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Hello and welcome to Part 2 of Flick, a History of Female Pleasure with Dr Kate Lister.

This episode in particular has themes of asexual nature and also has the strongest language imaginable.

Let's get on with the show.

So talking about that period moving through the 17th century,

another thing that I've stuck out with the Anania pamphlets,

am I pronouncing that right?

Or is that wrong?

The wanky ones.

Onanism. Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

And how that's kind of impacted shame around sex in Britain. So do you want to explain this? Because they was widespread, weren't they? They were, and lots of people would have encountered them. It was a strange thing that happened. It's like, I mean, it's the oldest grift in the world, isn't it? Is you invent an illness and then you peddle the cure for it. So what we get in the 18th century is this new paranoia about what is called onanism or self-pollution. It's basically masturbating. It was equally applied to men and women, although men, they really, really did have some nasty cures on offer for you guys. So it was this idea that if you lost... What were those cures? What were the cures for... I'll get to them. Not that I need them, just to be clear. No, no. So you get this idea that if you lose too much seminal fluid, that your body will become weakened. That was a big one. And it kind of makes a weird kind of

sense if you think about how do you feel immediately after you've orgasmed, probably a little bit like, oh, and I'm done. Yeah? Like the French call it La Petitmore, the little death. So they kind of extrapolate from that, this idea that if you lose too much seminal fluid, your health is going to be damaged. And women don't have

seminal fluid, but they still applied it to them as well. No wanking for anybody. And they start

to publish all these really mad tracts and pamphlets, like showing basically that masturbation

can be terminal that you'll go, if you've ever heard that you'll go blind if you masturbated,

...