Imagination?
And probably coupled with observation, as jsgoddess says.
Another possibility is Alexander Pope. He suffered from Potts Disease and was physically deformed and apparently quite misanthropic and bitter.
George Bernard Shaw is rumored to have never consummated his long marriage to Charlotte Payne Townshend, and thus died a virgin. He wrote some great plays, but there’s probably a price – many critics have written of his characters as sexless, and one describes Shaw’s characters as hermphrodites. The best quote about this I can’t find online, but it goes something like that: “You can learn everything there is to know about men and women by reading Shaw’s plays, except that they have sex.”
I don’t know that I completely agree with that. Shaw once wrote that he thought of women as being just like men, if men were the ones who got pregnant and were generally smaller and so forth. I don’t think Shaw had much understanding of how hormones affect the mind, or how the libido works.
This might be slightly off-topic, but I found it interesting at the time I was reading it:
Fay Weldon wrote a book that purported to be a series of letters to her teenage neice who was finding it difficult to study Jane Austen in English classes at school. Weldon basically goes into various intriguing biographical details on Austen and on the England of her time. One statistic she brought up was that, because there was no reliable form of contraception or way to avoid getting STDs, about 30% of middle-class English women would have remain virgins all their lives. (Obviously the other 70% were married, prostitutes, or women who were good at concealing their sex lives and were lucky enough not to get pregnant or contract syphilis).
I think the book was called Letters to Alice on first reading Jane Austen. I don’t like Fay Weldon but this is a pretty interesting non-fiction work of hers and it’s mercifully short as well.
Evil, the theory that GBS was a virgin was prevalent for several decades, but research in recent years has revealed that in middle and old age he had affairs with several women.
Shaw was sexually repressed in his youth, probably because his parents’ marriage had been a source of scandal and embarrassment. His mother, father and a male lodger lived openly together in a menage a trois and Shaw was never sure whether his mother’s husband or the lodger was his father. It gave him a distaste for matters sexual that stayed with him well into midlife. He had a wife, but it seems he married for money (his wife was rich) and quite possibly they never consumated the marriage. But he eventually had affairs, no question.
It’s possible she knew enough. Jane was writing before the Victorian age, when women were kept incredibly sheltered.
Er - he picked it up off a toilet seat? :smack:
Well, the Georgians - Jane lived and died during the reign of George III - may not have gone to the lengths that the Victorians did to preserve their daughters’ innocence. The Victorians put pantalettes on piano legs so that ladies wouldn’t be be reminded of human anatomy, and invented euphemisms such as calling chicken parts “white meat” and “dark meat” so that no one would have to speak the words “breast” and “leg” at the dinner table. The Victorians edited the bawdy bits out of Shakespeare - or at any rate, out of the editions sold for family perusal. The Georgians may not have gone to those prudish extremes, but they were still very strict with their daughters. I’ve often wondered how much Jane knew of the facts of life.
Well, if you trying to fuck it, no wonder. You should have been reading it instead.
This board shows there is a positive correlation between virginity and the ability to write very well.
Have I ever mentioned how eloquent Bear_Nenno is?
:dubious:
That is actually an urban legend. Victorians never put skirts on their piano legs. They may have on piano benches, but not because they didn’t want to scandalize the ladies-it was to protect from scratches and such.
Frankly, I have to raise an eyebrow at the suggestion that there’s a correlation between sexual expression and artistic ability. Outside of explicit erotica (you know when you’re feeling a woman’s breasts, and the feel like sand?), what can’t an observant virgin write about?
Most writers never experience a fraction of the things they write about. Dante may have gotten laid, for example, but he certainly never visited Hell.
Assuming arguendo the word “virgin” can properly apply to a male:
I recall once on an episode of Prairie Home Companion broadcast from Denmark, (the actor playing) Hans Christian Andersen said, “I regret keeping my virginity.” Don’t know how well-documented that is.
Nietzsche probably died a virgin even though he (probably) died of syphilis (infected-blood transfusion is one theory). That’s gotta suck.
And I wouldn’t be surprised if St. Paul (he counts as a writer, doesn’t he? in terms of readership, one of the most successful in human history) died a virgin.
I had no idea Jane Austen was a virgin – so I guess she never married then? Considering how much she went on about marriage (see this thread) I assumed she’d had some experience.
J.M. Barrie supposedly died a virgin.
Austen never married. As for St. Paul, he was a Roman soldier, and a pagan before his conversion, so probably not.
Alexander Woollcott, one of the founding members of the Algonquin group, had a bad case of mumps as a young adult that appears to have left him impotent. I say appears because there is no confirmation of this that I know of, but it’s the consensus of modern researchers.
That’s been debunked as legend. No one has ever found any proof of that actually being done.
As many have said you are speaking crap.
I’ve long thought that meaning of the word virgin has changed over the years. At the birth of Jesus it was a female who wasn’t married. A century ago it was a female who hadn’t slept with anyone. Today it’s a person who isn’t a parent:)
Many people looked down their nose at us when we parented outside of matrimony. Only thing was we knew many of them were rooting like rabbits outside of matrimony. What gives anyone the right to look down their nose at someone for the simple fact that their condom hasn’t broken?
Not a dictionary definition, I’m just a realist.
So, sex makes you dumb. 