Bizarre Sexual Beliefs Throughout the Centuries

There have been different perceptions of sexuality that have evolved and devolved in the past few centuries. A sixteenth century thought is that males and females were the same sex. People believed that the vagina was simply the penis turned inside out. They believed that the testicles produced sperm and that females produced eggs from the inverted testicles. Sexuality was so primitive that men actually believed that a woman had to have an orgasm for the couple to conceive. How else would the egg come out of the inverted testicle unless the orgasm forced it out? This belief continued in some cases until the eighteenth century (Davidson).

There was also a belief that if you had a sexual contracted disease, you can get rid of the disease by has sex with someone who was clean. The belief was so strong that the rape of young children and women was perpetrated so that the adult could pass on the disease and be cleansed. All this did was to spread the disease throughout the village causing early death and a life of misery. Though this sounds impossible but people have used this as a defense of raping children when they were tried in court for child abuse and sexual misconduct. Unfortunately, until the nineteenth century these perverted criminals were set free.

A bizarre Chinese sexual belief was self-castration. The gain employment in Imperial Service many Chinese men would cut off their penis, testicles, and scrotum. There was more than 70,000 men in the Ming Dynasty who castrated themselves to gain more power in the Royal Family. These men had a lot of power and some even gained positions as regional leaders who did the bidding of the Emperor. This practice was finally made illegal in 1912, but the practice kept going in private.