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Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast Episode 225 – A History of Lesbian Sex in Pornography

Saturday, March 19, 2022 - 07:00

Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 225 - A History of Lesbian Sex in Pornography - transcript

(Originally aired 2022/03/19 - listen here)

(For the video version of this show, see our YouTube channel. Video includes explicit sexual images.) - Apologies for the sound quality of the original upload.

Introduction

I love the opportunity to make a project do double-duty, so when Sheena asked me to contribute to an event on lesbian erotic fiction with something on the topic of sapphic erotica in history, I jumped at the opportunity because I already had something along that line on my list of podcast ideas. This presentation will be available in two versions: one with and one without the slide show, so there are a couple references to images that won’t make sense in the audio-only version. Also, in case it wasn’t obvious from the title, this presentation will include explicit language and images.

The only major stumbling block to this topic is that, in the pre-20th century material that I study, lesbian-friendly erotica (within a modern understanding of those terms) isn’t very thick on the ground. Prior to the later 20th century, you don’t see much in the way of sexual literature featuring female couples that is written by or for women.

There’s also the question of definitions. There’s a lot of fuzzy overlap between literature and art that simply has sexual content, material that is specifically intended to arouse the consumer, and satirical or political works whose sexual content is intended to shock or disgust the viewer. When doing a historic survey of material within the general category of erotica and pornography, there’s always a question of what purpose it was intended to serve within its original social context. And I’m completely side-stepping any distinction between the labels “pornography” and “erotica.” Too often, all that distinction ends up meaning is “erotica is the good stuff I like and pornography is the bad stuff you like.”

So this tour through time will cover a variety of genres of sex-related art and literature, with a variety of purposes, focusing specifically on material featuring sex between women. But be aware that very little of it can reasonably be labeled “lesbian erotica” as that term would be understood today.

The Theory of Pornography

The words “pornography” and “erotica” both derive from Greek roots, although both words were coined in more recent centuries by scholars who wanted an elevated vocabulary for talking about sexual material. “Pornography” literally means “writings or pictures concerning sex workers” while “erotica” comes from the root eros which referred to love in the sense of sexual desire. In general, we use those terms when one of the purposes of the material is to create a sexual response in the consumer. So, for example, a medical treatise with illustrations of the genitals that discusses reproductive health generally does not fall in the category of pornography. Art depicting semi-clothed bodies in sensual poses may be considered pornography or may be considered a neutral adherence to the prevailing artistic tastes, depending on the culture. Art that depicts a sex act with a focus on showing the genitals will usually be considered pornography, regardless of other considerations.

While art and literature that depict sex acts has been around more or less since the invention of art and writing, the creation of material intended to cause arousal is more dependent on what a particular culture considers arousing. And the production of works that combine the intent of sexual arousal and the breaking of cultural taboos is even more recent. The concept of “pornography” as a defined category of sexual material is rooted in a specific cultural and political context. And I should note that this discussion is focused on Western culture because that’s the context I know enough to talk about. I don’t even know enough to know whether the concept of pornography has any meaning in pre-modern, non-Western cultures, given that one of the forces that produced it was the sexually repressive attitude of Christianity. The meaning and uses of explicit sexual material in other historic cultures can differ wildly and are worth study on their own.

The concept of pornography exists in counterpoint to the idea that sexual content in art and writing should be controlled or censored by some sort of authority. This approach has its roots in 16th century Italy, when the creativity of Renaissance humanism, combined with the revival of the body-positive artistic traditions of classical art generated a boom in explicitly sexual works that were met by growing concern and censorship by the Vatican.

An example would be I Modi, the popular manual of sexual positions using the engravings of Marcantonio Raimondi for which Pietro Aretino wrote a sequence of bawdy sonnets. Aretino also wrote a set of dialogues or Ragionamenti in which women discuss sexual topics—a genre that was prominent in early pornographic works. The name “Aretino” became a byword for sex manuals and related concepts in later ages, but his work was part of a wider 16th c Italian humanist tradition of obscene writing for the masses, in addition to the more educated tradition of literature that used sexual allegories to discuss politics. Raimondi was imprisoned for the publication of I Modi which, alas, only illustrates heterosexual couples, although he also created at least one image of a woman using a dildo. To some extent, what drew the attention of the authorities was the opportunity for mass distribution that printed books created, and control over pornography acted primarily though control over the authorization of printed matter. In the era when pieces of art and literature were individually created by hand, distribution had natural limits.

