“The Origins of Sex”

I picked up a fascinating book to read on my train journey from Manchester back to London last week – “The Origins of Sex” by Faramerz Dabhoiwala, a Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford. (Hey, I have no shame regarding my reading matter. The cover’s not that rude. And the first-class carriage was pretty deserted, anyway). A few choice extracts might amuse…

From the late 1570s in Bury St Edmunds:

On Sundays, sexual offenders were paraded to the whipping-post… Then they were all tied up and left for a whole day and night, at the mercy of the elements and the contempt of their community. Finally, on the following day, they were publicly whipped, ‘receiving thirty stripes well laid on…’

From Deal in 1703, where the  mayor Thomas Powell ‘took up a common prostitute’, describing in his diary how he:

‘brought her to the whipping-post – being about mid-market, where there was present some hundreds of people – I caused her to gave twelve lashes; and at every third lash I parleyed with her and bid her tell all the women of like calling wheresoever that she came that the Mayor of Deal would serve them as he had served her…’

What about  the 1758 London opening of the Lambeth Asylum? ‘[P]oor girls deemed to be at risk of seduction were sent to live here, to be brought up as servants and apprentices’, offering them:

‘the means of better instruction in religion, in honesty, in sobriety, in chastity, in industry, in temperance, than you could possibly have received under the protection of your natural parents. ‘

Before too long, only orphans were admitted, and family members and friends were not permitted to visit. As a concept that could  work well for a weekend scene, it takes some beating. (Pun, perhaps, deliberately intended). Although the best was in  some ways saved to last – a 1730s club called the ‘Beggar’s Benison’ – a Hellfire Club for the professional classes, with branches scattered far afield. Members:

‘met regularly to drink, talk about sex, exchange bawdy jokes and songs, and read pornography. They paid young women to strip and display themselves naked’

That sounds like a fun premise for an evening with friends, along the lines of the Worshipful Company or Bordello gatherings I’ve described here in the past. I need to do some more research on the club concerned, but even to begin with its Wikipedia page contained an amusing thought that, when it was wound up: “The remaining club money was bequeathed to fund prizes for girls at school in East Anstruther.” I wonder what they had to do to win the prizes?!