Over the Jubilee weekend, we will of course be posting royal fanny facts, rumours, myths and art, and we'll start with a story that's true: Princess Marie Bonaparte's (AKA Princess George of Greece and Denmark) research on orgasm and the clitoris.
Marie Bonaparte (1882-1962) was a princess by marriage and a descendant of Napoleon. In her own right, she was a psychoanalyst and published researcher.
Marie experienced sexual dysfunction, which using the language of the time, she called frigidity. She had difficulty orgasming, and wanted to rectify this. So she started researching orgasm in women.
In 1924, Marie published her theory of orgasm and frigidity, based on research on 200 women. In her research, she had measured the distance between the clitoral glans and the vaginal opening, and analysed her subjects' sexual history and function.
Marie believed that the distance between vagina and clitoris was related to orgasm.
She classified women into three groups: paraclitoridiennes, who had a short distance and orgasmed easily, téleclitoridiennes who had a distance of an inch or more and had difficulty orgasming, and mesoclitoriennes, who were in between.
Marie herself believed she was a téleclitoridienne, and having identified the problem, set out to rectify it. She underwent an operation called the Halban–Narjani procedure, named for surgeon Josef Halban, and her published pseudonym, A. E. Narjani.
The goal of the Halban-Narjani operation was to move the clitoral glans closer to the vaginal opening. The operation was unsuccessful (we hope we don't need to tell you that its premise was incorrect). Still unable to orgasm, Marie underwent the surgery again.
As well as her research and surgery, Marie sought out and consulted with Sigmund Freud for treatment of her sexual dysfunction. Her husband, Prince George, was kind of annoyed by this, and asked her to stop and focus on her family. She refused.
Marie had a lifelong fascination with psychoanalysis. In 1953, at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, she sat next to François Mitterrand (who later became president of France), and psychoanalysed him throughout the ceremony.
One more Princess Marie Bonaparte fact for you. In 1919, she sat for modernist sculptor Constantin Brâncuși. This is the sculpture he made of her.
Brâncuși claimed that any resemblance to a dick in his sculpture was purely coincidental and you were a perv for thinking it looked like a willy. He believed it depicted the essence of the woman it was depicting.
Mind, Brâncuși's analysis of Princess Marie Bonaparte was probably more offensive than saying she was a great big penis, he said she was vain and constantly looking at herself (hence the downturned defo-not-a-glans) and but had good tits (the bit that looks like balls).
Although she was wrong about orgasms, Princess Marie Bonaparte was a prolific author, and in her lifetime, published 13 books and papers on the topic of sexuality and psychoanalysis. Tune in for the long weekend where we'll be posting more about royals, sex and fannies...
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Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana, and also cunnilingus.
Yep, it's true. Some Drosophila practice oral sex. And that's probably not the wildest thing you're going to learn about fruit fly sex today.
Drosophila is a genus of insect which are commonly known as fruit flies. They're very well-studied, with Drosophila melanogaster in particular being a model organism for scientists and widely-used in research. This is how we know all about what they get up to.
Fruit flies reproduce quickly, which is why if you leave an apple core in the bin too long you'll probably find your kitchen swarming with the little gits (tip: add a small amount of washing up liquid to a cup of vinegar, this traps them before they become a problem).
In 1542, sixteen palace women rose up in an attempt to assassinate the Jiajing Emperor. It didn't work, but they had good reason to give it a go. This is the story of the Palace Plot of Renyin Year.
The Jiajing Emperor was an adherent of alchemy. At the age of 35, he was looking forward, and preparing alchemical concoctions to prolong his life. Various accounts of what exactly he was making, but all accounts suggest his concoctions involved cruel treatment of teenage girls.
By some accounts, the Jiajing Emperor was making a substance called red lead. This was concocted from the menstrual blood of virgins. To create it, he kept girls aged 13-14 and fed them on a diet of mulberries and rain water. If the girls became sick, they would be thrown out.
A satirical engraving depicting a man-midwife, showing a figure split completely down the middle, half man and half woman. By Isaac Cruikshank, 1793.
Courtesy of Wellcome Images.
By the eighteenth century, obstetrics was becoming increasingly professionalised, by which we mean, men were taking on the job and decided it was a science and medicine kind of thing.
This wasn't completely well-accepted by the world at large. There was a perception that childbirth was very much a thing to be dealt with among women, and "man-midwives" were met with ridicule.
Since it's #WorldBeeDay, settle in because we're going to give you the bees and the bees talk. Here's where baby bees come from.
For the purpose of this thread, we're going to be talking about western honey bees, because these are best-studied, but many of these principles also apply to other bees. Also ants.
Another note before we get going, whenever we say "the queen" in this thread, we're talking about a queen bee. We don't want to get locked up in the Tower, so we thought we'd be clear.
An 1834 illustration of an ectopic pregnancy in an ovary from "Graphic illustrations of abortion and the diseases of menstruation" by A.B. Granville, illustrated by J. Perry.
Courtesy of Wellcome Images.
Ectopic pregnancy is where a fertilised egg implants outside of the uterus. A lot of the time, it will implant in the tubes, although it's also possible in the cervix, abdominal cavity or in this case, an ovary.
This is an 18th century illustration of an ectopic pregnancy in a tube by Pierre Dionis in a book called "A general treatise of midwifery."
With news that Roe v. Wade may be overturned in the USA, this week we're going to explore a history of the landmark decision on reproductive rights, including its context, the decision itself, and what happened after the decision.
Today, we'll focus on the background, and abortion in the USA prior to Roe v. Wade in 1973. For the first few decades of its history, there were no laws on the books outlawing abortion: it was subject to English common law.
Under English common law, abortion prior to "quickening" - where the foetus's movements are first felt, which is usually between 15-20 weeks of pregnancy - was not an offence. It was not permitted after this point.