Kate Lister > Quotes

“Language is a powerful tool of social control: as sex became repressed, words linking to the body became taboo. After all, how can we enjoy the sexuality of our bodies, shame free, when the very words we use to talk about them, think about them or write about them are considered obscene?”
― Kate Lister, A Curious History of Sex

“Vulvas aren’t dainty. They can eat a penis and push out a baby.”
― Kate Lister, A Curious History of Sex

“Marie became Freud's patient in 1925 which further reinforced her belief that she could only be satisfied if she came through penile penetration. Listen carefully and you can hear the lesbians laughing.”
― Kate Lister, A Curious History of Sex

“Studies have shown that most women require at least twenty minutes of sexual activity to climax, and there are myriad factors that can kibosh a lady's snap, crackle, and pop. Age, stress, atmosphere, smells, self-esteem. Frankly, it's a known flight risk.”
― Kate Lister, A Curious History of Sex

“The moral of the story seems to be that Paul’s misogyny is not a response to being treated poorly by real women, but is a result of his own sense of inadequacy.”
― Kate Lister, A Curious History of Sex

“There are those who sail through a ‘visit from Auntie Flo’, enduring little more than a twinge in the abdomen. And then there are people like me, who firmly believe their uterus is re-enacting the Battle of the Somme.

Allow me to paint a picture for you. It’s fucking ugly. Your body bloats, your tits hurt and you sweat uncontrollably. Your crevices start to feel like a swamp and your head is pounding all the time. You feel like you have a cold – shivering, aching, nauseous – and have the hair-trigger emotions of someone who has not slept for days. But we’re not done yet. The intense cramping across your lower abdomen feels like the worst diarrhoea you’ve ever had – in fact, you’ll also get diarrhoea, to help with the crying fits. As your internal organs contract and tear themselves to blooded bits so you can lay an egg, blasts of searing pain rip through you.

You bleed so much that all ‘intimate feminine hygiene products’ fail you – it’s like trying to control a lava flow with an oven mitt. You worry people can smell your period. You are terrified to sit on anything or stand up for a week in case you’ve bled through. And as you’re sitting, a crying, sweaty, wobbly, spotty, smelly mess, some bastard asks ‘Time of the month, love?’ And then you have to eat his head.”
― Kate Lister, A Curious History of Sex

“In 1946, Walt Disney released the educational film The Story of Menstruation, which was shown to high school students across the United States.

The film includes the first documented use of the word ‘vagina’ on screen and was an attempt to educate young women about their bodies. The narrator, Gloria Blondell, tries to debunk a number of menstrual myths, such as not bathing or exercising while menstruating, and explains the role of neurobiology, hormones and reproductive organs in menstruation.

The film also advises young women to ‘stop feeling sorry for yourself’, to ‘keep smiling’ and ‘keep looking smart”
― Kate Lister, A Curious History of Sex

“Retrospect of Medicine & Pharmacy lists the following ‘fluids to be used for vaginal douching’ to prevent conception: alum, acetate of lead, chloride, boracic acid, carbolic acid, iodine, mercury, zinc and Lysol disinfectant.

Lysol brand disinfectant was introduced in 1889 to control a severe cholera epidemic in Germany.

But its antiseptic qualities were soon put to other uses, and by the 1920s Lysol was being aggressively marketed as a vaginal douching agent. Birth control was a highly controversial issue in the 1920s and certainly not something to be openly advertised. By focusing on the issue of ‘feminine hygiene’ within marriage in their advertising campaign, Lysol could raise the subject of sex and intimacy without ever having to use the word ‘sex’. Soon, a product that was used to scrub out bins, drains and toilets was being used to clean vulvas as well.”
― Kate Lister, A Curious History of Sex

“The eighteenth-century literary blockbuster Harris’s List (1757–1795) was an annual almanac of London sex workers, and a masterclass in self-promotion.

A forerunner to the modern tart card and TripAdvisor, the list detailed the appearance, skills and prices of up to two hundred women selling sex in the capital.

The list was a collaboration between Sam Derrick, an Irish Grub Street hack and poet, and a London pimp, Jack Harris. Only nine known volumes of the list survive today (1761, 1764, 1773, 1774, 1779, 1788, 1789, 1790 and 1793), and they are scattered throughout various archives around the world.”
― Kate Lister

“If you shake any book by Sade, a cunt will fall out; Sade is a cunt piñata.”
― Kate Lister, A Curious History of Sex

“Aubrey calls this a ‘relique of natural magik’ and goes on to suggest that ‘cockle’ derives from an Anglo-Saxon word meaning ‘arse’, which is supported by the sixteenth-century term ‘hot cockles’ – meaning to have sex.17 Think about that the next time you’re ‘warming the cockles of your heart’.”
― Kate Lister, A Curious History of Sex