The Facts of Life: The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in Britain, 1650-1950
This absorbing book explores the ways in which sexual activities, disorders, pleasures and proprieties - sexual knowledge - evolved in Great Britain over a period of 300 years. The authors examine sex advice manuals, and explore the moral, religious, scientific, medical, domestic, and social backgrounds of various periods in which sexual information was received.
This remarkable study presents the first detailed and scholarly analysis of the creation of sexual knowledge in Britain.
Surveying the period between the mid-seventeenth and the mid-twentieth centuries, it examines the major texts which established
and authorised sexual knowledge and sexual practices.
Porter and Hall then explore the various kinds of backgrounds - sexual, moral, religious, scientific, medical, domestic, social and cultural - without which these texts are unintelligible. And they examine their authors (some famous, some obscure, some anonymous), their careers, and the motives for involvement in medico-moral campaigns that were often thought unsavoury and commonly led to criticism and censure.
The Facts of Life also assesses the wider impact of the publication of sexual knowledge and especially of sex advice literature, and explores the interplay between expertise, therapy, social mores and behaviour. Chapters on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries discuss prostitution, contagious diseases and gender relations, and consider debates on sexual issues and associated revelations of personal experience.
428 pages
Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300062212
Sex Education for Men (semen)
Find out about the male body and penis, learn about the benefits of masturbation, better sex and read about ejaculation issues. There's also a section about common problems and a glossary for any unusual terms. And you can ask questions.

