5 Women From History Who Were Basically Magic At Sex
A few months ago I introduced you to half a dozen people who should be famous simply for all the boning they did. Many of you noticed something weird about the six Casanovas: They were all men (also, they didn't actually include Casanova, because he was on an even more previous list).
Obviously, women have been just as slutty as the greatest man-whores in history. But stories about dudes getting laid all the time are usually boasts, while those about women who had sex all day and night tend to be the tragic ones that win Anne Hathaway an Oscar.
But it isn't always about quantity. So here are some historical women whose creative sexual resumes stand up to any man's.
The Countess Of Castiglione Was So Good In Bed She United A Country
Virginia Oldoini was born to minor nobles in Tuscany in 1837. When she was 17, they married her off to a guy 12 years older than her. But a year later her cousin decided that it would be a lot more convenient to his career and country if Virginia was available to have sex with someone else. Namely, Napoleon III.
See, at that time, what we now call Italy was a bunch of smaller countries, and Virginia's cousin was part of the group that wanted them to unify. He took one look at his hot, young, close relative and realized the best plan was to get her to cheat on her husband with Napoleon and hope some political pillow talk could turn the tide. Because 19th-century Europe was apparently an alternate-universe Game Of Thrones, complete with a short guy and creepy family relationships.
Virginia managed to become the emperor's mistress for over a year, and shortly after it ended he sent troops to unite the peninsula. Historians disagree about how influential she was in making that happen, since various battles and treaties and intrigues were going on at the same time, but she gave herself basically all the credit and was pissed off that everyone else didn't as well.
Even if the countess was a lot less influential with her pudenda than she would like to think, men still found her enjoyable to be around and were willing to pay for the pleasure. She continued to cheat on her husband and made a nice living from it. Eventually, word got around to the unbelievably rich but famously stingy Lord Hertford, and he offered the countess the original indecent proposal: 1 million francs for one night with her.
There was one catch: She had to do anything he wanted. She agreed, and legend has it that she couldn't sit down for three days. The two also avoided each other after that, supposedly out of "mutual respect."
Peggy Guggenheim Combined Art And Sex
You might have visited one of the various Guggenheim Museums around the world, but what the guidebook won't tell you is that one of the patrons had a crazy sex life.
Peggy married twice and had two children, but that was just the tip of the iceberg. When once asked how many husbands she'd had, she replied, "Do you mean mine, or other people's?" Most biographies put the estimate around 1,000 lovers over her lifetime. Her own autobiography was called Memoirs Of An Art Lover, and yet she didn't manage to mention anything about art until page 110 of a 200-page book, mostly because she had so much to say about men and sex.
She was especially a fan of getting down with famous people, including most of the modern artists she discovered and the playwright Samuel Beckett. When she couldn't get men into her bed by seduction, she would try to use her money. Even as she got older she still wanted to get laid by the hottest guys; well into her 70s she was hitting on men in their 20s.
Unfortunately for Peggy, she wasn't as pretty as the paintings she collected. Jackson Pollock said you would have to put a towel over her head to fuck her, but he was no Ed Harris himself, so screw his opinion. She did, however, have a very large "potato-shaped" nose, and commentators have attributed low self-esteem about her looks as well as losing her father at a young age (he was on the Titanic) as reasons she spread herself around so much. Because apparently women only want lots of sex if they are messed up in the head.
Queen Nzinga Had A Harem Of Men She Forced To Fight To The Death For Her
Nzinga Of Ndongo And Matamba was born in what is now Angola in 1583. She spent the rest of her life kicking ass and having sex.
By the time her father died in 1618, the Portuguese were slave-trading their way all over Africa. Nzinga's brother took over as leader, but he immediately gave the invaders everything they wanted. When the Portuguese started ripping people from their homes and sending them to be worked to death in Brazil, the Mbundu tribe turned to Nzinga to save them. So she did what a kickass lady needed to do: She had her brother killed and took over. Then she started fighting back. This was insane, since Portugal was one of the world's biggest powers, but she led her armies in guerrilla warfare and held them off for 40 years.
With all this fighting, she must not have had much time to meet guys. She got around this problem by having a giant harem. Yes, women can have hundreds of men that they keep enslaved for sexual purposes. In the past, I mean. Don't go into my basement. She may also have had a fetish going on, because she made all of them dress as women.
Legend has it that she managed to combine her two favorite things. It's tough to pick which hot guy you are going to have sex with each night, so she found a foolproof option: Two of the men would fight to the death, and whoever won would get to sleep with her. Then the next morning he would be killed as well. No pressure performing under those circumstances.
