A Curious History of Sex

by Kate Lister

Unbound 384pp £25

The Week Bookshop £21.99 (incl. p&p)

“Buckle your trousers, fasten your seatbelts, here comes Kate Lister,” said Gerard DeGroot in The Times. In this “wild ride” of a book, the academic and blogger serves up a “wonderfully irreverent” history of sex. She discusses, among other subjects, “masturbation, sex dolls, vibrators, odours, aphrodisiacs, oysters, pubic hair, condoms and prostitution”. Her emphasis, though, is on the “really weird stuff” that people have got up to over the centuries. We learn that the earliest dildo (a stone phallus measuring 7.8 inches) is some 28,000 years old. In medieval times, doctors thought erections were gas-powered – and so prescribed beans as a cure for impotence. Bicycles featured prominently in Victorian erotica (“Lister provides ample visual evidence”) and in the 1920s, the craze for “gland therapy” – using animal testicles to make tablets and creams, and even grafting them onto human scrotums – led one doctor to set up his own monkey colony. I have read some surprisingly boring histories of sex, but Lister’s isn’t one of them. Underpinned by “gargantuan knowledge”, it’s eye-opening and extremely funny.

“Had Victoria Wood decided to write a scholarly book about sex, it would be like this,” said Roger Lewis in the Daily Mail. Lister brings to her investigations a “saucy wit”; I laughed out loud at her description of vibrators being marketed as a cure for “colds, digestive complaints and flatulence”. But her book, at times, is also “very angry-making”. The history of sex has largely been a story of “suppression” – and as Lister shows, it is women and “women’s passion” that have been most “relentlessly” policed.

Lister invites us to “marvel at the horrors inflicted upon innocent women in the name of science and religion”, said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Sunday Times. From Vestal Virgins in Ancient Rome – entombed alive if they were found to have had sex – to the “clitorectomies” of the 19th century, she shows that cranks, zealots and “mansplainers” have always dominated in the sexual arena. Her stories are often diverting: the clitoris was “discovered” in 1550 by Gabriele Falloppio, he of fallopian tube fame (“Lucky Mrs Falloppio”); cornflakes were invented “with the specific aim of discouraging masturbation”. But as the book goes on, its whimsy wears thin. “Holes are left gaping”: sex and breadmaking merits a chapter of its own, but not pornography or sodomy. “A Curious History of Sex falls into the slightly embarrassing English tradition of tittering at naughty French pictures. It feels like a missed opportunity.”