Ins and Outs of the Chastity Belt

While I've been away visiting my son in Manhattan (how New York City has changed! I tweeted about its emergence from sweltering in grime, crime and an atmosphere of general hostility to become Europe, USA--a tourist destination), I've thought about a question I received in response to the last posting about chastity.

The question is: "Is that a photo of a chastity belt, and do those points face inward?" The short answer is, yes, that metal belt with the jagged openings, pictured in the last post, is a Medieval European chastity belt.

And the rest of the question calls for a longer answer that, I realized while walking Avenue of the Americas, Times Square, and Central and Riverside Parks, may need a posting all its own. So before this blog moves on to the difficulties chaste daters experience, I'd like to pause and explain the Medieval European chastity belt. Perhaps, in the next post to this blog, we'll deal with the chastity belt's probable precursor and possible inspiration: African and Middle Eastern female genital cutting, which practice was most likely encountered (and, to some extent, admired and emulated) by Europeans defeated in the Crusades and colonized by Muslims. I'll see if we get any questions about FGC.

But back to the chastity belt: yes, the last post featured a photo of an actual museum-displayed chastity belt. The chastity belt was a forged iron panty meant to surround a woman's vaginal and anal orifices with such dangerous material that a male wishing to introduce his penis into these openings for sexual intercourse would find himself faced with a terrible dilemma: once his penis entered, retracting it would be like driving backward over those tire puncture strips laid down at car rental locations and thrown down at police barricades and checkpoints. The man would either have to shred his penis or remain trapped in his lady's embrace.

This terrible dilemma is what we are probably meant to think of in Dante Alighieri's Inferno when we meet Francesca da Rimini and her lover and brother-in-law Paolo, infinitely entwined and moaning in their suffering, as they once did in their pleasure.

For those who have engaged in sexual intercourse, the trap is deceptively attractive: one surmises, "Oh, that's no problem at all! After ejaculation, the penis shrinks, and the gentleman can retract it from the lady and the vagina dentata without much difficulty."

Vagina dentata is Latin for "toothed vagina," the stuff of many European nightmares about the pleasures, sins and dangers of men having sex with women, and the attendant psychoanalytical misogyny that results from attempting to address this fear while blaming the lady for her allure and for the recriminative dangers attached to having illicit sexual relations with her.

However, retraction--also a thought for those with years of experience in unobstructed heterosexual intercourse--is not going to be so easy when there is not only psychological terror at play but engorgement of the penis prior to ejaculation having already done a significant amount of damage. Remember that the increasing rigidity of the penis may meet with increased internal lubrication of the woman's vagina and therefore not be noticed by the couple in unobstructed circumstances; but the iron mouth of the chastity belt will be unaffected by the passions of the couple and will not budge or soften, as their pleasures increase both engorgement and lubrication. My guess is that the foolhardy or headstrong lover or rapist who penetrated either the vaginal or anal opening of a woman's chastity belt, counting on post-ejaculation shrinkage to get him out of there safely, never made it to ejaculation.

Perhaps--we may never know, as there seem to be few or no documents describing this phenomenon; one wonders if such trapped gentlemen were routinely castrated and simply disposed of in ignominy--the lover is rendered incapable of ejaculation because of sudden, horrific damage to his engorged penis and is simply trapped there in his terrified lady's arms until fear of discovery or increased suffering leads to some crippling or fatal act of desperation, on either of their parts.

I am sure that such events must have most likely arisen because of my acquaintance with what people in today's somewhat sexually obsessed American society will risk, seemingly acting on a wordless faith that love or passion is its own god and will protect them. This is a pre-Christian European inheritance, for the most part, in the U.S., though acquaintance with some of the teachings and practices of Hinduism and Tantrism lead me to suspect that Europeanized American culture is not unique in its continuing adherence to the tenets of a millennia-old Love Cult; you may want to review one of my favorite discourses on the rules of obeisance to a Love god, Plato's Symposium, or Andreas Capellanus's The Art of Courtly Love, in which this rather roguish though apparently unreined-in Bishop discourses upon the rules regulating who owes sex to which suitor, and other such blithe handlings of flagrantly venal if not capital sins, according to Christian dogma.

