The History of Sex: Seville -- 'Ten Tips on Caressing the Female Breast' -- (Chap. VI, Pt. 14)

Given this backstory, it's no surprise that when sexual liberation came to Spain, it arrived with a bang.

Tragically, the country returned to democracy during one of the most vacuous periods in Western history: the Age of Disco.

By that time, Sixties platitudes about bettering society had been all but discarded in favor of full-blown self-fulfillment: it's all about me, baby!

On the same day in 1975 that a democratic Don Juan was named King of Spain, the #1 song in America was 'That's the Way (I Like It)' by KC and the Sunshine Band.

Uh-huh, uh-huh.

So when it comes to sex, you can't blame modern Spain for being a bit conflicted: having swung from religious totalitarianism to total secular freedom, who wouldn't be?

LOCO ALERT

'THE PSYCHOSIS RETURNS' declared the TV this morning as a pillow-lipped presenter announced the latest outrage: un loco has tried to molest a teenager in one of Spain's beach resorts.

And while I'm rushing through Seville to meet a modern Don Juan, I do a double-take outside a newsstand not far from the plaza where the Inquisition used to condemn its victims.

It's not the run-of-the-mill porn that catches my eye, but a self-improvement title called Sexologies.

Just above the teaser for '48 Hours of Sex Shopping in London' is the main article: 'Ten Tips on Caressing the Female Breast.'

As opposed to man boobs, I guess.

Buy the magazine, get the vibrator for free

At first, I assume the title is figurative, or maybe I'm misreading it—it's probably more along the lines of 'how to touch a woman's heart.'

But no, the list is literal, including Tips #2 and #3: 'Take Off Her Bra' (always a good start) and 'Look At Her Breasts As If You've Made A Great Discovery.'

Of course, every would-be Columbus of the Bosom has to learn some time.

But if you need a science-lite magazine to tell you how to caress a breast, I'm guessing you're probably not ready for penetration—and you definitely shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a woman with the fuchsia, battery-powered 'Rabbit of Love' that comes free with the magazine.

It's enough to make you say a prayer to the patron of the Internet, St. Isidore, who analyzed sex as the Bishop of Seville way back in the seventh century.

'INCREASE YOUR COLLECTION OF
LITTLE RABBITS OF LOVE
Which is your favorite type of man?
The voting begins!

The History of Sex: Seville -- Home of the Spanish Inquisition... and Don Juan -- (Chap. VI, Pt. 4)

So our thrifty anti-hero decides to change his luck with women by tanning himself 'dark as a Zulu,' switching to contacts, depilating and sculpting his body, learning how to dance and perfecting his 'devastating smile:' 

'Simply put, I was adorable.'

And I can vouch for that, having marveled at his author's photos and online videos, revealing a guy so cute, he probably poos curlicues.

In fact, as muy macho as he and his manicured brethren no doubt are, whenever I read about these avowed womanizers, I can't help but wonder if their braggadocio isn't a form of protesting too much.

I reckon it's only a matter of time before one of these DIY Don Juans, these 'polyamorous' young men comes out and confesses, 'Y'know, what? I actually prefer taking it up the bum—and I don't mean with a strap-on dildo.'

Funnily enough, there's also a theory that the real-life inspiration for Don Juan liked men more than women, a notion so offensive to Spanish masculinity that it supposedly inspired a governmental cover-up (though Don Juan did make his debut around the same time that Castilian dandies adopted their lisp).

However, the main shock for me is that Spain's famed lotharios would need a 'Bible for seduction' at all.

Are Western men so maladjusted that even Spanish ladykillers need help?

* * * 

The modern capital of Andalusia is loud and proud about being the fictional home of a murderous heartbreaker, but Seville is uncharacteristically quiet about a far more important fact from its history.

Up until the opening of a museum on the subject, you could live there for years without stumbling across the city's dirty secret.

But it's true: the city of orange blossoms, flamenco and Don Juan was also the home of the Spanish Inquisition.

And being Torture HQ was no small thing.

Next to the Reconquest—the epic battle to expel the Moors from their last foothold in Western Europe—the Inquisition was one of the institutions (if not the institution) that made Spain and the Spanish what they are today, uniting the country religiously and politically for more than three-and-a-half centuries until a succession of foreign rulers finally put a stop to it.

The Spanish Inquisition was effectively a law unto itself, setting the moral code for Spain and a precedent for the rest of the globe, from Europe to Latin America and even Asia.

