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lb_lee Mac: while reading a book about a sex educator who married a spirit in the 1890s, I came across the wildest thing: apparently one of the damn reasons people were so against touching clits (including this woman) was because IT MADE YOU GAY. (Or, as they called it at the time, "homogenic." Genic multis take note.)
"By Craddock's anatomical account (which she shared with Freud, among others), the clitoris was 'not a female organ at all, but a rudimentary male organ.' Hence the man who stimulated it was actually entering a danger zone of same-sex genital contact and the woman who wanted it was showing herself to be 'semi-masculine.' [...] 'What a man needs, in order to establish a perfectly wholesome channel for the outlet of his sex magnetism at the genitals,' Craddock explained, 'is to have genital contact, not with a grown man, nor with an immature boy, nor with the rudiment of a male procreative organ in a woman, but with the female organs of a thoroughly sexed woman.' She readily admitted that many women liked 'the excitement produced there' and were wont to insist on it from their husbands, but, given the specter of same-sex love, clitoral stimulation was indelibly marked as abnormal, 'an out and out act of sexual perversion.'" (161)
Man, talk about homophobia being used as a bogeyman to control straight people! Even a heterosexual married couple who never bang anyone else could be made gay BY HAVING SEX WRONG. Consider my mind blown.
The book is Leigh Eric Schmidt's Heaven's Bride: the unprintable life of Ida C. Craddock, American mystic, scholar, sexologist, martyr, and madwoman. It's pretty good, and really interesting to be reading alongside Marie Cartier's Baby, You Are My Religion: Women, Gay Bars, and Theology Before Stonewall, because both are about how religion and accusations of mental illness are used against sexual difference. Craddock, who never masturbated and had no sexual partner but her spirit husband, was nonetheless considered an insane nymphomaniac sex pervert and a criminal, as were pre-Stonewall lesbians for being gay, fifty years later. It's just made so clear that it's about social control, not health or wrongdoing.
"By Craddock's anatomical account (which she shared with Freud, among others), the clitoris was 'not a female organ at all, but a rudimentary male organ.' Hence the man who stimulated it was actually entering a danger zone of same-sex genital contact and the woman who wanted it was showing herself to be 'semi-masculine.' [...] 'What a man needs, in order to establish a perfectly wholesome channel for the outlet of his sex magnetism at the genitals,' Craddock explained, 'is to have genital contact, not with a grown man, nor with an immature boy, nor with the rudiment of a male procreative organ in a woman, but with the female organs of a thoroughly sexed woman.' She readily admitted that many women liked 'the excitement produced there' and were wont to insist on it from their husbands, but, given the specter of same-sex love, clitoral stimulation was indelibly marked as abnormal, 'an out and out act of sexual perversion.'" (161)
Man, talk about homophobia being used as a bogeyman to control straight people! Even a heterosexual married couple who never bang anyone else could be made gay BY HAVING SEX WRONG. Consider my mind blown.
The book is Leigh Eric Schmidt's Heaven's Bride: the unprintable life of Ida C. Craddock, American mystic, scholar, sexologist, martyr, and madwoman. It's pretty good, and really interesting to be reading alongside Marie Cartier's Baby, You Are My Religion: Women, Gay Bars, and Theology Before Stonewall, because both are about how religion and accusations of mental illness are used against sexual difference. Craddock, who never masturbated and had no sexual partner but her spirit husband, was nonetheless considered an insane nymphomaniac sex pervert and a criminal, as were pre-Stonewall lesbians for being gay, fifty years later. It's just made so clear that it's about social control, not health or wrongdoing.
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Date: 2023-11-29 07:36 pm (UTC)