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People didn’t really know howthe male bodyworks for most of history.
Homosexual male encounters might have been normalized, but women weren’t so lucky.
The answer is that size matters quite a bit, or at least it did to the ancient Greeks.
Far from being just a fashionable facial accessory, however, the beard served another purpose.
How were men of this time supposed to protect themselves from the filthy air of the city?
Why, with a beard of course!
An exceptionally long-lasting fog in 1873 resulted in 268 deaths from bronchitis.
Women, he declared,were essentially men, but had their genital organs locatedinsidetheir bodies.
Further proof of the inferiority of women was the fact that they do not produce semen.
Here, too, Aristotle erred in his teachings.
Aristotle believed that men are hot whilewomen are cold.
Semen was a key part of the Egyptian creation myth.
According to Egyptian mythology, Atum, the creator god, created the worldthrough his seminal fluid.
Aristotle thought that self-indulgence could stunt a man’s growth.
People in the 19th century were so concerned about the dangers of one-handed love thatanti-erection devicesbecame hot market items.
Sylvester Graham had a similar thought in mind, believing that whole wheat was the answer.
Hisinvention of the graham crackerwas part of an effort to quell sexual desire.
To the enlightened mind, this indicates the ongoing marginalization of women in the artistic community.
“It was unthinkable for a female to become an artist,” wrote Joanna Woods-Marsden inRenaissance Self-Portraiture.
Women, at the time, were considered to be inherently inferior.
Speculation about what, exactly, was living in the sperm ensued.
There were two major schools of thought in this time period on how babies were made.
Epigenesists believed that both the male and the female contributed something to the baby-making process.
The idea of preformationism didn’t start with van Leeuwenhoek’s research, though.
The idea that babieswere pre-formed in semendates back toAnaxagoras, an ancient Greek philosopher.
One of the things that Pliny got drastically wrong was on the subject of dexterity.
Pliny’s belief that only men can be left-handed is obviously erroneous.
