Image via Photography Paradiso.
I didn’t think this article was going to be interesting, and then I was fixated once I got into the salacious details — it’s almost certain that everything we thought about Victorian-era women being cold, sexless prudes was absolutely untrue. In fact, according to research that has just been revealed in Stanford Magazine (“The Sex Scholar“) it sounds like they had more frequent and more satisfying sex than many of their modern-day contemporaries. Their image is about to get a makeover.
Even more exciting, I think I’ve found the Ada Lovelace for sex educators: Dr. Clelia Duel Mosher. My new hero.
Mind Hacks has a nice post about the article in Beneath the Petticoat, snip:
More than half a century before Alfred Kinsey started to study the surprising diversity of human sexual behaviour, Stanford professor Clelia Mosher surveyed Victorian-era women on their bedroom behaviour but buried the results. Her report, its accidental discovery, and the sex lives of 1890s women are covered in a fascinating article for Stanford Magazine.
Mosher was an amazing woman by all accounts and took a scientific approach to testing some of the ‘received wisdom’ of the day, such as that women were inherently weaker and that menstruation was necessarily disabling.
As part of her work, she surveyed women on their experience of sex and sexuality, much as Kinsey would do many decades later.
“Slightly more than half of these educated women claimed to have known nothing of sex prior to marriage; the better informed said they’d gotten their information from books, talks with older women and natural observations like “watching farm animals.” Yet no matter how sheltered they’d initially been, these women had—and enjoyed—sex. Of the 45 women, 35 said they desired sex; 34 said they had experienced orgasms; 24 felt that pleasure for both sexes was a reason for intercourse; and about three-quarters of them engaged in it at least once a week.”
I think I should point out. This was posted to a website on April 1st at 8:00am.
Have you independantly verified the source? It sounds like a prank.
Now the “kink” link is doing the same thing! McAfee claims that the web site has to contact THEM to correct the alerts.
It IS alarming. I rely on you to clear these links before I connect. I understand that the internet is a wilderness with obvious risks. Your sponsors need to keep up with these alerts if they want to keep customers.
This sort of nonsense could cost them a lot of currency and you a lot of credibility.
“They only need a small excuse … ” Jesus Christ, Superstar
Hello Ms. Blue,
Like ‘Criolle Johnny’, I didn’t know how else to get a hold of you other than to use this blog.
Your blog post on ‘Lusty Victorian Behaviour in the Bedroom’ was most interesting.
If you are interested in more information on the (relatively) recent history of sex and society, you might consider the following.
‘Bonk’, The curious coupling of science and sex by Mary Roach.
This is her website (and no, I do not have any affiliation with her).
http://www.maryroach.net/
Among other things, it has some interesting historical tidbits on the history of sex and society.
Regards, SpencerAlanMacLeod
Many thanks, I feel very awkward (and apologize for) using the comments section to contact you. Have I perhaps, missed the “contact” link on your page?
Bright Blessings
johnny, I’ve run a number of tests and it’s not Life Erotic; it’s looking like it’s MacAfee. looking through MacAfee forums I’ve discovered that MacAfee is set to freak out about redirects — which is troubling because I’m concerned that MacAfee would not know how to handle friendly (or permanent) redirects, which are on the increase in general internet use, and even have Google-safe guidelines. that worries me in general. for instance, my old, original blog page has a redirect on it because it had a different URL than my age check page — I started blogging back before blogging software was available, and also before browser-intelligent age check pages. (I did everything by hand.)
basically, I have not one but two redirects on the URL so that I can track the traffic myself and compare it to their reports. I do it with all my sponsors now, so that I can hold them to third party traffic reports. MacAfee might be seeing my redirect as a browser hijack — which to me means they need to fix their browser hijack security specs because it’s too general. and too general can sometimes = exploitable security flaw.
but Life Erotic is clean. (incidentally, that’s one of the reasons they passed my vetting process)
thank you — doing so right now.
The new “the life erotic” site sponsor sent my anti-virus software (McAfee adviser) into a tizzy. Could you please check on that for us?