Historically, disabled people were seen as asexual, hypersexual, perverse or contaminated. But what can disabled bodies teach us about sex today, and why should we listen? That’s the theme of this week’s Mosaic article. Here we publish a related post.

Why are some people turned on by disability? By Katharine Quarmby

This article was first published in Mosaic. It is republished here under a Creative Commons licence.

The theme of fetishism and disability came up in ribald and raunchy conversation during the Talking Dirty session at the Unlimited festival held at London’s Southbank Centre in September 2014.

A central theme of the festival, which celebrates disability arts in all its forms, was the importance of sexuality. During that particular session, a number of prominent disabled activists talked about the importance of speaking out about and celebrating sexuality. One panel member praised the beauty of another participant’s particularly well-shaped feet, saying she had been “given permission” to fetishise them. The discussion was good-humoured and funny, and an insight into an area of sexuality that has become increasingly of interest – and controversial – over recent years.

Mik Scarlet, one of the panel members, spent some time in the 1990s partying at fetish clubs with his wife, Diane. “We found that disabled people were accepted there. But when we talked about it on TV, it was presented as if ‘Diane likes [having sex with] Mik because he’s a cripple, and she likes [having sex with] cripples’. That taught us that when it comes to sex and disability, it can be presented as a freak show, if you’re not careful.”

What they want to stress, instead, is that the fetish scene is far less likely to reject people with impairments and that many people feel welcome in fetish clubs (some of which make demonstrable efforts to be accessible to disabled people).

A fetish is broadly defined as having a strong sexual response to an object, behaviour or type of person. People involved in the scene often self-define as ‘kinksters’. The fetish scene is booming in many Western cities and there are growing online fetishist forums, such as FetLife. As the British sex therapist Dr Tuppy Owens says in her new book, Supporting Disabled People With Their Sexual Lives: “Fetish clubs are more welcoming to disabled guests than most night clubs, and I feel sure this is because most disabled people and fetishists feel stigmatized.”

Some fetishes can become problematic for disabled people, however – for example, if their impairment becomes the object of sexual arousal in a way they find disturbing. There are many websites created by so-called ‘devotees’, usually men, who have a sexual attraction to amputee women or those with other impairments. Sometimes ‘wannabes’ – who desire the amputation of a limb themselves (a condition known as body integrity identity disorder) – also have a sexual attraction to amputees.

Some people with disabilities find this a tricky issue, but the reasons why are difficult to summarise. Disabled people are often disturbed by devotees who are attracted to an impairment per se, rather than the disabled person with the impairment. For instance, some devotees will collect photos (or even take photos, without permission) of disabled people’s body parts, to which they are ‘devoted’. Some might desire a relationship with a disabled person – for instance, a wheelchair user – not to promote their independence but to encourage their perceived helplessness.

Dr Kirsty Liddiard, a disabled sociologist at the University of Sheffield, explains some of the complexities: “I’ve met disabled women who like it [devoteeism] and were empowered by it – as empowering as being an object of desire can be… but, again, in the context of disability, this is very powerful. I’ve met disabled women (and men) who were disgusted by it.

“Where an objective desire excludes all else then it can enter problematic territory, but objective desire is OK if both parties are aware and acknowledge this in the exchange. Devoteeism can enter abusive territory very quickly, however.”

The unequal power dynamic manifests itself most clearly online, where you can find websites on which desperate amputees in low-income countries offer photographs of themselves and their impairments for sale to devotees – sometimes to pay medical bills.

This feels dehumanising and ultimately disempowering for people who have to deploy their impairment as a sex object for money. If a devotee is taking photos of disabled people (in some cases, children) without permission, that is equally disempowering and – akin to wolf-whistling in the street – makes their very presence sexualised, whether they want it to be or not. The fact that it is disabled women, rather than men, who are primarily the object of disability fetishism suggests a very disturbing trend.

For more on sex and disability, see this article.

Note on terminology: The author has used language that disabled people employ to describe themselves in the UK. Terminology is different in other countries, so where contributors from other countries have used different vocabulary, that has been preserved. Any offence is inadvertent.

Historically, disabled people were seen as asexual, hypersexual, perverse or contaminated. But what can disabled bodies teach us about sex today, and why should we listen? That’s the theme of this week’s Mosaic article. Here we publish a related post on the movement to help disabled women express their sexuality.

“I am a woman more than a wheelchair” By Katharine Quarmby

This article was first published in Mosaic. It is republished here under a Creative Commons licence.

In 1989 Ellen Stohl, who had become a wheelchair user after a car accident, appeared in an eight-page spread in Playboy magazine. She had pushed to do so, she explained later, because it was important for her to express her right to sexuality. “Sexuality is the hardest thing for a disabled person to hold on to,” she said in a TV interview. “I am a woman more than a wheelchair.”

Regarding Playboy owner Hugh Hefner, she added: “He believed that I could have the same sexual voice as women without disabilities.”

But despite pioneers such as Stohl, disabled women still face acute disadvantage today. Kirsty Liddiard, a disabled sociologist from Sheffield University, has written about how disabled women have found it difficult to claim ‘positive sexual self-hood’, partly because of the lack of positive role models in mainstream culture.

“Where we do – for example, in films and on television,” Liddiard writes, “we are usually depicted as sexless, burdensome and pitiful…Disabled men could, more easily, claim a sexual selfhood they were quite happy with despite the fact that we think of masculinity as being rooted in strength.”

She adds, in an interview, that people idealise womanhood, and the tropes of womanhood that are revered are unmanageable for all women but particularly so for disabled women.

“They have to mediate those two issues – womanhood and disability – at the same time, in a patriarchal world,” she says. “Disabled people have been largely silent about this until recently, where it has been loudly and proudly placed on disability rights and justice agendas.”

When it started (in the UK and USA), the disability movement was largely white, male and dominated by those with physical impairments.

The well-known South African-born activist Vic Finkelstein, one of the founders of the movement, said over ten years ago: “The visible prevalence of people using wheelchairs in UPAIS [Britain’s first disability rights organisation] made some groups…awfully suspicious of what we wanted to achieve.”

Baroness Jane Campbell, in an interview for my book Scapegoat: Why we are failing disabled people, said that the early days of the disability rights movement could be justly characterised as “white and male”. The privileging of male desire – by both disabled and non-disabled people – has to be seen within this context. It is now being consciously questioned by a cadre of British and American disabled women and male allies. (Many leading activists also identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual and have to confront prejudice because of their sexuality as well.)

But at least the conversation about the inequalities between disabled men and women has begun. One person who freely acknowledges the problems is Alex Ghenis, an American disability advocate. He has been instrumental in running panels at UC Berkeley, California – entitled ‘Are Cripples Screwed?’ – that examine issues around disability, love and sexuality. Although they have been pioneering for students and academics (men and women alike), he notes that the road to sexual self-expression isn’t easy for everybody.

“There’s a big spectrum out there, just as there is for able people too,” says Ghenis. “Not everyone identifies as sexually worthy. Women with disabilities seem to have a hard time, because society places such a premium on the sexy female body, whereas there are women with nurturing personalities who might have a relationship with a disabled man.”

Penny Pepper – whose book of erotic short stories, Desires Unborn, explores the desires of both disabled men and disabled women – wants to see equality of access for both sexes to sexual opportunities. She points out, for example, that the campaign to legalise and improve access to brothels in the UK has been, in the main, about satisfying male sexual desire.

She posits something different: “I have fantasised about a playhouse, where you can experiment, where there are sex surrogates and sex furniture. This would be for both men and women.”

Liddiard, for her part, also wants to get away from the “tired media conversation” about whether accessible brothels should be legalised.

She says: “I want to talk about how women still live with constructed sexualities where it is difficult to talk about pleasure, where their sexuality is suppressed, and where they are not allowed to experiment or explore their sexuality.”

For more on sex and disability, see this article.

Note on terminology: The author has used language that disabled people employ to describe themselves in the UK. Terminology is different in other countries, so where contributors from other countries have used different vocabulary, that has been preserved. Any offence is inadvertent.

Dr Jana Funke reflects on her experiences discussing sexology and photography with visitors of the Institute of Sexology exhibition in another post. After the event, visitors had the option to have their picture taken by Bret Syfert. Bret turned the shots into gender blurring portraits and now tells us about the process.

Back in January, I attended the “Photographs as evidence” gallery event within the Sexology exhibition at Wellcome Collection. Historian Dr Jana Funke was there presenting late 19th and early 20th century photographs to visitors, and it was my job to produce illustrations which captured both the event itself and the people attending it. The photographs being shown raised questions about gender and identity, and the sessions became a conversation between Jana and the visitors.

Some of the photographs were of men dressed as women, and I was immediately drawn to their “Victorian Photoshop” techniques, as Jana called them. For example, a man’s waist might be painted out to look narrower, or his foot to have a more feminine shape. Even though the painting is obvious and crude, it is still enough to make the viewer see what’s intended to be seen.

As the talks ended and visitors were leaving, some volunteered to have their portraits taken by me. My idea was to first process the photos to look like the Victorian ones we had been looking at, then I attempted my own Victorian Photoshop technique in order to change the gender of each visitor. To take the technique a bit further I used hair weaves from a local beauty shop as well, scanning them into the computer and placing them on top of the photographs.