Although the word “pornography” didn’t come into widespread use until the 19th century, the concept—as a legal and regulatory category—developed during the 17th and 18th centuries, especially in France and England. Specific social and political concerns in those countries (which I’ll get to in a moment) resulted in French and English works dominating the genre until the 19th century, when translations and original works in other languages also became popular.

The concept and popularity of pornography was intertwined with intellectual movements that emphasized free-thinking and the challenging of cultural control. Just as the rise in popular sexual media was a byproduct of the Renaissance, the rise in concern about pornography came in the wake of the Age of Reason and the age of revolutions. Pornographers stood with heretics and libertines in defying political absolutism, and pornographic texts were often as much direct challenges to political authorities as they were to moral authorities. To some extent, the concept of pornography has always emerged from the act of suppression. But the nature and preoccupations of pornography have also been shaped by the specific cultural context, and this is rarely more evident than in how the topic of sex between women is treated. Because those free-thinking, libertine, heretical movements were often wildly misogynistic, and women’s roles in the history of pornography were more often as abstract subjects than as creators or intended consumers.

Regardless of topic, men’s voices are over-represented in the historic record compared to women’s voices, due to the structures of the production and distribution of art and literature being dominated by men. This is even more the case for sexual material, as cultural double-standards tended to discourage women from expressing their sexual desires, and suppressed their work or punished them personally when they dared to do so. In eras when men were writing and publishing a wide range of content from non-sexual to pornographic, women tended to stop short of the more explicit end of the scale if they wanted their work to be taken seriously. Even when pre-modern pornography is expressed from a female viewpoint, it is most often written by a man and reflects male attitudes toward sexual relations. When those relations are between women, we are far more likely to be seeing male fantasies than accurate reporting of women’s experiences.

Keep this in mind as we trace themes and examples of lesbian pornography across the centuries. And make no mistake, sex between women holds a significant position in the history of pornography.

Classical Material

Although depictions of sex between women are a through-line in the history of Western pornography, it isn’t a given that every culture that produces art or literature intended to produce sexual arousal will use female couples for that purpose. The erotic works of classical Greece and Rome are a counter-example. The reasons are complex, but there is a near absence of art depicting sexual scenes with female couples, or written works where sex between women is depicted in a way that the consumer is intended to find erotic.

One scene from a fresco in Pompeii depicting a series of sex acts shows two women (although the condition of the art means you’ll have to take my word for it). But when viewed within the context of the whole sequence, there is a sliding scale from positively framed sex acts to deprecated sex acts, with this image falling toward the latter end, grouped with depictions of oral sex (which the Romans considered filthy) and depictions of a man simultaneously penetrating and being penetrated by sexual partners (which was considered logically incoherent).

This attitude was not a general ambivalence toward depicting same-sex acts, as depictions of male pairs were common and popular, as long as the defined roles were observed. Nor was there any reticence in classical Greece and Rome around erotic work in general. Rather, it was specifically that the men creating these works—primarily for a male audience—did not find the idea of two women together attractive. This is useful to keep in mind when we look at early modern pornography where such scenes were commonplace.

Medieval Material

Medieval literature is notorious for its bawdy humor and did not shy away from depicting sexual situations. But it would be odd to characterize such works as pornographic, as works with sexual content were not set apart from ordinary literature, and sexual humor was not treated as distinct from scatological humor or other types of transgressive texts. To oversimplify somewhat, medieval literature was more inclined to use sexual content to poke fun rather than to arouse. Art depicting sexual situations in general treat them as part of everyday experience, without an exaggerated focus on the genitals or the mechanics of the activity.  There were sexual taboos, but there was not yet a genre that violated them as an act of defiance or resistance—the dynamics that gave rise to the idea of pornography.

Depictions or descriptions of same-sex activity tend to illustrate religious prohibitions and avoid explicit details, more often showing the partners displaying physical affection but not the sex act itself. For example, the image from an illustrated Bible that I use in the logo for the Lesbian Historic Motif Project shows a female couple and a male couple, each in erotic embrace, but fully clothed. The image is intended as an illustration of the text about forbidden sexual acts, but it is not explicit or transgressive in any other way.

