Why does the field of women’s sexual health lag 30 years behind that of men? Why haven’t women received the same attention?
To understand the present we have to consider the past. Little is known about sexual behaviour in ancient times, but from the time of earliest recorded history, about 3 000BC, women were considered as property, valued only for reproduction. Adultery was not only a sin but a trespass against a husband. In ancient Greece women were viewed as chattels and the Romans considered infertility as grounds for divorce. The Christian church after the fall of Rome went even further.
The church fathers deemed sex unsavoury and women a threat to male salvation. Nothing, said St Augustine, brought “the manly mind down from the heights more than a woman’s caresses and that joining of bodies”. Procreation with such “temptresses” was to be accomplished by passionless, purposeful intercourse.
Even as late as the 19th century women were expected to embrace modesty, personify purity and lack all sexual desire. The Victorian era transformed the middle-class housewife into a guardian of the public morality. Her place was at home with her children, protecting the family’s decency and social position. She endured sex with her husband for procreation, but if her husband was a decent soul he subjected her to his urges as infrequently as possible.
Many women readily accepted the view that they were without sexual needs. At the same time, “hysteria” was apparently pandemic. If the disease was in fact chronic sexual frustration, as Rachel P Maines argues in her book The Technology of Orgasm, an entertaining but serious history of the vibrator, women sought relief through one of the more acceptable outlets: going to the doctor’s for their orgasms. Maines writes that Western doctors performed the “routine chore” of relieving hysterical patients’ symptoms with manual genital massage until a woman reached orgasm, or, as it was known under clinical conditions, the “hysterical paroxysm”. The vibrator, invented in the 1880s, was a direct response to doctors who wanted help performing this procedure.
There is also evidence that not all 19th-century middle-class women were as Victorian behind closed doors as in public. The cultural historian Peter Gay, for example, has quoted extensively in his work from the diary of Mabel Loomis Todd, a New Englander who revelled in the eroticism of her marriage to her husband. “We retired at seven and had a magnificent evening,” Mabel Todd wrote in her diary in February 1882. “I shall never forget it, so I’ll not write about it.” The entry was followed by two symbols indicating the couple had intercourse twice that night.
But Mabel Todd was probably the exception. Most Victorian women repressed their sexuality to such a degree that most men and some women viewed prostitution as a necessary evil that allowed the male a natural outlet for his lust. By early in the next century Sigmund Freud was questioning almost every aspect of sex. His ideas were revolutionary and had an enormous impact on attitudes in that they promoted sexual desire. However, in a view which still permeates our culture, he also believed that clitoral orgasms were immature and that vaginal orgasms were “authentic”.
Writing at the same time as Freud was Havelock Ellis, an English doctor who is less well known but who had a far more positive impact on women’s attitudes to sex. Sometimes called the prophet of modern sexuality, he believed that women had strong erotic needs. He also believed that the emphasis on sex as a means of reproduction was a repressive influence on female sexuality. Freud, he once said, “was an extravagant genius the greatest figure in psychology who was almost always wrong”.
The 20th century saw radical research by the likes of Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male and Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female in which Americans were asked to talk frankly about masturbation, premarital sex, extramarital sex and homosexuality. If the findings from men shocked traditionalists more than a third of adult men, for instance, said they had had a homosexual experience few Americans were ready to hear that women were as capable of orgasm as men.
Fifty years on the opposite seems to be true. Women have the pressure of being drawn into sex much earlier in a relationship, with expectations from men that they should be sexual adventurers, or at the very least multi-orgasmic. “Placed on the defensive, they were rapidly losing the right to say no that 19th-century feminists had struggled to obtain,” write John D’Emilio and Estelle B Freedman in Intimate Matters: a History of Sexuality in America .
And yet we are optimistic. When Bob Dole discussed erectile dysfunction his own, in particular on television, men as well as women realised their sexual “problems” were nothing to be ashamed of. Although we can’t yet say that the field of women’s sexual health is about to catch up with men’s, we can say that women are increasingly deciding that they need the same treatment as men. And once women truly feel entitled to their sexuality, they’ll feel entitled to anything.