The final pieces are meant to look like they are from pages of a Victorian photo album, commemorating the event. Funnily enough, I found the source images for the album on the Wellcome Images website and they are from a 19th century photograph album depicting private and theatrical cross-dressing.

Bret is a freelance illustrator for the Wellcome Trust, specialising in illustration.

How did sexologists use and interpret photographic evidence? What role did such photographs play in allowing individuals to explore their own gender identity and sexuality? In this blog, literary scholar and historian of sexuality Dr Jana Funke reflects on her experiences discussing sexology and photography with visitors of the Institute of Sexology exhibition.

In 1919, German-Jewish sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld (1869-1935) opened his Institute of Sexual Research in Berlin. In addition to operating as a clinic, the Institute housed an archive and library and offered educational services to members of the public. Among Hirschfeld’s vast collection were hundreds of photographs, some of which were exhibited at the Institute.

To me, Wellcome Collection’s The Institute of Sexology exhibition is a bit of an homage to Hirschfeld’s Institute and so I was keen to see how visitors today might respond to such photographs. In January, I had the opportunity to find out, as I spent three afternoons in the exhibition talking to visitors about sexology and photography.

To prepare, I met with the organisers and curators over the summer of 2014. Lesley Hall, a senior archivist at the Wellcome Library, was kind enough to show us some of the original photographs and postcards found among the papers of German-Austrian sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840-1902). The Wellcome Library’s holdings also include many sexological publications and so we got a chance to look at Hirschfeld’s medical textbook Sexualpathologie [Sexual Pathology], published in Germany in 1918, which includes many photographic images. In the end, we selected a number of photographs from the Krafft-Ebing archive and Hirschfeld’s textbook to be reproduced for the event.

I was keen to find out what visitors made of these images, especially because some of them are rather mysterious and there is so much we do not know. The studio shots of a man posing in women’s clothing, for instance, were found randomly among Krafft-Ebing’s papers after the sexologist’s death. The photographs must have been taken in the second half of the nineteenth century, but they were never published or discussed in writing. Visitors immediately noted the elaborate studio setting and the careful selection of props and costumes – we talked a lot about the beautiful shoes in particular!

Looking at a large-scale reproduction of the images, we also noticed how the photographs had been manipulated: if you look closely, you can see what can best be described as nineteenth-century ‘photo-shopping’. In several of the images, the contours of the hips, bottom and feet are redefined, so as to make the body appear more ‘feminine’.

What do we make of these images? It is impossible to know who the man in these pictures was and we can only speculate as to why they were taken in the first place. Given that cross-dressing was heavily regulated and even criminalised in many European countries at the time, visitors discussed whether these photographs offered the subject an opportunity to try out and capture a different side of himself or herself, one that could possibly not have been expressed publicly. Yet, we also wondered how private these images really were. Perhaps they were circulated among a small group of people with similar interests or desires. After all, how did they end up in Krafft-Ebing’s possession? Did the sexologist purchase them or did a medical colleague or patient pass them on?

What might Krafft-Ebing have made of these pictures? Based on what he wrote about cross-dressing in his book Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), he might have thought that the individual had a ‘dress fetish’ and was sexually aroused by wearing female clothing. He might also have looked at the pictures and wondered whether the individual was expressing homosexual desires or a wish to be a woman. Discussing these questions in the exhibition, it became clear that it is impossible to offer definitive answers. After all, some visitors cautioned, the images might not have anything to do with the expression of innermost desires or a deep-rooted sense of self at all. Perhaps the subject was just having fun testing out or trying on different gender roles?

The other photographs we looked at raised similar questions, but they were taken from Hirschfeld’s medical textbook and so we had a lot more information on which we could draw in our discussion. The three images above show a male patient whom Hirschfeld diagnosed with ‘androgyny’, ‘homosexuality’ and ‘transvestism’ (a term coined by Hirschfeld himself in 1910 to describe cross-dressing). Looking at the three images side by side, we talked about how it is not primarily the physical body that determines how we see ourselves and how we are perceived by others. A visitor put this succinctly when she said “it is the clothes that make the man or woman”, which allowed us to reflect on the many decisions we make every day to present ourselves as either male or female.

We also debated the case of Amanda/Amandus B., a patient who had first approached Hirschfeld in 1914 with the wish to obtain a legal name change and to wear male dress in public. If Amandus were alive today, he might understand himself as a trans man, but 100 years ago, Hirschfeld described the case as a form of ‘preliminary hermaphroditism’. In accordance with Amandus’ wishes, Hirschfeld agreed that the patient should be allowed to live as a man. He justified his claim by arguing that Amandus was not really a woman in the first place, but psychologically and physically masculine.

The photographs play a crucial role in supporting this claim and the images are carefully staged and posed so as to underline Amandus’ masculinity. Several visitors noted, for instance, how lighting is used to minimise the appearance of breasts in the nude shot. The three photographs are also carefully framed so as to give the impression that Amandus is taller in the third picture in which he wears male clothing.

Some visitors perceived this seeming manipulation of medical photographs as controversial: was Hirschfeld abusing his power as a medical doctor by ‘distorting’ the photographic evidence in this way? Others felt that we should applaud the sexologist for collaborating with his patient and allowing Amandus to claim and visually construct his own gender identity. At the heart of this debate were fundamental questions that kept coming up throughout the event: can a photograph ever be expected to tell a simple truth? And can there ever be a simple truth when it comes to our gender identities and sexuality in the first place?

After the discussion, visitors explored these issues further in conversation with visitor experience assistant Sol Szekir-Papasavva and by creating drawings and written statements in response to the question “If my gender were different …”. See the gallery below.

They also had the option to have their picture taken by Bret Syfert, who turned these shots into gender blurring portraits. You can also find more images from the Richard von Krafft-Ebing archive and from Magnus Hirschfeld’s publications at Wellcome Images.

Please leave your own thoughts in the comment section below. What do you make of the sexological photographs? How would your life change if your gender were different?

Dr Jana Funke is an Advanced Research Fellow in Medical Humanities at the University of Exeter.

Last week our Graphic Sex event offered a taste of sexuality, desire and disease in comics and graphic novels: from the ripped shirts of Doc Savage to Adam Hughes’ ‘Wonder Woman’ to gay marriage in ‘Astonishing X-Men’. The speaker, Stephen Lowther, tells us about some ways in which sex and sexuality have been represented in comics.

The humble comic book has evolved since its early days as a cheap, throwaway entertainment medium aimed squarely at children, whose images helped them to learn to read. Just as books, films and television cater to a wide audience and age ranges, so do 21st century comic books and graphic novels, as diverse today as they have ever been.

The American comic book has conquered the world of entertainment through films, television, the original comics and endless collections reprinting them as books. The Avengers, X-Men, Batman, Superman, Guardians of the Galaxy, Walking Dead are all famous across the globe, and feature their fair share of sexuality.

Comics and graphic novels also enjoy healthy industries in France, Italy, Japan and South America, with the UK quietly also continuing what was once a major part of its publishing industry. The medium is no longer confined to print either: a lot of work is being done digitally, the internet giving creative freedom to anybody with a computer and the necessary skills.

The history of graphic novels is fascinating as trends come and go, with comics reflecting and commenting on changes in society; attitudes to sex being a prime example. Pornography has been around for a long time historically and small, 8-paged ‘tijuana bible’ comics were very popular with soldiers between the 1920s and 1960s, but sex as part of mainstream entertainment is a relatively recent thing. Perhaps the 1960 Penguin edition of D.H. Lawrence’s ‘Lady Chatterley’s lover‘ is one of the starting points for this change?

Eroticism was already prevalent in early comics, such as in Doc Savage, with ripped shirts (or a complete lack thereof) revealing a toned and taut torso, as well as Conan the barbarian or Tarzan and Jane with lithe, athletic bodies wearing very little in the 1930s.

Similarly, Phantom Lady from the 1940s was erotic in much the same way as Tomb Raider, Witchblade or Cavewoman are in today’s market. All have exaggerated physical attributes and very revealing outfits. Did and do these pulps and comics provide fairly innocent erotica for teenage boys unable to buy real pornography?

Looking back, primarily at American comics, sex covers a wide array of subjects. The medium was aimed largely at teenage boys, offering heroes, desirable women, power fantasies (imagine you’re Superman) and excitement. Most of the creators were male and the attitudes portrayed tend to reflect this “maleness” as well as male/female roles in society at the time. Even Wonder Woman, one of the most powerful characters in comic history and widely considered a feminist icon, was initially introduced as the secretary to the Justice Society of America.

LGBT characters for a long time didn’t feature at all (unless you chose to read between the lines). American psychologist, Fredric Wertham, in his 1954 book ‘Seduction of the innocent’ denounced Batman and Robin as being lovers and Wonder Woman as living on an island populated entirely by lesbians (and being repeatedly tied up – something undeniably present on the comic covers). Violence, gore, vampires and zombies were also objected to by Wertham. His book took America by storm and almost overnight the industry was forced to change to a sanitised, simpler, more ‘innocent’ product, with many publishers going out of business as result.

