Episode 372: Lustful Appetites
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You're listening to the Sex and Psychology Podcast, the sex ed you never got in school and won't get anywhere else. I am your host, Dr. Justin Lehmiller. I am a social psychologist and research fellow at the Kinsey Institute and author of the book, Tell Me What You Want, The Science of Sexual Desire and How It Can Help You Improve Your Sex Life. In the previous episode, we started diving into the history of food and sex, which turns out to be a truly fascinating topic.

So in today's show, we're going to dig even deeper into this subject. We left off last time talking about the world's first restaurants, which opened in France in the 1800s and were places that men went to both eat and have sex. Today, of course, most of you probably don't think of restaurants as places where you'd go to get it on, although maybe some of you do. But what happened? What changed? When did restaurants transform into places that people went to eat instead of places they went to feed their lustful appetites?

That's one of the topics we'll be diving into. We're also going to explore why people used to believe that women who ate a lot of food were sexually voracious, and how this belief set the stage for the modern diet culture that we have today. We'll also discuss why gourmet cooking came to be associated with homosexuality, as well as why cooking used to be a widely promoted strategy for maintaining a blissful marriage.

I am joined once again by Rachel Hope Cleaves, a professor of history at the University of Victoria and a member of the College of the Royal Society of Canada. She is the author of four award-winning nonfiction history books and one science fiction novel co-authored with her brother. Her work focuses on the history of sexuality and her latest book is titled Lustful Appetites, an intimate history of good food and wicked sex. This is going to be another fascinating conversation. Stick around and we're going to jump in right after the break. ♪

If you love the science of sex as much as I do, consider becoming a friend of the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University. The Kinsey Institute is the world's premier research organization on sex and relationships, and you can help them continue the legacy of Dr. Alfred Kinsey, whose pioneering research changed everything we think we know about sex.

Visit KinseyInstitute.org to make an impact. Your donations can help support ongoing research projects on critical topics. You can also show your support by following Kinsey Institute on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Thank you for supporting sex science. Okay, Rachel, in the last episode, we talked about the surprising erotic origin of the restaurant in France and how these were places where men would go to both eat and have sex.

And those restaurants developed quite the reputation. So it was only a matter of time before this concept was exported abroad. So when French restaurants started opening up in the United States, they actually had private rooms where people could go to engage in sex. And well into the 20th century, many people considered a French restaurant to be less about food and more about sex. So can you tell us a little bit about the arrival of French restaurants in the U.S. and how they kind of shifted restaurant culture?

Well, there really aren't restaurants in the U.S. before the arrival of the French restaurant. So the French restaurant is what a restaurant is. And at its first arrival, it has many of the trappings of the restaurant in France. Like the menu is often in French and it carried with it the private room. So you see, and this happens outside the spread of the French restaurant, for example, in Britain. It's the same story that many of these restaurants have private rooms outside.

And the word, just the term French restaurant can be synonymous with a place to meet sex workers or to have illicit sex in the second half of the 19th century into the beginning of the 20th century. But even as...

As late as the 1960s, there's a cookbook by the food writer Mimi Sheridan from 1963 called The Seducer's Cookbook. And she writes about how the girl next door might blush if you invite her to a French restaurant. That's 1963. It still has that reputation.

Yeah, it's so interesting. And I think a lot of people listening might wonder, like, how were these restaurants that were also brothels, you know, in places that sold sex, how did they make it? Because wasn't prostitution illegal? And the answer is no. Like, actually, in the United States, prostitution was legal up until the early 1900s. And in fact, the only reason that prostitution was really outlawed throughout the United States was...

stemmed from the need for the government to have men of military serving age who were eligible to serve. And that meant being free of venereal disease. And so they outlawed prostitution in the interest of having a fully functional military. And

In my textbook, The Psychology of Human Sexuality, I actually have a lot of these examples of government posters that went up in the 1930s and 40s saying things like, you can't beat the axis if you have VD and so forth. And so, yeah, it was really not until the early 1900s that we started to see that shift in terms of legal changes in prostitution laws. And then I think that

It's probably around the time when you might have seen, you know, some of these restaurant brothels starting to close or maybe just shift toward being food only. Yeah. So, I mean, the history of the regulation of prostitution is really interesting. And like throughout a lot of early America, prostitution is socially regulated, right? Like there's brothels and sometimes if they're causing trouble, the neighbors might riot, right? So it's not...

