Female Onanism: Condemned Pleasures, Medical Probes, and Late-Victorian Pornography

The more Victorian physicians deepened their research into female sexuality, the more a culture of lust infected the hypocritical façade of a nation strictly attached to social norms of order, formality, and bigotry. Lascivious sexual desire and carnal appetite – here embodied in female masturbation – were taboos that had to be forcibly silenced. Yet, late-Victorian pornography mocked medical discourses on female onanism, as well as fears related to female sexuality, and revealed ‘unspeakable’ secret domestic settings marred by ‘dangerous’ practices, scandalous carnality and deviant desires. Furthermore, contemptuous of literary censorship and strict morality, the plenteous erotic literature, represented here by William Lazenby's pornographic magazine The Pearl, not only dared to taunt physicians’ concerns about female ‘self-pollution’ circulating at that time, but also found a great inspiration in the huge domestic success of some innovative medical tools – specifically patented to assuage women's nerves – being produced in those years: electric vibrators. Those ‘engines’ rapidly invaded pornographic literature of the late nineteenth century and became central to a great number of erotic stories, titillating fables and poems, as clearly demonstrated by the contents of The Pearl.

Song of Songs

The essay reviews the current trend of classifying Song of Songs as a Wisdom book. Instead of hastily subsuming the unique expressions of love under the rubric of wisdom and allegory, it is proposed that Song of Songs is a powerful lyric creation of a counter-world, where sentiments—otherwise carefully veiled—can be freely expressed. Song of Songs is not a Wisdom book but a form of poetic and erotic literature that deeply impacted a developing sapiential corpus and whose language enabled other authors to create their own discourses about sexual relationships.

Sex in Stencil Novels Case Study: Readers' Reception of Enny Arrow's Stencil Novel in Surakarta

The phenomenon of sex has always been novel in every era. In Indonesia, for example, Enny Arrow’s stencil novel has been circulating, which has been named as a legend of Indonesian erotic literature. Along with the development of technology, the existence of stencil novels was replaced by DVDs or VCDs, which then continued with the emergence of various sites providing access to pornography. This difference in phenomena certainly makes the meaning of sex for each individual different. This research will analyze the meaning of sex in the stencil novel by Enny Arrow in the eyes of millennial men. The data analysis will focus on social psychological factors using Normand Holland’s literary reception theory. From the data analysis, it can be concluded that there are different views on sexual relations before and after reading the novel. This research is expected to provide a new perspective on the picture of sexuality for modern humans.

Dirty Jokes and Bawdy Songs

Born into a poor Jewish family, folklorist Gershon Legman (1917-99) made an independent career for himself in the study of erotic literature and obscene folklore. The book is the first full biography of this major figure in twentieth-century folklore study. Drawing on unprecedented research in Legman’s papers, the author traces his working and personal life from the 1930s American landscape of underground publishing, through midcentury sex research, through to his recovery and publication, in the 1960 and 1970s, of suppressed and censored folklore texts. Gershon Legman expanded the study of folklore in a series of authoritative works on topics ranging from limericks, folk songs, and jokes to the history of erotica publishing. Legman’s work prefigured the history of sexuality and the body, while he used the language of folklore to create a romantic outsider’s vision of American culture freed from repression. The book places Legman in the censorship battles of his times, connecting him to other important thinkers on sex and to the expansion of folklore as an academic discipline in the twentieth century. As it weighs the effect of Legman’s long exile in France, the book describes the twentieth century’s narrowing intellectual space for marginal, contrarian thinkers.