I recently wrote to a colleague about Capellanus's response to a certain young woman. She wrote to him desperately pleading that, as a new bride, she loved her husband, and therefore she asked if her husband might not be seen as her lover. The woman's torment was her dread of being forced to acquiesce to another knight who demanded her heart and her body, as she had no Lover, capital L. Capellanus--that villainous Bishop--pronounced that, as her husband was her husband, he therefore could not also be her lover, and as one must acquiesce to the demands of Love, she must take a Lover (presumably inspired by the arrow-like pangs that indicated that the god of Love had chosen this man for her). Since such a Lover had presented himself, this poor bride who loved her husband must therefore accept the other man, whether she wanted him or not. (In a future blog, we will address whether or not women in Europeanized societies such as the United States have been freed of this expectation that they must give their bodies to someone moved by passion to demand access to them; is chastity really tolerated in today's globalized society?)

One can only guess how the situation faced by the Medieval bride who loved her husband and actually wanted to be faithful turned out--or read Tristan and Iseult or Le Morte d'Arthur, or some of the coercive rape scenes in Giovanni Bocaccio's The Decameron, or perhaps Marie de France's Heptameron story of the lady eternally pursued and torn to pieces by hounds for her refusal of her suicidal suitor. For the continuing influence of such Love Cult thinking long after the Middle Ages had closed in flaming witch-burning pyres, one can read the Medieval arguments still used quite dramatically--and to such tragic effect--in Liaisons dangereuses (Dangerous Liaisons), written by de Laclos well into the Englightenment.

The point here is that the chastity belt was not only applied to its wearer as a bulwark against her own temptation to stray, or some rapist's temptation to assault, but also against a culture that ignored Christian doctrine in its unshaken pre-Christian obsession with the power of sexual passion as its own god, confusingly enough calling this emotional bombardment by the same name as that Christian Love in whose honor lives--such as the bridegroom's--were being lost in the Holy Land.

Picture the travesty: a knight and his minions trek off to do battle against the superiorly educated, fabulously advanced cultures of the Muslims and Jews who, he is told, have invaded "his" Holy Land, knowing that the society that has accorded him wealth and power for bashing and raping his neighbors will also--most likely--push his wife to acts of infidelity while he is gone. At the least he may suspect that fellow lords and ladies of his court will villify, ostracize or otherwise punish her for her chastity, if she clings to it.

So he has his blacksmith forge an iron panty to help his lady safeguard her fidelity, necessarily applying this life-threatening device with some degree of her cooperation, if not at her request. However, I suspect that some women, faced with social Love Cult pressures and the threat of rape at court, probably requested the aid of the chastity belt. I am willing to be proven wrong; but it will take substantial proof to allay my suspicions that women dreaded rape at least as much as if not more than they feared temptation, upon the parting of their husbands for the Holy Wars.

This iron panty might be forged in the shape of today's g-string, thong, high-waisted bikini panty, or full old-fashioned girdle, depending upon the means and inhumanity of the knight who commissioned it and his concommitant desire for his lady to survive wearing it for the years he would be away.

Remember that she would have to manage to urinate, menstruate, and defecate continually, using only the limited openings available to her as toothed slits in the iron panty. Any act so innocent as "straining at stools," as attempting to alleviate constipation by sheer force of will used to be called in the medical books I read, would be likely to produce abrasion and resultant infection, at the very least, from what I can see of most toothed chastity belts. Now, in addition, only attempt to imagine the added difficulties of surviving the bloating and accumulation of waste around sensitive tissues that might result from a difficult menstrual period, or a urinary, kidney or "yeast" (vaginal) infection, and it is no wonder that the rate of death of even the most privileged of young European women at Medieval court was monstrously high. Add to these dangers the additional possibility that a woman might not have known she was already pregnant by the time she was fitted with a chastity belt, and her lord and owner was already on the road to Jerusalem with the key to free her from it.