But there's a lot of flexibility and you can be a sex worker and still make a totally respectable marriage or you can move in and out of sex work and respectability in the 19th century. And there's notable people like William Penn's great grandson marries a sex worker. It's not taboo in the same way it is now and it wasn't.

or the same way it became. And it definitely wasn't regulated in the same way. And then some of the regulations when they pop up end up having unintended effects. So for example, when you close the brothels and force women out into the streets, it leads to the rise of pimps, right? And it,

actually takes away control of the sex industry from women. And I should clarify that there are male sex workers as well throughout all of history. I'm talking about women sex workers here, but there's always male sex workers as well.

But by casting women out of brothels, it takes the industry out of the control of women, puts it into the control of men and ends up creating worse and more exploitative conditions for women sex workers, which I think is one of the major arguments for the legalization of sex work today and which I would absolutely support.

Yeah, so it is so true that when it comes to regulations surrounding sex work, there are always unintended consequences. And there are even unintended consequences when you

pursue legalization. So for example, in the Netherlands, where sex work is legal and government regulated, what that means is that sex work is only legal if it takes place within the parameters that the government specifies. And there may be certain rules and requirements such as formally registering as a sex worker and paying taxes and these other sorts of things. And

Many people don't wish to comply with those regulations because, for example, some people don't want to register formally as a sex worker. And so the end result is that most of the sex work that takes place in the Netherlands actually takes place outside of that legal regulated system, which is kind of paradoxical. And so, yeah, there are always these unintended consequences. And I don't know that anybody has figured out a perfect solution yet in terms of how you can create a system that makes it safe for sex workers and sex

reduces risk of violence and exploitation and so forth. I think full decriminalization is often argued to be kind of the best model for that, but it's a complicated subject and we could do a whole podcast just on that alone. Absolutely. So in the early days, restaurants were really only for men and they were associated with sex work and infidelity and things like that.

So women couldn't really even dine out due to kind of like the stigma and negative associations with restaurants and also the belief that it was immodest for women to even eat in public. So when did things start to change where restaurants kind of closed their private rooms, became open to women and started to be more about food than about sex? Well, they always

always are about food as well as about sex, but it's an ongoing process that takes place really in the late 19th and early 20th century. So restaurants increased vastly in numbers in the second half of the 19th century. Cities grow. The United States is undergoing this like vast urbanization. Women are moving into the workforce and it leads to the expansion of all different types of restaurants. So you get more like, you know, less expensive restaurants. You get the emergence of the first types of restaurants that are oriented towards women and

Places like ice cream saloons, which emerge in the mid-19th century, they serve light and delicate fare and sweets and no alcohol. That's the key thing. And that makes them at least into quasi-respectable places for women. Although, like as soon as women appear in large numbers of them, they then immediately become sexually suspect places.

So you get sort of a multiplication of the types of restaurants in the second half of the 19th century, some that are more associated with sex work and some that are less associated with sex work. And then at the turn of the century, in the sort of first wave feminist movement, women start, like upper class women start pushing for their right to access the

these high-end restaurants, places like Delmonico's, which is the first restaurant in the United States. And initially it's very much in keeping with the French restaurant model. It has private rooms, there's prostitutes there. And you get these elite women members of things like the cirrhosis club who say, no, we want to be able to meet in private rooms and we don't want any aspersions about our sexual reputation. And so you need to kick out those people

sex workers. We can't occupy the same space. So as part of the progressive era and this first wave women's rights movement, there's a push by women, middle class women to expel women sex workers from restaurants.

But that takes a long, long, long, long time. And throughout the 20th century, there are still a lot of what are called stag restaurants, which are restaurants that deny access to women and make the argument that like if any women were permitted into them, that they would be overrun with sex workers. You still see restaurateurs making those arguments in the 1970s.

And it's really not until the 1980s that the second wave women's rights movement manages to compel through legal cases all restaurants to open up to women. And again, it's elite women who are moving into the professions who are saying, like, there are important business meetings happening at these men's grills. Like a lot of time, these stack restaurants were called grills. There are important business opportunities that were being denied.