Slowly things began to change. DC and Marvel vied for market share in the 1960s, Marvel’s soap opera approach to superheroes becoming ever more popular with large groups of readers taking them to heart. This more adult audience enabled them to produce more adult material. Underground comics featured drugs and sex. The Stonewall riots in 1969 gave rise to gay liberation while women’s liberation was challenging traditional views of what a woman’s role should be. Society was changing.

The feminist Valkyrie debuted in Hulk #142 (1971); Ms. Marvel in 1977; Gay Comix #1 (1980); and Northstar came out in Alpha Flight #106 (1992). Lesbians featured in Love & Rockets (1982-86) and the current Batwoman is gay (although was “not allowed” to marry her partner). Bisexuality was explored in Strangers in Paradise (1994-2007); unstable gender in Legion of Superheroes #31 (1992).

Gay characters are fairly commonplace in comics these days: Apollo and Midnighter in Stormwatch (1998); teenage lovers Hulkling and Wiccan in Young Avengers (2005); Kevin Keller in the bastion of teenage heterosexuality, Archie Comics (2010). Northstar finally married his lover in mainstream comics’ first gay wedding in 2012.

In Europe, Milo Manara and Guido Crepax published highly regarded erotic graphic novels in Italy from the sixties to the eighties. Nudity, both male and female, and sexuality featured heavily in Metal Hurlant in France (1974-87), while in Germany, Ralf Konig’s ‘Der bewegte Mann’ celebrated gay sexuality (1987).

Alan Moore and Frank Miller’s more sophisticated work at DC throughout the 1980s (Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, Swamp Thing) was a move by DC to engage a more mature audience. The medium has continued to expand. Comics are no longer “just for children”. People can tell their stories of battles with cancer, mental illness or AIDS through a graphic novel.

It’s this type of material we have been adding to the Wellcome Library’s collections for a while now. The ‘Strip AIDS’ comics project raised funds for London Lighthouse in 1987. ‘AARGH!’ by Alan Moore (1988) served as a counterpoint to Margaret Thatcher’s section 28, forbidding the promotion of homosexuality by councils. Health education in comic form, such as ‘Death talks about life’ (AIDS, 1992), ‘Spider-Man and Power Pack’ (child abuse, 1984), Ninja High School talks about Sexually Transmitted diseases (1992) and Teen Titans (drug abuse, 1983), have also been added.

Nowadays, sex is often treated in an intelligent way in graphic novels: one part of a complex whole. Women are resourceful, intelligent, powerful and independent. Male characters are more nuanced; they aren’t simply musclebound heroes. LGBT characters are commonplace role models not defined purely by their sexuality.

Things have indeed changed since the 1950s.

Stephen is a Cataloguing Librarian at Wellcome Library.

The Institute of Sexology exhibition is on until September 2015, a candid exploration of the most publicly discussed of private acts. In this post, Taryn Cain leads us through a potted history of nymphomania: its rise and fall and the reasons for both.

Kinsey once said that a nymphomaniac is “someone who has more sex than you do”, and Kinsey was a man who knew what he was talking about. Having collected data on human sexuality for over a decade, he released a book called the Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female in 1953. Among other things, Kinsey claimed that female masturbation was normal, that vaginal orgasms were not the norm and that women were as capable as sexual desire as a man; all claims which went against accepted medical lore at the time. The book soon became a bestseller but not everyone was a fan. Margaret Mead claimed that Kinsey had so medicalised sex that the book suggests “no way of choosing between a woman and a sheep”, and the ensuing public outrage ended Kinsey’s research.

Kinsey may have been making light of nymphomania, but a century earlier it was considered a serious medical disorder. The word nymphomania was first printed in English in 1802 and at the time it was recognised as a fairly common female disorder. Originating from Latin, nymphomania literally means ‘nymph madness’. It was understood by both doctors and patients that strong sexual desire in a woman for her husband, or more worryingly, for a man to whom she was not married, could be indicative of disease. A woman suffering from nymphomania could expect to find herself sliding into madness, organ failure and even death. Causes for nymphomania varied. As women were considered to be at the mercy of their bodies, nymphomania could be due to drinking brandy, reading too many books, feeling desire for another woman, being inspected by a speculum, divorce and even frigidity. Treatment for nymphomania included cold enemas and baths, bland food, bleeding, leeches and even drastic and irreversible surgical options.

While nymphomania was a gendered disorder, men were not immune. The male equivalent, satyriasis, had been around since Ancient Greece. It was also known as Don Juan syndrome in the 1900s. Through the ages it was accepted that men could suffer from excessive sexual desire and ‘love madness’, but by the Victorian era it had morphed into an entirely different sort of beast. While men were expected to have a strong sex drive, and were allowed outlets for that drive, it was believed that excessive sexual behaviour would diminish a man mentally and morally. Masculinity became synonymous with self-control, and a man who was unable to do so was considered effeminate, weak and lazy. In serious cases satyriasis could lead to rape, murder or the death of the patient. Jack the Ripper was believed to be motivated by satyriasis.

Prior to the 18th century, nymphomania was a virtually unknown disorder. This may have been as men and women’s bodies were thought of quite differently. For most of human history, men and women were considered to share the one body (with a woman being an inverted version of the man) so it didn’t seem strange to anyone that a woman could be as lusty as a man. In Ancient Greece the prophet Tiresias even claimed that women were able to experience pleasure 9 times greater than a man! By the time of Charles Darwin in 1871 things had changed dramatically. Now it was believed that Natural Selection had made it so the only things a woman lusted after was a respectable marriage and babies.

Another consequence of the changing nature of female sexuality was the rise of rape and ravishment in romantic literature from the 1700s. Rape had always been present in literature, but for a long time it was presented as a crime of passion, with the victims of rape secretly enjoying their violation. As the female libido slowly disappeared from society, so attitudes on rape had to change as well. Instead of being a mutually enjoyable event, rape instead became a short cut to love, the means for a woman to overcome her own natural inhibitions in order to tame an uncivilised man. These ‘forced seduction’ romantic stories remained common until the 1980s, when they eventually fell out of favour. You still see similar themes, of the dominant male and reluctant female, in contemporary works such as Troy and 50 Shades of Grey.

Nymphomania also fell out of favour in the 20th century, with people such as Magnus Hirschfeld, Marie Stopes and Masters & Johnson claiming that female sexual desire was a normal part of human sexuality. As a disorder, it was finally removed from the American Psychiatric Associations Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1980. These days we don’t talk about nymphomania or satyriasis, instead we speak of sex addiction or hypersexuality. In the last ten years many politicians, and celebrities such as Russell Brand and David Duchovny, have sought treatment for sex addiction. Yet while Hypersexual Disorder has been considered for inclusion in the DSM, many medical professionals and scientists doubt the disorder really exists. Taryn is a Visitor Experience Assistant at Wellcome Collection.

Intersex, in humans and other animals, is a variation in sex characteristics including chromosomes, gonads, or genitals that do not allow an individual to be distinctly identified as male or female. In this post, Taryn Cain takes us through a potted history of intersexuality.

Freud once said “when you meet a human being, the first distinction you make is ‘male or female?’ and you are accustomed to making the distinction with unhesitating certainty”. At the time, Freud was aware that his contemporaries, namely Hirschfeld and Ellis, knew the idea of absolute certainty was a lie and that they had documented many such people living long and full lives.

Known around the globe as hija, two spirit, kathoey, travestis and khuntha; for most of European history the terms hermaphrodite, and, later, intersex or Disorders of Sex Development (DSD) were used.

Hermaphroditos was a beautiful man who was loved by the nymph, Salmakis. When Salmakis prayed to the Gods to unite her with her love, they took her request perhaps more literally than she would have liked. They combined the bodies of both Hermaphroditos and Salmakis into one person, creating a body that was both male and female, hence “hermaphrodite”. Although just a story, many examples of hermaphrodites have been found in nature.

Clownfish are hermaphrodites as they can change from male to female in their lifetime. Earthworms are hermaphrodites, reproducing using both ovaries and testes. Cannabis is a hermaphrodite too as it can develop both male and female flowers simultaneously. Humans are not mythical creatures, nor do they reproduce like fish, worms or flowers, so it was eventually recognised that “hermaphrodite” as a label was outdated and misleading.

A German physician, Richard Goldschmidt coined the term intersex in 1917. Past terminology had implied that the intersex community was one big homogeneous group, whereas they are incredibly diverse. Some intersex people are very comfortable with the gender they were assigned at birth, while others don’t feel they have a gender or may wish to go through gender reassignment. Some may not have realised they were intersex until they hit adolescence or wished to start a family, while others may have always known they were different. These differences are due to biological sex being a complex process; any number of paths could lead a developing foetus to intersexuality.

One common cause of intersexuality is congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), which is due to exposure to high concentrations of androgens in utero. This can cause medical problems as well as affect gender. A far less common issue is when a developing foetus absorbs the DNA material for two bodies rather than the usual one body, a process known as chimerism. Essentially a person could be their own twin. This isn’t necessarily an intersex condition, however, unless the individual carries both an XX and XY chromosome.

