Here’s a story from a quarter-millennium ago called “The Female Husband” about a notorious lesbian of the era said to have married a woman while posing as a man. Some of the delicate phrasings are quite humorous:

As Molly Hamilton was extremely warm in her inclinations, and as those inclinations were so violently attached to Mrs. Johnson, it would not have been difficult for a less artful woman, in the most private hours, to turn the ardour of enthusiastic devotion into a different kind of flame.

Their conversation, therefore, soon became in the highest manner criminal, and transactions not fit to be mention’d past between them.

Or, how about:

Molly assured her mother of the falsehood of this report; and as it is usual for persons who are too eager in any cause, to prove too much, she asserted some things which staggered her mother’s belief, and made her cry out, O child, there is no such thing in human nature.
…
The whole truth having been disclosed before the justice, and something of too vile, wicked and scandalous a nature, which was found in the Doctor’s trunk, having been produced in evidence against her, she was committed to Bridewell.
…
At the trial the said Mary Price the wife, was produced as a witness, and being asked by the council, whether she had ever any suspicion of the Doctor’s sex during the whole time of the courtship, she answered positively in the negative. She was then asked how long they had been married, to which she answered three months; and whether they had cohabited the whole time together? to which her reply was in the affirmative. Then the council asked her, whether during the time of this cohabitation, she imagined the Doctor had behaved to her as a husband ought to his wife? Her modesty confounded her a little at this question; but she at last answered she did imagine so. Lastly, she was asked when it was that she first harboured any suspicion of her being imposed upon? To which she answered, she had not the least suspicion till her husband was carried before a magistrate, and there discovered, as hath been said above.

It sounds like pretty good use was made of “something of too vile, wicked and scandalous a nature, which was found in the Doctor’s trunk”.

From the random email humor file:

I shall seek and find you …

I shall take you to bed and control you …

I will make you ache, shake and sweat until you grunt and groan …

I will make you beg for mercy …

I will exhaust you to the point that you will be relieved when I leave …

And you will be weak for days …

All my love …

–The Flu

I’ve been just sick enough lately (not flu, Jupiter be praised!) to find this really funny.

Daze has the story of a cad guy who had to remove from the web his ungentlemanly tale of drunken lustful shenanigans with one Katy Johnson, a former Miss Vermont. And sure enough, the story is gone. But the Google cache remembers.

[Well, it did for awhile. But then it forgot. But it’s OK, Tucker fought back, and the story’s back up on his site.]

The tale itself is fairly ghastly, and paints neither its author nor its subject in a good light. But I can’t see anything in there that ought to override the author’s freedom of speech, and of the press. So I’m posting the link, but no salacious excerpt.

Much later update: Tucker has removed those links from his website and excluded them from the Internet Archive. But some of the material survives survives elseweb.

I am home sick today. Head cold, yucky but not too miserable. Yesterday, on my way home early to take a nap, I stopped to grab some liquids and a pint of ice cream for comfort food. Wound up with a little tub of Nestle Bon Bons, which are rich little nuggets of vanilla ice cream dipped in a chocolate shell. The ice cream is heavily whipped with air so it’s soft as silk even at freezer temperature, and the chocolate shell is thin, fragile, and apt to break or melt in your fingers during the brief journey from tub to mouth. Both ice cream and chocolate are very yummy.

Gentlemen, I’m telling you, these things are sex pills!

So far that’s an untested theory. But I’m convinced. Get a tub of these things and sit down on a couch next to any woman. If she has even the slightest touch of warm inclination toward you, or feels she should, and you play your cards right, you should have her eating out of your hand (literally) inside of three minutes.

Better yet, since these things are fragile and melty and too good to let go to waste, there’s going to be some licking of (at least) fingers within another two minutes.

Lick her sticky fingers. Get her to lick yours. Tease her with a bon bon, put it between your lips instead of into her mouth. Crack the chocolate shell visibly with a light-but-firm press of your lips so that the ice cream starts to melt along with the chocolate shell. If she kisses you at this time, give the bon bon back. If not, feed her another one, but slowly….

Dammit, if you have to be a peacock, be a good one!

As soon as this head cold clears up I’m going to have to find me a lady friend with whom to experiment. The Nestle Bon Bon theory of seduction must be tested.

A day too late, I learn a new vocabulary word that I sorely needed for the title of this post. Thanks, of course, to Eugene Volokh.

I think this picture is evidence that sometimes recycling can be taken a little bit too far:

I just stumbled over a fascinating series of blog essays entitled “Why Your Wife Won’t Have Sex With You.” If this is a topic of interest to you, as it was to me during a six-and-a-half-year doomed relationship, you’ll want to set aside a couple of hours and read through the whole series.

G’wan, do that now, before I poison it for you with my opinion.

Back already? Gosh you read fast.

Anyway, it’s a very thoughtful series, clearly written by a woman with a level head, an introspective disposition, and a lot of good will. Her observations are useful and interesting and I wish I’d had a chance to read them before my girlfriend, who I loved quite a lot but who had serious sexual issues, got rid of me and picked another man not to have sex with.

That was supposed to be funny.

Moving rapidly along. So I’m reading this excellent series of essays, nodding and agreeing and going “Hmm, that explains a lot” and generally getting myself edified, when suddenly it struck me. There’s a unifying theme to the whole essay series, and it’s this: “Your wife won’t have sex with you because you’re doing something wrong or failing to do something right.”

Yup, it’s all about you, buster.

And I suppose, in a weird definitional way, that has to be true. If getting it right as a man is defined as doing whatever it takes to get laid by your chosen woman, then by definition if she’s not willing to be intimate you need to get your act together.

Still, I’m concerned by the way this approach utterly disposes of the concept of an intimate partnership between two responsible adult humans. If it’s never about the woman, if there’s never any concept that by cleaving unto a partnership relationship she undertook some responsibility for maintaining the intimate part of the relationship, then there’s no partnership. There’s just another pea hen watching from the sidelines, waiting to see whether any of those strutting peacocks ever manage to wave their tail feathers just the right way to make her tingle.

Maybe that’s the way the world is. But I was raised to afford women a bit more humanity than that. I’m concerned that this essay series dehumanizes women by, effectively, absolving them from any responsibility for intimacy.

Go read the essays. If nothing else, you’ll learn to be a better peacock.

2012 Link Update: The original Salon.com link went 404 in 2009. I’ve replaced it with an archives.org version. The author also moved much of her Salon material to an archive blog, possibly with some curatorial changes: Why Your Wife Won’t Have Sex With You.