ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates a 'discursive' body created in texts, but bodies are not blank slates onto which endless meanings can be scrawled. It shows that a multiplicity of male bodies were valorised and reviled in a system with many axes: male bodies were ranked along the lines of size, age, nationality and fertility. The exclusion of male bodies from the history of the body implies that these bodies possess both a constancy and a one-dimensionality which excludes them from the field of historical exploration. 'Masculine in readership' does not exclude the possibility of a woman reading these texts, rather it suggests that the content of this material was 'male-centered' and implies that the intended actual reader was male. Images of male bodies in eighteenth-century erotica are invariably accompanied by representations of women as sexual beings, which might offer tantalizing material for historians of women.
