Put What Where?: Over 2,000 Years of Bizarre Sex Advice

Backaches

Kidney and bladder pains

Bad breath

Foul body odour

Just put the Hoover down

Dr Alex Comfort, The Joy of Sex (1972)

Never fool around sexually with a vacuum cleaner.

Two (#ulink_526d9129-e362-5951-9e1c-a423253ceb8e)

MANKIND’S FIRST MANUALS (#ulink_526d9129-e362-5951-9e1c-a423253ceb8e)

In archaeology, as in life, if you want to find sex books, look in the son’s room.

The first lovemaking guides in human history may well be in the form of 4,000-year-old cave paintings found in countries such as France, Peru and Japan, showing women or couples in various positions, naked or wearing strange headgear. But without any words to accompany the pictures, we simply don’t know: they could have been educational, religious or ceremonial, or simply prototypes of readers’ wives. The earliest actual written sex books we have were only discovered in 1973. They date from around 2,400 years ago and were hidden in a Chinese family tomb, in the section where the son was interred. The books were greatest-hits compilations of Chinese wisdom that had already been around for a century. The questions they raised have proved extremely persistent – if you read a modern sex manual, glossy magazine or newspaper advice column, they will still be there.

If the advice these ancient books contain were written in the form of modern magazine coverlines, it would read:

FOUR SEASONS OF SEX:

AND WHY AUTUMN IS HOT, HOT, HOT

Your 100 thrusts to happiness

Wild new positions: tiger roving, gibbon

grabbing ... and fish gobbling

Sexplanation: read your partner’s writhing

From your wrists to your peaks – the ultimate

in-the-mood massage

Aphrodisiacs to keep you up all night!

And

Exclusive: your love route to immortality

The manuscripts were among a treasure-house of ancient books discovered in Mawangdui Tomb Three, in the city of Changsha in the Hunan province of China. The tomb was a horseshoe-shaped mound of earth about 30ft high and 90ft in diameter that contained the bodies and possessions of the Hou Family. It took two years, from 1972 to 1974, to excavate the 2,100-year-old Han-period tombs, which contained more than 3,000 cultural relics and a complete female corpse. In among 28 silk books were seven medical manuscripts, which together constitute mankind’s first Joy of Sex.

The tomb’s occupants, Dai Marquis Licang, his wife and son, were part of the local political elite. Licang was the King of Changsha’s prime minister for seven years from 193 BC. Each body lay in its own tomb, inside a set of coffins stacked like Russian dolls, one inside another. The Number Three Tomb-the book room – is now restored to its original state. The son was called Li, and his skeleton indicates that he was about 30 when he died in 168 BC, though most of the medical manuscripts seem to have been copied in 200 BC. References in them indicate they are from earlier texts that must have circulated around 300 BC.

Li was an avid book collector whose hobby covered several specialist fields, including medicine. He would have been a whizz on Mastermind. We can only guess why his extensive library was buried alongside him: perhaps it was thought to have magical powers, or maybe the books were simply there to show his new pals in the afterlife what a wise and wealthy guy he’d been. The sex books were written on silk or on strips of wood or bamboo, and were found on top of a pile of silk manuscripts stored in the side compartment of a lacquer box.

Two of the texts focus on the bizarre mystical practice of ‘sexual cultivation’, which promises that if a man spends years having intercourse with hundreds of women (preferably virgins) without ejaculating, he will have received so much yin energy from female orgasms, and conserved so much of his male yang energy by not orgasming, that he will become immortal (either that, or his testes would explode). The idea was attributed to Ancestor Peng, who is said to have died at the age of 300, some time around 4 BC and 3 BC, thanks to his strict ‘way of hygiene’ which covered personal cleanliness, diet and sex. Ejaculating frequently, the books warn, wears a man out, because semen is full of the life-force, chi.

A man could preserve his penis chi either by not climaxing, or by climaxing but preventing ejaculation. Medical experts suggest this can be done by applying hand pressure to a point between the scrotum and the anus, which blocks the urethra. Peng’s theory was that the semen would be diverted up the spine into the brain. In fact, if you block your urethral tube behind your scrotum, the sperm is squirted into your bladder and gets urinated out. This whole idea might seem insane, but it has resurfaced in different forms for centuries. It reappeared in Chinese books printed in 1066, 1307 and 1544, and was later published in Japan. It also crops up in different cultures around the globe at different times. It even became popular, as we will see, in nineteenth-century America.

The Mawangdui guides do not only cover non-ejaculation. There is an entire regime dictating when to have sex: in spring you can do it from evening until after midnight; in summer from evening until midnight; in winter from evening until around 11pm; and in autumn, hooray, whenever you like – though the text then says that men should never try having intercourse in the morning.

The books also tell you in confusing and often tedious detail the precise operation of lovemaking, with a guide to foreplay using slow, sexual massage, the ‘ideal 100-thrusts’, and then the ‘ten refinements’ – which basically involve going up, down and from side to side, and changing your speed and depth – information that must surely have been old hat even 300 years before the birth of Christ. And with around 21 centuries to go before the invention of Viagra, the manuscripts offer their own aphrodisiac ideas, involving such exotic stimulant ingredients as swarming beetle larvae, wasps and dried snails.

The ancient Chinese also brought us the first sex-advice Q&As. The format so beloved of Cosmopolitan and co was created by books in which the legendary Yellow Emperor asked ‘your common questions’ of a team of expert female advisors with names such as the Plain Girl and the Mystery Girl, as well as (of course) a qualified doctor. The Yellow Emperor texts were frequently illustrated with pictures of sexual positions, and given to brides as part of their trousseau.

Despite its general uselessness, much of this advice remained in circulation in one form or another in China until the sixteenth century, when it was suppressed by the new regime of Confucianist emperors. They found all this sex stuff generally unspeakable and censored it so efficiently that subsequent Chinese writers never knew that it had even existed.

When to Have Sex

Never after a meal

Perfumed Garden of Sheik Nefzaoui (16th century), translated into English by Sir Richard F. Burton

If you wish for sex, you should not have your stomach loaded with food and drink. If your stomach is full, only harm can come of it to both of you; you will have symptoms of apoplexy and gout, and the least evil that will be the consequence of it will be the inability of passing your urine, or weakness of sight.

And not before lunch

Ancestor Peng, in the introduction to Yinshu (The Pulling Book), c. 186 BC

Morning is not the recommended time for men to practise sex.

Daytime – all day

R.T. Trail, Sexual Physiology: a scientific and popular exposition of the fundamental problems in sociology (1867)

If children are to be begotten ... the sexual embrace should be had in the light of day. It is only then that the magnetic forces and the nervous system are in their highest condition of functional activity and the body, refreshed by sleep, is in its most vigorous condition. But it should not be the hurried act of the early morning, like a hasty meal before a day’s work ... Surely, if sexual intercourse is worth doing at all, it is worth doing well And it would not exalt its importance one iota above its real merits if certain days were set apart, consecrated, to the conjugal embrace. It might be one day in seven, or one day in twenty, or more or less.

Seasonal sex

Giovanni Marinello, Medicine Pertinent to the Infirmities of Women (Italy, 1563)

Least harmful: spring and winter

Use sparingly: summer

Use even more sparingly: autumn

Spring for men, autumn for women

Nicholas Venette, The Mysteries of Conjugal Love Reveald (1703)

Men are most apt for the company of women in winter and in spring; women most desirous of commerce with man in summer and autumn; and this proceeds from the contrary complexion, in respect both to the times and persons, which complexion is nothing else than the different mixtures of warmth with cold, and moisture with dryness ...