In an isolated village in the Dominican Republic there were rare instances of girls developing into boys in adolescence. Known as guevedoces, it turned out to be a defective enzyme which interfered with the hormones involved in foetal development, but not those in adolescence. All these seem very clear-cut, but many cases of intersex bodies have no obvious cause.

The idea of two genders is deeply engrained in our culture, and we highlight that difference in every aspect of life. It wasn’t always this way however. Back in the Renaissance, women were seen as inverted, or underdeveloped, versions of men. To study a man was to study the whole of the human race. At this time, an intersex body was merely evidence of male superior development, rather than something that threatened a binary view of gender.

From the 16th century the lines of male and female were being drawn, with heterosexuality as the norm. Anything else was considered abnormal, which meant that intersex individuals were increasingly being lumped in with all other non-conforming individuals, such as transvestites, homosexuals and women with feminist notions. Darwinian ideas were becoming accepted and, in a twist, the superiority of human evolution became synonymous with sexual dimorphism. It was a time of strict sexual and gender norms.

It was in this climate that John Money, the man who became the authority on intersex conditions in the Western world, first coined the term “gender”. He was also the first to suggest that a gender identity and role could differ from that of a biological sex. Just as Freud determined that sex was dependent on the absence or presence of a penis, so did Money determine that the “true” sex of an intersex person was reliant on the penis. Unfortunately for Money he will be remembered through history as the man who inflated his own success, particularly since his most famous case tragically ended with the suicide of his patient.

In the 1970s and ’80s, feminists and the gay movement started to challenge ideas on gender and gender roles in society. As people began to accept the possibility of non-gender conforming individuals and behaviour, the world opened up for intersex people to reveal themselves. In the 1990s the internet finally gave a voice to the potentially 1.7% of the population who don’t fit neatly into our gender binary. Discussions finally opened up on the effect of childhood genital surgeries on later adult sexual function, with some physicians advocating giving families and patients more control over their own bodies.

Legally, life started looking up for intersex people in the 21st century. In 2003 Australians were given the option of having an X on their passport; in 2007 Disorders of Sex Development came into common usage; in 2013 Germany chose to allow “indeterminate” on the birth certificates of new born babies while the UN condemned non-consensual surgery on intersex infants; and in 2014 intersex individuals in India won full legal protection in the Supreme Court.

Not everything is rosy, as intersex women in sport are subject to problematic gender policies. The Olympics in particular have been very concerned about gender “fraud” since an intersex man took part in a high jump event in 1939. Perhaps as we move towards a future where gender is no longer the most important aspect of your identity, there will finally be less societal concern about gender variation.

Taryn is a Visitor Experience Assistant at Wellcome Collection.

Earlier this year, Dr Jamie Lawson held an event in our Institute of Sexology gallery exploring ideas of sex and gender and how they are constructed. Here, Jamie asks a very simple question: what is sex? The answer, however, is less simple than you might think.

Sex, as an activity, turns out to be a slippery thing, by which I mean it’s troublingly hard to define. To some extent we all know what we’re talking about when we talking about “having sex”, but there’s room for disagreement. The edges of “sex” seem…porous.

Which can be a problem. There are a number of reasons why we might want to define sex; most pressing of which is that we need to have more conversations about it. We need to do that because quite a lot of people seem to be having bad sex. Bad sex in this context is sex that is not consensual, sex that is not pleasurable or sex that is not safe. Sex that is, in summary, the opposite of awesome. If people want to have sex at all, they should be able to have awesome sex.

It seems not unreasonable to suggest that the awesomeness of sex will increase the more openly we can discuss it, but in order to talk about something, we kind of need to agree what we’re talking about. Otherwise our conversation is going to be at cross purposes: we’ll end up staring at each other with a puzzled look on our faces before pretending we need to check the time just so we can text a friend to tell them about this totally strange conversation we’re having.

This post is going to present you with a crash course in the slipperiness of sex. There aren’t easy answers here, but it’s important we are at least aware of the issues at play.

While the field of sexology owes a great deal to Victorian writers such as Havelock Ellis, Kraft Ebing and von Hirschfeld, sex received very little in the way of systematic study prior to the 20th Century. In the 1950s and ’60s, Masters and Johnson blew the lid off sex research in the UK in much the same way as Kinsey had done in the States in the 1940s. Where Kinsey took his surveys to as many different areas of American society as he could, Masters and Johnson brought as many different kinds of people as they could into their lab and subjected the process of sex to detailed, scientific scrutiny.

In 1966 they produced the “Human Sexual Response Cycle” graphs that describe sex in terms of increasing sexual arousal, orgasm and resolution. The graphs look slightly different for men and women: women get three different options, including one that tracks multiple orgasms; men only get one (line and orgasm). The ‘male’ graph contains something called a ‘refractory’ period, which describes a state immediately post orgasm where sex cannot be reinitiated, which is not included in the female models.

The work conducted by Masters and Johnson was important in that it laid sex open for formal, scientific study. Sexology was given formal, academic credentials and sex became a thing that could be discussed within an academic setting. That is unarguably a good thing, but it comes with consequences.

Masters and Johnson medicalised sex. They described it in terms of physiology, in terms of erection, lubrication and orgasm. Those sexual response cycles became “normal”, and deviation from them became pathological. Suddenly it was possible to orgasm too quickly or too slowly or in the “wrong” way. Sex became a series of recognisable, classifiable stages, and people who experienced sex differently could be quickly dismissed and excluded from mainstream discussion. Masters and Johnson focussed sex on genitals, and on orgasm, and on relationships between male and female physiologies in ways which obscure an awful lot of variation in the way people experience sex.

For example, it turns out that a proportion of men are, or can learn to be, multiply orgasmic, a possibility which Masters and Johnson’s model does not allow. Nor does the emphasis on genitals describe sex particularly accurately for many people. Sex is frequently associated with preferences not just for specific body parts, but also for locations, body zones, particular acts at a particular frequency, or for particular sorts of power relationships or in particular sorts of clothes or costumes. We call this “kink” and it represents a fascinating challenge to the dominant discourses surrounding sex because it exposes a really important fact: people can get up to all sorts of different things and still call it sex.

Against this sort of backdrop, if our aim is to be inclusive, how might we begin to define sex?

Let’s try to keep things simple. We might divide people into two categories: virgins, who have never had sex, and non-virgins, who have. The first time a person has sex, they move from one category to the other in a way that is uni-directional and permanent (you can’t go back).

So far, so good, but what behaviours actually move a person from one category to another? At what point during that first sexual experience do you move from being a virgin to being a non-virgin? Is orgasm necessary? Does oral sex count? How about mutual masturbation? Do genitals have to be involved? If so, which genitals, in what configurations? What effect might sexual orientation have here? How do straight people become non-virgins? Is it different from the way gay people do? How do gay men lose their virginity? How do lesbians? The more you think about it, the more it seems that we have a very real possibility that people might disagree about what sex actually is, in ways that make it impossible to say that anyone in particular is objectively correct.

In 1999, Sanders & Reinisch published a study on this issue. They asked 599 people whether they would “say they had had sex if the most intimate behaviour they had engaged in was…” and then described a whole list of acts: mutual masturbation; giving or receiving oral sex; vaginal penetration; deep kissing; and anal penetration. They found that, while 99.9% of the sample (i.e. most, but not all) agreed that vaginal penetration qualified as sex, whereas 81% thought that anal sex counted. That means 19% of people surveyed thought that anal sex was not actually sex. 2% of people stated that heavy kissing alone was enough to turn an encounter into sex; not many, perhaps, but still some. Other results from the paper are given in the table below. Have a look; it’s fairly clear that individual people can vary in their definitions of what sex actually is.

Individuals may vary, but society as a whole seems to have its own opinions regarding what sex is or at least what sex needs to be to be “acceptable”. Last year, the British Government extended to online video sales a law governing DVDs that renders videos containing certain sexual acts illegal for sale. It is currently illegal to charge money for videos containing, among a few other things, spanking, caning, physical or verbal abuse (regardless of if it’s consensual), watersports, fisting, face sitting or female ejaculation.

The list is almost hilariously arbitrary (although various commenters have pointed out that these particular acts are associated most frequently with porn made for and by women), but signals clearly that our society treats certain kinds of sex as transgressive, as undesirable. The existence of “undesirable” sex, of course, implies that there is “desirable” sex. As feminist anthropologist Gayle Rubin has clearly argued, Western society has constructed an idea of “good” (i.e. morally good, acceptable) sex that is heterosexual, penis-in-vagina and, ultimately, reproductive.

Basing a definition of sex on reproduction may seem, at first glance, like a fairly obvious move. Sex is, after all, one of the two dominant modes of reproduction available to life on earth. Living things tend to reproduce sexually (reproducing with another individual), asexually (reproducing by themselves) or, very occasionally, both. If we focus our discussion on this point, “sex”, for our species, becomes an act of procreation, and all the emphasis on penis-in-vagina sex follows from there.

