Weird Sex Advice
• Amorous Scholarship
Sexual self-help manuals are often the only books many people read. And for every Susie Bright and Dan Savage there are dozens of supposed experts who offer questionable to downright bad solutions to quotidian amatory ailments.
Put What Where? Over 2,000 Years of Bizarre Sex Advice by John Naish is a history of the world's sex guides from ancient to modern times:
Medieval European sex advice followed the strait-laced trend: most of it said “don’t”. Pleasure paved Hell’s roads and misogynistic manuals such as De Secretis Mulierum (The Secrets of Women) claimed that females used sex to drain men of their power and that some hid sharp shards of iron inside themselves to injure innocent lovers.
A technological breakthrough in the Renaissance put us back on our lascivious tracks. The printing press enabled publishers to churn out dodgy books faster than the Church authorities could ban them. Readers were treated to gems such as Mrs Isabella Cortes’s handy hint from 1561 that a mixture of quail testicles, large-winged ants, musk and amber was perfect for straightening bent penises.