snatch in the victorian period

 The Victorian era of the nineteenth century, like no other period preceding it, became dominated by the belief that an individual's sex and sexuality form the most basic core of their identity, potentiality, social/political standing and freedom. It is a curious irony that we moderns commonly portray Victorian sexual mores as puritanistic, moralistic and highly repressive, when like never before, sexuality became a focus of public and private attention. The Victorian bourgeois may have covered their piano legs out of modesty, but as an emergent social and political force they chose sexuality as the basis for delineating their identity from the aristocracy, peasants and emergent working classes.

Toward the beginning of the eighteenth century, there emerged a political, economic, and technical incitement to talk about sex. ..... This need to take sex ‘into account’, to pronounce a discourse on sex that would not derive from morality alone but from rationality as well, was sufficiently new that at first it wondered at itself and sought apologies for its own existence. How could a discourse based on reason speak like that?



But speak they did, with increasing intensity and authority, bringing into the objective light of science, a multitude of distinctive sexual species. The pervert, child masturbator, homosexual, hysteric, prostitute, primitive and nymphomaniac, all emerged as distinctly classified sexual species possessing their own internal "secret" which had been revealed by the penetrating gaze of science.



The polarisation of public and private spheres becomes the foundation upon which the ascendant bourgeoisie constructed the family and it's sexuality. The passionless reproductive wife confined to private domesticity, along with her publicly and competitively orientated husband becomes the central reference point for discussions concerning sexuality. The prostitute, homosexual and the solitary masturbator emerged as entities posing the greatest threat to heterosexual reproduction, bourgeois morality and social order.



The real life sex goddess in the day was a beautiful teenage showgirl named Evelyn Nesbit. Her story is a history  in itself  about thoughts on women  Victorian males.

. Her flowing tresses typified the Victorian female along with her taller than average hourglass figure and seductive expression.

 Her personality probably matched the then  modern woman as well.  Girls were spirited, well bred, independent and utterly feminine, yet underneath it all, there was that Scarlet O’Hara flash of mischief their eyes. That ever so naughty characteristic was what made them so alluring. There is a Catalan saying: 'La mar es posa bona si veu el cony d'una dona' - 'The sea calms down if it sees a woman's cunt'. This Catalan belief in the power of the vagina is, in fact, the source of the good luck custom of fishermen's wives displaying their genitals to the sea before their men put out on the water. The flipside of this faith is, logically enough, that a woman can cause storms if she urinates in the waves.

 Moreover, according to folklore, it's not just the oceans that are soothed by the sight of a woman's vagina. A flash of female genitalia has the power to calm other forces of nature too. For example, women in the southern Indian province of Madras were known to subdue dangerous storms by exposing themselves. And Pliny, the first-century historian of the ancient world, writes in his work

Natural History of how hailstorms, whirlwinds and lightning are all quieted and dispelled by a face-o with a naked woman

Victorians tabooed more and more words, new words, often slang words, replaced them. So many words have been used to replace taboo words that you can't talk for long without saying something that might offend some prude. Take cock for instance. (These days most people can't understand the relationship between cocks and...ahh...cocks. If you've never handled a live rooster, you probably don't know that when you wrap your hand around its neck, it has a very penile feel. If you're familiar with chickens it's obvious why a penis is called a cock and if you're not no explanation will suffice.) The word is first found in written English in Chaucer. Shakespeare himself uses it in puns, jokes, and wordplay but by the late 1700's and early 1800's the taboo had grown so strong that apricox, haycocks, and weathercocks became apricots, haystacks and weathervanes. As the old word was rooted out, new ones, and not so new ones, came to replace it - such as prick, Peter, Dick (thus a Dickless Tracy is a policewoman), Jack, John Thomas, knocker, tool, gun, pistol, short arm, truncheon, pole (as in Mae West's immortal line: I wouldn't let him touch me if he had a ten foot pole.), schlong, putz, shaft, root, snake, one- eyed trouser snake, Cod, bone, fishbone (the bone used to fish in what Shakespeare calls that peculiar river) and so on and so on. Penis replaced cock after the older word became unprintable even in scientific literature. Penis is Latin, not for cock, but for tail. The Latin word for penis is gladius or sword, something placed in a vagina or sheath

gropecunt lane

So we come to cunt, probably the most heavily tabooed of English words. This was not always so. The word appears in the Canturbury Tales (ca. 1400), spelled queynte, "And prively he caught hire by the queynte... And heeld hire by thehaunchbones." The earliest known reference is from the 11^th century and in 1230 there was a London street called Gropecunte Lane (Lover's Lane maybe?), and, in 1328, even a Bele Wydecunthe (poor thing!). Shakespeare uses cunt as a pun in Twelfth Night. As cunt became taboo, new words sprang up. A woman's external genitalia have been known as cat, beaver, beard (thus a beardsplitter is a womanizer), snatch, twat, nokie, piece, squirrel, tail, mutton, Lapland, slit, scut, Netherlands, cozzy, quim, mouse, monkey, fish, cony, bit, bunny, scut, hat (because frequently felt), furburger or a boxlunch or hair pie (the dish in cunnilingus) and Carvel's ring. In a poem from 1230 a jealous old doctor named Carvel dreamed the Devil gave him a ring that would prevent his wife from being unfaithful as long as he wore it. Carvel 's wife woke him with the complaint "You've thrust your finger God knows where

Fuck is thought to be a Scottish word. The old English words for intercourse were swive, jape and sard. Fuck is believed to have originated with the Middle Dutch fokken or perhaps the Germanic ficken both of which mean to strike or to copulate with. So the word has roots of both violence and sex. The English word firk, also a possible progenitor, meant to move suddenly, to cheat, to force oneself froward, to beat, and to copulate with. Like the other major taboo words, fuck has a multitude of slang synonyms such as screw, poke, plow, ride, sex, jazz, rock and roll, zig-zag, nug, roger, ball, bang, hump, score, and, when in California, to Californicate. In Australia Redfern or getting off at Redfern refers to coitus interruptus, Redfern being the last railway station before Sydney. My least favorite of the fuck words in motherfucker. Let's face it. Very few people are fucking their mothers. And if they were, it would probably be mutually consensual behavior. It seems to me a much worse insult would be daughterfucker or daughter molester, much worse because much more common and, by definition, involving force, coercion or exploitation. My favorite fuck word is Windfucker, a name for the European Sparrow Hawk. A beautiful thought, that this winged creature is on such terms of intimacy with the air.