The Beggar's Benison: Sex Clubs of Enlightenment Scotland and Their Rituals (review)

In discreet meetings, the leading figures of Scotland's East Neuk met to engage in public masturbation and to extol the pleasures of the libertine. David Stevenson makes the vehicle of these very un-Presbyterian activities, a Scottish sex club, the subject of his most recent study. His analysis of the Beggar's Benison, an eighteenth-century provincial club whose members extolled the virtues of sex and sexual freedom, adds to the valuable insight offered by the author into associational culture in early-modern Scotland through his previous analysis of Freemasonry. Like Freemasonry, the Beggar's Benison's influence spread beyond the borders of the East Neuk of Fife, where it began, and eventually included chapters in Edinburgh, Glasgow, and even Russia. Stevenson argues, at times persuasively, that, like Freemasonry, the Beggar's Benison Club was a product of the Enlightenment and a dynamic cultural force, though on a much more modest scale. What makes this study singular in Scottish historiography is its subject matter.

The historiography of clubs has been dominated by study of the philosophical, social, and political societies. To these, Stevenson adds the category of the sex club, hitherto passed over in the study of Scottish associational networks, and he argues that under careful analysis it too may be seen as expressing philosophical, social, and political objectives. Stevenson acknowledges from the outset that the source base for this study is limited (indeed, it comprises a relatively small amount of documentary material that has been altered, reproduced, and otherwise modified since the 1730s), adding layer upon layer of material so that identifying the range of ways in which successive people have intervened with the sources through compilation and selective preservation of its records becomes a focus of the book.

In an effort to expand this narrow base, Stevenson draws creatively on material culture—the seals and medals that were the typical paraphernalia of eighteenth-century clubs as well as the more inventive "test platter" and "breath horn," whose functions were specific to the rites and rituals of a club preeminently concerned with masturbation and the glorification of male sexual licence (in accounts of initiation into the club, men's penises were "prepared" for the rite by the club remembrancer and others in a closet). But while these items may seem somewhat eccentric, the club's myths of foundation, which inventively incorporate biblical narratives and the life of James V, seem no more curious than their Masonic counterparts.

Seeking, with periodic success, to escape the strait-jacket of the general descriptive history to which much of this source base lends itself, Stevenson identifies several ways in which the club can be seen as an expression of wider themes in eighteenth-century Scottish history. First, he argues, it must be understood in the context of the Enlightenment, the secularization of public discourse about sex, and the proliferation of new medical and philosophical treatises as well as the publication of more explicit sexual narratives. Second, he sees in the rites of the Beggar's Benison and other sex clubs vehicles for the (albeit ambiguous) expression of subversive political ideas—from opposition to Anglo-Scottish Union to Jacobite sympathies. Stephenson alludes in many places to the club's extensive borrowing from its English and Continental neighbors for inspiration. A more detailed situation of the Beggar's Benison within the context of this libidinous, male associational world would be especially welcome and could underpin Stevenson's efforts to understand the club in a transnational Enlightenment perspective, a republic of letters both erudite and lewd.

In understanding the social functions of the club, Stevenson's perspective is decidedly local: in the provincial burghs of the East Neuk, the club offered an outlet for male sexual expression that was of a bawdy character and...