Warning: This article contains the spilling of some juicy historical tea. Please proceed with maturity and caution.
How do you get a man to give up a kingdom? Well, there’s one secret technique that’s so mind-blowing a man will forever follow you around like a starving dog, even if that means estranging himself from his family, instigating a constitutional crisis, and abdicating the throne.
I’m talking about the fabled and legendary “Shanghai Squeeze.” A closely kept secret for Chinese sex workers, American socialite Wallis Simpson was taught it in confidence, and went on to deploy it on the heir to the British throne. The course of history was forever altered.
So what are the dark secrets of the Shanghai Squeeze, and is it simply too powerful to become common knowledge?
The seedy back alleys of 1920s China
Wallis Simpson’s first husband was Earl Winfield Spencer Jr (FYI, his first name was Earl, that is not a title). The son of a Chicago stockbroker, he distinguished himself as a U.S. Navy pilot during World War 1 and married Wallis Simpson ⏤ then known as Bessie Warfield ⏤ in Dec. 1916.
In 1924, Spencer and Simpson were posted to China aboard the USS Pampanga. Both Spencer and Simpson were big personalities (he would go on to be married five times, her three times) and frequently argued. Soon after they arrived in China, Simpson decided she was sick of him and departed his company to explore the country. What follows is a rather murky period of her life, though during the abdication crisis, the British did their best to figure out what she was up to and produced “the China dossier,” which was perused by the Prime Minister and King George V.
Among other things, it alleged that Simpson had had multiple sexual encounters, was a nude photographic model, and had had an abortion. More pertinent to this story is that it reported that Simpson had been taken into the confidence of sex workers in the city’s brothels, where they instructed her in the secret art of the Shanghai Squeeze (or, as some would dub it, the “Shanghai Grip”).
Years later, Simpson deployed the Squeeze on Edward, then Prince of Wales and heir to the throne. Apparently, the Prince was considered “sexually inadequate and prone to premature ejaculation” and was known to not be especially well-endowed. As such the British concluded that Simpson had “captivated” the Prince with the Squeeze, transforming him into her “sexual thrall.”
The Squeeze itself
The China dossier describes the Squeeze in an incredibly British manner: “a technique where the woman would tighten her muscles in order to make a matchstick feel like a cigar.” Which muscles might they be referring to? Well, let’s just say Simpson wasn’t known to have especially strong hands…
After perusing several dusty tomes on the subject, I’ve concluded that the Squeeze must be a form or variation on what the French call “pompoir,” which is effectively Kegels on steroids. Mastery depends on intense training and gaining control of certain muscles. This grants a woman various special abilities like “the lock,” “the grip,” “the pulse,” “the twist,” and “the extrude.” Using these abilities in combination with one another will, apparently, turn a man’s mind into malleable mush.
It’s perhaps worth mentioning that Simpson’s time in China remains hotly controversial, with her supporters claiming these salacious stories were invented by the British in an attempt to break up the couple.
But, let’s face it: to make a man abdicate his throne and throw away everything he’s waited his entire life for takes more than sweet words and a pretty face. You’ve got to have it where it counts and, if Simpson really was the Bruce Lee of pompoir, she clearly had an iron grip on the King of England’s heart… and certain other parts of him.