Of course, some more humane (or less possessive) knights left a spare key in the keeping of a trusted religious or family head, in case news of their deaths arrived from the Holy Land; and it is to be hoped that such trusted persons might have been persuaded to release a pregnant or ailing wman from her bonds before tragedy resulted, though, once again, I confess that I have my doubts. Ironically, the Medieval European courts were not a place to practice such altruistic chivalry, as we might think of it, today. Chivalry, at that time and in that place, seems to have evolved with more focus upon the seductive arts of love and the power of the loved woman over the man who sought her sexual favors, than on humanity and heroism based on platonic self-sacrifice.

(For lovers of Medieval literature, lore and tradition: please forgive my candor. But this millennia-old cultural reverence for the force of passion as a god of its own has a lingering effect on twenty-first century global society, and therefore must be set up for eventual discussion in this blog.)

The tool of the chastity belt survived, like European psychoanalytic interest in female genital cutting, into the early twentieth century, probably more as a tool to discourage oral, manual, and pelvis-to-pelvis (lesbian or heterosexual, commonly known as "grinding") sexual activity, and the deterrent teeth become pronouncedly turned outward, as if to ward off instead of entrap.

In all, then, the Medieval chastity belt seems to have been about claiming and power, a statement threatening the manhood of one man, made by another man to speak in his absence, like a gauntlet perpetually thrown down at the door of his lady's chamber (if you will forgive such a metaphor, after what you've been reading). Its Victorian evolution became a statement that a woman's sexuality was claimed by the men who made decisions for her and, therefore, "owned" her body and her conscience.

And now, it is as I suspected: after dealing with a reasonably thorough introduction to the European chastity belt, we must leave African and Middle Eastern female genital cutting or, alternatively, the difficulties of those who practice chastity but who wish to date, for a future post. As always, if you have questions or comments, they are quite welcome.
I hope that you are enjoying your summer!

Understanding Sex in the US: Why are Some People Practicing Chastity?

Though there seems to be increasing intent among young and mature Americans to return to the practice of chastity before marriage in the United States, those who elect to abstain from sexual activity outside marriage may find that the least of their problems is unfulfilled sexual desire. Loneliness, ostracism, and perhaps even harassment, hostility, and social censure from those involved in sexual intercourse outside marriage seem to become equally or more pressing problems for the chaste in the US than unsatisfied sexual impulses. Why youth and adults in the US, where sexual intercourse outside marriage has been increasingly normalized for at least the past two generations, may choose to practice chastity--defined in this blog as abstinence from sexual activity outside marriage as well as from behaviors that would give the impression that one is available for or involved in extramarital sexual activity--might include religious, health, social, personal, and/or moral motives.

Perhaps in response to the sense of social formlessness that accompanies rapid, uncharted social change such as took place in the second half of the twentieth century, many youth and adults are taking it upon themselves to attempt to live, as closely as they can manage, by the teachings, laws and guidance of their various religions: Shi'ite or Sunni Islam, Judaism, Catholic, Coptic or Protestant Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Janism, Hinduism, and Baha'i, among others. Many religions prescribe sexual abstinence outside the bonds of marriage.

However, in this age of the rampant spread of HIV/AIDS and the discovery that some genital and reproductive disturbances--even serious ones such as cervical cancer--may be caused or spread by non-monogamous sexual activity that carries the contagion or the conditions that favor infection from one sexual partner to another, some people are choosing abstinence to protect not only their own immediate health but that of a potential future partner, with whom they hope to eventually share a lifetime of exclusive sexual activity.

Some sexually active people who begin such activity because of intense feelings of devotion for one person may find that relationships whose boundaries are not defined and protected by a socially recognized institution such as marriage end abruptly or are more quickly permeated and compromised than they might have foreseen. The person who thought s/he was going to be sexually active with only one special person may become disillusioned and feel emotionally numbed or even jaded as s/he finds that s/he is moving on through a progression of uncommitted relationships. Therefore, some abstainers are removing themselves from the US's sexually active social community.

