Beware, you’ll have to keep it up
Theodoor Hendrik Van de Velde, Ideal Marriage, Its Physiology and Technique (1928)
I would warn husbands not to recklessly habituate their wives to a degree of sexual frequency and intensity which they (the husbands) may be quite unable to keep up for any length of time. There are many women of moderate sexual temperament who keenly enjoy long festivals of erotic activity, in which husbands both give and demand their utmost, but who do not suffer or resent when the tempest abates and a calm follows.
But there are others, though they are perhaps less numerous among Northern races, who, when once introduced to the maximum of sexual pleasure cannot modify their desires when this maximum is no longer available. Then indeed the husband cannot exorcise the spirits he has invoked. He has the painful choice between chronic ‘nerves’ on his wife’s part, which destroys marital peace and happiness, and equally chronic sexual overstrain and fatigue of his own.
Often no choice between these twin evils is possible and nerves, health, love and happiness are wrecked all round.
Sexual matters, meanwhile, were rather more skilled and sensual in Southeast Asia.
Ancient Balinese culture revered sex as an important religious practice, which meant that Saturday-night quickies were ruled firmly out. Babies were made by mixing male and female fluids with the elements of air, fire, water, earth and space – along with the odd reincarnated soul. The magic only worked if the couple orgasmed at the same time. And they needed to perform synchronized sex consistently, as part of a regime of meditation, chanting and mutual pleasure. What’s more, the quality of the sex was thought to affect the quality of the children. Hence the need for detailed manuals.
Bali’s first erotic guides were written in around AD 900 at the latest, according to recent studies. They originated from Java, where Islam eventually suppressed them. But Islam never reached Bali, and the islanders revered their manuals as living texts, so generations of scholars and scribes updated them continually over many centuries. The books were called Tutur and could only be read as part of several years’ study under close guidance from a teacher. Tutur were considered top-shelf stuff, and were usually marked with the words aywa wera: ‘Do not disseminate indiscriminately.’ The books also warned that if a man failed to follow their guidelines, then he was having sex not as a human but as an animal.
Foreplay was a lengthy business. One guide, Rahasyasanggama, stipulated that lovers must meditate themselves into a state of union with the divine before even starting sex – otherwise it would prove neither pleasurable nor productive. For first sexual encounters, the preliminaries could take weeks, if not months. Six stages were required: chatting up, to ensure compatibility; fantasizing (or in religious terms, visualizing the beloved day and night in order magically to attract the desired person); and then touching – a strict 30-day regime of caressing one part of their potential partner per day, running up one side of the body from big toe to forehead and then, when the moon turned from waxing to waning, coming back down the other side. Stage four required male suitors to pull their lovers towards them psychically through intense meditation: the length of time required was determined by the woman’s tincture – it took three days if they were light-skinned, forty if they were dark. At this point, albino females must have been at something of a premium. Stage five, at last, was sex, though it demanded that the man be skilled and respectful in sexual relations, using (sadly unexplained) positions such as ‘boxing’, ‘squirrel eats a nut’, ‘frog climbs a banana tree’ and ‘thrusting pig’. Stage six required the couple to start again, right from the beginning.
Even after that, properly married couples could not simply dive in willy-nilly whenever they pleased. The guides stressed that they had to practise sex at the right times. The rules forbade lovemaking on the wife’s birthday, as well as the day before a full moon, and on new moons.
Across the water in Java, the ancient sex guides adopted early Islamic rules, which were based on the Prophet’s guidance: no sex standing up, or sitting, or with the woman on top; no talk during intercourse; and sex during menstruation was banned because it created ugly children. Other written advice probably survived from older local folklore: you can tell the shape and size of a man’s penis by looking at his thumb, while a woman’s vagina reflects the shape of her mouth. Or perhaps they got those ones from the playground.
My Place or Yours?
How to pull
Philaenis, papyrus sex manual (2 BC)
Pick the woman’s worst feature and then make it appear desirable. Tell an older woman that she looks young. Tell an ugly woman that she looks ‘fascinating’.
Top womanizers
Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana (3rd century), translated by Sir Richard F. Burton and F.F. Arbuthnot (1883)
The following generally obtain success with women:
Men well versed in the science of love
Raconteurs
Ones acquainted with women from their childhood
Guys who send women presents
Slick talkers
Men who have not loved other women previously
Chaps who know their weak points
Good-looking men
Men who have grown up with women
Men who live next door to women
Men who are devoted to sexual pleasures, even though these are with their own servants
The lovers of the nursemaid’s daughters
Men who have been recently married
Men who like picnics and parties
Liberals
Men who are celebrated for being very strong
Enterprising and brave men
Men who are better looking, cleverer and kinder than your husband
Girls go mad for burnt skulls
Ananga Ranga of Kalyanamalla (Stage of the Love God), by the Indian poet Kalyan Mall (16th century)
Take a human skull from the cemetery or burning ground on the eighth day of the moonlit fortnight of the seventh month Ashvini (September-October), expose it to fire, and collect the soot upon a plate held over it; let this be drawn over the inner surface of the eye-lids, instead of the usual antimony, and the effect will be to fascinate all the women.
Turn yourself into a sex god
Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana (3rd century), translated by Sir Richard F. Burton and F.F. Arbuthnot (1883)
First, get some fashionable gold hyena bones:
Good looks, good qualities, youth, and liberality are the chief and most natural means of making a person agreeable in the eyes of others. But in the absence of these a man or a woman must have resort to artificial means ...
If the bone of a peacock or of a hyena be covered with gold, and tied on the right hand, it makes a man lovely in the eyes of other people.
Or smear either of these on your penis:
The application of a mixture of the leaf of the plant vatodbhranta, of the flowers thrown on a human corpse when carried out to be burnt, and the powder of the bones of the peacock.
The