ABSTRACT
For a field in which questions of difference between bodies have come to dominate, the term 'the history of the body' might appear to be an inappropriate title. As exemplified by Thomas Laqueur's book Making Sex (1990), the foreground of this field is occupied with how people in the past imagined the relationship between the male body and the female body. Laqueur constructed a narrative of change in which this relationship experienced a momentous transformation some time during the eighteenth century, spawning the two opposite sexes of modernity. Yet in the opening passages, one of the bodies which emerged as half of this binary model by the end of the book, is apparently removed from exploration. 'It is probably not possible', Laqueur wrote, 'to write a history of man's body and its pleasures because the historical record was created in a cultural tradition where no such history was necessary.,2 The term 'the history of the body' is no misnomer, therefore, for a field in which one body - a female body - dominates. This chapter, in contrast, works on the assumption that all bodies are subject to the lending of meaning to physical matter. Male bodies were sites of construction and debate. 3
The exclusion of male bodies from the history of the body implies that these bodies possess both a constancy and a onedimensionality which excludes them from the field of historical exploration. Correspondingly, female bodies are often considered to be more unstable and less resistant to having meanings ascribed to them. 4 While the idea of constancy can be used fruitfully in work on male bodies, much recent work has made strenuous efforts to erode the myth of the one-dimensional male body.s Most frequently, this is attempted by adopting the theme of a disparity between ideals of masculinity and male bodies on the one hand, and the actuality of experiences of men and their bodies on the other. A specific variation of this approach can be found in those analyses which employ the language and analytical tools of psychoanalysis. In these, male bodies and authority are symbolically represented by the singular, majestic and imposing phallus, while the actuality of male bodies as changeable, soft and various is overshadowed. 6 Phrased in various ways, historians of the male body attempt to prise open the association between 'ideology' and 'actuality',7 between the 'imagination and experience' of men themselves and 'traditions of representation',8 or between 'embodiment' and 'phallic signification'.9 The unmasking of the breach appears to show discord to be at the foundation of masculinity, and produces one of the most powerful themes of this historiography, in which men are repeatedly portrayed as anxiously trying to live up to unattainable ideals. 1o
This chapter implicitly questions these distinctions between 'discursive' ideals and anxious experience. It draws on around ten texts in both prose and poetry, published between 1722 and 1779, which are united in their deeply satirical use of extended metaphors to portray the genitals. Priced between sixpence and two shillings, these were not extremely expensive texts, though neither were they cheap ephemeral items. While they work on many different levels, their price and content suggest that readers were members of an educated, urban middling group or elite. If readers were to appreciate all the satirical jibes made, for example, an extensive knowledge of a range of other genres would be required. Moreover, it is likely that this sub-genre of erotica was deeply masculine in authorship, readership and content. Though a large proportion of these texts was published anonymously or pseudonymously, all the known authors of this material were male. Information on actual readers is more elusive, especially when one trick of the erotic book trade was to make false statements regarding the intended readership. Nevertheless, there are other suggestive clues. Though distinctions between different types of material should not be ignored, it is significant that references to consumers (rather than purveyors) of sexually revealing or obscene material in this period always refer to men, never to women. 11 In view of this, it may seem odd that images of reading which appear within the material invariably feature women as readers. Yet, as this chapter seeks to show, these fictional readers constitute one of a range of techniques which indicate an intended actual readership of men. 12 'Masculine in readership' does not exclude the possibility of a woman reading these texts, rather it suggests that the content of this material was 'malecentred' and implies that the intended actual reader was male.I~)
The lack of explicitness apparently rendered by these extended metaphors has been regarded as indicative of the relative timidity of the English with regards to things sexual, and has led historians to exclude them from the category of pornography.I4 Though the use of the term 'erotica' in this chapter is in accord with this exclusion, it does not imply a less explicit form of pornography.Is Rather, these two bodies of material are envisaged as portraying sex, desire and bodies with distinctive strategies. At the heart of these distinctions is pornography's claims to explicitness and realism in its depiction of bodies and sex. Through techniques such as the obscene word and descriptions of the sex act, an illusion of greater proximity to the body is created, and sex takes on a realistic quality. 16 Erotica also creates an illusion, but it is an illusion which places bodies and sex at a distance. A variety of strategies might be employed in this process: bodies might be made conspicuously absent by being clothed in garments, placed outside the narrative, or (in this case) 'veiled' through the use of extended metaphors.
