In their book “Nymphomania”, Albert Ellis and Edward Sagarin represent the failure in a woman – through physiological rather than psychological reasons – to achieve orgasm as the “most frequent physiological cause of nymphomania” (p. 95). This is a highly contentious subject. Not much work has been done on it,

Orgasm, stressing the body in various ways, has been known to produce some dire consequences. Kinsey again – “At orgasm some individuals may remain unconscious for a matter of seconds or even for some minutes”. Kinsey also notes more than a dozen authorities – from Roubaud (1876) to Brown and

The medical literature abounds with descriptions of the various types of hermaphroditism. Sometimes a good nonmedical description is produced. Perhaps the best is that in Henry Spender Ashbee’s “Catena Librorum Tacendorum”. The “woman,’ was fairly attractive. Ashbee said – “She was about twenty years of age, rather pretty, and quite

In Genesis XX, 12, we learn that Abraham married his father’s daughter -“And yet indeed she is my sister; she is the daughter of my father, but not the daughter of my mother, and she became my wife.”

We could write a book on this one (people have). There are endless instances of prudish silliness in Fryer, Findlater, and others. One instance will suffice here. Many women have been positively repelled by the sight of the male body. A woman of seventy, the mother of seven children, said

Valeria Messalina of ancient Rome almost certainly wins this one; indeed her name (the “Messalina complex”) has been used as a synonym for nymphomania. With her insatiable sexual appetities she acted as prostitute and seducer. She married Claudius when only sixteen; it has been speculated that she started an active

There are many bizarre (and well-authenticated) tales from the world of white slaving. One case was publicised at the trial of 1964 of three sisters of Mexico who, with immense brutality, ran a wholesale business of sex slavery. Girls were abducted – and then branded on the thigh or the

It has been said of a number of famous people that they never experienced sexual intercourse. It is hard to establish such claims as the truth. It was said that Immanual Kant, the German philosopher, died a virgin at the age of eighty. And the allegation was made that Sir

This emerged in 1773, under the title “The Covent Garden Magazine,” Amorous Repository, Calculated Solely for the Entertainment of the Polite World. In the words of Hurwood, “This, inauspicious as it may have seemed at the time, the great granddaddy of a multi-million dollar business was born.” Ten years later

A fellatrice is a woman – often a prostitute – who specialises in the art of fellatio, i.e. exciting the male genitals by means of mouth, lips, and tongue.
Cleopatra of Egypt has been represented as the “most famous free-love fellatrice of the ancient world.” Cleo is said (I do