If that’s our starting point, then the focus on heterosexual, monogamous, non-kinky, committed sex becomes logical because those are the ways in which we, as society, expect children to be produced. Except, of course, that children can be and have been produced in all sorts of ways that vary from that particular set of circumstances. Another exception is the fact that people have more sex than they have babies. These two exceptions alone makes the connection between sex and reproduction problematic.

If not reproduction, then what should we be emphasising when we talk about sex? One logical alternative seems to be pleasure, which is, after all, a fairly regular outcome of sex. Interestingly, groups who have sex for pleasure are regularly targets of social disapproval, legal sanctions and occasionally violent oppression: gay or bisexual people, sex workers, kinky people, women who assert sexual agency, etc. Having sex for pleasure attracts instant and negative attention, in ways that really shore up that dominant “sex is reproduction” idea. Debates and reactions to the availability of contraception add to an array of evidence pointing in one direction: having sex for pleasure seems to be a particularly transgressive act.

If our central focus for discussions about sex becomes pleasure rather than reproduction, suddenly there’s room to move conversations away from an exclusive focus on penises and vaginas and to recognise that, given that people are going to vary in what they find pleasurable, of course definitions of sex are likely to vary between individuals. How might one go about actually having sex in this sort of situation? How can I, a person with my own personal definition of sex and my own list of sexual wants, wills and won’ts, obtain sex if people have different definitions and lists from me?

The earth shattering solution to this problem is simple: we talk about it. We compare definitions and lists and come to mutual agreements about how sex between us is going to function. Conversations about sex need to happen first and foremost between people who want to have it with each other. We need to get used to talking openly about sex, because the only other option is for sex to carry on not being awesome…and with a solution so simple, there’s really no excuse for that.

Dr Jamie Lawson is an anthropologist and sexologist working at Durham University. He enjoys taking concepts people thought they understood and making them complicated, especially sexuality.

The Institute of Sexology is a candid exploration of the most publicly discussed of private acts and is open until 20 September 2015. Sarah Jaffray gives us her insight into the new commission for the exhibition: introducing Neil Bartlett’s work, explaining how visitors can contribute, and talking about what a powerful experience it has been working on the project.

Meet Neil Bartlett: the artist, theatre director and author who would like to ask you a few (perhaps intensely) personal questions. Bartlett is interested in what people have to say about the intimate parts of their existence and in his special commission for the Institute of Sexology exhibition at Wellcome Collection, WOULD YOU MIND?, he does just that.

If you don’t mind answering 24 penetrating questions, fill out a questionnaire, slip it into an envelope and post into a box in the gallery, allowing the artist to use your words and statistics to become part of his installation. In the past few months, a lot of people haven’t minded at all: 6,571 people so far, to be exact.

Some simply answer “yes” or “no”, but most go in depth, sharing how they feel, what they’ve experienced and what their personal beliefs are. Some are raw and painful admissions, some are cheeky, some are filled with emojis and drawings of penises, but almost all, in some way, are engaging.

The provocative nature of the answers is due to the challenging nature of the questions. Initially all written by Bartlett, the 24 questions that comprise the questionnaire are replaced, one by one, each week by a question posed by one of our visitors. “Question 25″ of the questionnaire invites participants to ask whatever they want and, each week, Bartlett chooses a question to replace one of his own. At the end of the commission, at the end of the exhibition, the questionnaire will be completely made up of public questions, creating a wholly public dialogue about sex.

Whether you fill in a questionnaire or not, by reading the quotes and statistics you become part of the work. Just like the questionnaires, the quotes remain anonymous, only the gender and the age of the respondent punctuate their words.

Selected quotes that have been submitted by the public can be read on a scrolling LED sign in the gallery. We’ve included some chosen by Neil Bartlett for the week of 6th April, 2015 throughout this post.

On average, 1,000 questionnaires are submitted each week. They are carefully numbered and read, mined for thought provoking and stimulating content by Bartlett in collaboration with four Wellcome Collection Visitor Experience Assistants (including myself). In the two months since the start of the project, we have seen some interesting patterns emerge:

• Overwhelmingly both men and women are tired of “slut-shaming”;
• Non-consensual sex, gender inequality and fear of admitting sexual preference have been the direct experience of far too many of the respondents;
• Many visitors agree that monogamy is a social construct; and
• On a less serious note, a huge number of people would like to travel back to Classical Greece or Rome to participate in an orgy.

As with all of Bartlett’s work, we run the gamut of human emotion. Humour mingles with despair, as much as pleasure and joy mixes with confusion and anxiety. It is sex after all: a basic human function with not so basic consequences.

To read the questionnaires feels at times like reading the confessions of a stranger: their hopes, their devastations, their desires, the cock-ups (pardon the pun). It has personally affected me, forcing me to consider certain aspects of my own sexual life. But, that is essentially the point of this work. By writing and sharing and reading about another’s sexuality, even anonymously, we learn about ourselves. The power of WOULD YOU MIND? lies in the fact that it unfolds as a dialogue rather than an instructive lesson: this is how sex should be.

The questionnaires are being archived and will be placed in Wellcome Library’s collection for posterity with the hope that researchers will be able to continue the discussion in the years to come.

If you want to be a part of the conversation, come visit The Institute of Sexology and complete a questionnaire. WOULD YOU MIND? can be found in the Archive section of the exhibition, until 20 September 2015.

Sarah is a Visitor Experience Assistant at Wellcome Collection.

Pornography is both consumed and condemned by the public, but there is very little research that engages with ‘ordinary’ people who use it. Researchers Feona Attwood and Clarissa Smith held in-gallery discussions earlier this year, asking how, when and why people turn to pornography. In this post, they tell us more about their work and respond to some of the questions raised during the discussions in our Sexology gallery.

Background

Clarissa Smith is Professor of Sexual Cultures at University of Sunderland and Feona Attwood is Professor of Media and Communications at Middlesex University. We have been researching in the areas of pornography, sexuality and media technologies for more than twenty years. We are also the editors of the Routledge journal “Porn Studies” and Feona is a co-editor of the Sage journal “Sexualities”.

With Professor Martin Barker (University of Aberystwyth) we launched an online questionnaire to examine where, how and why people engage with pornographic representations. We received almost 5,500 responses (2/3 male; 1/3 female) from across the globe.

Questions

How, when and why did you turn to this field of research?

Clarissa’s academic career has centred on the ways in which pornography matters to those who consume it and to those who would condemn it. She started out on this research during her MA studies and continued them as a PhD project looking at how women responded to the publication of a softcore magazine called For Women.

She is interested in the textual formations of pornography and how those play out across different technologies; in how people access and engage with pornographic materials and with other forms of sexualized products; she’s also intrigued by the constant demands for increasing regulation and censorship which rarely seem to engage with the idea that pornographies are realms of representation which dramatise all kinds of sexual feelings and fantasies and therefore actually matter to people in important ways.

Feona’s interests in this area of work first came out of what struck her as a gap between the concerns and panics that are regularly voiced about sex and the media and the lack of real knowledge about different kinds of media representations and their audiences. Some of her writing has focused on the ways in which pornography and other kinds of sexual media have become the focus of public and political discussion; most recently in the debates about ‘extreme’ pornography and the sexualization of young people. She has also tried to chart the different approaches that researchers have taken to the study of pornography and to describe their experiences of working in this area.

From the people you gave the questionnaire to (mainly students) what was the most popular response to the question asking why people engage with pornography?

Our respondents were all ages – we used snowballing techniques to get people involved; we didn’t target students specifically. We wanted to take a different starting point from the usual worries about the effects of pornography; one that was concerned with people’s actual everyday engagements with pornography and which was not based on assumptions about its harmfulness. We wanted to gather a body of responses from people who engage with online pornography –  people who are almost entirely absent from the debates in the press and elsewhere.

We tried to do this in a way that those people, who are likely to be intensely aware of the ways they are talked about, categorised and belittled, would trust us sufficiently to tell us their stories, their responses, their pleasures and their preferences. In ways that would allow us to discern patterns, distinct groupings, connections and separations. To do this, we needed to generate enough responses to allow for secure quantitative analyses – but what mattered most to us was hearing the accounts that people would give us, in their own words, of the nature of their involvements and engagements with online pornography.

We know that such accounts are not transparent truths. They are the ways that people are willing and able to tell us about themselves. But that is their distinctive value.  Through the words that men and women, straight and homosexual, young and old choose and use, we can hear their reasons and interests in sex, their sense of sexual self, what pornography means to them and the ways in which it may matter to them.

There was no one response to this, instead we were able to see more than a dozen reasons for engaging with porn.

1. Boredom, it’s just there, no special reason.
2. Escaping from negatives (stress, loneliness, etc).
3. Inadequate sexual relationships/opportunities.
4. Simple pleasure in it, intensification of orgasms.
5. As an aesthetic as well as erotic experience.
6. Seeing new, previously unimaginable things.
7. As a component in an ongoing relationship.
8. As a leisure/cultural choice in its own right.
9. Working in porn, or being in a community of users.
10. Trying out fantasies, exploring one’s sexual identity.
11. As part of a wider recognition of the force of sex.
12. Visiting the explicit, the naughty, the illicit, the dirty.
13. As a thing in itself, with its own troubling attractions.

