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It is the eighteenth-century ‘medicalisation of sex', as it has
been called, that underpinned this period's polarisation between a clinical and a burlesque view of orgasm. It was widely believed once again (a view still in play in the twentieth century) that the female orgasm, or ‘hysterical paroxysm' (‘the most common of all diseases except fevers,' according to one contemporary doctor) helped women to conceive. This led to another revival of the idea of the therapeutic orgasm, but administered to women less as an expedient way of calming them down than as a course of medical treatment. Doctors in the eighteenth century were not as keen as they would be in the nineteenth to perform manually this laborious task, which could take up to an hour before the Victorian genius for mechanisation reduced it to ten minutes or less. So physicians used midwives and even husbands as their masturbating proxies.

Clitoral stimulation by a medical index finger was not the only method of rousing in recalcitrant women a healthy, conception-aiding orgasm. Other methods advocated were vigorous horseback riding or simply sitting in a rocking chair. Bernard Mandeville, author of a 1711 book on hysterical paroxysm,
Treatise of Hypochondriack and Hysteric Passions
, recommended a stiff ride out followed by three hours of ‘massage'. The reasons he put forward for the hysteria were a little contradictory; it was caused either by sexual frustration or masturbation.

Another pseudo-medical pioneer of the eighteenth century was James Graham, a moralist who, a little ironically, found himself imprisoned in 1783 for giving obscene public lectures on sex. He travelled round England and the American colonies spreading the word for healthy sex, within a strict marital context. He was also one of the world's first sex therapists, helping couples with difficulties conceiving. His patented sex aid was a magnetic, vibrating bed. When he was imprisoned, he was trying to raise £20,000 for an updated musical version of the bed.

In Europe, sexual advice was being given to the great and good by a prominent doctor Dutch physician, Gerard van Swieten, who was famous as a health reformer and founder of
the Vienna Medical School. In 1740, van Swieten was consulted on a delicate matter by the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria. Maria Theresa was unhappy, unfulfilled and confused by her inability after three years of marriage not only to conceive, but even to manage a moment of penetrative sex with her shy young husband, the Holy Roman Emperor Francis I. There was no question of blaming the Emperor, so gossip in the Viennese court had it that the Empress was ‘sterile' as it was called then, or sexually dysfunctional as we would say today.

Van Swieten's pronouncement on the matter does not look all that remarkable in the Latin in which he cautiously clothed it:
‘Praeteria censeo, vulvam Sacratissimae Majestatis, ante coitum, diutius esse titillandam!
Had van Swieten delivered it in modern language, the conclusion of his prescription might have caused a stir, however. The diagnosis translates as: ‘Furthermore, I am of the opinion that the sexual organs of Her Most Sacred Majesty should be titillated for some length of time before coitus.'

And it would seem that van Swieten's advice, that sex worked better if it was pleasurable for both parties, hit home too. After three years of sexual drought, Maria Theresa almost immediately became pregnant and went on to have sixteen children, the eleventh of whom was Marie Antoinette, later Queen Consort of King Louis XVI of France. The couple also began to enjoy a reputation for being passionate and ardent lovers. All, it would seem, because the Empress was emboldened to ask her husband to tease her clitoris a little, to treat sex as a pleasure – and thus to turn their lovemaking overnight into something more than a clinical attempt to provide a successor.

Maria Theresa went on to become a positive advocate of sexual pleasure, according to Marie Antoinette's biographer, Antonia Fraser. Marie Antoinette was married at fourteen in 1770 to Louis Auguste, the fifteen-year-old heir to the French throne, but history repeated itself with the newly marrieds unable to consummate their relationship for another two years.

The Empress, who became quite domineering in middle age, saw this entirely as the soon-to-be Queen's fault, for failing to inspire sexual passion in Louis XVI. Marie Antoinette, according to Fraser, was interested in intimacy based on sentiment, not sex, which she regarded as a disagreeable duty. In the ribald popular pamphlets of the day, which were used to whip up Revolutionary crowds in 1789, Marie Antoinette was portrayed as both a lesbian and an unfaithful wife, since if the King was not satisfying her, somebody surely had to be; the Princesse de Lamballe, Superintendent of the Household, was said by the gossips to be working on the queen's sexual frustration ‘with her little fingers'.

