Sex with the Queen by Elizabeth Herman

[msmcknittington]

This is, quite possibly, the worst non-fiction book I have ever read. A comment on a previous post in the comm reminded me of it, and I thought I should share. Forewarning, like a literary lighthouse

Comments

[gehayi]

She had known only the smooth girlish hands of Edward upon her; in their most intimate joining her husband must have fantasized that he was actually making love to Piers Gaveston.

I don't know what bugs me more--the characterization of Edward II as "girlish" (because men who like having sex with men ALL have feminine faces, features and forms, of COURSE they do) or the notion that because Edward had a couple of male favorites and was alleged to have committed sodomy, he couldn't also have enjoyed sex with his wife. Because bisexuals don't exist, y'know.

The five children that Edward sired on two women (Edward III, John, Earl of Cornwall, Eleanor, Countess of Guelders and Joanna, Queen of Scotland with Isabella of France, and his illegitimate son, Adam FitzRoy, who went on campaign with his father and whose allowance installments are recorded among the king's bills) must therefore be considered figments of our imagination.

Let us imagine the queen’s duties in the royal four-poster. The king would likely have suffocated his petite bride if he had perched on top of her. He must have required her to ride astride him, careful not to disturb the stinking wound on his thigh. She who had played with the charming Manox, who had rutted with the sexy Dereham, now had to perform loathsome sex acts on an obese and smelly old man. We can picture the happy king, perfectly sated, snoring, as his young wife lay silently beside him, her heart sinking. And the following day her bright eyes wandered to the young and handsome courtiers dancing gracefully before her as she sat on the throne next to Henry, who was too fat to dance.

She's ripping off The Boleyn Inheritance here--right down to Henry being offensively smelly and Katherine Howard HAAAAAATING sex with Henry and being forced to ride him so she didn't get crushed. It's no better in the novel, either.

[msmcknittington]

Yes to everything you said about Edward II! The heteronormativity and homophobicness in this book is so appalling. I generally don't anticipate finding such blatant -isms in non-fiction, because non-fiction is supposed try to avoid biases like that, but the way things are recounted here is really polarizing and sensationalized that it's kind of like reading bad slashfic. You know how sometimes there's a character who's in a heterosexual relationship with another character, and the second character gets turned into a horrible, awful person so that the first has motive for cheating? Yeah. It's historical RPF masquerading as non-fiction.

In general, I really hate speculating on the sex lives of dead people. Not just because it's intrusive and not anyone's business really and the dead person can't tell you to back off, but because the specifics of people's sex lives usually aren't historically important. I mean, in cases where people were executed for sodomy or other "transgressions" it's relevant, but whether or not Henry VIII liked woman-on-top is just not important. Or even provable.

She's ripping off The Boleyn Inheritance here--right down to Henry being offensively smelly and Katherine Howard HAAAAAATING sex with Henry and being forced to ride him so she didn't get crushed. It's no better in the novel, either.

Is she really? Ha ha ha! That book is not listed in the bibliography, either.