Homosexual Prostitution in 18th Century Paris

Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, Count of Mirabeau (1749 - 1791) even to this day is a divisive figure. Various historians have labeled him, a demagogue, a hero, a villain, a pervert, a traitor, and a patriot. No one can figure him or his actions out. Perhaps the most accurate portrayal is that he was a man who made sure he kept his head in life. After all he was a noble who survived the French revolution. For Assassin’s Creed fans, he was head of the French Assassin Brotherhood in AC: Unity. 

A decade before the French revolution he wrote Erotika Biblion (Full text of the book can be gotten free here) which is a collection of sexual anecdotes from history, in which he blends together actual research with fantastic tales. This excerpt seems to be more of a mockery of French bureaucracy than fact, but there is no doubt a ring of truth about it. 

Assassin's Creed: Unity

“The taste for homosexuality makes considerable inroads here- although it is less in vogue now than it was during the reign of Henri III when men groped each other under the very porticors of the Louvre.

“Since Paris is a masterpiece of police control, public places have been designated for this purpose.

“Young men destined for the profession are carefully classified, for the bureaucratic system extends this far. They are examined, and those who can play both an active and a passive role, who are handsome, rosy-cheeked, well-made with nice plump figures, are reserved for the high ranking noblemen; or they will be amply rewarded by bishops or financiers.

 Bust of Comte de Mirabeau

“Those who are deprived of their testicles, or to use a euphemism (since our language is more chaste than our habits) those who do not have their “weaver’s weights", but who give and receive, form the second class; they are even more expensive because women can use them while they are serving men.

“Those jaded ones who can’t get an erection although they still have their genitals, are registered as “pure passives” and compose the third class; but whoever officiates over these pleasures, must verify their impotence. To do this, they are placed completely nude on a bed with the bottom half of the covers pulled up; two girls caress them with all their skill, while a third gently whips with fresh nettles the seat of their venereal desires. After a quarter hour of this test, a long red pepper is inserted in their anus which causes considerable irritation; then a fine mustard of Caudebec is smeared on the welts caused by the nettles; and camphor is rubbed on the head of the penis. Whoever is immune to all these attempts, and shows absolutely no sign of an erection will serve as a passive partner at one-third pay only.”

             For more fun try books by Rex Hurst

On Stumbling Around the Rose Wine Festival

Normally I’m a beer and beer nuts man, but due to some protracted whining from my girlfriend and the fact that she splurged for the tickets, I was obligated to attend the annual Rose Wine Festival in my fair city. Now as time goes on at these events, my memory naturally becomes more and more hazy until I wake up half dressed in my bed the next afternoon and burp out, “How the hell did I get home?” 

Of course, currently I have an Uber account and a girlfriend who could drink Hunter S. Thompson under the table, so the inevitable blackouts are less of a worry to me. 

The first thing I noticed was that this was a very different clientele than attends the beer fest. It seemed as if every rich college girl was there, schmoozing it up with her friends. Each wearing similar clothes, similar hair, sunglasses. They even had similar voices. That upwards “yah” inflection which is de rigueur to master before entry into a sorority. You could only tell them apart by their height.

 “You look so pretty.”

 “No, you look pretty.”

They looked the same.

On this particular weekend, there had been dire predictions of an apocalyptic downpour which threatened to toss back to the city back to the time of Noah. In fact, they had canceled my beloved Taco Festival the previous day due to these forecasts. The fact that the state has had massive flooding for the previous two years gave weight to the weather reports. Therefore, to combat the elements, all of the wine tasting vendors were placed into a very long stall and everyone else jammed in with them.

The deluge never happened, but it felt as if it could have at any moment. The air was muggy and pregnant with moisture. That heavy air which causes everyone to sweat more and with everyone jammed into the same stall the temperature quickly rose. And with it the BO.