The level of disrespect to the Royals betrayed by this scurrilous pamphleteering about their sex lives is thought to have been one of the catalysts of the French Revolution. Yet Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette's disastrous sexual relationship had less to do with the King's foppishness and Queen's neurotic instability and more with a simple physical cause, according to research unveiled in France in 2002. The historian Simone Bertière showed that the King was the possessor of a
‘brac-quemart assez consid
é
rable'
(an over-large penis), and the Queen of a condition politely known then as
‘I'étroisse du chemin'
, an unusually narrow vagina.

With the Austrian-French alliance that was designed to be cemented by the marriage rendered rocky by the sexual problems between King and Queen and their resultant childlessness, Marie Antoinette's older brother Joseph II of Austria, according to Bertière, wrote to their brother Leopold with an interesting view on the best way of producing orgasm in sexually shy males. The French King, Joseph reported, was able to have ‘well-conditioned, strong erections and introduce his member, stay there for two minutes without moving, withdraw without ejaculation and then, still erect, wish [Marie Antoinette] a good evening'.

He should, concluded Joseph, ‘be whipped like a donkey to make him discharge in anger'. It was after more such extreme
Agony Uncle advice from Joseph that the unhappy couple finally conceived a daughter in 1778, four years after their succession to the throne, followed by three other children before both of them were executed in 1793.

So much, then, for the medicalisation of the orgasm in the eighteenth-century, a phenomenon that was going to be a key ingredient of the next stage in the evolution of sex: Victorian prudery. The endemic rakishness of Georgian London tells us something of the other end of the sexual spectrum that in due course contributed, by its conspicuous excess, to the Victorian mindset.

In 1780 an extraordinary kind of Good Whore Guide -
Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies: Or Man of Pleasure's Kalender, Containing the Histories and Some Curious Anecdotes of the Most Celebrated Ladies Now on the Town -
began to be published annually.
Harris's
detailed the physical charms, attractions and prices of all the known prostitutes in the area. So successful did it prove that a companion guide to the ladies of Piccadilly was soon brought out.

The entries in
Harris's
appear today to be rather comical; it is easy to spot the kind of raw material that must have inspired
Blackadder Goes Forth:

Miss B., Titchfield-street: This child of love looks very well when drest. She is rather subject to fits, alias counterfits, very partial to a Pantomime Player at Covent Garden Theatre. She may be about nineteen, very genteel, with a beautiful neck and chest, and most elegantly moulded breasts, her eyes are wonderfully piercing and expressive. She is always lively, merry, and cheerful, and in bed, will give you such convincing proofs of her attachment to love's game, that if you leave one guinea behind, you will certainly be tempted to renew your visits.

A book of 1709,
The Secret History of Clubs of All Descriptions
, by a journalist, Ned Ward, gives a slightly less saccharine impression of the reality of eighteenth-century
London than does
Harris's
glowing review of Miss B. of Titchfield Street. ‘Once drunk enough,' Ward reports of London ‘gentlemen', they would, ‘attack the mask'd ladies who hand about the theatre in their secondhand furbiloes to open the wicket of love's bear garden to any bold sportsman who has a venturesome mind to give a run to his puppy'.

Behind the bawdy, however, lay desperate social problems that would not be recognised until the next century. One view of the Victorians is that they were more reformers than mere prudes. Miss B., it is clear from reading
Harris's
, was very much carriage trade. On Drury Lane, a quickie with a lesser-starred whore could be had for a shilling or a cheap bottle of wine.

Unmarried or widowed women faced a choice between making their living as servants or shop girls, which was as underpaid a calling as ever, or taking their chances catering to the market for instant orgasmic satisfaction for the carbun-cled, black-toothed and foul-breathed self-styled Georgian rakes. When arrested, the women faced being sent to a disease-ridden jail, or even transportation. And if eighteenth-century prostitutes were lucky enough to escape prosecution, they were more likely than not to contract syphilis or gonorrhoea. The
Times
reported in 1785 that 5,000 prostitutes a year in London were dying of venereal diseases.

