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- [00:00]
Narrator/Host
This History Extra podcast is sponsored by Help for Heroes. Throughout history, from the battlefields of the past to today's operational deployments, the story of Britain has been shaped by the service and sacrifice of its armed forces. Behind every campaign, every conflict and every moment studied in the history books are the people who served. For some, the impact of service is felt long after they leave the forces through physical injuries, mental health challenges or the difficulty of adjusting British to civilian life. For centuries, societies have relied on those who keep us safe. Today, it's our responsibility to support them in return. That's where Help for Heroes comes in. As one of the UK's leading armed forces and veterans charities, they provide life changing support to veterans and their families, helping them rebuild their lives, recover their independence and find the peace they deserve after service. With Armed Forces Week coming up from the 22nd to the 28th of June, it's a moment to recognise and celebrate the dedication and courage of all those who serve and have served. To find out how you can show your support this Armed Forces Week, visit helpforheroes.org.uk Getting dressed in the summer is
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- [03:36]
Kate Lister
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- [03:57]
Charlotte Vosper
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- [03:59]
Kate Lister
That's why you rack.
- [04:08]
Narrator/Host
When we think about women's sex lives in the past, many of us might assume that they simply lay back and thought of England and as the old saying goes. But in this episode of the History Extra podcast, Kate Lister, whose new book is the Story of Female Pleasure, shares with Charlotte Vosper the many ways in which this is far from the truth. Please note this episode contains a very frank and open discussion of sexual experiences and practices and strong language throughout.
- [04:36]
Charlotte Vosper
Your new book offers us a history of female sexual pleasure, and it takes us all the way from the ancient goddesses of sex to to modern day contraception. But before we dive into what's going to be a really frank and open discussion of the history of sexual pleasure, why did you want to write this book?
- [04:53]
Kate Lister
Right, so this book is born of my deep and abiding frustration at the idea that women's sex drive or pursuit of pleasure is somehow less than men's. That, I mean, you don't have to look too far to find that narrative. It's all around us the idea that women need love to have sex and that, you know, the female gaze is so vastly different from the male Gaze. And women go off sex and men just want one thing, and. And I get so angry with it because it's nonsense. It's not. It's not borne out by any of the research that's available on this. It's not borne out anecdotally. What we've got is a situation where women aren't allowed to express sexual desire and the pursuit of pleasure in the same way that some men have been able to for a very, very long, long time. When you were growing up, like, you kind of learn when you were a woman navigating the world, like, male sexuality is. It's threatening. Like, somehow, like, not all men. I know, hashtag, God bless the. The nice ones of you. But like. But like, when your mates are saying, text me when you get home. And like, you know, you're using keys between your fingers as a weapon, and. And you got to be on your guard all the time and be careful and don't get drunk. Don't wear a short skirt and don't do this and don't do that. So you're kind of navigating a world where you're like, okay, calm down, everybody. And we don't have space to be able to say, we like sex too. We want pleasure too. We kind of. It's all fitted in around sexual scripts that tend to prioritize male pleasure. And what we've kind of ended up with is this idea that women's sex drive is somehow weaker than a man's. And I'm here to say, nonsense, not a bit of it. Did you ever see the footage of those girls screaming at the Beatles? Like, thousands and thousands and thousands of them en masse, like, all wetting themselves and fainting. Don't tell me women's sex drive is weaker than a man's. It's just gibberish. We don't have permission to enjoy it. But I wanted to understand where these sexual scripts come from. I wanted to understand how long this has been in the making. Have we always thought like this? And that's where the book came from?
- [06:49]
Charlotte Vosper
And as we will soon be finding out, that sexual script goes back a rather long way, doesn't it?
- [06:54]
Kate Lister
It really does.
- [06:55]
Charlotte Vosper
Okay, so let's start at the beginning, then. What is the earliest evidence we have of people thinking about or having sex?