Early Modern Material (16-17th century)

Art and literature of the Renaissance and early modern era see a rise in both a focus on sex and an anxiety about it. Anyone familiar with Shakespeare, for example, is aware that bawdy sexual humor was a staple of the era. Anxieties about gender roles and relations between men and women in general show up in a wide variety of material, and medical literature that focuses on sex and reproduction can have a rather fuzzy boundary with more prurient literature, especially as they were more often published in vernacular languages and easily accessible editions.

Sexual or romantic relations between women were part of this wealth of material, but were not necessarily viewed as a separate category, even when given their own labels such as “fricatrices”. Sexual literature might discuss female couples as a sort of curiosity, or as a type of apprenticeship for heterosexual experience, or as a natural consequence of women’s stronger libidos (as was then believed).

For example, in the 1638 play “The Antipodes” by Richard Brome, a still-virgin wife of three years is complaining to a friend about not knowing how to get her husband to perform, while recalling a same-sex erotic encounter in her past. There is no concept that a male versus female sexual partner indicates a particular orientation or identity, although “spouse” versus “non-spouse” is a relevant category. Similarly there is no hint that her friend might react negatively to this revelation of same-sex experience. The only aspect of the scenario that is considered problematic is her husband’s sexual indifference.

Medical literature embraced the theory that female orgasm was essential to conception, as well as to female health in general, and therefore professional advice included techniques for clitoral stimulation and other activities that could be used for non-procreative sex. Engaging the help of an experienced woman or midwife to achieve orgasm “for one’s health” was an approved practice. In this context, the substitution of a dildo for the male organ completes the shift from procreation to pleasure. But with this shift, we move from medical and behavioral advice to obscenity, from the merely bawdy to the pornographic.

In this context, the image of women instructing each other in the pleasures of non-procreative sex merges seamlessly with the image of lesbians, engaging in sex with each other for its own sake (though always -- in the literature -- for the purpose of the male reader’s arousal). In terms of activities, equipment, and effects, medical literature and pornography are very little distinguished. And there was a constant anxiety that medical writings would be condemned as obscene. Medical works were often censored in later editions (especially the parts on female anatomy) due to fear that they would put ideas into the reader’s mind.

And, of course, not all works with sexual content had more than a pretense of anything but prurient interest, such as the 16th century French courtier Brantôme’s, Lives of Gallant Ladies, which purported to be an educational treatise on women’s adultery. An entire section of the work concerns sex between women, presented with a sort of fascinated distaste. But Brantôme certainly considered images of lesbian sex to have erotic potential. He relates an anecdote about a group of “ladies and their lovers” admiring a painting of women at the bath who were portrayed embracing and fondling each other in so stimulating a way that one lady demanded that her lover take her home to satisfy her immediately. We can’t know exactly which painting he was referring to, but Jean Mignon’s mid-16th century engraving of women in a bathhouse shows the type of scene he had in mind.

I previously mentioned the “conversational” work of Aretino, in which two women discuss sexual topics in a series of dialogues. In the 17th century, this genre embraces the motif of the sexual initiation of one woman by another, leading eventually to the less experienced woman being introduced to heterosexual encounters and, in many cases, to increasingly debauched forms of sex involving multiple partners, flagellation, and other elaborations. This sexual initiation motif continues over the following centuries to be a way of introducing lesbian scenarios in a context that is non-threatening to the male reader, as it is explicitly presented as an apprenticeship to heterosexuality.

One of the foundational works in this vein is L’Académie des dames (The Academy of Women) attributed to Nicholas Chorier and published in 1660. The French work is a translation and adaptation of a slightly earlier Latin original, Satyra Sotadica, whose authorship is much debated.

The work is structured as a dialogue between two women: the older, experienced Tullie and her younger cousin Octavie who moves from fiancée to wife in the course at the book. The book begins with Tullie providing sexual advice and coaching to the inexperienced Octavie and moves on to discussions between them of their experiences with the increasingly kinky sex they experience with their husbands and others. The text balances a libertine rejection of social norms with just enough portrayal of shock or disgust on the part of the women to give the reader a frisson of transgression. (And to give the author, perhaps, plausible deniability regarding the work’s morality.)

