How did people in Ye Olden Days find out about sex?

[hpmons]

In Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Tess says "How could I be expected to know? I was a child when I left this house four months ago.  Why didn't you tell me there was danger in men-folk? Why didn't you warn me?"

If sex was such a repressed topic, how did people work out how to do it? Maybe Tess's man had some friends who were rascals and told him, but how did THEY know?  Presumably men discovered on their own that if they touched their thingy they felt good, but how did they know that if they put it in a woman's downstairs area then lots of cool stuff would happen?

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

The same way women would find out about menstruating.

A horrible, horrible traumatising incident near the bike sheds.

[El Unicornio, mang]

They probably saw animals doing it and copied them

[thehungerartist]

They probably saw animals doing it and copied them

Did they have Discovery in Ye Olden Days?

[Zero Gravitas]

I think it has something to do with the magnetic pull of arses.

[El Unicornio, mang]

I'd like to know who came up with the idea of wanking, and shake him by the hand.

[Big Jack McBastard]

Preferably the left one.

Risqué plays perhaps? The scandalous writings of some cad who got published in spite (or because) of public uproar maybe, or anyone around who had gotten themselves pregnant would have been a source of innocence destroying stories.

Also, slappers provided a girl could have words with one, they've always existed, but would have been kept from the eyes of the more genteel ladylike folk out there lest they go the same way, meanwhile the men got their end away on the sly and then returned to their uptight, monocle-falling-out-at-the-slightest-mention-of-a-thigh lifestyle the next day.

Oh just thought, 'rural types', they'd have been round to sell their wares to the mansioned toffs and would have had no such reservations about leading a young lass into a state of moral disgrace.

[ziggy starbucks]

explicit cave paintings

[The Boston Crab]

Define 'find out'.

[Cerys]

One of the least publicised examples of Ice Age cave art depicts a man on skis having sex with an elk.

I think this answers the question.  Father Christmas told them.

[Big Jack McBastard]

What did horny but reserved and uninformed ladies put those sensations down to when they first cropped up?

All of a sudden that carriage ride over the cobbled streets brings on a most befuddling disquiet in their nethers, how do they explain it?

I bet they all just had a wank but didn't write about it, they didn't want future generations thinking they were pervy sods and so took great pains to present themselves as pious and prudish in the books of the day.

[The Boston Crab]

I found out about wanking by stretching back my foreskin to the X-Treem and thinking 'flipping heck, I might do that again some time'. Turned out, 'some time' was about a second later and every half second after that for about seven or eight years. It's the same principle.

[Serge]

From the popular medieval pornographic magazine, 'Knave', of course.

[MojoJojo]

Denied of foreknowledge of sex, homo sapiens in puberty begin a ritual known as "humping the furniture". After many days of this ritual, the luckier humans collide, and in the process discover sex, much like Columbus and the Americas.
Luckily*, heterosexual associations are more likely to arise from this process, as they require less artificial lubrication**.

The Victorians found this all very embarrassing, and Queen Victoria herself issued a D notice on the subject, which is why this beautiful ritual of nature is little known today.


_{*for the continuation of the species and my own existence, not any sort of moral judgement.
**um, I know that doesn't really work for woman on woman homosexuality, even though to my mind all the best female on female scenarios involve lots and lots of butter.***}

[rudi]

Mosaics?

[Cerys]

Well that's just silly.  The lady's on top of the man.  How's that ever going to work?

[El Unicornio, mang]

It must have been pretty scary for people back in the old days when they got pregnant, seeing their belly get huge and then this little living thing pops out. I can imagine it being akin to that scene in Alien except not on a space ship.

[purlieu]

I found out about wanking by stretching back my foreskin to the X-Treem and thinking 'flipping heck, I might do that again some time'. Turned out, 'some time' was about a second later and every half second after that for about seven or eight years. It's the same principle.

Oh come on, you post on CaB, everyone knows you can't pull your foreskin back.

[purlieu]

It must have been pretty scary for people back in the old days when they got pregnant, seeing their belly get huge and then this little living thing pops out. I can imagine it being akin to that scene in Alien except not on a space ship.

And scarier, what with the realisation you have to fucking care for this thing for the next 20 years.

[Depressed Beyond Tables]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuxBOTYPY2k&feature=related


Worth it just for the line:

"Get rid of it??? No..."

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

As this is turning into a wanking thread, I remember as an 11 year old in the pre-wanking knowledge days, sticking my cock through a slit on the zipline of an adventure playground Lego kitbag, desperately trying to find a way of increasing this nice sensation I was feeling.

Too much information?

Well I hope to educate and inform. Don't do it, kids! Or at least, if you should try it some time, know this: it's rubbish and doesn't work.

[biggytitbo]

Most people in those days learnt about sex through Margi Clarke. Indeed images of her have been discovered inside ancient egyptian tombs.

[mobias]

Even though the television has only really been popular as a house hold item since the 40's and 50's the show Sexcetera has been around a lot longer. Infact paradoxically they were making behind the scenes documentaries about the goings on in the porn industry long before Eadweard Muybridge had even photographed his first cum shot.

[Glebe]

They used to say, "come hither, yon maiden." Then they'd have a look under their huge skirts for a muff. And Bob's yer uncle!

[jutl]

Hardy was a talentless deranged miserable cunt, so that may be the problem here.

[Cerys]

I protest!  Hardy was not talentless!

[jutl]

Thomas Hardy, OM (2 June 1840 – 11 January 1928) was an English novelist and poet. While his works typically belong to the naturalist movement, several poems display elements of the previous romantic and enlightenment periods of literature, such as his fascination with the supernatural. His works are among the most maudlin and pathetic in the English language, a fact which lead the critic F R Leavis to describe Hardy's entire oeuvre as 'misery porn for clueless shits'.

[Cerys]

I'm going to cry now. 

Spoiler alert

If Hardy's works are 'misery porn', is it wanking when someone who likes him cries?

[close]

[rudi]

My girlfriend thinks he's t'riffic and forces him upon her students every chance she gets, the fiend!

[Uncle TechTip]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_Museum,_Naples

"Ancient Roman  culture had a different sense of shame for sexuality, and viewed sexually explicit material very differently to most present-day cultures.[1][nb]Not a real footnote[/nb] Ideas about obscenity developed from the 18th century to the present day into a modern concept of pornography."