Sex at Dawn полностью

If female chimps and bonobos could talk, do we really think they’d be griping to their hairy girlfriends about prematurely ejaculating males who don’t bring flowers anymore? Probably not, because as we’ve seen, when a female chimp or bonobo is in the mood, she’s likely to be the center of plenty of eager male attention. And the more attention she gets, the more she attracts, because as it turns out, our male primate cousins get turned on by the sight and sound of others of their species having sex. Imagine that.

No man (who is but never so little versed in such matters) is ignorant, what grievous symptomes, the Rising, Bearing down and Perversion, and Convulsion of the Wombe do excite; what horrid extravagancies of minde, what Phrensies, Melancholy Distempers, and Outragiousness, the preternatural Diseases of the Womb do induce, as if affected Persons were inchanted....

WILLIAM HARVEY, Anatomical Exercitations concerning the Generation of Living Creatures (1653)

Hysteria was one of the first diseases to be described formally. Hippocrates discussed it in the fourth century BCE, and you’ll find it in any medical text covering women’s health written from medieval times until it was removed from the list of recognized medical diagnoses in 1952 (twenty-one years before homosexuality was finally removed). Hysteria was still one of the most diagnosed diseases in the United States and Great Britain as recently as the early twentieth century. You might wonder how physicians treated this chronic condition over the centuries.

We’ll tell you. Doctors masturbated their female patients to orgasm. According to historian Rachel Maines, female patients were routinely massaged to orgasm from the time of Hippocrates until the 1920s. Have a seat; the doctor will be right with you..

While some passed the job off to nurses, most physicians performed the therapy themselves, though apparently not without some difficulty. Nathaniel Highmore, writing in 1660, noted that it was not an easy technique to learn, being “not unlike that game of boys in which they try to rub their stomachs with one hand and pat their heads with the other.”