Why are men so obsessed with the idea that women go MAD without SEX?
FEELING steamy and sexy? Or just plain sweaty? Heatwaves can take you either way: some find all that bare skin tempting, others prefer to wait for some chilly Irish cuddle-up weather.
But in the midst of this, we are reminded of a wonderfully insulting old superstition. Academics at the University of Basel, in Switzerland, have been analysing an old papyrus, found in Egypt, with mirror writing in Greek characters. For 500 years scholars wondered what vital truths were in it.
It turns out to be a Roman treatise on how women’s health suffers when deprived of regular sex. According to the manuscript we get ‘hysterical apnoea’ and stop breathing.
This belief goes back to Hippocrates, the Greek ‘father of medicine’, who in the 5th century BC decided that female ‘hysteria’ — irrational uncontrollable emotion — was caused by a lack of sex.
That it might have been caused partly by their lives with the men who ran society did not, at the time, occur to him.
Instead, perhaps fascinated by our ability to grow new human beings inside us, a feat even the most powerful men can’t manage, he fixated on wombs. ‘Of the so-called women’s diseases, the womb is cause of all,’ he opined. Without frequent sex it dried up, causing fainting, loss of breath, dumbness and hysteria.
HE ANNOUNCED that girls must be married and pregnant by around 14, lest they get asphyxiation and suicidal lunacy. The recommended cure was simply sex.
Or, in older women of less obvious appeal to the men in charge, garlic, laxatives, a tasty drink of ground-up cantharid beetles and fumigating of your lady-bits with ‘malodorous vapours’.
Urghh. I really shouldn’t have read that book (In Bed With The Ancient Greeks by Paul Chrystal). But it is fascinating to trace, all down the long centuries, this fixed male idea that abstinence or virginity are dangerous for women, who must be cured by willing blokes.
It’s worth noting that the belief hangs around even today, because it makes a lot of women unhappy. The myth that you can’t be normal, bright, happy or fit without ‘a healthy sex life’ is corrosive, and women buy into it as much as men.
There have, of course, been cultures where not having sex was something you could be admired for. The Middle Ages had a downto-earth attitude to bodily functions (try reading The Canterbury Tales, very rude), but medieval Christianity also set great store on virginity.
Sometimes too much: a Middle English text which infuriated us at university was called ‘Hali Meidenhad’ — holy virginity — and explained that the whole business was just awful, and marriage was a safety net spread to catch you as you hurtled towards hell.
On the other hand a ‘bride of Christ’, virgin all her life, could be highly respected with nobody assuming she was mad or ill. Holy women such as the musician Hildegard of Bingen and Julian (or Juliana) of Norwich were revered, their advice sought by powerful men. Chaste widows, too, could hold high status, without anyone barging in and trying to feed them ground-up beetles or new husbands in case their wombs imploded.
But the Greek idea lingered. Women have traditionally been treated as a sort of currency (after all, we have both an ability to give enormous pleasure to men and to produce their heirs).
It helps the patriarchy to believe that only they can keep us going, by mating with us a lot. By the time we got to the Victorians, the theory that regular sex was vital to women was back in the mainstream. Sadly, it is not entirely true (as the 2012 film Hysteria tried to persuade us) that doctors invented the vibrator to do therapeutic ‘massage’ for a ‘hysterical release’ in troubled female patients. The first vibrators were actually just massage tools for both sexes. But they caught on, being advertised in women’s magazines by the turn of the 20th century promising ‘all the pleasure of youth will throb within you’ and talking of ‘revitalising’. That only sex can keep women sane is a notion echoed in dozens of novels about spinsters (in the real world, of course unattached women just got on with life). Think of Dickens’s Miss Havisham, thwarted on her wedding day and devoting her life to ruining everyone else’s. Or his sadistic, whiskery Miss Murdstone, tormenting David Copperfield. They crop up in Jane Austen, too, with Miss Bates being chattery and boring in Emma, and in Persuasion, Anne Elliot losing her ‘bloom’ and faded by 27, until luckily marriage saves her.
Move on and you still find the suspicion that sexually un-used women are not quite normal.
In the 1930s even the independent Dorothy L. Sayers, who created the wonderfully tough heroine Harriet Vane, can’t resist the caricature. There’s a malign, needy spinster in one Sayers novel, The Documents In The Case, who diagnoses herself as suffering from ‘sex-starvation’.
In other books she explores the then-popular theory that after the First World War killed so many young men, sex-starved women went batty and embraced cults and spiritualism.
In Agatha Christie, one of her characters — a lonely middleaged lady — falls for a murderous preacher. But at least both those writers gave us clever spinsters too. The great Miss Marple needed no weird vibrators or beetle soup to beat Scotland Yard.
But still the quack theory endures: right into this century we get the idea that a woman who is not being ‘serviced’ might be a nuisance or an oddball.
It haunts us, all the way from Anita Brookner’s brave but sad ladylike loners, to Bridget Jones squealing that she might ‘seal up’ if she doesn’t have sex, and the kind of pub oaf who says some woman ‘needs a good seeing-to’.
In reality, women’s sex drive varies between individuals and times of life as much as men’s does, and is more tightly tied to emotions and affections. For us, bad sex is far worse than no sex, and we are unlikely to go weird just for lack of it.
Through all the years since Hippocrates, we have also had other things on our minds. Like caring for the weak and the young, striving for unsexy things such as equality, education, good work, choice in marriage and permission to divorce men who rape, beat or simply bore us rigid.
What is depressing is how often that frustrated desire to be treated as a human being gets reinterpreted by grumpy males as something to do with the little ladies not getting enough sex.
As the internet connects our beliefs and worries globally, you find the idea still floating about, endorsed by women worried for themselves. I don’t mean messageboards full of wives feeling sad because sex has vanished from marriage: often as you read their complaints they are not so much missing the basic act as affection, cuddles, being noticed and loved and still admired as they grow older.
Far more numerous are strident anti-feminist campaigners saying things like, ‘Women need a man’s love in order to be themselves again’, that is ‘proper’ women. Or pretend-medical sites hoping to get clicks by using the s-word, and claiming frequent sex is ‘vital to cardiovascular health and the immune system’. Nonsense.
TO take an example at random, one site boasts that ‘scientists have demonstrated that sexual activity boosts neuron growth in the brain’s hippocampus’.
But two minutes on, more sober sites point out that you can do just as much good to your neurons with exercise, proper food, learning a language or taking a training course. Meanwhile, studies of monks, celibate priests and nuns show they actually live longer than the rest of us.
Sex is great. It can be tenderness, connection, release and a source of happiness, not to mention babies. When women want that form of intimacy, they should be able to enjoy it.
But it’s not compulsory. Not bothering with it doesn’t make you ill. It is men, all down the ages, who have needed to be reassured that their male equipment is a magic wand.
And that even if the woman in their bed looks a bit bored, they are doing her good.