There are distinctions in how heterosexual and homosexual encounters are treated in the work. In particular, although male-male sex is discussed and hinted at, it is never portrayed directly, despite ample opportunity, given the scenarios. Sex between women, on the other hand, is plentiful and foregrounded (naturally enough, given that the main conversations are between women). It is introduced as a way to initiate the younger woman into sexual pleasure to prepare her for marriage, but continues even as Octavie enters into her heterosexual adventures.

The women's same-sex activities are clearly framed as being irrelevant to their marriages. Lesbian activity is presented as not constituting adultery and furthermore as not deriving from any specific orientation or preference, but being available to (and typically desired by) all women. The work avoids depicting women who are solely or predominantly attracted to women as an acceptable option, though examples suggesting this are played for humor.

In Chorier’s text, sex between women is generally presented as non-penetrative, and when penetration is hinted at, it is the only context in which an act between women is characterized as adultery.

We have an unusual window on the reading context of a similar work, the anonymous L’Ecole des filles (The School for Venus) published in 1655. This book is mentioned by Samuel Pepys who noted that he planned to burn it after reading so that no one would ever list it among the books in his library. A coded entry in his diary indicates that he masturbated while reading it. I haven’t been able to confirm whether the dialogue in this work includes sex between the two women, but the episode demonstrates how such books were received and used. The image here is a frontispiece form a 19th century edition, not the original 17th century one.

Another stock theme of early modern pornography featuring female couples was the convent seduction, which combined outraging sexual morals with satirizing religious morals. One example that also uses the dialogue format is Jean Barrin’s Vénus dans le Cloître (Venus in the Convent) originally published in 1683 and later republished and translated in expanded editions. The work takes the form of a dialogue between two fictional teenaged nuns, Sister Agnes and Sister Angelique, in which the elder, Angelique, comes upon the newly arrived Sister Agnes in the middle of masturbating and decides to give her a more formal instruction in sexual pleasure.

As is typical in this sort of “sex education” genre, we find an older, sexually experienced woman initiating a younger, sexually naive one who makes a show of being reluctant or embarrassed. Angelique’s past sexual experience is not limited to women, but the convent setting provides the context and excuse for the description of same-sex acts. The work has a certain air of criticizing the sexual repression encouraged by the convent structure, but this is largely window-dressing. An English translation of the work in the early 18th century may have been the subject of the first legal conviction for obscenity in the United Kingdom.

The 18th century and the Rise of Pornography

Across the18th century we see several shifts in attitudes toward sex that shape the content and reception of pornography. The relatively pansexual libertine attitudes of the later 17th century begin to give way to a narrowing of the acceptable options for male sexuality. Even among the more adventurous parts of society, male same-sex encounters become less accepted and we see the rise of a sense that male desire for men constitutes a specific identity rather than a polymorphous taste. Female desire continued to be treated as pansexual for a longer time, but the female narrators of pornographic works were increasingly limited to sex workers and the demi-monde rather than offering a sense that all women were expected to be sexually adventurous.

Pornographic works often have a secondary purpose of critiquing some social or political institution—increasingly so later in the century, but an early example is Delarivere Manley’s political allegories, including The New Atalantis (published 1714). Her work often satirized women with social and political connections to Queen Anne, and used implications of lesbian sex as one means of challenging the female-centered power structures of the English court. Lesbianism as political satire would become even more prominent later in the 18th century in a far more explicit form, but Manley’s satires were more in the wink-wink, nudge-nudge category, even when it was clear that the women were having sex.

Convents continued to be a popular setting for lesbian pornography, in both Catholic and Protestant cultures. Catholic writers were often satirizing what they viewed as the hypocrisy of the church and its institutions, while Protestant writers might view the entire institution as inherently corrupt, with the suppression of sexuality automatically leading to debauchery.

This religious pornography might fall in the “sexual initiation” genre, but more commonly we see the rise of a more predatory scenario in which an authority figure in the convent takes advantage of the required obedience of the novices to seduce them, or scenes of penance and flagellation are sexualized. Denis Diderot’s La Religieuse (The Nun) published in 1760 falls somewhat in the middle of the scale. We have the motif of an experienced, predatory, older authority figure taking advantage of a rather improbably naive religious novice. The novice’s initial bewildered innocence—even as she is brought to orgasm—turns to manipulation in order to receive favors and concessions in exchange for her compliance. Eventually, when pressured to admit the erotic nature of the affair, she flees the convent and comes to a bad end.

