This week we are looking at Medieval birth control. This terrifying object, known as a “chastity belt,” was once thought to have been developed by men during the Middle Ages to lock up their wives or daughters’ genitalia, thereby controlling not just women’s reproduction, but their sexuality. The good news — they were probably mostly fake.
To wear this contraption you would have the wide circle go around the waist. The intersecting metal band would go across the labia and anus — you can see the holes meant for defecation and menses flow. Note the spiky prongs on the outside — those were to frighten off any male suitors who might wish to impinge on the men-with-the-key-to-the-belt’s control over the woman’s body.
Although there is a drawing of a chastity belt dating to 1405 by a German military engineer called Konrad Kyeser, this was likely to have been satirical. Historian Albrecht Classen has uncovered (so to speak) the chastity belt’s history, and argues that most current examples were made in the 18th and 19th centuries as a sort of joke, and that the stories around them were meant to ridicule the Middle Ages in opposition to the Enlightenment Era. One sincerely hopes this is the case. In Googling to find images of a historical chastity belt like the one featured here, I inadvertently discovered that modern ones are very much on sale at select websites. Ouch.
Source(s): Image Alberto Pizzoli/ Getty Images. _The Medieval Chastity Belt: a Myth-making Process, 2007, Palgrave Macmillan, A. Classen. @allthatisinteresting.com, “The Ugly, Misunderstood History of the Chastity Belt,”,Aimee Lamoureux, Jan 30, 2018 updated August 25, 2018.
