Weird News: Restoration Era Sex Manual Is Finally On Sale
A formerly banned sex book called Aristotle's Compleat Master-Piece is being auctioned.
You know how the Victorian era was all fainting couches and chastity belts? Evidently, the Restoration era* was off the chain.
Per The Guardian, a book called Aristotle's Compleat Master-Piece is now being brought to auction. While the book was originally published in an era best referred to as the Restoration, around 1680, the copy in question was produced somewhere in the neighborhood of 1760 in the so-called Georgian era.
Art, architecture and smut (fine, pornography and erotica) has coexisted since the first cave bro sketched a spear going from his crotch into a cave woman's crotch rather than from his hand into a mastodon's keister. Tell me that pyramids don't remind you of early man trying to cover his turgidity with a gauzy linen sheet.
What separates Aristotle's Compleat Master-Piece is that it's a sex guide with a conscience. Aimed at helping out midwives and young couples, the book insists women ought to climax to conceive. Then it goes on to mention that children conceived by sinning parents may be born deformed. While neither thing is strictly true, many experts believe orgasms aid in conception and if sinning means smoking crack, riding rollercoasters or not taking folic acid, then yeah, birth defects are possible.
As English people's collective sphincters began puckering over anything gynecological (or phallic or mammarian), the book was banned for a couple hundred years ending in 1961. If you happen to be in Scotland on January 16th, the Lyon & Turnbull auction house will ready to move this 350 year-old dandy.
*The Restoration lasted from the late 1650s to the late 1680s.
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