In all of your time researching, are you ever shocked, surprised or embarrassed anymore?

Of course, we can still feel all of those things! But what matters most is what we do with those responses of ours – we have to examine our own responses (why are we embarrassed or shocked?) if we are to begin to understand the diversity of people’s engagements with pornography.

For people in long-term monogamous relationships, does use of pornography increase?

Our research indicates that people in long and short term relationships may be using pornography in different ways. Consider the following responses:

“Solo sex is really important to me, whether or not I’m in a relationship, and porn is one of the components of that for me.”

“I feel that personal pleasure is very important, and porn is a good visual aid. It’s also great with a partner.”

“It provides stimulation, as well as inspiration for sexual fantasies. It also provides ideas for trying new things with my partner and it’s a way to turn us both on when watching it together and give us a different kind of sexual experience.”

“Being from different countries, my partner and I must now and then spend extended periods of time apart. To keep intimacy alive and to connect sexually with each other during this time (and sometimes when we’re together!) we share pornographic videos and images we find online.”

“My partner and I are in a long distance relationship. We send links of porn to each other as a way of keeping things fresh and hot.”

Did you consider a question about whether people always masturbate when watching porn or if they view it as more of an artistic experience?

We did consider this and in the responses we collected we can see both of these orientations, often in the same account. For example:

“Pornography (viewing/reading) stimulates my desire for sexual/emotional connection in the absence of a partner and permits me to connect with myself in a way that I find revitalises me and keeps me from feeling old. If I no longer had the opportunity to view porn, I would miss seeing the beauty of the male body in its infinite sameness and variety. That would make me very sad.”

Anti-porn people often argue that women in porn are exploited and unhappy. Have you ever heard this said about men?

This is sometimes said about gay porn, particularly that men are ‘feminised’ in gay porn. The claim that pornography is a form of sexual violence continues to influence political and public health policies. In fact the word ‘pornography’ seems to inevitably call up the question of ‘violence’ as a word association –  pornography is often defined as an act of violence and violence is often suggested to be an inescapable part of human sexual relations, but the evidence for this is quite slim and often seems to be targeted at forms of representation or practice that don’t conform to very normative ideas of what sex ought to be like.

“Violent porn” seems to refer almost always to violence towards women. Have any similar studies been done on gay (male) porn?

The research on the effects of porn is very contradictory with claims for both effects and no effects. Even so, previous research into media forms seen as ‘problematic’ (comics, horror film etc) has demonstrated that emotive terms such as ‘violent’ and ‘extreme’ frequently act as code-words for objections based on moral, political and taste grounds. Moreover research which starts from wanting to find the ‘effects of pornography’ is underpinned by unexamined and unproven causal claims of a link between viewing and perpetrating illegal acts – there is a substantial body of research evidence which entirely refutes these claims

What are your personal thoughts on the government’s recent changes in legislation regarding certain BDSM porn acts?

Calls for the legislation rested on an amorphous ‘increasing public concern’ about ‘extreme’ pornography, but the evidence base for this public disquiet was not offered.

Panics about troublesome media forms are not innocent of their own politics and prejudices and in the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act the definitions of the materials to be legislated were vague; we were extremely concerned that the law would criminalise images which ‘appear to be real’, clearly those drafting the Act had no knowledge of the vast body of research examining the complexities of viewers understandings and relationships to the ‘real’ in all kinds of media. When it comes to BDSM material, there is a very real risk that images which have been created entirely consensually and with attention to the safety and comfort of those involved may be prosecuted.

What is your point of view on the recent “censorship” of UK produced porn by the recent amendment to the 2003 Communications Act?

Again, we feel that the amendments are based not on rigorous research but on a range of fears and a desire to be ‘seen to be doing something’, which does not make for good law!

For more information about Clarissa and Feona’s work, visit Porn Research.

Can you sum up the joy of sex in one tweet? What about the darker side? To celebrate our sexology literature tour, we want you to sweep us off our feet with your poetry skills.

We’re looking for your best efforts to craft a poem about sex using the medium of Twitter, as part of Sex in the Afternoon. The limits imposed by writing a poem on Twitter can result in surprising creativity, as these examples show.

Inspired? Then enter our competition! The only rules are that it has to be about sex (so not love per se) and it must fit into one tweet. Share your poem exploring and exposing sex in all its joy, pain and glory with us on Twitter by using the hashtag #OdeToSex (that still leaves you with 130 characters!). How can we express our desires? What stops us?

The winner will receive a pair of tickets to Sex in the Afternoon, the London event at the Southbank Centre on 26 July 2015. You have until 14 July 2015 to tweet your poem. The winning entry will be selected by our panel of judges:

• Lisa Mead Creative Producer, Apples and Snakes
• Elizabeth Lynch Sexology Season Producer, Wellcome Trust
• Malika Booker Writer of poetry, plays and monologues, Malika is one of the writers involved in Sex in the Afternoon (find out more)

Read the poems entered so far

Terms and conditions apply, so make sure you read them before entering.

Sex in the Afternoon is a live literature tour and four short digital films commissioned as part of Wellcome Collection’s national Sexology Season.

To celebrate our sexology literature tour, we asked you to sweep us off our feet with your poetry skills for our #OdeToSex competition. Here we announce the winners and tell you what we loved about their poems.

We weren’t sure what to expect when we asked you to write poems about sex for us. The focus of the competition was very much on the act of sex itself; not love, not passion, not romance. Sex. In addition, we wanted those poems to fit entirely within a single tweet (leaving only 130 characters after the hashtag is included).

To our surprise and joy we received 111 #OdeToSex poems in total over the last couple of weeks, varying in tone and approach. Some were funny while some were sad; some were delicate and others were graphic; some, just a few words long, others filled the word count.

Russell from Apples and Snakes, one of our judges, felt that “the overwhelming sense we got from these poems is that sex is fun: from the throwaway quips and puns to the pieces that simply revelled in the experience. The other thing that came across is that a universally shared experience can possess so many facets. Judging this competition was itself like the sex act: a rollercoaster of emotions culminating in a sense of plateau.“

The winners

The quality was so high there had to be more than one winner. The judges were unanimous in their decision of the top two and, unable to choose one over the other, selected them as joint winners.

One of our judges, Elizabeth Lynch, said “The winning poems capture the raw physicality of the sexual act and reflect sexual behaviour realities that are rarely represented in popular mainstream narratives.“

@LittleWhitt13

Malika Booker, another judge (and one of the writers involved in Sex in the Afternoon), said there was “something fresh and endearing about the winning poems, such as the surprising haiku ending “don’t wake the baby”.” Elizabeth mentioned that @LittleWhitt13 “nails the pleasure and potential panic for those stolen moments of what can feel like illicit sex when you have small children.” Russell felt the poem “throws up one of the real-life conundra surrounding sex (and begs the question ‘Has the baby been born yet? Or even conceived?’).“

@WriterOfSound

“The unique, beautiful approach to the sexual act between aged bodies” caught Malika’s attention in this poem and Elizabeth liked that it “valued older bodies and the continuing lust for life and fun“. It also comes up with “one of the best metaphors: sex as an ancient scroll – a contrast to all that wriggling and giggling elsewhere” said Russell.

Both @WriterOfSound and @LittleWhitt13 have each won two tickets to Sex in the Afternoon, the London event at the Southbank Centre on 26 July 2015.

Highly commended

The quality was so high that we’ve selected a third poem to be highly commended.

@labellaraquella

@labellaraquella “reminds us that sex isn’t or can’t always be what we want it to be” says Elizabeth. Malika felt the poem “stood out due to the sophisticated imagistic language used to describe sexual engagement‏”, while Russell said it “reminds us that sex is colourful, dizzying and strangely addictive. Nice use of the word ‘yaw’, too.”

As a highly commended entry, @labellaraquella has won a ticket to the above event also.

Thanks to everyone who submitted a poem or enjoyed reading and sharing them as they came in. You can still read all the entries.

Tickets are still available for the London event at the Southbank Centre on 26 July 2015.

Do you know how the “secret” gay language came to be? Perhaps you didn’t even know there was such a thing. Nick Dent gives us a potted history of Polari, a language born out of discrimination.

“If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.“ Nelson Mandela

To call Polari a language may be a bit of a stretch. It is more accurately described as a “cant”: a lexicon deliberately designed to deceive. One in particular is very famous; you’ve probably heard more than a few of its dickey birds in your bottle of beers. Cockney rhyming slang was thought to be used by either traders to communicate without punters knowing what was being said or, perhaps even more tantalisingly, as a thieves’ cant, where being understood could result in arrest.

Polari has likewise been used to avoid arrest by a community of people. It starts as all good stories do, amazingly, at a Punch and Judy show.

Punch and Judy were brought over by Italian immigrants and, as a result, Polari has strong romantic roots. Common words, such as bona meaning “good” (buono in Italian) or vada meaning to “look” or “see” (vedere in Italian), highlight this connection. However, many Punch and Judy performers felt that they were wasted on the seaside and moved into the theatre; the language followed.