You know, we're not allowed to enter them. And even when I was a kid, I grew up in New York City. There were still bars that were notoriously did not allow women, including McSorley's Ale House in the village, still did not permit women and held on until it was like sometime in the 80s that a legal decision finally forced them to open the door to women. And then it went from being kind of like a journalist hangout to being a NYU college student hangout. Yeah.

Yeah, and now it's a big tourist hotspot. I've actually been to Pixorlis a couple of times and it's an interesting place and has a long and storied history, but especially with regard to that restriction on gender in terms of admittance. And I think it really was the last remaining holdout.

that had like a no girls allowed policy, essentially. But there were a lot of them throughout into the 1980s. It wasn't just McSwirly's. And I mean, McSwirly's is more of a bar than a restaurant, but there were a lot, you know, there is, I talk about Monteleone's and Norland's in the book, but I mean, like every city in the United States and in Canada and in Britain too had stag restaurants. Yeah.

They were common. Yeah. And part of the reason why women weren't allowed in restaurants was because there was this idea that women who indulged in eating, you know, that this somehow raised suspicions about what she was doing sexually in private. And you write in your book that the female appetite was often used as a barometer of sexuality by people at the time. So tell us a little bit about kind of

this belief and how it was used to promote early diet culture and was kind of used as a way of suppressing women's pleasure.

So in the 19th century, as luxurious French food becomes associated with illicit sex, there is a counter reaction in Victorian Anglo-American on both sides of the Atlantic that more and more stigmatizes women's expressions of their appetites. It comes to be seen as more and more illicit in reaction to this association between good food and bad sex. And it really gets...

It goes to kind of hard to fathom heights by the mid 19th century. It's sort of like the height of Victorianism. So you have advice books, you know, telling women like never to betray their appetites at the table, never to say the word stomach at the table, never to talk about food. If you're going to eat a piece of bread, you have to tear it up into tiny pieces. You know, you could never put a piece of bread in your mouth. If you're going to eat an orange, you have to eat it with a teaspoon.

Basically, it's a total restriction on women eating in any way that betrays an animal appetite because the assumption was that if you indulged, it must be that you were sexually lustful and promiscuous and disreputable. So mothers would tell women,

tell their daughters like not to eat at public dinners. And you get a lot of tale of like secret eating, women eating privately in the kitchen. Cause like you basically go to a dinner party and you, you're not supposed to eat the food. You're supposed to say no, no to seconds, no to the sauce.

Eat lightly, if at all, and eat the light things like you could eat sugar, like the sweets and the salad, but like no meat, like meat, you know, is going to heat up those lustful appetites. And again, this carries through with us today. And I talk about it with my students. I teach food history classes at the university level.

And I'll ask my students, do they think that their gender influences their eating at all? Oh, no, no, they don't. And then I was like, but, you know, would you order like a steak on a first date? Absolutely not. Right. Like nothing messy, like not a burger. And like there we have social science evidence that like like on dates, like first dates, women order the fish, they order the light foods. Right.

Yeah, these ideas are definitely still with us and have a very, very long history. And it's easy to see how they have shaped and played a role in not just modern dating culture, but in terms of modern diet culture as well. Yeah, absolutely. The whole like fixation of like women and salads. This is an old story, but it is still entirely with us.

And it's interesting, you know, around the time that these messages were being promoted, you know, it was actually considered quite scandalous for a woman to even write a cookbook because again, women weren't supposed to enjoy food. And if they did, it basically meant that they were a slut essentially. So tell us a little bit about the history of food writing and how it was hard for women to break into that space.

Well, women could write some types of cookbooks. So there are women who write cookbooks in the 19th century, but they're domestic cookbooks and they are often centered on economy. Like how do you run an efficient household?

