Sex in the West

Well, this is a rather sensational title, n'est-ce pas? I don't mean sex in Tinseltown or Orange County (LOL!!) but sex in the wild west as well as sex in earlier historical periods.

The other day, I was thinking of women in the old west and I thought of the image (I use that word because I ask is it real?) of dance hall girls and prostitutes that were first and foremost in the minds of novelists and movie script writers. Coming from a Roman Catholic background, in which sex was allowable (yes, that is the word) during the 50s in marriage only for procreation, I sometimes think of that much of the world viewed sex as only allowable for procreation. Any way, if there were so many saloon girls and prostitutes, it is obvious that the settlers of the West jettisoned the notion of procreation in favor of recreation.

So the question becomes, was there that much prostitution? What did prostitution consist of? This is not a naive question because here I take my cue from Brenda Maddox's bio of Nora Barnicle Joyce in which Maddox writes that women of the late 19th and early 20th century would sometimes relieve their beaus manually into their hankies on walks, which is why in New England, Scotland, Wales and perhaps other places as well, the custom of bundling was considered morally superior to allowing an interested pair to "walk out." Maddox also asked the question of whether the Joyces used anal sex for birth control. That written, did prostitutes engage in full intercourse? Did they use herbal abortafacients (see the book Eve's Herbs) or crude pessaries or did they rely on douching or coitus interruptus? Did they engage in anal intercourse or manual or oral gratification? What was the pregnancy rate among prostitutes?