Acting, as a profession, has always involved a melting pot of people and has generally been more accepting of minorities than the general population. Thus, Polari started to incorporate loan words from different languages, such as Romany gypsy (moey meaning “face”), Yiddish (schnozzle meaning “nose”) and even cockney rhyming (hampsteads, meaning your pearly white hampstead heath). Over time these evolved to become distinct words in a new dialect.

One minority in particular has often been associated with the performing arts, because they are usually much more welcoming of the homosexual community than the world outside. (Weirdly, there are still no A list Hollywood leading men who are gay – sorry, NPH – a sad irony). This meant that the language was eventually spoken in the gay bars and clubs of London’s West End; gradually the language became associated with London’s gay scene.

For a long time people engaging in homosexual acts in this country were judged by the ecclesiastical courts, threatened with damnation and hellfire for all eternity. It wasn’t put into English law until the Buggery act of 1533, which basically said that anyone who commits buggery will be killed and have their lands passed to the king. This law was eventually changed so the land would be passed on to their children or wife.

This is pretty much how the law stayed until 1861 when the death penalty was abolished and proven homosexuals would instead be locked up in the sole company of men for a number of years. A somewhat questionable curative method. In 1885, having difficulty proving and charging men with Buggery, the authorities were driven instead to prohibit “gross indecency between males”. This was a far easier charge to prove; indeed it was this which led to Oscar Wilde being imprisoned.

This was how the law stayed until 1967, when a law decriminalised homosexual acts between two men over 21 years of age in private (England and Wales). It was still illegal if more than two men were involved; if either was under 21 years old; if the act was done outside of their home; or the deed was done in either Scotland or Northern Ireland. So if two 20 year old men wanted to have sex in a hotel in Aberdeen while their friend watched, they would have to flagrantly disregard the law. Amazingly, it was illegal in Scotland and Northern Ireland until 1980 and 1982 respectively. The age of consent was not changed to match heterosexual sex until 2001.

With the very real fear of death, and latterly jail, it was useful if not essential for homosexual men to be able to communicate then-illegal ideas without being caught. Polari was a way to do just that. Once the practice of homosexuality was legalised in 1967, Polari somewhat lost its usefulness and slowly dropped out of use.

Today it is rarely spoken, but a few words are still recognisable. Naff is a Polari word which originally meant “a non-homosexual” (from not available for f***ing); this later evolved into a more general word meaning “bad”. It was even used by royalty when Princess Anne told reporters to “Naff off!”. Other examples include a palaver, meaning a “hassle” or “fuss”; and drag, meaning “clothes” (commonly known thanks to the popularity of the drag scene).

If you feel a twinge of sadness at not having heard it spoken in all its fluent glory, worry not. Polari’s two most famous speakers can still be heard on Radio 4 Extra. Julian and Sandy (played by Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams) were out of work actors who often found their various temporary jobs attended by Kenneth Horne in the radio show “Round the Horne”. This ran from 1965-1968, and was broadcast to an estimated 9 million people at its peak.

This was at a time when homosexual acts were illegal, so doing so was very brave. However, some have also suggested that it helped lead to Polari’s downfall: once people who weren’t gay friendly started to hear and understand it, it was no longer useful. It also has its fair share of contemporary criticism, with some saying it’s unnecessarily divisive and even isolates the gay community. Some go so far to say that its overly dramatic (and even camp) tone can reinforce preconceptions about the gay community as a whole.

However, many similar languages exist and are still in use in places where homosexuality is either illegal or culturally unacceptable. These form a part of what is referred to as “lavender linguistics”. Examples from around the world include “bahasa binan” in Indonesia and “swardspeak” in the Philippines. Living up to its reputation as the rainbow nation, South Africa even has two: “IsiNgqumo”, a Bantu based language derived from Zulu; and “Gayle”, which is derived from Afrikaans.

For gay men (and, to a lesser extent, women) around the world and throughout history these dialects offer a way to stay safe and became a proud part of the culture. People may now say it’s divisive and that times have moved on, but it originates from a time when the gay community didn’t have much. But they did have Polari.

And as Nelson Mandela said “If you parlare to an omee in a lingo he parlares, that goes to his loaf. If you parlare to an omee-palone in Polari, that goes to his strawberry.”

Nick is a Visitor Experience Assistant at Wellcome Collection.

The definition and diagnosis of hysteria has quite a history. Sarah Jaffray takes a look back over the years to explore the beginnings of hysteria in Greece, through to animal magnetism, vibrators and shell shock in WWI. 

When it comes to explaining hysteria, you might have heard some variation of the following.

1. In ancient Greece it was thought that women’s wombs wandered through their bodies, causing madness: (hystera = womb; hysterikos = of the womb).
2. Hysteria stems from sexual frustration in women.
3. (And the one you are most likely to have heard) In the 19th century women thought to have hysteria were “treated” with vibrators by their doctors.

All of these are simplifications, perhaps even pure misogyny. In fact, the idea of hysteria has changed throughout Western European history: the disease has been a catch-all (tragically) for ailments as wide-ranging as epilepsy, infertility, PTSD, depression and menopause. The simplified urban myths of hysteria make assumptions about the continuity of women’s sexuality. As historian Helen King explains, hysteria is not a single disease entity with a continuous history nor is it a disease with a continuous set of symptoms.

The ancient Greek doctor Hippocrates, perhaps the first to diagnose hysteria, explained the disorder as “suffocation of the womb” – as the womb moved throughout the body it produced different symptoms in response to its trapped location. One cure was anointing the head with “oil of lilies” and massaging the patient. In ancient Rome, Celsus prescribed bloodletting or cupping followed by the application of hot moist plasters to the genital region. In the ancient text of Soranus (ca. 100 AD), the main objective for these treatments was to help with painful or non-existent menstruation.

Sensibility and Mesmerism

The conception of the “suffocation of the womb” persisted for centuries, until the Enlightenment ushered in a greater understanding of anatomical function. Although anatomy was better understood, the comprehension of mental function was still a burgeoning science, as proved by the work of physician George Cheyne who wrote The English Malady in 1733.

Dr Cheyne attempted to separate the English from their enemies the French, Germans and Spanish (and their malady: syphilis) by saying the English had melancholy, anxiety, nervousness (i.e. not syphilis). Cheyne claimed that this disorder could only happen to intelligent people: “fools, weak or stupid Persons… are seldom troubled with Vapours or Lowness of Spirits.” He was perhaps the first to call the disorder a “nervous illness”, linking it to functions in the brain and motor system, which were being discovered more and more through dissections and Enlightenment enquiry. Women got the vapours and men had the (wandering) spleen; the whole thing was called “sensibility” (hence Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility).

In the late 18th century Anton Mesmer had the cure for all of those aristocrats afflicted with the vapours and the spleen: mesmerism, his own brand of animal magnetism. Animal magnetism was not, at first, seen as potent sexual energy; rather it concerned the energy that flowed through the nervous system and how that energy could be transferred to others as a method of healing. It could be manipulated and channelled from one person to another through massage or transference that looks like the image below.

At a Mesmer Banquet people would hold onto metal rods which would be lightly electrically charged by Mesmer’s animal magnetism, which would then pulsate through the metal rods, helping to cure them of their nervous illnesses. Thought to be too sexual when it began to be used in private sessions, Mesmer’s technique was discredited and he was disgraced.

The Height of Hysteria

In the mid-19th century, Silas Weir Mitchell created the “rest cure” as a treatment of hysteria. Mitchell believed hysteria was caused by over-stimulation of the mind, which women could not take because they did not have the capacity. If prescribed the rest cure, a woman would be confined to bed; force-fed rich, fatty foods; massaged; and electro-shocked (in some cases).

His cure is famously explained in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper (about her experience at “rest”). The gifted neurologist Jean Martin Charcot, who worked at Salpêtrière (a hospital and asylum for the working classes just outside of Paris), was absolutely stumped by the “dis-ease”. He attempted to document the symptoms by photographing, drawing and even publicly displaying patients in various states of hysteria in an attempt to find a consistency in the affliction so that he might be able to treat it.

Some contemporary rumours suggest that doctors like Charcot masturbated their patients with vibrators, performed clitorectomies on them or used electrocution of testicles/uterus to cure hysteria; these ideas have since been debunked by several historians, including Leslie Hall. Charcot most certainly did not use these particular torturous abuses as a cure, but he did employ the ovary clamp (you can imagine the visual). Some patients even requested it when they felt symptoms coming on.

So, where exactly did the myth of vibrators come from if the most famous hysterical doctor of the 19th century did not use them to treat patients? The source of this myth is Rachel Maines and her 1999 work The Technology of Orgasm (which seems to be the only source of this information). It is true that with the evolution and availability of electricity, vibrators were used by doctors to treat patients for all sorts of ailments. Electronic massage was used, but it is highly unlikely it was used to stimulate orgasm (again see Leslie Hall). That’s not to say that people did not eventually use electronic massage for that purpose.

Psychosomatic

The extreme misdiagnosis of hysteria slowed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries because of two major factors: psychoanalysis and World War I. Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis (literally “talking cure”) had its origins in hysteria: Freud was Charcot’s student. Along with his research partner Joseph Breuer, Freud was able to explain that the physical manifestations of hysteria were not a result of nerves or disorders in the physical body. Instead, physical symptoms were brought on by mental trauma.