And eventually this morphs into a genre of cookbooks that's like cookbooks for new brides. Like, how do you cook for your husband? And again, the emphasis is on thrift and home cooking, but it is not on cooking as essential pursuit, right? It's very, there's a couple of exceptions, of course, but by and large, cookbooks that are about like cooking for art or pleasure are authored by men, by elite male chefs, because chefs in restaurants are,

remain male throughout the 19th century at the elite level. And then at the turn of the century, some women start writing about food in a sensual way, both food writing and cookbook writing. And I talk about some of them in the book. For example, there's a woman named Elizabeth Robbins Pinnell, who's born in Philadelphia. She's an American woman and she's an expat. She moves to London and she's taking part in what we call the decadent movement, which is

like 1890s, early 1900s, kind of a somewhat queer sexual subculture. She's an art critic. She's mixing in these circles and she starts writing a column for a kind of risque newspaper or risque publication. And these columns are all about the sensual enjoyment of food. They're like food columns. She's a woman. It's seen as appropriate, but they're not

They're not domestic. They're not about frugality. They're about the pleasure of seasonal eating and food for essential dimensions. And she collects them in a book called The Feasts of Autolycus, The Diary of a Greedy Woman. And it's really groundbreaking. So she's the first in kind of a wave of early 20th century women who start pushing the envelope. But they, women like MFK Fisher, very famously, ultimately like Elizabeth David and

you know, a number of other wonderful food writers from the period, but they get a lot of blowback. They get a lot of criticism. MFK Fisher gets labeled a mistress of gastronomical pornography, which, you know, she's very annoyed at. But this is the origin of the term food porn, which really begins as a pejorative against women who write erotically about food. And I

still see that criticism made all the time, you know, including like by people who just see something pornographic about women writing centrally about food in a way that just they do not feel about men writing centrally about food.

"Mistress of gastronomical pornography" is one of my favorite terms I think I've ever heard. I wouldn't mind being called a mistress of gastronomical pornography, but MFK Fisher didn't like it. Well, I actually wouldn't mind being called it either. So early on, restaurants were houses of masculinity. You know, there were places where straight men went to eat fine food and hire female sex workers.

But there was an interesting shift over time where in the 1930s or so, men who showed an interest in fine food came to be associated with being gay. So how did that happen? Where did this association between gay men and gourmet cooking come from? I think it comes out of bohemianism. So what happens is you get this...

kind of standard moral belief that showing too much pleasure in food is there's something sexually suspect about it, right? And so people...

People who want to push back against those moral norms, people who are critical of conformity of moral culture, what we call a bohemian, start embracing good food as a sign of their iconoclasm and how they break from the Solomon Grundy's of the world.

And at the same time, they are challenging sort of moral sexual norms. So you get this conflation. It's what I call in the book, the rise of like a counter discourse. And it creates an opportunity for,

as the first same-sex sexual subcultures emerge at the turn of the century, so you get the first gayborhoods in New York and Paris and San Francisco and elsewhere, where like gay men and lesbian women are coming together in like specific communities and are self-identifying, where they are using an indulgence in good food as like a sign, like a way to like

embody and evoke queer culture, right? And it makes sense because it's about a sort of pleasure-oriented indulgence of the appetite that's not procreative in the same way that gay sex is not about procreation. It's about pleasure for the sake of pleasure. And so eating good food for the sake of pleasure has this parallel in people's minds.

And then on top of that, for gay men in particular, the association in the popular imagination between effeminacy and homosexuality really reinforces that. Because the idea is that homosexuality for men is an expression of an inversion of gender. And so men who are interested in things of the kitchen are betraying some sort of

and that effeminacy is linked to their homosexuality. So by the mid-20th century, being a gourmet for men is highly marked as queer. And it's both a stereotype, like an extremely pervasive stereotype, but it's also connected to reality because a lot of the leading men in the food world in the mid-20th century, and we're talking about famous chefs and chefs

Food critics, food reviewers, television personalities, hoteliers, a lot of people who are running fancy food boutiques, a lot of these men are gay. So it's like it's not completely insane. Like there is, in fact, a preponderance of gay men in the gourmet food industry in the mid 20th century.

Yeah, and there was this kind of burgeoning gay food scene, you know, and gay restaurants in the mid-20th century served as an important meeting point for the community. And they tended to be places that served rich gourmet food. And it's interesting because if you look at the gay restaurant scene today, they've largely moved away from this. And the focus is often very much on nutrition and healthy meals, right?