But at some point age catches up with all of us. At 75 years old, Nzinga decided she didn't need the harem anymore and disbanded it, but she made an honest man out of one of her youngest sex slaves. She lived another seven years, presumably a cougar until the end.
The Wives Of Philip V Of Spain Boned For God And Country
If you are the head of a whole country, one of the benefits is that no one can tell you to stop sleeping around. That is why virtually every king in history had tons of sex outside of marriage. In fact, so few kings were faithful to their wives that it is notable when we know for sure that one was. King Philip V of Spain was one of those rulers.
It wasn't that Philip didn't like sex. He loved it. He wanted it all the time and claimed to get depressed if he went too long without getting laid. It was just that he was also a really, really devout Catholic, and if you were raised in the Church, you know their ideas on sex out of wedlock. Philip took it all to heart, and even his penis couldn't convince his brain otherwise. That meant his wife needed to be available round the clock for coitus whenever he felt like it.
He basically never wanted her out of his sight, so they slept in the same bed during a period of history when that was bizarre, and she attended all his meetings with councilors during the day just in case he wanted a lunch-time quickie.
Philip was married twice, first in 1701 to Maria Luisa of Savoy and again in 1714 to Elisabeth Farnese. Both of these women were hugely influential in the running of their country, for one reason only: They literally had their husband by the balls. Maria was married to him during the War Of Spanish Succession. When her husband would talk about it, she would give her opinion of what he should do, and if he disagreed then sex was off the table. Within a few hours she usually got her way.
There was no let up for these poor ladies. Even when she was actually on her deathbed, Maria still had to put out three times a day to keep her husband happy. Within 10 months, Philip was with Elisabeth, and the sexual frustration he felt in the less-than-a-year he was single was so bad he could barely concentrate on running the country.
Tallulah Bankhead Could Not Be Stopped
I mentioned Tallulah previously as one of the many, many lovers of Leslie Hutchinson, he of the diamond-encrusted penis sheath, but she had her own sexual resume that dwarfed his, and yours, and probably that of many future generations.
Tallulah was born in 1902 and was acting by the time she was 15. But by then she was already sleeping with people. And it wasn't just men she was interested in. She first started sleeping around at her all-girl convent school, because putting a whole bunch of horny teenagers in one room overnight after telling them sex is bad all day has always ended well. But once she became famous, her lesbian relationships got a bit more A-list. At a time when both interracial and gay relationships were punishable by time in prison, Tallulah was linked to women like Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Hattie McDaniel, and Billie Holiday.
But Tallulah really loved men.
Apparently this was a documentary about her vagina.
She once gave a magazine interview in which she complained that she hadn't been with anyone in six months, saying, "Six months is a long, long while. I WANT A MAN!" (The records don't indicate if she then jumped the journalist.) She didn't often go that long without getting laid, though, and she must not have been very careful about it, since by the time she was 30 she needed a hysterectomy due to STDs. As she left the hospital, she assured the doctor that she had learned nothing from the experience. She kept up her usual pace and by 1948 could proudly proclaim that she "found no surprises in the Kinsey Report" and everything in it was "old hat" to her.
She managed to be married for four years, to a minor actor named John Emery. She based this important and meaningful life decision on the fact that he was extremely well hung. But, she said, "The weapon may be of admirable proportions, but the shot is weak," and she dumped him.
Tallulah died aged 66, and not a minute too soon, since it seems she had gotten sick of her favorite hobby, once saying, "Sex? I'm bored with sex. What is it after all? If you go down on a woman you get a crick in your neck. If you go down on a man you get lockjaw. And fucking just gives me claustrophobia."
Follow Kathy on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter.
These women sure did a lot of boning. But can they match the sex lives of the most sexually crazed demographic the world has ever seen - U.S. Presidents? See how Calvin Coolidge hated having sex with his wife so much that they named a science thing after him in The 4 Most Impressively Weird Sex Lives Of U.S. Presidents and be sure to check out History's 7 Most Astounding Sexual Resumes, because chances are you've slept with one of these people.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see some really weird vampire boning in The 5 Most Unintentionally Hilarious Movie Sex Scenes, and watch other videos you won't see on the site!
Also follow us on Facebook, to participate in a contest where the most popular comments created will get the most likes. The stakes have never been higher.
Kathy Benjamin's Funerals to Die For: The Craziest, Creepiest, and Most Bizarre Funeral Traditions and Practices Ever unearths very true stories that put the, er, "fun" back into funerals!