There were a few connoisseurs there. People going through the rigamarole of smelling the wine’s nose, peering at the chromatic redness of the juice, then sampling it, only to spit it out in a nearby bucket. But they were edged out quick as the rising tide of sweating bodies must have overpowered even the most pungent wine. And as for spitting it out, well, heh heh heh, that didn’t last long and I certainly didn’t indulge in the repulsive habit of wasting alcohol. I slurped it down! Hoping the effects would soon inure me to the crush of bodies and their bad smells.

As I was adjusting myself to these new surroundings, I noticed a new fact about myself. Honestly, I can’t tell the difference between one type of red wine or another. If it was beer I’d be all over it, hoppy, smoky, pilsner, Belgian, dubble, tripple, quad, pale, milk, wheat… and all the subtle variations within those classifications. Sweet and dry was all I could make out from these liquids.

Just before the storm

Now all of this drinking, even if it comes in dribs and drabs, builds up over time into a swell of alcoholic bliss and eventual unconsciousness. So the need to stanch the flow of alcohol in the blood, or slow it down, was great. Luckily, this was included in the price of the ticket.

At a massive open roast oven, huge platters of steaming paella was plopped down for the now completely blitzed crowd. At the sight of the food, the onlookers let out a collective moan of hunger. As one, they ripped into the Spanish dish. It was a display of pure horror. Women shrieked and clawed their way ahead, ruining their nails almost beyond repair. Men battered back their children and wives to grab fist-fulls of the food, only to be garroted back themselves by the sneakier attendees who had the foresight to bring waxed coated twine and yarn to the event.

One lady, dressed in a day-glo orange, lay dazed and drunk on the manure ridden floor, propped up against a log. Her husband, kneeling down, was attempting to feed her a forkful of paiea, when a trio of college girls descended on them. Two of the girls screamed and attacked the man, battering him in the testicles and attempting to claw out his eyes. The third began to repeatedly kick the wife in her face. The food was scattered across the floor.

I myself attempted to get a nosh, my woman was squatting in the port-a-john by this time, only to be spritzed in the face with pepper spray by some old pinch-faced alcoholic female, upset that her womb was now no better than a rock for reproduction.

Now, it was my turn to scream. I ran blindly away, knocking over people young and old. If you’ve never been pepper sprayed, I cannot do justice to the amount of pain and disorientation that comes over one. It was like a box of miniature hornets had been let loose in my eyes and they were having a field day stinging. My nose and throat became clogged with mucus. It was only after I stormed a vendor’s area and emptied half a bottle of J. Brut Rose from the Russian River Valley into my eyes, that I felt relief.

By this time, things had truly gotten out of control. Vendors had abandoned their product and were zipping off in unmarked vans, with screaming people throwing empty bottles after them. A general orgy of violence erupted. Tables flipped. People attacked. Toilets violated.

My significant other, finished with her deuce, grabbed me.

 “I called an Uber. Let’s get the hell out of here before we’re all killed!”

I roared an assent, then filled my complimentary glass to the brim with a left behind bottle of pinot noir, and we ran for our lives from the event.

For more fun try books by Rex Hurst

On Attending an Adult Education Graduation

Ahhh, the High School graduation ceremony. A stifled time of pomp and circumstance, where proud parents sit bored stiff in a stifling hall for an hour and a half, waiting for that two seconds when their acne-ridden whelp stumbles across a flimsy stage and is handed a scrap of paper. 

Does anyone enjoy these events? Having worn many hats in graduations- parent, student, and presenter- they are always a tedious affair. Lots of people you don’t care about standing up, giving speeches that go on for waaaaaay too long, that turn minutes into hours and hours into millennia. I have never met a soul that said to me,

“Boy, I enjoyed that whole ceremony.”

So why do we have them? Who the hell knows? No one is brave enough to hit the brakes and scream that ceremony has no clothes.

Recently, for reasons that are unimportant, I was corralled into attending a graduation ceremony for an Adult Learning Facility provided by the state, for those who wished to finish their diploma or simply obtain a General Education Degree. And I must say, I found the event much different from the standard yawn-fest.

