Illustrated condom revisited

Some while ago I made a blog post about an illustrated animal-gut condom which was sold at Christies in 1992, allegedly to a Swedish collector intending to establish an erotica and pornography museum. 

Imagine my glee at coming across this report: Dutch museum to display 200-year-old condom probably made from sheep’s appendix:

A 200-year-old illustrated condom will go on display with Dutch golden age masters in Amsterdam this week, after the 19th-century “luxury souvenir” became the first-ever contraceptive sheath to be added to the Rijksmuseum’s art collection.

The condom, which was probably made of a sheep’s appendix circa 1830, is thought to have come from an upmarket brothel in France, most likely in Paris. It features an erotic etching depicting a partially undressed nun pointing at the erect genitals of three clergymen, as well as the phrase Voila, mon choix (“There, that’s my choice”).

The Rijksmuseum curator Joyce Zelen said the composition of the etching deliberately alluded to the Greek myth of the Judgment of Paris.

It's very pleasing to have the item more specifically located in place and time of origin, as well as being made available in a public museum. I am also very tempted by the exhibition of which it is part, 'Safe Sex: featuring Dutch and French prints and drawings on the themes of sex work and sexual health.' (I can't find anything about this actually on the Rijksmuseum website, as at today, though masses of press reports all of which focus on the condom.)

I'm intrigued, however, that the price given for its acquisition ('Bought for €1,000 (£840) at an auction in Haarlem') seems rather lower than what it (reportedly) fetched in 1992, £3300, at that time probably the highest amount paid for a historical condom. This gives one to wonder about the various journeyings of this artefact over the past 30+ years, and the state of the antique condom market over time. In fact, another source reports the curator as remarking that 'It was a bargain... as condoms with pictures on them have been fetching much higher prices in the last 20 years'.

(I would, however, dissent from the curator's quoted comment 'It enables us to pause and look at the sexual history of the 19th century which we haven’t done much with so far'. Or maybe I am being Anglocentric, because sometimes it seems there is no end of looking at the Victorians and their sexual histories.)

 

 

 

A brief taste of the ICHSTM in Manchester

The International Congress of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine took place in Manchester this week and is still going on. While I didn't have the time - or the stamina! - to attend the whole week-long event, I did get in a very enjoyable day and a half of participation.

I travelled up on Tuesday afternoon, had a preliminary meeting with the other members of the two-panel symposium The science of man? Bounds of knowledge in the twentieth century within which I was presenting my thoughts on Naomi Mitchison engaging with the issues around reproduction and breeding which had been so salient in her own life, and in the circles in which she moved, in her late-life move into science fiction. I then attended the Civic Reception in Manchester Town Hall, a neo-Gothic monument to Victorian municipal pride: very crowded, rather hot, and the acoustics/PA system not perhaps all they could have been for the speeches, but I managed to spot, and chat with, some people I knew.

The next morning I popped into 'Governing minds and bodies with the human sciences' in order to catch Alice White's fascinating paper on Constructing consensus: human relations and the War Office Selection Boards in World War II but then panel-hopped into Expanding women’s sphere: knowledge and the re-definition of women’s work in the twentieth century and stayed with this for the following session, in which I found Rosemary Wall's paper on British nurses in the field of tropical medicine of particular interest.

The 'Science of Man?' symposium on Wednesday afternoon went very well, I thought (kudos to Graham Baker for organising this) and I thought raised issues about complexity, muddle, and definitions that recurred in the following morning's papers. Sometimes looking back we draw lines and create categories that were not there, or at least not taken into account, by the people there in the past moment. And thinking about Graham's paper on Julian Huxley, the useful interrogation of the mainline/reform eugenics dichotomy suggested to me that this (like Old/New Feminism in the 1920s) has perhaps outworn its usefulness.

There was an excellent reception in the Fossil Gallery at the Manchester Museum to launch WISRNet - I think sipping fizzy wine (and eating delicious canapes) under a tyrannosaurus rex skeleton known as Stan adds tone to an event, even before the splendid inaugural speech by Ludmilla Jordanova.

On Thursday morning I made a special effort to get up in time to get checked out my hotel and to the conference venue to catch the first session of the symposium From patronage to biotech: new perspectives on medicine and commerce. Given my own research interests, I was particularly excited by Claire L Jones' work on the supply and marketing of contraceptives in Britain in the late C19th-earlyC20th, as I have long felt that understanding of the industry and its activities has been a major lacuna in the history of birth control. Even if artificial contraception played less of a part than previously thought in bringing about population decline, enough people must have been using it to make manufacture and distribution a profitable, if marginalised and stigmatised, commercial proposition. All three papers were looking at forms of health activity within the home: I am interested to see where James Stark's work on the Overbeck Rejuvenator goes!

I then ventured into the Science as Public Culture revisited symposium session on media, which again, was indicating that narratives of science have tended to impose a clear but sometimes simplistic picture of what was actually happening. I did perhaps want to suggest, in response to Katherine Pandora's lovely paper, that there are some instances of the laboratory becoming an intimate and perhaps quasi-familial space rather than an austere location for the solitary scientist (e.g. Honor Fell at the Strangeways, and her 'tea ceremony' for researchers there). Also, on thinking further about Rebecca Onion's intriguing work on environmentalism in children's picture books, early 1970s, I wonder if this relates to wider issues of children's literature expressing concerns over contemporary problems, but also to the longer tradition of didacticism and purpose in books for children.

All in all, a very stimulating experience which has provided me with a lot to keep thinking about.

