Can you be a Victorian lady?
Why I never wanted to be a Disney Princess
Hi horny readers! Thank you so, so much for reading the ADULT SEX ED newsletter.
New here? Adult Sex Ed comedically challenges why we think what we think about sex. I’m Dani Faith Leonard, a filmmaker, comedy writer, and performer. In 2018, I started a comedy show called Adult Sex Ed and launched this newsletter in 2023. Each week, I take a fun deep dive into a topic that I’ve been researching. Ready to plug the holes in your education? Okay, let’s go!
I’ve never wanted to be a woman of a different era. I was in California for the past few weeks. It seemed like everywhere I drove, there was a billboard for the Renaissance Pleasure Faire. I’ll attend, dress up, and have a fun, day of debauchery (I love mead), but I don’t romanticize the era. Think of the lack of education, political rights, and living lives of obligation! Think of the smells!
Let’s jump about three hundred years in time from the Renaissance. Many of the novels, period movies, and references from my young-adulthood were Victorian-era. I read Jane Eyre in 9th grade and my classmates might have been imagining themselves wearing petticoats. Not me. I had too many questions about body functions, smells, and the reality of a disease-ridden life.
Victorian era novels skip over some really important details. First of all, there’s how they pooped, which was in a pot, sometimes kept under their bed, called a “thunder mug.” The novels we read were about rich people, so they didn’t have outhouses like the other folks. The poor didn’t go in pots, which is where the derogatory slang phrase “without a pot to piss in” comes from. Eventually, those chamber pots were attached to stools, which is why you leave a “stool sample” at the doctor.
It was very hard to get out of the layers and layers of clothes to relieve yourself (which is something that even ladies have to do sometimes. This is why all ladies’ undergarments of the era were crotchless, according to Unmentionable: The Victorian Lady's Guide to Sex, Marriage, and Manners by Therese Oneill. When you read Pride and Prejudice, did you think Elizabeth Bennett was strolling about, clit to the wind?
Crotchless underwear can be fun, but what about when you’re “on the rag” (another phrase that started during the Victorian era)? Women had to be discreet about their periods, so there’s not a lot written about how they handled it. They didn’t have underwear to attach a pad to, so that’s how the menstrual belt came to be. The rags extended from the belly to the back along the crotch area and were affixed to a belt using safety pins.
Most of the Disney princess movies are also set in some Victorian-era Disney Verse. Elsa and Anna are traipsing around a frozen landscape getting frost bite on their clits under their dresses and petticoats. Cinderella’s mice would be fantastic at crafting an origami menstrual belt, but she probably had scabies. And where in the world did Rapunzel keep her shits? You might think that Rapunzel’s long hair could have been her pubes, but most women of the time actually shaved due to the threat of lice. Perhaps she didn’t have to worry about that in her tower, but just wait until she gets released into a disease-ridden world.
If I lived in that era, I would also have to deal with the way that women were viewed. “Promiscuous” women have never been viewed well throughout history, but in Victorian times you could be seen as promiscuous for showing some ankle. Last year, I wrote about the history of slang words for promiscuity. The 1800s gave us two of the most commonly used euphemisms: tomcat for the men, and a tart for the women. The male euphemisms in the 1800s trended towards professions one could master, while the female euphemisms were a lot less complimentary.
Men: cunt hunter, rump splitter, meat monger, fleece hunter, dollymopper
Women: loose fish, bag, easy piece, fuckstress
Then there’s the slang for the word vagina. By the 1800s, the only thing that was clear was that the vagina was much enjoyed, but you might get trapped. Slang words included man’s pleasure garden, cock trap, pleasure pit, and the enemy.
As long as women have been around, men have loved to give them advice. Victorian mansplainers had really interesting ideas on periods, birth control, and babies in general. Dr. John Harvey Kellogg (I’ve written a bunch about this guy) claimed that most of women’s diseases could be cured if men would just ejaculate into them, versus spilling their seed!
In a book titled Advice to a wife on the management of her own health and on the treatment of some of the complaints incidental to pregnancy, labor, and suckling, author Pye Henry Chavasse compares women to trees:
“A wife may be likened to a fruit-tree, a child to its fruit. We all know that it is as impossible to have fine fruit from an unhealthy tree as to have a fine child from an unhealthy mother. In the one case, the tree either does not bear fruit at all—is barren—or it bears undersized, tasteless fruit.”
Just make sure you’re not a fruit-tree with opinions! If you spoke out of place, had any kind of illness, or queefed out of tune, you could also secure yourself a diagnosis of Hysteria. The diagnosis of wandering womb eventually evolved into Hysteria, which translates to “womb disease.” The list of symptoms were long and vague, but could include anxiety, irritability, nervousness, having sexual thoughts, and vaginal lubrication. If you had a real medical issue, like diabetic shock, epilepsy, or post-partum depression, you’d probably just get diagnosed with Hysteria too. A popular cure for hysteria was a doctor or midwife manually massaging the genitals, providing orgasms, but if it didn’t work you could get lobotomized. Hysteria was a formally recognized psychological disorder until 1980.
I never wanted to be a woman of a different era.
Make sure you’re subscribed so you never miss a post!
If you enjoyed this newsletter, please share with friends, so they can be hilariously informed.
Don’t miss these recent newsletters:
Not a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out.