KATE LISTER: When you're looking back at old texts and they're talking about 'slut holes' that need clearing out, it makes us fall about laughing; but what they actually mean was like a hole that was just full of rubbish and crap in the street, that you'd put coal into and store there. And there's something that was called ‘slut wool’ as well. You know when you lift up the sofa or the bed and you call them dust bunnies now, all those balls of dust - that was ‘slut wool’ once upon a time.
Read moreAllusionist 116: My Dad Excavated a Porno transcript
HZ: The Victorians really did a number on people. I feel like we're still unpicking Victorian attitudes.
KATE LISTER: Yes, we are. I mean, we're still very much the children of the Victorians, and they're a fascinating bunch, the Victorians. No generation, at no point in history, has sex been successfully repressed, ever. It just doesn't happen. But what you have is really strict social morality, conditioning and mores and constructs and power dynamics around sex that dictate what we are and what we're not supposed to be doing. And outward facing, they were so repressed and polite society and so offended by everything even remotely to do with sex, to the point of where they wouldn't say the word 'trousers' because they thought they were too rude. They were 'sit down upons'.
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