Monday, July 28, 2014

Troubadours: Quaint Singers or Purveyor of Male Dominance



Think of a medieval troubadour, and most of us envision a smooth-singing, tight-wearing gent strolling leisurely through ye olde village. The troubadour entertaining the culture-starved townsfolk with ballads about romance and chivalry, valiant knights and courtly maidens. To some degree, this image is true.

The troubadour, or travelling musician, was a popular sight in medieval Europe from the 11th century until the Black Plague in the 1300s. Songs performed by troubadours followed a common pattern and often told fictional tales of heroic deeds and complicated love triangles. But a good performer knows how to play to the crowd, so the theme of these poetic songs could take a vulgar turn, with veiled or overt references to the vagina. In fact, some of these salacious songs portrayed women as horny, sex-fiends.

 But, sadly, these tunes are vastly out-numbered by songs that thrust women into a subservient role as the recipient of men’s sexual aggression, with rape, seduction, and domestic violence as popular themes. The collection of troubadour ballads that remains illustrate the typical male-dominated attitude of the time: men were in the power roles, women were to be dominated and kept in their place. 

Monday, July 7, 2014

Birth Control: Present and Past


I thought this would be a timely post due to the recent ruling on coverage—or lack of---birth control in the United States.  Despite the current controversy, 21st century birth control is much better now than in medieval times. 

Did you know that Michael Scot’s The Secrets of Nature, published in 1730, contains cryptic recipes that women shouldn’t eat because it will render them infertile? Also, a chap named Raymond Lull recommended that women should consume juniper and thyme to prevent pregnancy.

Despite the fact that post-modern birth control continues to improve, societal attitudes towards women and their reproduction are still consistent with medieval times. Who has a right to decide what happens in a woman’s womb? In the Middle Ages it was men: husbands, fathers, clergy, and the courts.  In 2014, it is courts, clergy, and employers.

To learn more about medieval birth control, The Medieval Vagina will be published this fall, so be sure to check it out!

Tuesday, July 1, 2014

Medieval Attitudes in a Modern Comnmercial


I saw a television commercial for a new product. It is a body wash that is specially formulated to be gentle on a woman's vagina. The commercial  is humorous, showing a man in the shower who accidently uses this vagina-friendly product. He freaks out – perhaps out of fear that his man-card will be revoked if his buddy learned of his faux pas or perhaps out of fear that his penis will transform into a vagina after coming into contact with a feminine soap.

 To boost his testosterone, the man seeks out a series of "manly" activities, such as chopping wood, mowing the yard, boxing, and karate. He even ends his masculine pursuits by crushing a beer can. Funny stuff!

This commercial combines three points we wrote about in The Medieval Vagina; how men fear the mysterious vagina, how we are all skittish about using the word vagina, and how vaginal hygiene products are viewed. Although the ideas in The Medieval Vagina are more than 600 years old, according to this 30-second commercial, the concepts still ring true today.

In The Medieval Vagina, we explore the vaginal paradox – how men in the Middle Ages were so fearful of the one feminine body part that they were also most attracted to. There is also a chapter dealing with term, words and euphemisms for the vagina. It seems crude and vulgar to us now, but the c-word was the acceptable term in medieval days. The word "vagina" really didn't enter English vocabulary until later, when Latin influenced the language, yet we are still intimidated by it.

 I noticed this  commercial uses "V" in place of "vagina". Maybe "vagina" is one of those words one cannot say on TV. And lastly, we included a chapter in The Medieval Vagina about douching and vaginal hygiene during the Middle Ages. Like the  company, women in antiquity recognized the need to keep the nether-regions clean, but unlike the modern company, medieval women resorted to a plethora of questionable recipes.

Kudos to the company for developing vagina-friendly products and to their marketing department for creating a memorable commercial. But the time has come for women – and men – to get over their nervousness about the vagina, both the object and the word.