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!
It is a great way to have a relationship. Just wanted to say thanks for this – excellent research and clarity on subject topic!
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