June 1st, 2004 -- by Bacchus
Bad Sex Advice
Don’t talk to me about the wisdom of the ancients:
“And it is absolutely NOT necessary for wives to move at all. For a women prevents and battles pregnancy if in her joy, she answers the man’s lovemaking with her buttocks, and her soft breasts billow forward and back; for she diverts the ploughshare out of the furrow and makes the seed miss its mark. Whores practice such movements for their own reasons, to avoid conception and pregnancy, and also to make the lovemaking more enjoyable for men, which obviously isn’t necessary for our wives.”
— Lucretius (60 B.C.)
Found via a link over on Tiny Nibbles.
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Shorter URL for sharing: http://www.erosblog.com/?p=910
Shorter URL for sharing: http://www.erosblog.com/?p=910
so glad i’m a bit more liberated than that.
who wants to have sex with a rug????
Once again, I fall to my knees and thank God I was born in 20th Century America.
Which, since I’m an atheist, should tell you how glad I am not to have been born in Rome around 60 B.C.
where does bacchus find this stuff anyway?!
i’m confused why wives wouldn’t have tried or wanted to make sex more enjoyable for their husbands.
where will we be in another 2000 years? :)
Yeah, this passage isn’t one of the crown jewels of “The Nature of Things”, but Roman aristocrats are hardly who you’d look to for a representation of the sexual thought of the time! IIRC, old Lucretius goes on to explain about the proper consistency of semen: that it should be medium-thick so that it might “best penetrate and yet properly cleave to her innermost recesses”, or something like that.. so, you know, it won’t slip out like water, on the opposite extreme, be too thick to get way in there!
We weren’t even assigned to translate this “ploughshare” bit back in my old senior Lucretius class.. lucky I read it out of prurient interest anyway, though — the dirty old professor put it on the final exam! The same guy later assigned the Filthiest Poem in History, and proved all our suspicions. :P
t- you have procreation sex with your wife (who you married because it was an advantageous matchnot for any other reason) and you have fun sex with a prostitute. You can’t “sully” your wife by having fun sex with her.
Also at the time, prostitution was a respected occupation because you could spend time with a man and “relieve” him of his urges so he could respect his wife.