England and Holland (where Mathijs van Mordechay Cohen had a thriving Amsterdam business selling ‘condons' made of lambs' bladders) were a little more liberal sexually at this time than France. In 1723, police in Montpellier swooped on a meeting of an orgy cult, the Multiplicants. The sect's members held sham temporary ‘marriages', which would be consummated publicly. The French authorities' reaction was surprisingly savage compared to the sexual anarchy in contemporary London. The leaders of the cult were hanged, the male followers were sentenced for life to the galleys, the women shaved bald and condemned to live out their lives in nunneries.

In the technology of contraception, nonetheless, the French
were stealing a march on their European rivals. The earliest bidets, a contraceptive aid that to this day confuses American tourists in Europe, came into use in France around 1710. The bidet was invented by Parisian furniture makers, according to a 1997 study by the domestic historians Fanny Beaupré and Roger-Henri Guerrand. It was known early in its existence as ‘the ladies' confidant' – and named after a French term for a pony, since it was thought that using it resembled mounting a small horse.

The bidet's prime purpose was as unclear as it remains for some today; it was partially introduced for hygienic reasons since, at a time when bathing was still a once-weekly treat, sex was a smelly business. Added cleanliness was also seen as a protection against VD. It was, additionally, a method of contraception, one of a wide variety in use in France which was the first country on record systematically to reduce its birth rate; it fell between 1750 and 1800 and carried on declining into the nineteenth-century. The official, pre-Revolutionary French view of this trend was not favourable. The author of the 1778
Récherches et consid
é
rations sur la population de la France
complained: ‘Rich women, for whom pleasure is the chief interest and sole occupation, are not the only ones who regard the propagation of the species as a deception of bygone days; already these pernicious secrets, unknown to all animals save man, have found their way into the countryside; they are cheating Nature even in the villages. If these licentious practices, these homicidal tastes, continue to spread, they will be no less deadly to the State than the plagues, which used to ravage it.'

Contraception in Britain was an earthier and manifestly less successful business. It also became caught up late in the century in the unpleasant business of eugenics, when a British economist, Thomas Malthus of Dorking, became famous as an advocate of family planning – as a method of keeping down the numbers of the poor. In the mid-eighteenth-century, the condom market was a duopoly for two women – a Mrs Perkins and a Mrs Phillips, who had a wholesale business on Half
Moon Street in London. Mrs Phillips even had an advertising jingle:

To guard yourself from shame or fear
,

Votaries to Venus, hasten here;

None of our wares e'er found a flaw

Self-preservation's Nature's law
.

The bidet did not take off in Britain, but post-coital douching by other means was later promoted by an 1832 book, Dr Charles Knowlton's
The Fruits of Philosophy
. He explained the importance of the douche, claiming to have invented it, and advocated not water but a solution of alum (an industrial chemical used medically as an astringent) mixed with green tea or raspberry leaves. Dr Knowlton was arrested on a sales trip to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and jailed for three months for trying to sell his book there.

While the bidet was revolutionising French plumbing, Paris became the scene of a strange and rare cult of what seems to have been communal female masturbation. The deeply peculiar early hypnotist (or ‘magnetiser'), the Austrian quack Friedrich Anton Mesmer (1733-1815), attracted a retinue of women and girls to sessions in the city where they would sit in a circle around a basin of ‘magnetised water', holding hands and touching knees. Assistant magnetisers, generally handsome young men according to one account, ‘embraced the patient between the knees', massaging her breasts and torso as they gazed into her eyes. A few jangling notes would then be sounded on a piano, whereupon the women would flush redder and redder, until they descended en masse into convulsive fits, reportedly laughing, shrieking, sobbing and tearing their hair, After the ‘crisis' was over, Mesmer (later immortalised in the word ‘mesmerism') would make his appearance and stroke the women on their faces, breasts, spines and abdomens so as to restore the ‘insensible' to ‘consciousness'. It has never been established what really went on in Mesmer's sessions, but they
seem to bear the hallmarks of a masturbatory experience for the women.