What I find weirdest about the story is that the clinic spokesperson said, “We’re not talking about retarded people,” and the Snopes link has the spokesperson saying “We’re not talking retards.”
What kind of spokesperson would say “retards”?!?!
ZJ
A fictional one, perhaps?
Didn’t that happen to Empress Elisabeth of Austria?
Actually, it wasn’t just princesses who had this problem. As you may know, Elisabeth’s cousin Ludwig II of Bavaria ascended the throne at the age of 18 apparently ignorant of sex. According to the accounts of members of the court, he thought women got pregnant by sleeping in the same bed as their husbands, and didn’t understand what it meant for a child to be illegitimate or what rape was. Even 140 years ago this was considered surprising and funny to everyone who heard about it, though.
I can’t buy that a modern European couple would have been trying to conceive by sleeping chastely in the same bed, but I could believe that they could be uninformed enough that, like the couple zoogirl mentioned, they thought some kind of sex act not involving vaginal penetration would do the trick. The phrase “between her legs” is often used in discussing sex, and some people may be confused enough to take this literally.
I can’t remember if it happened to Elisabeth, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Poor Ludwig-he and his brother both ended up going insane.
According to a book I have Royal Babylon* (I cannot vouch for the accuracy, since it’s mostly a tongue in cheek book about scandals and royalty), Queen Marie Henrietta of Belgium didn’t learn until she got married, and then the same thing happened to her daughter Louise, who ran away in the middle of the night and was found by a servant, hiding in the palace gardens. (Later on she was forced into an insane asylum by her tyrant of a father, Leopold II when she ran off with her lover and refused to return to her husband).
And another, in 1898, the nineteen year old Duchess Marie of Mecklenburg was made pregnant by her footman. Her parents had not told her the facts of life and when this happened, instead of realizing their mistake, had her kicked out.
Another example of princessly ignorance is Anne of Cleves, who was married to Henry VIII for a short time. He found her repulsive (she had terrible body odor, for one thing), never consummated the marriage, and Anne didn’t realize anything was wrong until a lady-in-waiting explained a bit more.
It’s not all that tough to believe that girls might remain ignorant if sheltered enough–though most figure it out somehow–but how many boys (besides poor Ludwig, who had enough problems) manage to get to their wedding night completely ignorant? Historically, men are expected to know what to do, even if the women don’t. Even in the most repressive cultures. I bet even under the Taliban, boys were still informed somehow or other.
Umm…maybe I just didn’t learn enough in sex ed but…what are UTIs?
I would suspect that Ludwig’s case was partially one of willful ignorance. Aside from an extremely sheltered and isolated upbringing (strict Catholic at that), he was almost certainly homosexual and so probably had little natural curiosity about the kinds of things men and women might want to do together in the bedroom. An equally sheltered straight teenaged boy of the era probably would have been curious enough to seek out someone to give him a clue.
Historically though, it’s been rare for boys to be brought up in such a sheltered environment. Upper and even middle-class girls were often kept at home with little chance to interact with outsiders, and if their mothers didn’t give them the Straight Dope they might not have anyone else to go to. (Although I like to think that in most cases more worldly housekeepers and maids explained things to girls whose sexual education was neglected by their mothers.) Boys more commonly went to school or some sort of job training and must have had plenty of opportunity to hear about the birds and bees from other young men even if dear ol’ dad didn’t want to discuss it.
:dubious: Got a cite for that??? I’ve heard wild, unsupported claims on this, but certainly nothing anywhere near convincing or certain.
As to the OP. Definite urban myth. Despite anything they may feel or say about sex, religious organisations have somehow managed to struggle through successive generations. You don’t do that by keeping wedded adults totally ignorant of sex.
Nor does fertility treatment get all the way through examinations and results before someone thinks to mention sex.
Urinary Tract Infections
What kind of cite do you want? I can’t produce a letter from the guy saying “By the way, I’m as gay as a day in May”, and there’s a limit to how accurately we can place historic figures into modern sexual orientation categories anyway. But when it comes to Ludwig II my fairly extensive research has at left me personally with no doubts, and I think all of the serious biographies of Ludwig II at least acknowledge the possibility. (The theory that Ludwig was secretly in love with Empress Elisabeth has much less support and doesn’t seem to be taken seriously by any modern scholars, unless you count those writing the books sold at Bavarian souvenier stands.) His lifelong lack of romantic interest in women was noted, with some concern, by his family and the court, as was his fondness for good-looking young men. During his lifetime he was rumored to suffer from some form of sexual abnormality, be it impotence or…something more unusual. Allegations of strange gay orgies were included amongst the evidence in the psychological report declaring Ludwig insane. These stories were at best lurid exaggerations of the facts, but they were apparently considered within the realm of plausibility at the time.
I think it’s possible, perhaps even likely, that the poor guy never actually got laid at all. That he never had sex with a woman is about as clear as such a thing can be. If he ever had sex with a man then there is no surviving evidence of this, and it would have been to the government’s advantage if they’d been able to produce a man willing to say that he’d slept with or at least been propositioned by the king. Some passages in the published “Ludwig diaries” (which are of somewhat questionable authenticity anyway) that have been interpreted as referring to his guilt over his gay sex life read more like guilt about masturbating to me. But judging from his verifiable personal writings, any romantic thoughts he ever had were about other men.
Futile Gesture-where have you been? Most historians I’ve read have concluded that Ludwig was gayer than a picnic basket.
It’s pretty much a given. He may have deeply admired Elisabeth-from all I’ve read, they were very close and they both suffered from schizophrenia, I think.
But Ludwig was almost certainly interested in men.
“Not that there’s anything wrong with THAT.”
To continue this Wittelsbach hijack (once I get going on the Wittelsbacks I can’t stop!), the symptoms of Otto’s madness seem consistent with schizophrenia. It’s possible that Ludwig and Elisabeth were schizophrenic as well, but I think it’s more likely that both were primarily suffering from bipolar disorder. Of course, their upbringing alone might have been enough to screw up even people with perfectly healthy brain chemistry. In Ludwig’s case the matter is also complicated by the fact that he suffered from terrible headaches and self-medicated with the popular painkillers of the time – alcohol and opiates. Some have also speculated that he may have suffered from organic neurological problems caused by anything from syphilis to brain tumors.
I knew it was something like that. I wasn’t sure whether or not it was bipolar or schizophrenia.
As a follow-up to the version reported in the Mirror that’s the subject of the Snope’s page, it’s worth noting that the print edition of this week’s Private Eye has a story casting a quizzical eye over this version:
The rest of the item concerns another story where Hall’s passed off a dodgy version.