Freud and Breuer are the first to assert that hysteria happens in the mind, not triggered by the physical brain, nervous system or the body. Their book Studies on Hysteria (1895) introduced the talking cure as a method of treatment for those afflicted with bouts of hysteria.

Shortly thereafter, World War I produced thousands of men with the same symptoms of hysteria; this time it was called “war neurosis” or “shell shock”. The British army alone claimed 80,000 cases of shell shock by the end of the war. Because the victims of this brand of hysteria were primarily men, the experimentation with treatment changed, varying from electro-shock to abstinence. The study of mental trauma and its physical results began to be taken as a serious point of focus.

So what is exactly is hysteria? How can we define it? It is mental instability, fits of rage, anxiety; things that can actually happen when you are suffering from an illness or trauma. In 1980, hysteria was removed from medical texts as a disorder unto itself, but it has remained present as a symptom of disease brought on by specific trauma, both physical and mental.

Although it is now seen as a symptom or result of another illness, it has marked women for centuries: their volatile behaviour, their need to be tamed physically, their weak mental constitution. Although the myths of hysteria are fanciful, its real history not only reveals how it has been a tool to control women’s behaviour and bodies, but shows the frightful neglect mental trauma has received throughout the centuries.

Sarah is a Visitor Experience Assistant at Wellcome Collection.

Earlier this year, we held some in-gallery discussions in the Institute of Sexology exploring the definitions and terms used in Britain’s Natsal survey for different aspects of sexual behaviour, and how these map onto visitors’ own ideas about sex. Soazig and her team look at how you describe something as fluid as sex.

In the late 1980s, amid growing fear and uncertainty about the spread of HIV and AIDS in Britain, the idea for a large-scale representative national sex survey was born. The aim was to use the best available sampling methods to collect robust, reliable, data for a National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles; the first time something like this had been attempted anywhere in the world.

But once you’ve got your representative sample, how do you actually go about asking those difficult questions? What kind of language do you use to make sure that people of all ages, and from all backgrounds, can understand – and will answer – the questions? Are some questions too offensive or personal to ask?

In May, we held a series of in-gallery discussions in the Institute of Sexology exploring the definitions and terms we used in Britain’s National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (Natsal) for different aspects of sexual behaviour, and how these map onto visitors’ own ideas about sex.

First things first, what do we mean by “sex”? We asked visitors to think of all the different sexual things people might do and write them on sticky notes. This, they obediently did. Some even drew pictures. We then asked them to stick the notes under the headings “sexual intercourse or having sex” or “any other type of experience of a sexual kind”. This was trickier.

For many people, the idea of grouping sexual activities like this didn’t make sense and they questioned our need to label and define. For others there were clear distinctions: people generally agreed that sexual intercourse had to involve more than one person, and had to involve penetration, whereas other sexual experiences could include things like kissing, massage, masturbation, fantasy and phone sex.

Although no group came up with a clear consensus about what counted as sex, most people understood the need for researchers to settle on some kind of definition so that participants are all thinking of the same thing when they answer the questions. For our findings to be useful for public health, we need information on the specific physical acts that people have engaged in. However, in real life sex is rarely a purely physical “act” and over time the survey has evolved to include more questions about the emotional and social aspects of sex and relationships.

The Natsal questionnaire covers topics ranging from how people first learned about sex when they were growing up to the wide range of experiences they may have had since, and their current views on different types of sexual relationships.

How do the questions stand up to scrutiny from members of the public? We borrowed techniques from cognitive interviewing (a method of testing questionnaires for comprehension, acceptability and ease of recall) to probe visitors’ understanding of the questions we use on Natsal. What did they think the question was getting at? Would they be able to answer accurately? How would they feel about being asked these questions?

On the whole, people said our questions were clear and easy to understand and felt that they’d be happy to answer them, quite a relief given the work we put into designing and testing them. However, there were some criticisms: some found our questions implied certain norms when it comes to sex or identity and that there was an underlying assumption in some questions that a particular sexual experience was consensual.

Others laughed about the old-fashioned wording; perhaps our questions haven’t quite caught up with the way technology has changed people’s sexual and romantic lives.

It won’t be long before we start thinking about doing another Natsal survey, which would be the fourth in a series carried out every 10 years since 1990. When we do, we’ll be faced again with the challenge of balancing the need to keep the wording consistent so that we can look at change over time, while at the same time making sure that our questions are inclusive, relevant and reflect the diversity of people’s sex lives.

For more about how the original Natsal definitions were devised, based on interviews with members of the public in the late 1980s, the original “Talking about sex” report can be downloaded here.

Soazig Clifton is an NIHR Research Methods Fellow at University College London, and a Senior Researcher at NatCen Social Research. She is part of the core research team for the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (Natsal).

Oxana Metiuk is an Interviewer at NatCen Social Research, and has worked both on the development of the Natsal questionnaire, and also conducting Interviews for the main study. She was the North-West of England Project Manager for the study fieldwork. 

Hayley Lepps is a Researcher at NatCen Social Research, specialising in health research and cognitive testing of questionnaires.

The Institute of Sexology closed last month, and after 117 events, 82 workshops and 8,600 live audience members and participants, the Sexology Season is also drawing to an end. The Season has been running for a year now all over the UK and Elizabeth Lynch, its producer, shares her highlights with us.

“Sexuality can for many be such a private issue, but at the same time it’s everywhere in our society, so people are usually both a bit shy and at the same time very interested in discussing it.”
Dr Lena Wånggren, sexuality researcher

What do you know about sex and how do you know it? How does research into sexual health affect our behaviour and our attitudes to sex? As Sexology Season Producer, these questions underpinned my thinking when developing the programme. We asked artists, writers, filmmakers, academics, health professionals, sex workers, over-65s, teenagers and people with cancer to explore and question with us.

“It’s so rare for us to have an open, honest conversation about sex. It was nice to reflect on my own feelings about sex and great to have a sexologist on board.”
Audience member

The Sexology Season enabled the themes of The Institute of Sexology at Wellcome Collection in London to be shared and explored beyond the exhibition and across the UK; a pioneering initiative for Wellcome Collection. Sex can be a risky topic but thanks to partners who were keen to work collaboratively and to respond imaginatively to the challenge, the Season has been successful on a number of levels.

We commissioned an interactive infographic as well as the book Sex by Numbers by Professor David Spiegelhalter, which drew on the Natsal surveys.

Sounds of Sexology engaged young people and sexologists in five locations to research, explore and create songs that expressed ideas around sex that are important to them.

The Sex in the Afternoon literature project featured films, an #odetosex Twitter competition and a performance tour. For the writers involved, sharing a platform with a sexologist was enlightening and gave them surprising insights into their work.

Three eclectic programmes took place in Manchester, Brighton and Glasgow involving 20 arts, culture and community partners. From performances, films and exhibitions to walks, talks and workshops, the content embraced pleasure and desire; gender and sexuality; sex and ageing; pornography; sex education; sex work; consent; and opened up conversations about what constitutes ‘normal’.

My highlights include the walks in Glasgow that were animated by artists, Hidden Sexology (conFAB) and Walking:Holding (Rosana Cade at The Arches); and the Human Library (The Arches) where I met a young drag queen and a young gender-fluid person who gave me some new insights into how to be yourself when mainstream society imposes so many limitations on how we can identify ourselves. These more intimate events were a valuable opportunity for one to one experiences and small group conversations.

I cried for all the right reasons during Lois Weaver’s What Tammy Needs to Know about Getting Old and Having Sex, which toured to all three Season locations and used a musical chat show format to playfully engage local seniors and audiences in sharing thoughts and revelations on sex, desire and ageing. You can hear an extract here.

Manchester’s programme featured some popular ‘Lates’, notably at Manchester Art Gallery where the Sexology Salon brought in their largest ever gallery tour audience for Private Erotica in Public Places followed by Frocks and Sex with Professor Helen Storey and at MOSI where a host of activities included a speed-dating experiment and eating sexy food.

My Sick! Festival highlights in Brighton and Manchester were the fascinating debates such as Why Be Normal? and Sexual Transactions. The speakers offered refreshing alternative narratives and contexts for sexual behaviour and attitudes that were opened out for lively and interesting discussions with audiences.

It was great to hear that SICK! Festival won the prestigious EFFE (Europe for Festivals and Festivals for Europe) 2015/16 Award for excellence.

I’m delighted that we have captured many of the debates, talks and post-show discussion in the Talk About Sex podcasts, which in turn can inspire new conversations.

A few more events are taking place during the autumn: a film, a podcast serial and the publication Sex Between the Covers, the culmination of Glasgow Women’s Library’s sexology programme; and performances of Under the Covers and Sex in Afternoon are touring. On 2 October, Glasgow Women’s Library’s sexology film programme bagged the Education Award from Cinema For All, which  is the national organisation for the support and development of community film exhibition in the UK.

What will all these provocations and conversations on sexology continue to inspire? What will the new relationships generated locally and with Wellcome Trust produce in the future?

Elizabeth is the Sexology Season Producer at the Wellcome Trust.