The Mens Answer to the Womens Petition Against Coffee, Vindicating Their own Performances, and the Vertues of that Liquour, from the Undeserved Aspersions lately cast upon them by their Scandalous Pamphlet, (London, n.p., 1674), [2], 5pp.; 4°. BL: 1038.i.47.(2). ESTCR30522. Hünersdorff

An anonymous prose reply to The Women’s Petition (above pp. 109–18), which is noted on the title-page as a ‘Scandalous Pamphlet’. Satires such as these reinforce their own controversial status by alerting readers to their place in a dialogue with other texts. In this case, the supplemental status of the satire is clearly indicated in the title, as an answer to particular complaints voiced by the women. The satire begins with the lament that women are ungrateful for men’s efforts to please them. The male satirist, however, understands that for women pleasure is almost exclusively sexual (keying into a discourse of misogyny broadly contiguous with that which it seeks to answer). The text proceeds to a point-by-point response to observations made by the women’s petitioner, revisiting, for example, both the rhetoric of cock-sparrows and dildos. Again, as with The Women’s Petition, the satire is addressed to contemporary sexual mores as much as coffee or coffee-houses. In identifying lascivious and libertine sexual practices amongst women in contemporary London, the satirist attacks the sexual politics of the Restoration, widely identified with the cavalier culture of the court of Charles II. The political contours of this satirical landscape are reinforced when the text turns to its defence of coffee. The satirist observes that the ‘Sober and Merry’ drink of coffee was sent by ‘Providence’ during the Republic, ‘at a time when Brimmers of Rebellion, and Fanatick Zeal had intoxicated the Nation’ (below, p. 124). It is the sobriety of the coffee-house, the satirist observes, that confuses women: and in fact both coffee-houses and coffee encourage libidinality amongst men. Nothing is known of the author, not even their sex: Peter Brown’s suggestion of John Locke has no known foundation (In Praise of Hot Liquors: the study of Chocolate, coffee and tea-drinking 1600–1850 (York, York Civic Trust, 1995), pp. 16–17). Four copies survive, at the British Library, Harvard, Yale and the Folger.