LHMP #546 Toulalan 2003 Extraordinary Satisfactions

The typical focus on researching female same-sex desire in the early modern period centers around medical and legal records, the motif of physiological anomaly (the enlarged clitoris myth), and attempts to identify covert homoerotic themes in women’s writing. In contrast, pornography and popular culture (ballads and pamphlets) present a different view, even though they can rarely be interpreted as self-reporting of the women involved.

Pornography is a particularly rich source of imagery for how people thought sex between women was performed, setting aside the question of its accuracy. It contradicts the notion of lesbian sex as “hidden from history” or “something not to be named.” And in particular, pornographic literature diverges from the more learned imagery of “masculine” lesbians or clitoral hypertrophy.

Given the authorship and primary audience for 17th century pornography, it is often considered to reflect male prurient fantasies and have little connection with actual female behavior—a view exacerbated by modern feminist debates over whether pornography is inherently misogynistic, as well as by the persistant trope of the “obligatory lesbian scene” in modern pornography. But the depiction of lesbian sex in early modern pornography is more contradictory than a simple assumption of male gaze and highlights a significant gap between the image of lesbianism in elite literature and that intended for popular consumption.

This article attempts to recover the historical and social context that pornography had for 17th century readers, separate from the meanings imposed on it by modern analysis. Modern analysis is inevitably filtered through a psychoanalytic lens, which views fantasies of sex as serving psychological needs, especially relieving or displacing anxieties. For example, the presence of a dildo in f/f pornography is interpreted as reassuring the male reader that a penis analogue is indispensable to sexual satisfaction. But interpretations like this can be challenged, not only in a historic context, but in contemporary readings as well.

The main body of 17th century literary pornography (such as The School of Venus, The Dialogues of Luisa Sigea/Satyra Sotadica, and Venus in the Cloister) emerged from a genre of “dialogues between whores” which can be traced back to Lucian’s Dialogues of the Courtesans, with more recent roots in Aretino and the like. Often the 17th century works would directly allude to these antecedents, either in format or in directly claiming the lineage. The new development was to place the dialogues in the mouths of ordinary women rather than prostitutes, sometimes framing them as instructional literature.

Although the economics and sociology of book buying and reading in the 17th century lean towards assuming a male audience, potential female readers should not be discounted; Direct evidence for any specific readers of pornography is rare, but general references to women and girls having access to erotic works (or works with sexual content, such as medical manuals) is recorded, often in disparaging ways. Reading, in this era, was often a social activity, with one person reading aloud to others.

Although the typically-anonymous authorship of pornographic texts is usually consider to be male, the texts themselves are framed through female voices (sometimes attributed to a fictitious female author) and often proclaim themselves to be intended for a female audience. Women were also active in the publishing industry. Claims that the texts themselves provide evidence of “inauthentic” male fantasies in part derive from modern assumptions about what authentic homoerotic experiences ought to look like. If the texts themselves are often contradictory or incoherent, is that proof of inauthenticity or evidence of multiple competing experiences and understandings? The contradictions between pornography and “professional” literature in this area have already been noted.

Traub (“The Perversion of Lesbian Desire”) argues for two dominant models of female homoerotic desire in the early modern period: the “masculine” tribade and the “chaste female friend.” But the protagonists of lesbian pornography fit into neither category. Although reference may be made to such ideas, the central characters are depicted as typically “feminine” women with no anatomical abnormalities. Their sexual activities include mutual acts, contradicting the image of a contrasting active/passive pair. Further, their encounters result in mutual orgasm, despite the absence (mostly) of any penis-analogue. Orgasm can be achieved by manual stimulation, and though dildos may be discussed in the text, they are absent from the women’s beds.

The actual content of these texts thus contradicts the assertions that early modern understandings of lesbianism assumed analogy to male-female relations. In a French context, it’s possible that this reflected harsh legal penalties for women engaged in penetrative sex (though why this should affect texts that include many different modes of transgressive sex is unclear). However English pornographic texts similarly offer few examples of dildo use by female couples (as opposed to being used for solitary pleasure). Exceptions (the examples are ballads) typically involve cross-dressing women who are suggested to have used an artificial penis, not only for disguise, but for sexual activity. This is a decidedly different context from the female-presenting women of the pornographic dialogues. Another context in which dildoes are mentioned in a putatively same-sex context involves men who disguise themselves as women in order to gain sexual access—an access which assumes that women might engage in erotic play together—who then pretends that his actual penis is a dildo to maintain the charade.

The author summarizes that 17th century pornography cannot be classified as merely intended to male consumption. It offers a different take on the possibilities for sex between women than the professional literature of the era. This apparent contradiction can be seen, instead, as illustrating the competing discourses available to readers. Although pornographic texts can’t be viewed as directly representing an “authentic” female experience, they do demonstrate that the popular imagination included the possibility of women engaging in satisfying sex together without the participation of a man, even symbolically.