As one of the world's great powers, Inquisition Spain cemented the link between sex and sin (if not death) in Catholic culture and revived the virgin-whore dichotomy, exporting all these beliefs via Columbus and the conquistadors.

Importantly, the home of the Inquisition became the gateway to the New World; paradoxically, it also produced 'the world's greatest lover:' Don Juan.

The History of Sex: Venice and Florence -- The Clit Writ Large -- (Chap. IV, Pt. 23)

Believe it or not, it wasn't until the nineteenth century that physicians finally managed to distinguish gonorrhea from syphilis, and neither disease was definitively cured until the discovery of antibiotics.

As for telegony, homunculi, and other misconceptions, scientists weren't able to prove that sperm-and-egg fusion caused fertilization until the late 1800s—and even then just in starfish.

It's only in the last half century or so that we've actually been able to witness the moment of human conception.

As for the clitoris, well, if this sounds familiar to women, I apologize: every time we men think we've found it, we end up losing it again.

The clit has been popping in and out of male consciousness ever since its rediscovery during the Renaissance.

Columbus' lyrical moniker was apparently too much of a mouthful, so an anatomist in nineteenth century Vienna circulated something catchier, based on a Greek word—kleitoriazein—meaning 'to titillate.'

FREUD VS. FEMINISM

Ironically, the man who did the most to bury the clitoris after that was another Viennese doctor who set himself up as an authority on sex.

Freud dismissed clitoral orgasms as immature and bordering on the perverse.

It wasn't until the feminist backlash of the 1960s that women began to reclaim their bits, so to speak, and now there's no getting away from them.

Amid a slew of neologisms ('clitmaster,' 'cliterature,' etcetera), the clit's writ large in modern culture, arguably bigger than ever before.

In fact, it's hard to imagine it ever being 'lost' again.

Then again, if history is anything to go by…

* * *

The History of Sex: Venice and Florence -- The World's First Sex Plague (Chap. IV, Pt. 21)

Far more importantly, La Specola's collection taught generations of doctors how to save lives.

And it's awe-inspiring that such fragile artworks—made of wax!—have survived for more than 200 years.

One mannequin—known as 'The Doll'—can be taken apart layer by layer to reveal the embryo in utero.

In fact, the sequence showing the development of the embryo is one of the few mistakes in the whole collection: it was based on an ancient theory of baby-making—the idea that sperm contained an itty-bitty perfectly formed human being called a homunculus (or 'little man') that just needed incubation to grow into a baby.

But my main destination is the museum's last room.

Lest you think me a total goremonger, let me explain: one of the ironies of the Renaissance is that the rediscovery of the human body coincided with its ruination, courtesy of the world's first sex plague.

To me, syphilis is all the stranger because my ignorance of it is surpassed only by the devastation it caused.

The first 'venereal disease'—the morbus venereus, or 'sickness of Venus'—seems to have been similar to AIDS but arguably worse because it affected far more people at a time when medicine was still locked in the Middle Ages.

Doctors have been debating how syphilis got started pretty much since its discovery.

No one knows whether the vicious spirochetes were already lurking in the New World or Columbus and his crew introduced them during their raping and pillaging.

As the disease mutated into a decimator of men, though, people tended to name it after their enemies with amusing consistency.

As an early sexologist put it, civilization spread 'syphilization.'

The History of Sex: Venice and Florence -- Compromising Positions -- (Chap. IV, Pt. 3)

The fact that both Columbus and Fallopius published their 'discoveries' in Venice was no coincidence.

As a standalone rival to Rome and the center of the richest, most stable empire in Italy (if not the world), the city built on the water was an oasis for rebels and troublemakers during the Renaissance.

Alongside many legitimate advances in art and learning, this official tolerance inevitably bred bastard offspring. 

Whereas Venetian maestros like Titian and Tintoretto painted the first modern eroticized nudes—naked women stroking themselves and scenes of 'heroic rape'—lesser artists cranked out smut on their newfangled printing presses.

Glamorized violence:
The Rape of the Sabines
as reimagined during the Renaissance

By the sixteenth century, the Most Serene City, the nexus where East met West, had become the first mass-media porn capital and Europe's center of illicit sex.

Venice's reputation as a safe haven for hellions made it a natural home for Pietro Aretino.

Born the same year that Columbus stumbled into the Americas, Aretino was a satirist who made his fortune by mocking the great and not-so-good.