And I actually really lament the loss of the old gay food. So I used to live in Philadelphia when I was in graduate school circa 27 years ago, and

And there were some fantastic gay restaurants there. One was called Judy's and one was called the Astral Plane. And these restaurants had like storied reputations, like Bette Midler actually held her 30th birthday party at the Astral Plane. And these places served up, you know, very rich, delicious comfort style food. And unfortunately, those restaurants no longer exist anymore. And, you know, the types of gay restaurants you're going to find today are serving a very different type of cuisine. But once upon a time, you

When I used to go to those restaurants in Philadelphia, I remember somebody asking me just what kind of food I like. And I said, I like gay food. They're like, what does that mean? I'm like, well, gay food is just good food. And so, yeah, I kind of miss the kind of gourmet comfort cooking and the shift to everything's got to be nutritious and healthy and so forth.

I mean, I think that that's both part of the larger story that I talk about at the end of the book of this shift from the old good food, bad sex system to this new what I call like bad food, good sex system. But it's also specific to the history of gay men, I think, and is a reflection of that, you know, the consequences of.

the HIV AIDS crisis. So because of the way that disease, because of the way it was associated with things like wasting syndrome, right? It created this like

a boon on like an appearance of health, right. That I think really shifts like aesthetics in queer male culture too, in the late 20th and 21st century. So I think there's like something specific that goes on in gay male culture, you know, and also it's sharing in this, this larger trend towards, you know, in some ways we've become so like liberated sexually and we have become like more and more uptight about our elementary appetites.

Yeah, I mean, we do live in interesting times where we're more sexually liberated than ever in some ways, but we're also more repressed than ever too. So yeah, we live in interesting times for sure. So one other topic I wanted to get in with you is the idea of how cooking at home was popularized in the early 20th century as a means of promoting marital bliss.

So you had all of these bridal cookbooks coming out, promoting cooking as a strategy for maintaining a happy marriage, and then later as a means of seduction. So tell us a little bit about that. One of my favorite parts of the research for this book was reading erotic and romantic cookbooks over the years.

over the centuries. And I actually have a huge spreadsheet of them where I ended up having like, you know, hundreds of cookbooks on this spreadsheet on the themes of romance and sex and like tracking change over time. And so what I found was the

first kind of erotic cookbooks, if you can call them that, are these new brides cookbooks that are published in the early 20th century. And actually, they're frequently given away for free at city halls to couples who are applying for marriage licenses, and they're paid for by local advertisers. So they're little cookbooks,

call like the bride's cookbook or something like that. And there's a handful of recipes and then like advertisements for like so-and-so's silver polish or so-and-so's, you know, smoked fish emporium or whatever it is. Maybe a couple of like local recipes, depending on like if it was sold in Louisiana or was it sold in Washington state, you know, are you going to get dungeness crabs or are you going to get gumbo? But again, they're like mostly in the tradition of those 19th century restaurants

kind of domestic frugal cookbooks. They don't tend to be for indulgent food. And the assumption is that they are

for new brides to cook for marital happiness. And then in the mid-20th century, you actually get the rise of cookbooks that aren't for brides, but for dating, right? And some of them are pitched to straight men trying to seduce women, and some of them are pitched to straight women who are trying to seduce men. And then eventually in the 1960s and 70s, you started to get like queer cookbooks that are

often about the sort of like queer food that like you remember loving in like Philadelphia as a grad student, but not always, you know, sometimes they're like healthy, like queer food cookbooks. They vary. And, and,

you know, by the end of the 20th century, we have like all these, you know, endless sub genres. So there's like multiple like cookbooks for bears and like, you know, drag queen cookbooks and like BDSM cookbooks and, you know, just the whole panoply of, you know, if you can think of it, it exists now with the rise of self-publishing, you know, I ended up talking about like semen cookbooks, you know, which there's not just one and there's not just two, you know.

It's a whole genre. And my favorite genre that I end the book with is the Fifty Shades cookbooks. So I found through diligent Googling, which was a real hardship, I ended up finding like at least 35 or 40 cookbooks.

Fifty Shades themed cookbooks from like those published by major publishers, like Fifty Shades of Cock and other. There's like at least two cookbooks called Fifty Shades of Cock. Surprise, surprise to, you know, all sorts of self-published ones. Fifty Shades of Kale and Fifty Shades of Quinoa and anything you can think of.

