The Once and Future Sex by Eleanor Janega

Author:Eleanor Janega
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

13.If she practices solitary vice, she shall do penance for the same period.

14.The penance of a widow and a girl is the same. She who has a husband deserves a greater penalty if she commits fornication.83

Theodore didn’t distinguish between women having sex with each other and women having sex alone, but he did gauge that such sins were more serious if a woman who had the acceptable sexual outlet of a husband chose to neglect him in favor of illicit activity.

Similarly, Burchard of Worms in Decretum nudged priests to ask the women who came to confession if they used a strap-on to have sex with another woman or if one was used on them. The punishment? “Penance for five years on legitimate holy days.” And women who masturbated had to do penance for “one year on legitimate holy days.”84 Burchard saw a clear link between two women having sex and women having sex with themselves, but sex with another woman carried a higher penance, indicating that it was more sinful.

The grouping of lesbian sex and masturbation seems to have been born from the idea that both activities arose from women being oversexed and lacking a marital outlet for their desires. But sex between women or by themselves simply didn’t “count” the way sex with a man did. Many theological arguments framed lesbian sex as a question of the misuse of objects for the pursuit of sexual pleasure. Hincmar of Reims (806–82) was alarmed by the insertion of objects as a substitute for a penis.85 Here even though a woman had a partner, such sex was considered masturbatory and a sin against “one’s own body.”

Understanding solo or lesbian sex was difficult within a system in which a heterosexual couple doing the missionary position was the definition of sex. Even Albertus Magnus, who wrote more of “rubbing” than insertion when discussing women masturbating, insisted that during the act, the girls in question “imagine men’s private parts.” The implication was that, given the opportunity, women would always prefer to have sex with a man, but in a crisis, they would make do. Whether that meant alone or with another woman was up for interpretation.

Sexual Magic

While women’s overt sexual nature was in turns a danger to the institution of marriage, a danger to the health of men, a danger to women’s own health if bottled up, some worried that women’s sexual preoccupations could cause them to turn to the occult. Buchard instructed priests to ask women whether, to increase their husband’s passion, they “take a live fish and put it in their vagina, keeping it there for a while until it is dead. Then they cook or roast it and give it to their husbands to eat.” This time the woman was supposed to “do two years of penance on the appointed fast days.”86

To be honest, the likelihood that medieval women inserted live fish into their vaginas and then fed them to their husbands was probably low. It cannot be ruled out, but all in all it seems unlikely, no matter how lacking their sex lives might have been.

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