A CURIOUS HISTORY OF SEX
KATE LISTER
Unbound, 456pp, £25
Kate Lister, who curates a website and social media accounts catchily named ‘Whores of Yore’, makes her book-publishing debut with this quirky omnium-gatherum of all that is saucy and strange in human history. The Guardian’s Zoe Williams reported that the book ‘contains, as the title promises, many delightful curiosities. There are people, for instance, who get aroused by the sun. “Actirasty”, it’s called, which sounds like a probiotic yoghurt drink but would of course be life-changing if you lived in Málaga,’ not to mention medieval sex-spells, questionable monkey-gland therapies, virginity tests, bicycle fetishes and much else besides: ‘Dildos, the clitoris, depilatory creams are all explored in her rambunctious style.’
For all its fruitiness, Roger Lewis wrote in the Mail, ‘Lister’s book is more about denial and suppression than fulfilment and adventure […] The chief, disturbing, lesson of A
Curious History of Sex is the male’s fear of women’s passion and independent erotic existence, a “moral leprosy” that had to be crushed […] the descriptions of the treatment of women are very angry-making.’
Nevertheless, he found it tremendous fun: ‘Had Victoria Wood decided to write a scholarly book about sex, it would be like this. Lister has a saucy wit and I loved the deployment of ingenious euphemisms: baby-cave, lady baubles, sugared almond. I laughed out loud.’
The New York Times’s Dwight Garner was charmed, or semicharmed, too. Although he warned that the author was ‘an Englishwoman’ he pronounced her ‘a strong writer’: ‘Lister is aware that her book, dark passages aside, is a romp rather than an especially serious or comprehensive work of history or criticism. She has the double entendres to prove it: “This is a drop in the ocean, a paddle in the shallow end of sex history, but I hope you will get pleasantly wet nonetheless.”
‘This is a book of varying merit. At moments, when Lister is piling one fact atop another, A Curious History
of Sex has a Wikipedia-page vibe. But she manages to pull out of these midair stalls. She’s mostly quite good company on the page.’