Yeah, I've actually exchanged dirty cookbooks with my mom before as a joke over the holidays. She got me one once called Fork Me, Spoon Me. And then I got her a Fifty Shades of Chicken book. So yeah, it's the books are kind of humorous, but they also kind of reinforce that association that still exists between food and sex and how there's something just kind of erotic about eating and also about cooking. Yeah.

And, you know, it's interesting just sort of how longstanding this association is, but it helps me to make a lot of sense of my social media feed today. So I actually follow a lot of cooking accounts. And as I think about it, there's a heck of a lot of sex that's interwoven into it. So, for example, there are people who are cooking who are dressed very provocatively or maybe they'll be shirtless. And whenever they taste their food, they make sounds that are very orgasmic.

So, yeah, you know, that connection between food and sex is very much present and isn't going anywhere. But any other examples from the modern world where you see this food sex connection playing out?

Yeah, I think it's interesting what you're noting. And I think we're seeing changes as well. So I was having a conversation. I'm not a big consumer of TikTok, but I was having a conversation with someone who loves TikTok cooking videos. And they were saying how there's this whole trend, which I'm sure you've seen, of like the real sexualization of male cooks on TikTok, like all these shirtless, hunky guys cooking like eggplant.

like very overtly, like again, like phallic foods, like highly sexualized in a way that I think is something new. So when the Food Network started, I talk about this in the book, initially, like the Food Network starts as a marketing thing. It's basically guys like, I can buy this channel. What can I sell on it? Why don't we do food, right? It's not started by like foodies. And they decide to have...

men on there who will be what they call like chunks, like chef hunks, but they tone it down. It can't be too, they have a couple initial goes at it and that they think are like too kind of lascivious or lecherous or like they're going to throw off what they assume is a female viewership that wants like approachable hunky men. Yeah.

And so you get more like the Jamie Oliver's or, you know, who are kind of like unthreatening, good looking men. But it seems to me, my impression is that like what is now on TikTok is much more sexualized. Like this is not unthreatening, hunky men. This is like in your face, like here's my abs and here's an eggplant, you know?

One of the arguments I make in the book is that the history of food and sex has rarely been investigated because we naturalize the connection of these things. And there's all sorts of reasons to naturalize that. Like it is a kind of, I think, probably universally human connection to make because of the ways in which like we ingest, right? Like the...

We put things in our mouths and we satisfy appetites. Like there are just like sort of natural human dimensions of this connection, but how we connect food and sex can change very radically over time and over place. So I think, you know, I end the book by talking about like the book kind of traces one particular way of associating food and sex that took place in Anglo-American culture between the

the late 18th century and the end of the 20th century. And now I think we're in this moment of transition and change. And clearly some of that is happening in social media and platforms like TikTok today. So I'm curious to see where it is.

Where it leads. I fear that one of the places it leads is towards more and more restrictive attitudes about like how to discipline our bodies and how we all have to watch our calories so we can be, you know, appropriately sexy for sexy sex. And I hope for a future in which we are

only engaging in the fun kind of discipline and are like, you know, less of the sort of like morally berating ourselves for eating quote unquote dirty food. Yeah, I agree with that. And, you know, hopefully we can get to a place where we have a healthy relationship with both food and sex, right? So thank you so much for this amazing conversation, Rachel. It was a pleasure to have you here. Can you please tell my listeners where they can go to learn more about you and your work and get a copy of your new book?

It has been an absolute pleasure to talk to you. You can visit my website, rachelhopecleaves.com, which is R-A-C-H-E-L-H-O-P-E-C-L-E-V as in Victor, E-S as in Sam. You can follow me on Blue Sky, where I think I'm at Rachel Cleaves. And you should be able to order my book through any independent bookstore. Well, thank you again so much for your time. I really appreciate having you here. Thank you for having me.

Thank you for listening. To keep up with new episodes of this podcast, visit my website, sexandpsychology at sexandpsychology.com or subscribe on your favorite platform where I hope you'll take a moment to rate and review the show. If you listen on Apple Podcasts, please consider becoming a Sex and Psychology Premium subscriber to enjoy ad-free listening for just $3.99 a month.

You can also follow me on social media for daily sex research updates. I'm on Blue Sky and X at Justin Laymiller and Instagram at Justin J. Laymiller. Also, be sure to check out my book, Tell Me What You Want. Thanks again for listening. Until next time.