image: L’Origine du monde, Gustave Courbet 1866
Thank God for Porno Mags and @whoresofyore
So the other night on Twitter while perusing my favourite saucy folks, I happened upon a tweet that had me jumping up and down with excitement! Kate Lister AKA @whoresofyore is bringing out a book! Hooray! A Curious History of Sex is going to be an actual thing and guess what? You can help it on it’s merry way by helping to fund this fantastic and important book.
Why am I so excited? Because Kate Lister is a champion of sex education, explores the history of human sexuality and is a fighter for sex worker rights across the land. I’m been a fan of her Twitter page since it was wee – and now it’s HUGE and packed with incredible funny, poignant and amazing facts and anecdotes of sex and sexuality.
I can’t wait to get my hands on a copy so let’s get it funded! 🙂
Here’s some of the book chat – find more and pledge on UNBOUND
A cornucopia of giggles, gaffs, titillation, temptations, and exceptional expertise in all things historically sexual from Dr Kate Lister aka @Whores of Yore.
Why in the hell were medieval priests worried about strap-ons made of bread?
Did the Romans style their pubic hair?
Why is the C-word so offensive?
This book looks at the curious history of sex, drawing from the best of the Whores of Yore archive with tons of exclusive, new material. Dr Kate Lister explores all the strange and baffling things human beings have done in the pursuit (and denial) of the almighty orgasm. Why do we feel so damn guilty about it? Has selling sexual services always been illegal? Were the Victorians really as prudish as we think (short answer: Hell no)? This book will feature the popular Historical Hotties and Whores of Yore’s Word of the Day, fascinating stories from the secret side of historical sex alongside modern day voices of sex workers, the marginalised and the outcast.
This book will be a beautifully designed hardback, with full-colour illustrations clocking in at over 300 pages. This edition includes a dustjacket, printed endpapers, head and tail bands and a ribbon bookmark.
Sex is one of the great universal levellers; we eat, we sleep, we shit, we fuck and we die. All living beings on this planet share the desire to reproduce, but what makes humans unique is that we are the only creatures who experience guilt around our own sexual nature. Whilst all beings have courtship rituals, who ever heard of two wildebeest attending couple’s therapy because he’s been eyeing up the young bulls at the waterhole and she is struggling to express a latex fetish. Of course, humans do far more than eating, shitting, and fucking – our intellect is what really sets us apart from the beasts. And herein lies the problem. To say that humans have overthought sex is something of an understatement.
Exclusive “Historical Hotties” 2019 Calendar in the “Historical Hotties” Pledge Level!
Kate Lister started the Whores of Yore project in 2015. The project aims to give voice to the voiceless, to start a much-needed conversation on the history of sexuality, the plight of modern sex workers, and, ultimately, to extract the prudish stick from the arse of society. The archive provides a platform for academics, activists, sex workers, and archivists to share their experience, research and stories around sexuality and sex work. Because nobody, no matter their profession, should ever be outcast again.”
And hooray for that!
Here is some information about the fantastic lady herself – and I have to say, I called this blog Thank God for Porno Mags as I too found one at an early age and believe it gave me the fascination I have today too 😀 (though I wasn’t forward thinking enough to rent-a-glimpse for sweets)…
“Kate Lister is intellectually slutty. She spends most of her time peeping up the skirts of history and reporting what she finds to over 100,000 follows on Twitter as @WhoresofYore. Kate has been fascinated by sex ever since she found a stash of porn mags in a hedge, on the way to school and Stewart Riley gave her two sherbet dib-dabs and a glitter pen to be allowed to look at them. Had she not been able to channel this interest into an academic discipline, she may very well have wound up a porn baron.
Thankfully, she is now a lecturer at Leeds Trinity University, where she researches the history of sexuality and curates the online research project Whores of Yore. Whores of Yore is a digital public engagement project that works to make research on sexuality and the history of sex work accessible to the public.
The project creates space for the voices of academics, sex workers, activists, artists, therapists and historians to stand alongside one another and work towards joining up conversations around sexuality. The website includes Kate’s research, as well as articles, as well as archived images, extracts from medical texts, antique erotica, and an independent blogs from groups supporting sex worker rights.
Kate is also a columnist for inews where she writes about the history of sex, covering such diverse subjects as medieval impotence tests and the forgotten custom of baking bread with your genitals. She is a historical consultant for Channel Five’s ‘My Sexual Fantasy’ series and can be heard happily chatting about the history of sex at the Edinburgh Fringe festival and Cheltenham Literature Festival. Not only does Kate research the history of sex work, but she is a staunch ally in the fight for sex worker rights. She is a board member of the International Sex Work Research Hub and an advocate for Basis Sex Work Project in Yorkshire, a charity who support sex workers working across all sectors.”