Some Sex History... From The Illustrated Book of Sexual Records.

[Godman]

Oldest sex manual
The oldest sex manuals in the world can be traced to China, more than two and a half thousand years before the birth of Christ. Huang-Ti (2697-2598 B.C.), the legendary Yellow Emperor, has been regarded as the originator of the traditional sex practices and beliefs. The ancient "Handbooks of Sex," composed nearly five thousand years ago, anticipate anything produced in the West by well over two thousand years.

[Godman]

Ovid wrote his "Ars Amatoria" (The Art of Love) about the time of Christ. One writer (H. Montgomery Hyde in "A History of Pornography") has characterised the book as an "immoral book" representing the art of love as "the adulterer's art rather than the husband's art." Renaissance humanists praised the book. It begins with the words - "If anyone among this people know not the art of loving let him read my poem and having read be skilled in love. By skill swift ships are sailed and rowed, by skill nimble chariots are driven: by skill must love be guided."

[Godman]

In the Eastern Han Dynasty (A.D. 25-220), a group of Taoist philosophers created Yin Taoism, firmly rooted in the importance of human sexual expression. This school of Taoists wrote volume after volume of sex manuals including "Su Nu Ching" (Manual of Lady Purity), "Yu Fang Mi Chueh" (Secret Codes of the Jade Room) the "Art of the Bedchamber" and "Yu Fang Chih Yao" (Important Guidelines of the Jade Room). To give their works authority and to exert influence on the emperors the Yin Taoists attributed the key points in their manuals to Huang Ti (the Yellow Emperor) and the ancient authority Peng Tsu who was said to have lived to 800 years of age.

[Godman]

The "Ananga-Ranga", published three quarters of the way through the nineteenth century, was to have appeared as "The Kama Sutra", or "The Hindoo Art of love". Alas, the printer, after reading the galleys, lost his nerve and refused to go on with the job. A consequence is that the proof copies in existence are extremely rare. Arbuthnot and Richard Burton translated the "Ananga-Ranga" - which was not written by a holy man (as was the 'Kama Sutra") but by a poet named Kalyana Mall. It has been published into many languages under a variety of titles "The Pleasures of Women", "The Form of the Bodiless One" "The Writ of Desire", etc.

[Godman]

In the words of one jacket blurb: the "Koka Shastra" (Trans. A. Comfort, Allen & Unwin, 1964) and its associated texts are to mediaeval literature what the "Kama Sutra" was to ancient. When Kokkoka turned in the twelfth century to the themes of love and sex the move was audacious: for a thousand years the "Kama Sutra" representing the summed wisdom of earlier times, had been supreme. What more was there to say? Mediaeval India was different to the India of Vatsyayana. "A new approach was needed yet the early pages suggest that we are reading a new abridgement of the classic work, a sibling rather than a sequel." And Kokkoka frequently expresses his debt to the earlier master. The abiding value of the Sanskrit texts, as of many other ancient works, is the positive attitude to human sexuality.

[Godman]

According to "Yu Fang Mi Chueh" ("Secret Codes of the Jade Room"), a Taoist sex manual written not long after the birth of Christ, it is possible to judge a woman's sexual features by scrutinising her face"A woman with a small mouth and short fingers has a shallow porte feminine and she is easy to please. You can be sure that a woman must have big and thick labia if she has a big mouth and thick lips. If she has deep-set eyes, her porte feminine is bound to be deep too... if a woman has a pair of big, sparkling eyes, her porte feminine is narrow at its entrance, and yet roomy in the inner part... A woman with two dimples is tight and narrow down below..." etc., etc. It is interesting to note that some of the superstitions of ancient Chinese are current in modern Western society.

[Godman]

In this permissive age it may come as a surprise to many that perhaps the best selling sex technique book of them all was first published in 1926. Written simultaneously in Dutch and German, and quickly translated into many languages, "Ideal Marriage" by Theodoor Hendrik van de Velde (1873-1937) went through forty-two printings in Germany alone between 1926 and 1932: it was suppressed in 1933 when Hitler came to power. By the 1970s the English translation, published by William Heinemann in 1930, had gone through forty-three printings totalling an estimated 700,000 copies. In America more than half-a-million hardcover copies had been sold between 1945 and 1970; a revised edition was published in 1965.

[Godman]

The most comprehensive of modern sex manuals is "The Joy of Sex" by Alex Comfort. A subtitle on the book is "A Gourmet Guide to Love Making." Thirty two colour prints are included and more than a hundred black and white illustrations. In The Washington Post Anthony Storr rather pompously remarked that ". . . the illustrations, of which there are many are frankly beautiful and entirely lack that kind of surreptitious, suggestive titillation that characterises pornography."

[chill_8_7]

do it with images

[Godman]

The Roman Catholic confessional has often intrigued those who have little or no experience of it and some of those who have an intimate acquaintance with the device. From time to time exposes have appeared of what actually takes place in the confessional; after all, in more dissolute times the confessional was used by randy priests as a means of recruiting likely women. In the nineteenth century a number of publications, mostly of poor quality, appeared claiming to reveal what went on in nunneries, monasteries and the confessional. One such was the "Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk": the author claimed to have been a nun in the Hotel Dieu in Montreal. Her disclosures, first printed in New York in 1836, were reprinted again and again in the U.S. and Europe and by 1851 more than a quarter of a million copies of the book were in circulation. A leading Catholic called the book "blasphemous fiction" and it was mentioned during debates in Parliament. In 1874 a certain Father Chiniquy published a book called "The Priest, The Woman, and the Confessional:" harrowing accounts were given of sex in the confessional. A more sensational book had appeared in London ten years earlier - "The Confessional Unmasked: showing the Depravity of the Romish Priesthood, the iniquity of the Confessional and the Questions Put to Females in Confession."

[Godman]

Originally Posted by chill_8_7

quote

I am sorry... Chill... I dont have images of these...

[Godman]

There are sex books and sex books! There is all the difference between a piece of cheap nineteenth-century pornography and a detailed research publication in sexology. Prudes have often failed to make a distinction, and when a distinction has been attempted it has often been bogus. The biggest sex book collections in the world contain all types of sexual literature - from the simply titillating to the driest scholarly tome. The leading sex institutes associated with the names of Bloch, Hirschfeld, etc. - all had associated libraries. The Kinsey Institute (more properly The Institute for Sex Research) has around 20,000 books of all sorts as does the British Museum. According to H. Montgomery Hyde, the Vatican Library tops them all with something like 25,000 volumes.

[Godman]

We have already met a number of book titles that seem needlessly lengthy. The longest I have come across is the one by Schurig (it is apparently typical of his book titles in general) MULIEBRIA Historico-Medica, hoc est Partium Genitalium Muliebrium Consideratio Physico-Medico-Forensis, qua Pudendi Muliebris Partes tam externae, quam internae, scilicet Uterus cum Ipsi Annexis Ovariis et Tubis Fallopianis, nec non Varia de Clitoride et Tribadismo de Hymen et Nymphotomania seu Feminarum Circumsisione et Castratione selectis et curiosis observationibus traduntur. A. D. Martino Schurigio, Physico Dresdensi... MDCCXXIX. After which you may feel there is little point in reading the book!

[Godman]

Would like to get some feed back if this thread can go ahead or not ???

[sexcrazy]

Photos would be more appreciated...