The structure of the ceremony itself was the same. Talk, talk, talk, look at watch, hand out paper, talk, talk, yawn, talk, begin to nod of, wake in a start, finally done! But the general character of the attendees was something else entirely.

What caught me off guard was how over-dressed I was. In every other similar event, it was de rigueur to dress in a suit and tie, or at least as button down dress shirt and slacks. But apart from the superintendent and others staffers, I was in the extreme minority.

As you can see from the pictures, this was a dress-down affair to most of the attendees. Flip flops, cargo shorts, “I’m with stupid” t-shirts, extendi-flex waistband sweatpants, ball caps, and hole-ridden jeans were in full bloom. Even many of those who were receiving degrees declined the standard cap and gown, walking up to receive their degrees in jeans and rumpled shirts.

Along with the lack of dress, the crowd spent a great deal of time eating and drinking, mostly gotten from the school’s vending machines. The only product available in them were small bags of Doritos- though the flavor did vary if that makes any difference. The soda machine was, of course, your standard variety of sugar water with various chemicals dumped in. Even though the ceremony was only about forty-five minutes, runners from the various families were sent back and forth to retrieve more and more goodies. One family I saw pulling all sorts of snack cakes and the like from a hamper they’d brought along. Forward thinking, I guess?

In addition to this, there were some odd choices of speakers among the anointed few to take the stage. Specifically, two people representing the Welfare office and Unemployment offices for the state. Both gave three minutes speeches in which they both had a single point. Don’t rest on the “laurels” of obtaining an equivalency degree, go out there and actually get a fucking job. Which makes sense, the highest concentration of people to use both of those offices were those lacking education. But the amount of times they repeated this idea that the student needed to keep going, made me think it wasn’t advice that was taken very often.

What really caught me off guard was the amount of noise generated. I’ve been to much larger graduations before, but this one, with the smallest number of graduates that I’ve come across, was the noisiest. It wasn’t just when their unkempt loved one shuffled briefly into view, but during the entire proceedings, they talked amongst themselves, sharing jokes and gossip, and openly not paying attention to the man on deck.

Then came a stern request from the head of adult education for people not to make a lot of noise when their family member walked across the stage, as it may cause others to miss out on their own member being announced. The request was immediately ignored.

“That’s my sister!” or “That’s my cousin!” was yelled after every name was read off. Uproars popped up over and over in different sections of the room as felonious people hopped excitedly to accept the lowest of academic honors. People leapt, hooted and hollered, each family trying to outdo the other, like some kind of deranged entrance on Family Feud.

“My boy’s done got himself a G.E.D,” screamed a tear-filled glandular disorder, as if the boy had brought home a Heisman.

Outside of a football stadium, I have never heard anything like it. It was photo negative of the “sit politely and endure the tedium” policy I had been raised with. Still even that paled compared to the final blow.

After all the names had been read off and the last tassel pulled to the right, the ceremony was supposed to end with a processional, in reverse of how they entered, of students, faculty, and staff. Well, that didn’t quite happen.

After having to sit through forty-five minutes of commencement rites, allowing the graduates another two minutes of dignity pushed the attendees to their breaking point.

“Shit, I’m finna get outta here!”

People began cutting in line, rushing ahead to get out of the building. Then two brutes actually stopped the processional to let the rest of their family out, grandmother, mothers, little kids. After that, the gloves were off and the seats emptied into the aisles, creating a sweating mass of tangled human taffy. Everyone strained to be the first one to reach the door and ironically ended up delaying their departure for much longer then had they just sat quietly.

Eventually they filtered out, leaving an incredible mess of Doritos bags, empty soda cans, crumbs, and various other unidentifiable stains all over the auditorium. Along with the intangible stains of destroyed human dignity.

