At Home - Bill Bryson [175]
However true or not the episode—and it is worth noting that Aubrey was writing more than a century after the fact—what is clear is that no one in his day thought it odd that More’s grown daughters would sleep beside the parental bed.
The real problem with beds, certainly by the Victorian period, was that they were inseparable from that most troublesome of activities, sex. Within marriage, sex was of course sometimes necessary. Mary Wood-Allen, in the popular and influential What a Young Woman Ought to Know, assured her young readers that it was permissible to take part in physical intimacies within marriage, so long as it was done “without a particle of sexual desire.” The mother’s moods and musings at the time of conception and throughout pregnancy were thought to affect the fetus profoundly and irremediably. Partners were advised not to have intercourse unless they were “in full sympathy” with each other at the time, for fear of producing a failed child.
To avoid arousal more generally, women were instructed to get plenty of fresh air, avoid stimulating pastimes like reading and card games, and above all never to use their brains more than was strictly necessary. Educating them was not simply a waste of time and resources but dangerously bad for their delicate constitutions. In 1865, John Ruskin opined in an essay that women should be educated just enough to make themselves practically useful to their spouses, but no further. Even the American educator Catharine Beecher, who was by the standards of the age a radical feminist, argued passionately that women should be accorded full and equal educational rights, so long as it was recognized that they would need extra time to do their hair.
For men, the principal and preoccupying challenge was not to spill a drop of seminal fluid outside the sacred bounds of marriage—and not much there either, if they could decently manage it. As one authority explained, seminal fluid, when nobly retained within the body, enriched the blood and invigorated the brain. The consequence of discharging this natural elixir illicitly was to leave a man literally enfeebled in mind and body. So even within marriage one should be spermatozoically frugal, as more frequent sex produced “languid” sperm, which resulted in listless offspring. Monthly intercourse was recommended as a safe maximum.
Self-abuse was of course out of the question at all times. The well-known consequences of masturbation covered virtually every undesirable condition known to medical science, not excluding insanity and premature death. Self-polluters—“poor creeping tremulous, pale, spindle-shanked wretched creatures who crawl upon the earth,” as one chronicler described them—were to be pitied. “Every act of self-pollution is an earthquake—a blast—a deadly paralytic stroke,” declared one expert. Case studies vividly drove home the risks. A medical man named Samuel Tissot described how one of his patients drooled continuously, dripped watery blood from his nose, and “defecated in his bed without noticing it.” It was those last three words that were particularly crushing.
Worst of all, an addiction to self-abuse would automatically be passed on to offspring, so that every incident of wicked pleasure not only softened one’s own brain but sapped the vitality of generations yet unborn. The most thorough analysis of sexual hazards, not to mention most comprehensive title, was provided by Sir William Acton in The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs, in Childhood, Youth, Adult Age, and Advanced Life, Considered in Their Physiological, Social and Moral Relations, first published in 1857. He it was who decided that masturbation would lead to blindness. He was also responsible for the oft-quoted assertion: “I should say that the majority of women are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind.”
Such beliefs held sway for an amazingly long time. “Many of my patients told me that their first masturbatory act took place while witnessing some