Pornography focusing on sex workers, and especially on the theme of a young girl being initiated into the profession by an established mentor, becomes prevalent across the 18th century. These works generally include a fairly brief lesbian episode at the beginning, followed by more extensive descriptions of the girl’s professional adventures. Two works both published in 1748 illustrate this genre. The French Thérèse Philosophe (Therese the Philosopher) follows a not-entirely-naïve country girl arriving in Paris, who is taken under the wing of a female neighbor who grooms her for prostitution by initiating a sexual relationship with her. The second is John Cleland’s famous Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, also known as Fanny Hill. Fanny is educated in sexual experience by a fellow prostitute who, it is stated, has a specific taste for lesbian sex, although Fanny herself finds it unsatisfying.

Lesbian episodes feature in passing in many works, such as the copiously illustrated French work Histoire de Dom Bougre, portier des Chartreux (published ca. 1748 and possibly authored by Jean-Charles de Latouche). The sexual adventures of the titular character, a lascivious priest, involve a wide variety of positions and combinations of participants, but at least one episode in the work involves a female couple with no man shown as being present.

The sexual memoirs of Giacomo Casanova, A History of My Life featured at least one scene in passing in which the author enjoyed a threesome with two women who engaged in sex with each other. Works such as these were very much in the libertine tradition which viewed women as open to all types of erotic activity, where lesbianism was simply an appetizer within the banquet.

In other material, sex between women is front and center, such as the novel Juliette by the Marquis de Sade. Juliette is the more licentious sister of de Sade’s more famous protagonist Justine. Having been seduced by a nun in the convent where the two sisters were being educated, Juliette embarks on a libertine life in which sex with women features heavily, along with the violent encounters to which de Sade gave his name.

French pornographic literature of the later 18th century increasingly became saturated with sequences of sexual encounters and obscene language, with only the flimsiest semblance of a plot connecting them. But threaded through the whole was rage at the political conditions in revolutionary-era France, and sexual writing was one means of expressing that rage.

As I detailed in my podcast about the Anandrine Sect, French anxieties around secret societies and the participation of women in politics were funneled into the image of a pseudo-Masonic lesbian sex club, as described in loving detail in the novel L’Espion Anglois, published in 1779 by Mathieu-François Pidansat de Mairobert. The work is a collection of salacious anecdotes, one of which involves an adolescent country girl who, having inclinations toward sex with women, is sent off to Paris to be initiated into the Anandrine sect. The practices of this group are described in a fairly soft-focus manner, more talked about than presented in graphic detail. The description of the Anandrine Sect in L’espion Anglois is decidedly tame compared to the content of a political pamphlet from 1791 entitled Liberty, or Mademoiselle Raucourt to the Whole Anandrine Sect, which can best be understood as part of a connected series of raunchy political satires featuring a mythical “Committee on Fuckery” which has taken on itself the application of revolutionary principles to the sexual underworld of prostitutes, sodomites, and tribades. The intent of this sub-genre leans much more to simple shock value, where crude language and a steady stream of graphic descriptions satirize the over-the-top polemics of political pamphlets.

Lesbian imagery as political attack reached its peak in revolutionary France in the accusations brought against Queen Marie-Antoinette that various of her female courtiers had been her lovers. Whether or not the accusations were true—and it’s quite possible that they were—the hostility toward Queen Marie Antoinette in France derived from a number of themes. She was foreign. She was financially profligate. And for quite some time she failed to produce an heir to the throne. The aristocracy in general were viewed as licentious, and this immorality in turn was considered to underlie the political instability of the nation. Antipathy to political favoritism was expressed in exaggerated form via accusations of sexual favoritism.

An anonymous pamphlet published in 1793 titled “The Private, Libertine, and Scandalous Life of Marie-Antoinette” consists largely of a chronological catalog of all the women and men she was claimed to have engaged in sexual relations with, starting with her sisters at age ten and continuing through most of her closest friends and supporters in the court, including the duchess de Polignac and the princess de Lamballe.