   For more fun try books by Rex Hurst

Medieval Witch's Description of the Devil's Genitals

Here we have an excerpt from the book Demonolatry, composed by Nicholas Remy, a fanatical hunter during the golden age of witch burnings. He was one of the leading authorities in France during the 16th Century. The number of people he had burnt at the stake is unknown (it is estimated at around 900) and in this book alone he cites over a hundred cases. 

Understand this is not the work of a delusional lunatic. He was fanatical, but he believed absolutely in the power of Satan and the existence of witches and witchcraft. This book eventually replaced the Malleus Maleficarum (“The Hammer of Witches), the 13th century handbook of the Inquisition) as the best source on sniffing out Satanism.  

Nicholas Remy

Along the way he would question those he eventually had executed and very often they would “admit” having sexual congress with the beast, and then go on to describe the Devil’s penis ….with hilarious results.

“All female witches maintain that the so-called genital organs of their Demons are so huge and so excessively rigid that they cannot be admitted without the greatest pain. Alexee Drigie reported that her Demon’s penis, even when only half in erection, was as long as some kitchen utensils, which she pointed to as she spoke; and that there were neither testicles nor scrotum attached to it. Claude Fellet said she had often felt it like a spindle swollen to an immense size so that it could be not contained by even the most capacious woman without great pain. This agrees with the complaint of Nicole Morele that, after such miserable copulatons, she always had to go straight to bed as if she had been tired out by some long and violent agitation. Didatia of Miremont also said that, although she had many years’ experience o men, she was always so stretched by the huge swollen member of her demon that the sheets were drenched with blood. And nearly all witches protest that it is wholly against their will that they are embraced by Demons, but that it is useless for them to resist.”

For more fun try Spiff Blasthandy Available on Kindle and paperback 

On an Earth rebuilding from an apocalypse, the star of the Spiff Blastandy show, the most popular drama of the day, must recover from a public scandal while simultaneously dealing with personal loss and tragedy. Even his popularity won’t save him from a beating. As the virtual world gathers to spit on everything in his life, the demons of his past rise and threaten to destroy his life. He must question everything in order to survive. Available on Kindle and paperback 

Worst Mothers in History Vol. 3

Where has the time gone? Once again, the calendar has swung around to that artificial date where everyone in the Western world is expected to fall to their knees and urinate themselves in supplication to the all-mighty mother figure. And once again, I’m here to remind you that having a womb is no guarantee that the mind it’s attached to is fit to raise the creature it shunts out. 

As I’ve done before and before, we will look at some of the ever-growing list of horrible women who became horrible mothers.

Christina Treadway and her murdered children

Christina Treadway: The Suicidal Strangler. From earlier this year, we have this wonderful slice of humanity. Hailing from America’s toilet, Puerto Rico, she moved to the Gateway to the South, Charlotte, NC, and took work as a ticket attendant for the Carolina Panther’s games. Despite this glamorous position, something was wrong with her brain. She had been in a relationship with her children’s father, Antoine Moore, for ten years. In January, 2018, while he was out drinking with the boys, she sent him a text stating, “I love you. I’m sorry. I’m going to end it all with the kids.” Soon after a woman’s body was found, seemingly having jumped from the I-485 interstate onto the pavement below. Tracking the woman’s address, police found her two children, Isaiah (7) and Illiyah (3) near dead from manual strangulation. The children died later that night. No motive is known. Reportedly, she had no history of mental illness. 

Michelle Sue Tharp

Michelle Sue Tharp: Starvation Mama. Hailing from an abusive home in one of the dingier parts of our fair country, this killer grew up poor and decided to stay there by having five children with four different abusive men, all of whom abstained from providing for their offspring. When the last, Tausha, was born, it seemed the burden was too much for the mother to bear. After a few more bad relationships, the mother stopped feeding her daughter, making her leave the room whenever dinner was being made and forcing her to root through the trash eating scraps. This began to stunt her growth, which the mother latter used in her defense stating that the starved child simply “failed to thrive”. For two years she dodged doctors and social workers about her daughter, until the child finally died of malnutrition. She and her boyfriend then strapped the dead girl into a car seat, went to her grandmother’s to call in sick to work (she had no phone of her own) and drop off a load of laundry, stopped to buy garbage bags, then dumped the child’s corpse in an wooded area. She told police that her daughter had run off at the mall.  At her trial she claimed to be a good mother overwhelmed by events and that she only dumped the body because she was “afraid of being blamed.” The jury did and she was sentenced to be executed.

