretty unsexy because we don't smell enough! Don't forget Napoleon's message to Josephine- "Ne laver pas, je reviens"- "Don't wash, I'm coming back"? (Apologies for any mistakes in the French...)

It's not just a ripe odour though, is it. I quite like a man who smells of himself IYKWIM without any cologne and I don't mind a bit of sweat. But for many people across much of history they would have been downright filthy: hard manual labour, impoverished liviing conditions inc. living with animals, grubbiness from open fires, untreated illness and infection, and so on. I just can't imagine something like oral sex (for example) being anything people would have enjoyed until relatively recent times. Exceptions being societies that did make a big deal of washing eg the Romans as mentioned earlier.

Maybe if you were rich you would have oral sex once a year, after your annual bath

The privacy factor is something that intrigues me even more in relation to sex than dirt does. I can't imagine living without privacy just in general; what on earth your sexual relationships would be like without it, I can't imagine.

When they did that Iron Age village recreation on tv in the 70s the participants talked about how there was visual privacy but not aural privacy - you could hear the other couples at it in the dark in your roundhouse!

Well, and what about families living in one room? That wasn't terribly uncommon in the last century in the UK, was it?

That is hilarious about the Iron Age recreation ... some sounds you would not want to hear!

Has anyone mentione Napoleon? Apparanatly he sent a message to Josephine saying 'Back in X days, do not wash!'

I've just remembered something.
Despite all this stuff about them not snogging, the normal Tudor kiss of greeting was on the lips. (No tongues or anything, but still.)

I can well believe that about incest, apparently it (and inbreeding) is still relatively common in very closed communities where branches of the same family live in consistently close proximity across several generations and where education (esp sex/health education) is either poor or non-existent.

Goodness me!

I have a copy of History of Women's Bodies too, R2. It's an interesting read.

MrsBovary Its a good one isn't it? Haven't met anyone else who has read it before. I read it for the first time when I was pregnant which was a huge mistake!