Nice, friendly reader may remember the 1000-page book, E.F.W. Eberhard's 1924 The Erotic Foundations of Women's Emancipation (Die Frauenemanzipation und Ihre Erotischen Grundlagen). I took lots of digital photographs of it in 2007 and merrily imagined myself reading it later.
Then it seemed for a long time like in fact, I would not read it later.
But yesterday I started reading chapter 6. And yes, the book is indeed the hoot that its chapter titles promised it would be.
Chapter 5: Masturbation and the Women's Emancipation Movement
Chapter 6: Tribadism and the Women's Emancipation Movement
Chapter 7: Sadism and the Women's Emancipation Movement
You couldn't publish certain descriptions of sex acts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, even if you were a scientist of sex. The sexologists got around this by putting them in Latin. E.F.W. Eberhard quotes them a lot.
The thing is, you can often tell what they mean, even if you do not speak Latin (or if your Latin teacher did not go over this vocabulary in high school):
frictio genitalium mutua (p. 538)
Which is good, because the online Latin dictionary run by Notre Dame University is no help.
5 comments:
I had to Google "tribadism".
Could you tell me what it means then, Tom?
I'll put up a link. I had to look it up at one point, too.
Actually, rather than put up a link, here's a definition: genital rubbing.
I was going to post the wikipedia page, but it lacks historical context. It seems to me that the idea that "tribadism" equals "scissoring" is a rather recent one, perhaps popularized by South Park. In the stuff I read from the 1920s, "tribadism" is defined as sex between two women involving rubbing, with one woman being the "active" rubber, which to me sounds like rubbing in the missionary position (they don't mention the so-called scissor position). Sexology is all about lesbian sex being an imitation of male-female sex. "Scissoring" doesn't really fit this paradigm, you know? There's no "male role" for one of the partners to assume.
However, the term predates sexology. I'll post the OED entry; it's interesting.
Oxford English Dictionary entry for "tribadism."
1601 B. JONSON Forest x. Præludium, Light Venus..with thy tribade trine, invent new sports.
1890 H. ELLIS Criminal iii. § 7. 106 Such emblems are common among pæderasts and tribades.
Hence {sm}tribadism, (a) the activity of a tribade; (b) spec. in modern use (see quot. 1965).
1811-19 Woods and Pirie v. Gordon (Index Catal. Libr. Surgeon-General's Office U.S.A. XIV. 752), Lady C. G...who had charged them with the practice of tribadism.
1864 tr. Caspar's Forensic Med. (N. Syd. Soc.) III. 335 Tribadism. Even in the Old Testament there is distinct allusion to this form of sexual aberration.
1965 New Statesman 26 Mar. 492/3 The first [technique of lesbian intercourse], known as ‘tribadism’, consists in one woman lying on top of the other and simulating the movements of heterosexual intercourse in such a way as to stimulate the clitoris of each.
1970 G. GREER Female Eunuch 293 The prevalence of tribadism as the principal lesbian mode of lovemaking argues the relative unimportance of the masculine fantasy.
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