Debra Jenner-Tyle

           Debra Jenner-Tyler: The “Stabbing-Them-Quickly-With-Her Toy” Killer. Let’s hop into the wayback machine and head to 1987, where Debra Jenner took her three year old daughter Abby Lynn and stabbed her seventy times, alternating the weapon between a kitchen knife and the child’s toy airplane. Abby’s lifeless body was found with her hands showing that she tried to defend herself and grasping long, blonde hairs that likely were from her mother’s head. She appeared to have had some sort of psychotic break and “had been working a lot lately”, so she took her rage out on her “very finicky” child in their kitchen, before calling over some relatives to help clean up the mess. She confessed to the police, then rescinded at trial, but there was little doubt to her guilt and she was give life without parole. In 2003, then-Governor Bill Janklow reduced her sentence to 100 years, so she would become eligible for parole. Since then she has been denied over 20 times.

Shaquan Duley

          Shaquan Duley: The Wanna-Be Susan Smith. Now we take a slight step down one state to the former prison colony South Carolina. A college dropout, unemployed, manless, and mentally ill, this deranged mother smothered her two sons, Devean (2) and Ja’van (18 months), hold forcibly holding her hand over their mouths until they stopped breathing. Having been abandoned by her paramour some months earlier, she lived hand-to-mouth in a motel room and killed her children after having an argument with her own mother who claimed that Shaquan was a bad parent. Apparently the woman decided to prove her mother right. After this, she tried to commit suicide by overdosing on aspirin and then cutting her wrists with a box cutter. When these failed, she loaded her children’s corpses into her car and drove to a river. She then got out, put the car in drive, and sent it crashing into the water. She later told police that she had fallen asleep before running off a bridge, but the investigation found no skid marks or other evidence to back up her story. Her defense attorney tried the old “excused for mental illness” trick and how her being oppressed in a racist culture drove her to these acts, but the jury did not agree. She received a thirty year sentence for her crimes.

Diane Downs

Diane Downs: The “I’ve Heard This One Before” Murderer. Always a troubled and promiscuous teen, Diane eloped with her husband and had three children, two girls and a boy, with him. After their divorce, she became obsessed with a married man. The two had a long standing affair, during which Diane stated that she would happily kill the man’s wife in order to have him all to himself. The man also had reportedly told Diane that he didn’t want children in his life. On May 19th, 1983, she pulled up to McKenzie-Willamette Medical Center, in Springfield Oregon, with her three children bleeding in the back. The oldest girl was already dead, the boy had been paralyzed from the waist down, and the youngest had a stroke resulting from her injuries. Downs herself had been shot in the arm. She claimed that a man had tried to carjack them and had shot the children. Police immediately became suspicious when they saw the car’s interior was splattered with blood, but none was on her. Additionally, she suggested to the doctors that her surviving children were brain dead (even though there had been no tests performed to determine that) and that they should just pull the plug. This all told police that her story was a fabrication. During the trial she went on the old “I was an abused child” and “my father sexually molested me” routine (all of which she later recanted). She was sentenced to life imprison plus fifty years. During both of her parole hearings, she continuously changed her story. One of them is presented below.

Her life was also made into a TV movie called Small Sacrifices starring Farrah Fawcett which is included below.

Happy Mothers Day everyone.

       For more murderous fun try The Foot Doctor Letters: A Serial Killer Speaks Out by Rex Hurst. Available in paperback and on Kindle. 