If you are reading this post, you've already been warned that you may encounter explicit material. But I'm warning you again: now it begins.

I remember when, reading for my Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, a well-known scholar of Ancient Greek literature assigned The Satyricon, a work of extraordinarily witty and elaborate pornography. Since most of the conglomerate of ancient cultures collectively known as Greek practiced and extolled homoeroticism--gay sex--of course, there was much discussion of the issues that arose in the text. As our professor was gay and a fluent reader of the language, he was often called upon to explain jokes, plays on words and situations that arose. One day, he said with great candor, "This man has told his lover he has only had intercrural (a man's penis placed between a partner's thighs) sex with other men. But his lover discovers, in penetrating him, that he has a wide a**; one doesn't get a wide a** by having intercrural sex." I am sure that you can imagine the class's silence as we contemplated our literary lesson for the day.

My own thoughts were about a friend of mine in high school, an extraordinarily beautiful, willowy European American girl from a very wealthy Los Angeles family who only hung out with a handful of somewhat individualistic African American loners. I was amomg them. One day, her closest friend approached me to talk about doing an intervention. Our mutual friend had requested not one or two but four tampons--internally applied menstrual absorbents. Four tampons? I was a virgin who had wept for hours in the bathroom over my attempts to insert one tampon. I couldn't wrap my mind around inserting four and walking, though I had just seen her do it (walk away from the bathroom, that is, not insert her tampons). Four live births later, truthfully, I still pause to grasp the condition of a sixteen-year-old girl who would insert such a bulk of foreign matter into her body. In the face of my stupefaction, the friend explained, "She's all stretched out of shape."

We had never approved of her boyfriend, and so we took her aside and imposed some restrictions. Today, I don't quite know what to think of our well-intentioned efforts to police a fellow teenager's sex life. However, we did not know at that time and therefore could not tell her that vaginal exercise might help restore lost tone. (One practices squeezing off the flow of urine, like turning off a faucet. One needn't wait for this exercise to be assigned by a doctor after vaginal delivery of a child; young women should be taught to practice it as part of a regimen of personal health and pre-pregnancy preparation for childbirth.)

That phrase, "all stretched out of shape," came back to rescue me during the university lecture on The Satyricon, with my internal addendum of astonishment that this could happen to men, too, I confess. (I assume the remedial treatment would be similar abstinence and sphincter-tightening exercises.)

It works now, I think, to describe the physical, psychological and emotional sense or dread of being over-extended by too much openness, too much vulnerability, too un-self-protective a
willingness to give all, as many of my students have confided, "just to be held."

Since health is mental and emotional--and, many would add, spiritual--there are those who practice abstinence for reasons that might be summarized as the desire for peace of mind. Whether these who are concerned with health go further and strive for actual chastity is a highly individualized choice.

The personal choice to practice abstinence often includes the further practice of chastity, which is sometimes intended to protect or strengthen one's social boundaries and, thereby, one's autonomy and privacy. I have had young women and female teens confide that, after becoming sexually active in the hope that it would free them from the social stigma of immaturity or frigidity, they discover, instead, that being known to be sexually active has cost them the respect of some of their trusted friends. People who choose abstinence to practice self-reclaiming and rebuild self-esteem are often actually practicing chastity.

Abstaining from non-marital sexual relations and practicing chastity for moral reasons can indicate that one is unwilling to experience or risk inflicting upon another the emotional insecurities, turmoils and betrayals that can result from the vulnerabilities of uncommitted intimacy. For all these reasons and, I imagine, a multiplicity of others with which I am not familiar, the United States' community of the young and the mature dedicated to the practice of chastity seems to be increasing.

But as I wrote at the beginning of this blog, chaste singles often seem to be misunderstood when they associate with others while maintaining their own chastity. In the next blog, we'll discuss why and what happens.