Dirty Sexy History

Aug 08 2024 83 ep. 43 mins 617

Dirty Sexy History Podcast artwork

Going beyond the sanitized and idealized to the dirty reality of human history with Jessica Cale. There's more to history than what you learned in high school, and we're going to skip to the good stuff together.

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Episode 4.8. Warm Bodies. The Life and Times of a Renaissance Anatomist

Aug 08 2024 52 mins

Gabrielle Falloppia is credited with inventing the condom. He didn’t, but he did discover the fallopian tubes, all while battling academic rivals, accusations of heresy, a syphilis epidemic, and the pirates who kidnapped his boyfriend. He has been accused of vivisecting the criminals given to him by the Medicis—that is, dissecting them while they were alive—but he didn’t do

Episode 4.7. Love and War: The Secret Lives of Ancient Women

Jul 25 2024 50 mins

Ancient history has traditionally been dominated by the lives of great men, while ancient women are confined to the margins or omitted altogether. In The Missing Thread, award-winning classicist Dr Daisy Dunn pulls these women out of the shadows and puts them center stage, where they belong. This week, we talk about the lives of ancient women: love, marriage, extra-marital relation

Episode 4.6. Tea in Colonial America

Jul 10 2024 58 mins

Burned, hanged, and symbolically “executed,” tea was a controversial commodity in 1770s America. This week we talk to Dr James Fichter about tea consumption, bans, the protests like the Boston Tea Party in the years leading up to the Revolutionary War. Dr Fichter’s new book is Tea: Consumption, Politics, and Revolution, 1773-1776.

Episode 4.5. The Undesirables: How Britain Locked Away a Generation

Jun 26 2024 65 mins

Under the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act, Britain imprisoned 50,000 people as “moral imbeciles.” Many of them were young women—working class, poor or unwed mothers, often victims of sexual assault—and most were confined to so-called Mental Deficiency Colonies for the rest of their lives. It was all down to eugenics; as the middle-class birth rate declined, Britain feared the wo

Episode 4.4. Abortion in Early Modern Italy

Jun 12 2024 52 mins

Just this week, all but two Senate Republicans voted against the Right to Contraception Act. At the same time, the GOP is calling for a nationwide ban on abortion. But what happens when abortion is banned? It happened in Italy in 1588…but it didn’t work. It was overturned only three years later in 1591. This week, Jess talks to Dr John Christopoulos about Early Modern family pl

Episode 4.3. The History of Nostalgia

May 30 2024 57 mins

Nostalgia can be both good and bad—at its best, it manifests in historical reenactment, vintage fashion, and mid-century modern furniture. At its worst, it can drive regressive political policies, fascism, and book bans. But nostalgia itself isn’t a bad thing—it’s a bittersweet, rose-tinted longing for the past, but how did people in the past experience it? In this thoughtf

Episode 4.2. Josephine McCarty: Abortionist, Spy, Mother of the Year?

May 15 2024 76 mins

During Josephine McCarty’s trial for murder, she was portrayed as an ordinary woman—a mother of six, she was only looking out for her children when she shot her lover in the face in front of dozens of witnesses. Over the course of her trial, she told the story of her life—she had been a lobbyist, an abortion provider, one of the first female doctors in the United States, and

Episode 4.1. High Priestess and Empress: Florence Farr and Ellen Terry

May 01 2024 50 mins

This week we welcome back to the show Susan Wands, author of the Arcana Oracle Series. We’re looking at the extraordinary lives of Florence Farr and Ellen Terry, two incredible women who broke all the rules of Victorian society. Divorce! Affairs! Illegitimate children! And best of all—careers! Ellen was an incredibly successful actress, and Florence was an artist and theater pr

Episode 3.21. Dancing With Myself: The History and Science of Masturbation

Mar 13 2024 46 mins

Following on from Episode 3.19 on sex toys with Hallie Lieberman, this week we talk to clinical psychologist Dr Eric Sprankle about the history and science of masturbation. We talk about the not-so-sexy origins of graham crackers and Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, bizarre conspiracy theories about porn, semen retention myths, and the Founding Father who thought math would keep you from t

Episode 3.20. “Fallen Women” in Victorian Poetry

Feb 28 2024 35 mins

Literary nerds rejoice! This week, we have another history/literature episode, looking at sex work in Victorian poetry with Emily Calleja. We’re talking about how sex workers were portrayed, what that can tell us about women’s real-life frustrations, and how it impacted the suffrage movement.