Your boner, my problem

You know what's funny? Premature ejaculation. I understand they can't help doing it and that it's very psychologically painful, but I can't help laughing at it, because it's very psychologically hilarious. Or at least it's hilarious now that I don't have to put up with it anymore, because at the time I never found a way to see the situation as funny or laughable or anything but me not getting the servicing I deserved, and it was infuriating. The massive egoism of a girl in need of a massive bang, I know, and the inability to not jizz right away was probably not associated directly with a conscious wish to disrespect and frustrate me, but the pain was real. Good lord, sexual problems are problematic.

My favourite historical sexual problem was probably Catherine de Medici and Henry II of France. I have a general fascination with Catherine de Medici - you could hardly find a more remarkable life. She'd be a feminist icon, but the English have always hated her, and the French obviously under-appreciate their monarchs, and she was far too evil to be palatable, I suppose - but sadly that's part of what feminism is - having as much power to be evil as the men. Or else we're working on the assumption that women are somehow morally superior, and I think that nasty bint Margaret Thatcher killed off that idea in the post-feminist context.

Anyways. Catherine de Medici. Her husband didn't love her and neither did her husband's family, after her uncle Pope Clement died and the new Pope wouldn't pay her dowry. And she was married for a decade not getting pregnant, while her husband managed to impregnate other people. Disastrous. But eventually she managed to conceive - and did she ever manage, having a grand total of seven children who made it for awhile, at least, and some miscarriages and infant deaths into the bargain. The story goes this was after the physician Jean Fernel, who in many respects looks more useful than physicians seemed back in the 16th century, examined both Catherine's twat and Henry's gear, saw some irregularities, and recommended a series of sexual positions that would facilitate impregnation. What were the positions? I'd dearly love to know. Not necessarily to aid in my impregnation, which we're still trying, in fact, to avoid - just because I don't think monarchs are good for anything but perving on.

Another of my favourite historical sexual problems, more for the way it's been perceived over time, was Henry VIII and Anne of Cleves. Almost any way you look at the history of this marriage - and there have been many ways - the odds look good that Henry was simply not able to get a boner for her. The way the English interpret their history and (bizarrely) internalize the lives of their monarchs means the view continues to dominate that this was her fault - that she was unpalatably ugly, though the Holbein portrait of her was commissioned to be an exact likeness, and it shows one of those pretty, calm women that Belgium, the Netherlands, and northwest Germany are full of, and frankly who I'd fuck, and I don't have a monarchical imperative to impregnate them.

But after a jousting accident in 1536 - probably not coincidentally, the last year he managed to impregnate a woman - Henry began to get vastly fat, and covered in fetid boils, and blessed with a revolting, weeping ulcer on his upper thigh, which didn't heal before his death eleven years later, at which point he was too vast and unhealthy to walk under his own power. The man was a disgusting, suppurating mess by the time he was in a position to get a boner for Anne of Cleves in 1540, seven years before his death. Think end-of-life Marlon Brando, except oozing pus and having people executed.

And yet despite this, and despite the commissioned-to-be-realistic, rather lovely Holbein, your typical English asshole has been raised in the certainty that Henry couldn't get a boner for Anne because she was ugly, and not because Henry was a living, bleeding, decomposing whale who would make any sensible woman kill the mood by vomiting uncontrollably as soon as he started taking his clothes off, assuming his willy was still in any way actually functional. And those pretty, calm women that Belgium, the Netherlands, and northwest Germany are full of are nothing if not sensible. It's amazing, the different persistences of nationalism in the way a people see their history. Henry VIII was a disaster of a man and king but it's simply received wisdom that his failure to get or sustain a boner was his wife's fault, even today.

Oh, historical sexual problems. Is there anything more human, or historical? I think a Spike Millligan quote is in order:

. . . whereupon she ate (of the fruit), and gave of it to her husband. 2. And the eyes of them were both opened and they knew they were both naked , and Adam said to her, 'Stand back, I don't know how big this is going to get.'