A suck-up par excellence, a hypocrite for hire and possibly the first modern journalist, 'the Divine Aretino' managed to transform himself into a sixteenth-century celebrity, styling himself the Scourge of Princes. One biographer sums him up as a 'man who lived on libel and blackmail and respected nothing but art.'

But even that was subject to negotiation.

COMPROMISING POSITIONS

When critics in the Vatican were lambasting Michelangelo for the nudity in his Last Judgment, Aretino sided with the philistines who demanded that the naked images in the Sistine Chapel be loinclothed.

Barely two decades earlier, the writer had had his own clash with papal authority in an incident that created erotica as we know it today.

The trouble seems to have begun with an act of Vatican graffiti by a protégé of the Renaissance master, Raphael.

One of the more colorful versions of the story claims that Giulio Romano was so miffed that the Pope was late in paying him that he decorated the Hall of Constantine—a celebration of Christianity conquering paganism—with sixteen scenes of fornicating couples.

The History of Sex: Venice and Florence -- Pig Ignorant Anatomy -- (Chap. IV, Pt. 2)

Of course, for women born with all their bits in the right place, this particular 'discovery' must have been an anticlimax.

But you can hardly blame Renaissance men for wanting to find a magic button that could turn women on at will—or, as the Columbus of the Nether Regions put it (no doubt with a pervy chuckle), 'even if they don't want it.'

After the official prudishness of the Middle Ages, the clitoral dispute reflected a rediscovery of the human body and the Roman maxim that 'nothing human is alien.'

Up until the Renaissance, even the most learned doctors were literally pig-ignorant about the basics of the human body. Textbooks were based on Galen's anatomies. Problem was, the Romans had banned human dissection, so he'd had to extrapolate from pigs and other animals.

It was Columbus' university mentor, Andreas Vesalius, who pioneered the use of cadavers to correct Galen's mistakes, making him the founder of modern anatomy—and a kindred spirit of artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, whose fascination with the body compelled them to dissect human corpses themselves.

Remarkably, it was only then that men began to realize the fair sex was profoundly different physiologically; previously, most great thinkers believed that women were merely males 'turned outside in.'

Columbus' reference to women's 'semen' was probably what's now called 'female ejaculate,' though in reality he was referring to the ancient theory that both men and women produced a kind of sperm that magically commingled to make babies.

Another theory as old as Aristotle was that of telegony, the idea that a woman's first pregnancy altered her womb so much that all her future offspring would resemble the father of her first child—even if they had different dads.

(Then again, Aristotle thought that men with small penises were more fertile—and more aesthetically attractive. So what did he know?)

The History of Sex: Venice and Florence -- And Man (Re)Discovered Flesh -- (Chap. IV, Pt. 1)

Chapter Four 

AND MAN (RE)DISCOVERED FLESH 

Waving Hello! to the Flesh in Venereal Venice and Syphilitic Florence 

Let's make love, my beloved,
If you adore my cock,
I love your pussy,
And the world wouldn't be worth a fuck without this.

--The 'Divine' Pietro Aretino, c1527 

The Renaissance produced not one but two great explorers named Columbus: the first, a discoverer who spread syphilis; the other, an anatomist who 'discovered' the clitoris… and died shortly thereafter. 

The latter Colombo was a professor in his forties when he published his text On Things Anatomical in Venice in 1559, claiming to have found something that everyone in the history of medicine had somehow overlooked—the very 'seat of woman's delight:' 

'It should be called the love or sweetness of Venus,' declared Renaldus Columbus. 'If you rub it vigorously with a penis, or even touch it with a little finger, the pleasure causes women's semen to fly this way and that, swifter than air, even if they don't want it to.' 

Tragically, the cocksure prof died later that year—I blame the flying female semen—and his successor at the university promptly accused him of plagiarism.

The Columbus of the Nether Regions: 
Renaldus Columbus

Gabriel Fallopius claimed he'd already had a good look under the hood years earlier; ultimately, though, he had to make do with being immortalized for his less-sexy discovery of the egg tubes connecting the uterus with the ovaries. 

It took centuries before a Dane pointed out that, like Christopher Columbus' 'discovery' of the New World, both the Italian anatomists had got it wrong: the great guru of Western medicine had caught sight of the clitoris way back in the second century AD. 

Sadly for women, though, Galen had thought the clit simply protected the vagina. 

He'd even compared it to the thingamabob at the back of the throat—nearly eighteen centuries before a porn-flick doctor informed a would-be nymph that her clitoris was lodged deep in her Deep Throat.

Would you pierce your uvula?