Bateman exhibition at the Cartoon Museum

Last Friday I participated in an evening event at the Cartoon Museum in Bloomsbury in connection with their current exhibition on the work of H M Bateman. Bateman is probably best known for his series of tableaux of social shame, 'The Man Who...' embarrassingly committed some solecism or faux pas but his long career included numerous other contributions to the cartoonist's art. (His vivid evocations of shame and humiliation resonate with Nash and Kilday's suggestion that shame continued as a compelling cultural force well beyond the period conventionally assigned to the rise of a guilt culture.)

I was asked to speak on women in the Edwardian period - Bateman has a number of rather conventionally hostile cartoons of suffragettes, but he often depicted women as terrifying and/or grotesque, and one feels that pillars of the anti-suffrage forces would not have gained any very flattering treatment either. Conversely, there are some more sympathetic portrayals of women, for example the Woman with Flat Iron and several of music hall performers. I didn't see any works illustrating 'khaki fever' in the early months of the Great War but one is rather surprised that he didn't make something of this.

It occurred to me, in my consideration of the wider changes in women's lives and their increasing move into public spaces for both work and leisure purposes, whether some of the hostility towards the suffrage movement, and the often very nasty ways in which they were portrayed, was because they were in some sense an epitome of, or a scapegoat for, disturbing changes more generally in the relations of the sexes at the period.

Yet more depressing news about the disposition of valuable research resources

I already mentioned the bad news about the uncertain fate of The Women's Library and the TUC Collections (and I do exhort people to go and sign the petition to save TWL.

I've also been distressed at the news that the Birmingham Medical Institute is selling off its historical collections of books and manuscripts and that the Wedgewood Collection continues to be threatened with dispersal.

And now I hear that the New York Public Library at 42nd Street is proposing, if not to get rid of its research materials, to outhouse them so that they will no longer be readily available to the researcher. I once made a flying visit from Boston to consult rare periodicals which could be found nowhere else, and was able to accomplish this within a day, a not inconsiderable advantage given the constraints on my research time and budget.

This is all very distressing and seems like a wide downgrading of the importance of actual primary research materials in a world in which it is (wrongly) assumed that everything is digitally accessible.

Sir Henry Wellcome's sexual objects

On Wednesday I went to the Classical Archaeology Seminar at the Institute of Classical Studies in London at which Jennifer Grove (Univeristy of Exeter) was speaking on 'Henry Wellcome's Classical Erotica: sexually related antiquities collected for the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum in the early C20th'.

This was a very interesting seminar on collecting, museums and the display of objects with sexual connotations. There is something of a perception that Wellcome was a rather undiscriminating collector and that he also acquired a good deal of material of non-medical interest through buying up job lots which dealers had carefully salted with one or two medical items. In fact it turned out that he was specifically acquiring in the area of classical sexually-themed objects and the collection (before it was dispersed) had nearly 1000 of these.

At least in the case of the sexual objects of European Classical Antiquity, it appears that he saw these as falling within wider paradigms of medicine and the maintenance of life and health, in particular the (mostly phallic, but some vulval) amulets and votive objects. These were displayed alongside other amulets within the museum context, at a time, intriguingly, when most museums were still segegrating any material of a sexual nature into secret cabinets and closed collections, rather than displaying it alongside related materials of a non-sexual nature with which it might originally have been associated.

This was presumably possible for Wellcome's museum as he very much positioned it as a place of research and study rather than a public show of entertaining curiosities: although it did receive large numbers of visitors, including school-groups, one wonders whether these were carefully escorted and guided around the galleries rather than running around freely with check-sheets like contemporary school groups in museums.

I was also struck, given that Wellcome's intended audience was the medical profession and scholarly disciplines such as anthropology, by the similarity to the ways in which works of sexology were being published during the same period, with titlepage provisos that they were for the medical/legal professions and serious scholars only (which it is clear a number of booksellers took as guidance). There also seems an intriguing shift from erotic/sexual materials being seen as the province of the gentleman connoisseur (who could bribe his way or at least use social capital to get into secret collections, as well as purchase limited editions of pornographic works) to the realm of the medical and scientific.

However, while the classical sexual objects in Wellcome's collections clearly fit into a model of the religious/spiritual/superstitious approach to medicine, and were about the vital powers of fertility and reproduction, some of the other erotic items (for example the box of Japanese tortoiseshell sex toys currently on display in the Medicine Man exhibition in the Wellcome Collection)

raising rather more puzzling questions about how these fit into the wider paradigms of the collection.

And yet another appearance

Let's Talk About Sex - After Hours event at the Natural History Museum, part of the programming around their new Sexual Nature exhibition (subject of an article in today's Guardian: The bizarre world of animal sex):

25 Feb 2011 at 19.00 hrs

From kissing and foreplay through to the act of sex, join us as we discuss the history and psychology behind the different stages of lovemaking and how our sexual technique compares to other creatures in the animal kingdom.

This frank and open discussion will encompass a number of questions you might be to afraid to ask... Do some people enjoy sex more than others? Why do we orgasm? What did the Victorians get up to after dark? What role does fantasy and fetish play in sex? Can we learn anything about our own sexual pleasure from other creatures like the adventurous bonobo apes? Plus many more.

Our panel of experts will be on hand to discuss the burning issues, answer your probing questions and broaden your horizons.

There will also be a chance to have your questions answered in our anonymous 'sex surgery' and we'll have a display of objects that will test your imagination!

Speakers include:
Dr Petra Boynton, University College London (UCL)
Lesley Hall, Wellcome Library
Geoff Boxshall, Natural History Museum

Tickets £8, £7.20 members (advance booking recommended)