Ancient Writings on the Female Orgasm

          Hippocrates of Kos is perhaps the most well known physician of ancient times and one of the most influential thinker on medical ethics. The Hippocratic Oath, so vaunted by various money-grubbing medical agencies, was if not written by him, named after him by his students, shortly after his death. One of his many achievements was the Corpus, which consists of about seventy medical works and is are the most detailed collection of ancient man’s medical expertise.

          Well, buried among them was this gem.

          “During intercourse, once a woman’s genitals are vigorously rubbed and her womb titillated, an itch overwhelms her down there, and the feeling of pleasure and warmth pools out through the rest of her body. A woman also has an ejaculation, furnished by her body, occurring at the same time in the womb, which has become wet, as well as on the outside because the womb is now gaping wide open.

          “A woman feels pleasure right from the start of intercourse, through the entire time of it, right up until the moment when the man pulls out; if she feels an orgasm coming on, she ejaculates with him, and then she no longer feel pleasure. But if she feels no oncoming orgasm, her pleasure stops when his does. It’s like when one throws cold water onto boiling water, the boiling ceases immediately. The same is with the man’s sperm falling into the womb, it extinguishes the warmth and pleasure of the woman.

          “Her pleasure and warmth, though, surge the moment the sperm descends into the womb, then it fades. Just when wine is poured on a flame, it spurts before it goes out for good.”

          Makes sense to me.

          If you liked that snippet try my new sci-fi novella Twin Villains.  Available on Kindle and paperback

Early Bestiality Laws

    The Hittites were an ancient people (mentioned throughout the Old Testament of the Bible as “the children of Heth” or Hethites) whose empire (or allied city-states) was located in the Middle East- notably around the areas of modern-day Turkey, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. In many ways they were your typical bronze age civilization, all of which spun off from the Sumerian and Babylonian civilizations. Perhaps their only distinction was a slight difference in architecture and dress fashions.  They had a cuneiform writing style, where writing was cut into clay and then hardened. And they had their own system of law and morality, as is evidenced below.

Taken from a clay Hittite Law Tablet. The term “does evil with” means to have carnal relations with.

“If a man does evil with a head of cattle, it is a capital crime and he shall be    

          killed.

If a man does evil with a sheep, it is a capital crime and he shall be killed.

If anyone does evil with a pig, he shall die

If a man does evil with a horse or mule, there shall be no punishment.

        If an ox leaps at [attempts to take the top sexually] a man, the ox shall die, but the man shall not die. A sheep may be proffered in the man’s stead and they shall kill that.

       If a pig leaps at a man there shall be no punishment.”

    Now we have no way of knowing how often these laws were called into effect. But they must have been enough occurrences for the authorities of the day to codify it into law and literally chisel the proclamations in stone. A few colleagues have chafed at the harsh punishment (death) of the infractors, which may say more about them than they wished, but one has to remember that this was essentially frontier law and harshness was the only way for the populace to take the lawmakers seriously. If you slap on fine on a guy for molesting a pig, it would be almost seen as an endorsement of the act. A slap and a wink. You hang him, people know you mean business.

    What I find most fascinating is not what wasn’t allowed, but what was. Sure I can see how being raped by a pig or a ox would not be the man or woman's fault. And while the person is spiritually unclean, hence the need to substitute a sheep (or scapegoat) to sacrifice for forgiveness, they aren’t going to be whacked for bending over at the wrong time.

    But apparently there are certain animals where it is accepted to have romantic relations with, the horse and the mule. Well perhaps accepted is too strong a term, it is more understood that on a long journey a man must relieve his sexual urges somewhere. Or is it that a man will eventually grow to have a certain fondness for an animal to which so much of his life and livelihood depend, and then on a moonlit night, after the vino has been flowing, if something should occur… well, these things happen.

For more on this subject try my book A Fine Romance: Details on Dating a Hooker  for 3.99 in paperback or free on Audible Audiobook or 99 cents on kindle