Esmé Louise James

A provocative journey through human sexual history, packed with fun factoids and forgotten stories, from the historian and storyteller behind Kinky History, @esme.louisee on TikTok Contrary to popular belief, our predecessors had all sorts of obscene hobbies long before Christian Grey hit the scene. In this enlightening romp, learn about the first instances of homosexuality on record from the ancient world and the diverse history of nonbinary gender; encounter a thousand years’ worth of hilarious and horrifying contraceptive methods; consider the positive and negative effects of the widespread availability of pornography in the digital age—and how our relationship to it changed during the pandemic; take a sneaky riffle through centuries of bedside drawers; and discover the dirty little secrets of luminaries such as Julius Caesar, James Joyce, Albert Einstein, and Virginia Woolf. Author Esmé Louise James also identifies the key tipping points that directly inform current beliefs around sex to place the past in conversation with the present. By educating ourselves about the weird, wonderful, and varied spectrum of human sexuality and experience, we can normalize and destigmatize sex, write people of marginalized sexual identities back into the pages of history, and build toward a more liberated future.

A Rollicking Journey through Our Sexual Past, Present, and Future

Kinky History

Holly 

One of the things that have always drawn me to books is the fact that they are participatory. As much as we authors like to flatter ourselves, only half of the encounter is owed to us. The rest comes from you, mysterious reader, and the qualities with which you will imbue my words. It comes from your imagination and your backstory, your expectations and your bias, your knowledge and your desires. Your experience at this dinner party will be truly unique from that of each of my other guests. Let us revel in that difference and celebrate its multiplicity. How wonderful is that?

When looking at gender, identity, and sexuality within history, it’s important. remember that we are viewing it through a modern-day lens. The terminology we today was not around in the times of many of the figures we will be discussing. and they are not here to confirm or deny the accuracy of our deductions. We can theorize whether these figures from the past may have been gay or bisexual, transgender or gender-nonconforming. In fact, I believe it is vital to do so, to demonstrate the long lineage of these communities. However, it is equally important to remember that we can never say for sure that these labels were the right fit for any of them. 

Our understanding of the modern world is greatly affected by the we history--for this reason, discussions of consent are as crucial in historv as today. Self-expression looks different for everyone. So when we look back on those who came before us, I think it is far more important to pay attention to the means by which they chose to express themselves than it is to subject them to a contemporary under- standing of identity that would be foreign to them. It is a bit of a paradox, isn't it? We're searching for communion with historical figures and movements to affirm our contemporary attitudes, even though language and understanding can differ so much across history and geography. 

Not only was sex already steeped in ideas of sin and shame, now the prevalence of sexually transmitted infections reinforced dominant cultural ideas about sex as dirty-a source of contagion that needed to be controlled

The most interesting insight from these studies is not the numbers reported, but the cultural and social factors that play a role in the discrepancies. The most obvious explanation would be that men tend to exaggerate their sexual en- deavors while women play theirs down--a variable referred to as a "social desirability bias." These gendered expectations will come as no surprise-there is a stubbornly persisting stigma that having many sexual partners makes a woman an undesirable whore," while the same number would make a man a "hero."

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