Political pornography in England operated on a more individual basis. The explicit and pornographic attacks in William King’s poem The Toast satirized a woman he considered an enemy as being the leader of a band of lesbians, among other things, but the purpose of the work was to disgust, not to arouse.

Similarly, the polemical pamphlet Satan’s Harvest Home included an Orientalist fantasy of lesbian encounters in a Turkish bath by way of accusing English women of taking up the same vice, but it was not directed at specific individuals and was not intended to be erotic (though readers may have treated it as such). But various travel writers of the 18th and 19th centuries spun a more erotic view of women-only spaces within the Ottoman Empire, and these orientalist fantasies made their way into art such as scenes of a bath house by mid-19th century French painter Ingres (to step somewhat out of chronological order).

Other satirical pamphlets and ballads of the 18th century focused on women’s use of dildos to satisfy each other, such as the anonymous epic poem The Sappho-an and the more popular-oriented ballad Monsieur Thing’s Origin: or Seignor Dildo’s Adventures in Britain.

Medical literature continued to be a potential venue for offering pornographic material with a veneer of respectability. Works such as Giles Jacob’s Tractatus de Hermaphroditus (A Treatise on Hermaphrodites, published 1718) fed prurient curiosity about the possibility of women engaging in sex with each other using an enlarged clitoris. And this theme recurs in a curious publication titled A Supplement to the Onania, or the Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution, which purported to be a polemic against masturbation but reads more like the letters column from Penthouse. Sex between women was sometimes framed as a type of masturbation—perhaps less worrisome to men that way—and several lesbian encounters are presented in the work, framed as either being caused by, or leading to, clitoral enlargement.

The Decadent 19thcentury

As we come to the end of the 18th century, there is yet another shift in the place of pornography in society. But that shift occurs in parallel with several general shifts in the intertwined fabric of politics, society, and concepts of gender and sex.

As a very brief—and vastly oversimplified—summary: the understanding of gender was moving from a view that the differences between women and men were—shall we say, quantitative—to a view that those differences were qualitative. That women and men were, functionally, different species with entirely different biological, intellectual, and emotional lives. This was one driver behind the “cult of the domestic woman”—the image of women (and let’s be honest, we’re talking about middle-class Christian white women) as some sort of pure, virtuous, sexless domestic caretaker. Somehow, gradually, over the course of the previous long century, women were no longer viewed as having the same erotic desires and experiences as men (indeed, as being more sexually driven than men). Among women, active sexual desire became assigned to the lower classes and to sex workers. For a good, respectable, middle-class woman to admit to enjoying sex was now tantamount to admitting she had no morals at all. I mean, of course many respectable middle-class women did enjoy sex, but a social model had developed that denied this.

In parallel with this had been a gradual shift from viewing sexual desire as being potentially pansexual and diffused across a variety of possible erotic activity (at least for those who failed to control their appetites) to a narrow focus on penis-in-vagina sex and a marginalization of same-sex activity to specific people with an individual proclivity for it. This, of course, was setting the stage for the modern concept of sexual orientation.

Control of sexual and other morals had traditionally fallen to formal power structures: the state and the church. But those structures were either losing their moral authority—one fallout of the association of the aristocracy with licentious behavior—or were simply abandoning responsibility. Moral control increasingly shifted to patriarchal family structures and social “peer pressure”. In part, this was implemented via an equation of the state with allegorical female embodiment. The nation--coded as a chaste and virtuous woman--was depicted as being at risk from violent sexual attack. This image was then turned around to place the burden of national honor on the proper and acceptable behavior of women. Loose morals in women undermined the stability and honor of the nation.

As one might imagine, these ideas didn’t sit well with everyone. Reactions against the cult of domesticity and the respectability politics of the early 19th century gave rise to social and literary movements specifically intended to produce shock and disgust. France became a center and source of this “decadent” movement, and that fact also led to a strong association of France with non-normative sexuality by neighboring cultures such as England. The use of lesbian encounters in decadent art and literature assumed an outsider’s gaze, but increasingly the social climate that allowed the genre to become more visible also created a space for women with same-sex interests to develop their own culture and literature, although with the understanding that their lives were also viewed as a performance for voyeurs. In this context, we begin to see publicly visible works by women on the subject of lesbian sexuality.

