{"id":93080,"date":"2015-12-25T12:00:38","date_gmt":"2015-12-25T17:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=93080"},"modified":"2015-12-21T12:14:47","modified_gmt":"2015-12-21T17:14:47","slug":"roger-that-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/12\/25\/roger-that-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Roger That"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>We\u2019re away until January 4, but we\u2019re re-posting some of our favorite pieces from 2015. Please enjoy, and have a happy New Year!<\/em><\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_85707\" style=\"width: 610px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/william_byrd_ii.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-85707\" class=\"wp-image-85707\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/william_byrd_ii.jpg\" alt=\"William_Byrd_II\" width=\"600\" height=\"294\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/william_byrd_ii.jpg 612w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/william_byrd_ii-300x147.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-85707\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Hans Hysing\u2019s portrait of Byrd, ca. 1724.<\/p><\/div>\n<p><em>The complicated sex drive of William Byrd II.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>William Byrd II was a colonial Virginia gentleman who, on occasion, was no gentleman at all. Writing about himself in the third person, in 1723, he bemoaned \u201cthe combustible manner in his constitution\u201d; he cursed the innate passions that \u201cbroke out upon him before his beard,\u201d making him a \u201cswain\u201d before all women. Byrd\u2019s carnal drive underscored the eyebrow-raising vigor of his lust. On a trip to London in 1719, according to his secret diary, he \u201crogered\u201d\u2014an easy enough euphemism\u2014no fewer than six women in nine days. Of one woman, he (proudly) recorded having \u201crogered her three times\u201d in a single evening. That same night, Byrd, aged forty-four, noted with a tinge of sadness that he had \u201cneglected my prayers.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>When he wasn\u2019t on a whore-chasing jag in the metropolis, Byrd was back on his Virginia estate, called Westover, with his wife, Lucy. At Westover, his sexual proclivities certainly raged with similar, singleminded intensity\u2014he wrote in his diary about having urgent sex with Lucy on a billiards table\u2014but it was also tempered by a healthy desire to achieve mutual pleasure with her. He was just as inclined to \u201cgive my wife a flourish\u201d\u2014bring her to orgasm\u2014as he was to \u201croger\u201d her, a semantic shift suggesting that Lucy\u2019s response to their sexual union mattered as much to Byrd as his own physical gratification. On April 30, 1711, he noted in his diary that although he discovered his wife in a \u201cmelancholy\u201d mood, the \u201cpowerful flourish\u201d he delivered filled her with \u201cgreat ecstasy and refreshment.\u201d He recalled one morning during which \u201cI lay in my wife\u2019s arms\u201d while, during another, his wife \u201ckept me so long in bed\u201d that \u201cI rogered her.\u201d That evening he got around to saying his prayers\u2014before rogering her again. The man could be a virtuous, even tender, Tidewater lover when he wasn\u2019t being a London sleazebag. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/05\/13\/roger-that\/\" target=\"_blank\">Read More &gt;&gt;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We\u2019re away until January 4, but we\u2019re re-posting some of our favorite pieces from 2015. Please enjoy, and have a happy New Year! The complicated sex drive of William Byrd II. William Byrd II was a colonial Virginia gentleman who, on occasion, was no gentleman at all. Writing about himself in the third person, in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":732,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20653],"tags":[18100,7682,18103,2861,1050,14988,18101,13593,18102,179,6737],"class_list":["post-93080","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-of-2015","tag-colonies","tag-diaries","tag-flourishes","tag-history","tag-london","tag-misogyny","tag-plantations","tag-prostitutes","tag-rogering","tag-sex","tag-virginia"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>The Historically Complicated Sex Drive of William Byrd II<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The Virginian\u2019s diaries are engagingly frank about sex and masculinity in seventeenth-century America.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/12\/25\/roger-that-2\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Roger That by James McWilliams\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"December 25, 2015 \u2013 We\u2019re away until January 4, but we\u2019re re-posting some of our favorite pieces from 2015. 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