But another thing happened across the 19th century. Behaviors and conditions that were viewed as “anti-social” (that is, outside the accepted norms) were increasingly medicalized and classified in minute detail, within a literary tradition that was almost as voyeuristic as overt pornography. In the later 19th century, “case studies” of same-sex desire could be hard to distinguish from the “true confession” style of pornography that had emerged in the 18th century. And access to books that discussed homosexuality from a medical and psychological point of view typically were as strictly controlled and regulated by moral authorities as pornography was. Women’s access to books with sexual content—whether academic or prurient—was of particular concern. The interest in “protecting” women from knowledge about sex was two-fold: a belief that such subjects would disgust their innocent sensibilities, and a belief that such subjects would corrupt them into an unthinkable desire for sexual experience.

The decadent movement produced a vast array of pornographic and erotic works featuring sex between women—both artistic and literary. I include only a small selection here, primarily of more familiar works. While there is an element of deliberate provocation in most of these works, many are specifically intended to generate an eroticized “fear and loathing” in the (primarily) male consumers.

Théophile Gautier’s novel Mademoiselle de Maupin (published 1835) is inspired only very very loosely by a historic women, retaining her name, her cross-dressing, and her bisexuality. The title character is presented as alternating between female and male presentation to engage in sexual relations with both men and women.

From the same date, Honoré de Balzac’s novel The Girl With the Golden Eyes follows a man’s shocking discovery that the secret lover of the woman he desires is his own half-sister. The story devolves into jealousy and murder.

The poet Charles Baudelaire, famous for his collection The Flowers of Evil, published several poems in the mid-19th century specifically focused on lesbian relations, including “Lesbos”, and a sequence of poems titled “Damned Women”. His theme of female couples tormented by their desires inspired a number of artists to create works echoing the title of the poem. Baudelaire’s work, like that of many of the decadent writers, was banned and suppressed at various times for creating “an offense against public morals.”

Many of the male authors using explicit lesbian themes reveal a deep insecurity about men’s ability to compete with women on a sexual plane. Adolphe Belot’s 1870 novel Mademoiselle Giraud, My Wife features a male protagonist who discovers that his new bride’s reluctance to consummate the marriage is due to an ongoing lesbian relationship. In Guy de Maupassant’s story “Paul’s Mistress” (published 1881), a man is driven mad when his mistress abandons him for another woman.

But another strain of works, particularly somewhat later in the century, was inspired by a revival of interest in the poetry and image of Sappho and evoked a somewhat softer eroticism, though still operating within a social framework where sex between women had shock value. This group includes works like Paul Verlaine’s poetry cycle Scenes of Sapphic Love (published 1867) that depict love between women, somewhat positively, though rather voyeuristically. The most famous of this genre is the collection The Songs of Bilitis by Pierre Louÿs (published 1894) which fictionally purported to be a newly-discovered set of texts by a member of Sappho’s community of women and include explicit descriptions of sexual desire.

Toward the end of the 19th century, the counter-culture interest in lesbianism had also created space for women to express their own feelings on the topic. That makes a positive note on which to end this survey, with a look at the novel Lila and Colette by Catulle Mendès (published 1885) which adopts a pseudo-Hellenic style to depict lesbianism in a classical Greek setting.

Conclusion

Prior to the mid-20th century, a combination of factors worked to exclude women’s voices from the explicit depiction of lesbian eroticism in public discourse. The precarity of women’s careers in art and literature meant that controversial or shocking topics were more likely to be tackled by men. This, in turn, meant that sex between women—when depicted at all—tended to be handled in a voyeuristic way by outsiders. But despite this, lesbian sex was not erased from the pornographic record, nor was it necessarily treated in qualitatively different ways from how other types of sex were treated. In some eras, sex between women was simply considered one of the many different types of non-normative sexual activity that might be included in erotic literature and art. But it should be kept in mind that the depiction of women’s sexual activity in public culture generally tells us more about the attitudes of the dominant culture toward women in general, and toward women’s control over their own sex lives in particular, than it tells us about what women may have actually been getting up to in bed.

Show Notes

Note: This episode has an accompanying slide show, which can be accessed through the YouTube version of the podcast. (See transcript link.) Please note that the video includes explicit sexual imagery.

In this episode we talk about:

Links to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project Online

Links to Heather Online

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