- [07:03]
Kate Lister
Right, so now this is. This is controversial because now we're the area where archaeologists and museum archivists have to say things like, it's a fertility object, and we don't really know what that means, is that we've got evidence from the Paleolithic period of things like phalluses being carved. We've got quite a lot of those. But then the question is, well, what were they? Yeah, were they sex objects? Were they erotic objects? Were they lucky objects? Were they, like, what was this? We're just not sure. But we do have representations of erect penises that go back, I think, some of the earliest, to about 37,000 years old. And we do have what's thought to be a vulva carved on a cave wall In France that's 42,000 years old. But again, the jury's slightly out on that one because other people look at it and go, that's not a vulva, that's a lollipop, or that's a whatever it is that they think it is. But clearly from our earliest ancestors, we have been very aware of phalluses, vulvas, and they have symbolically meant quite a lot to us. When it comes to written evidence, where we are a bit more certain. Okay, this is what we might call erotica. This is now definitely talking about the act itself. We're looking at ancient Mesopotamia, the Uruk period. So we're looking at probably about 5,000 to 3,000 BCE. And that's when we start to get records left to us in cuneiform tablets that detail sex lives, sex goddesses, that kind of behavior that we can see a bit more of what's going on here. So, yeah, it has a very, very, very long history indeed.
- [08:34]
Charlotte Vosper
Okay, so if we're thinking about sex goddesses, then what kind of ideas are these deities promoting and what stories are being told about them?
- [08:42]
Kate Lister
They are so good, they're so much fun. So one of the earliest that we've got, and there will have been others. We just don't have the records for them. We don't know who they would have been. But because the ancient Mesopotamians were writing about her, we know about the goddess Inanna, who later became Ishtar when the Arcadians subsumed that culture. And Ishtar, Inanna is a deity of very contradicting powers. She is the goddess of sex, and she's a goddess of war as well. Some, like prudish historians in the 19th century, refer to as a goddess of fertility, but it's not really fertility. She's not about being a mum. She is quite a horny, naughty goddess. Like, there are erotic songs sung about her, erotic hymns, there are stories about her sex life that are legendary. She's clearly a very powerful goddess, and she was clearly a very Erotic goddess. Some of the songs that she sings about herself. So she's married to a guy called Dumuzi or Dumuzid, who's a God of the storehouse. And there's lots of. They're called wedding hymns or wedding Babels. She's talking to him when she's marrying him and she's saying things like, come plough my furrow, I'll be your ground, come and plough me. And there's another one called the Song of the Lettuce where she's talking about her well watered lettuce. There's one reference to the dub dub bird in the hole, which some historians think she means clitoris when she's saying that. A dub dub bird. So it's all about like come and plough my FL furrow, water my lettuce. And she's really hungry for her husband. It's clearly there's no shame in the way that we would recognize shame. They have different types of shame. You want to be really careful when you're looking at the ancient world and it's very tempting to go look, they got it right and we've messed it up somehow. They very much had their own hang ups. There's evidence from these cultures about adulterous wives being covered in pitch and tar. Like it's not a happy sex positive community in the way you might want it to be. But Inanna is certainly revered for her sexuality and her sexual appetite was legendary.
- [10:40]
Charlotte Vosper
That's so interesting that actually there wasn't the same culture of shame that we might expect there to be around a deity that's promoting sex essentially. Do we know how these deities like Inanna would have been worshipped? You mentioned there that adultery would still have been punished in quite horrific ways. Would sex have become a part of practicing a religion in these ancient cultures?
- [11:02]
Kate Lister
Oh, you're on controversial territory there, Charlotte.
- [11:05]
Charlotte Vosper
I know, yeah.
- [11:07]
Kate Lister
This will start a bun fight amongst ancient historians. So the subject you're kind of getting towards there is the subject of what's been called sacred prostitution. The idea that in the ancient world that women could worship various goddesses. I mean, Aphrodite descends from Inanna and Ishtar. There is a very clear link between the two of them. So there's an idea that women once might have worshipped these goddesses by essentially going on the game and then giving money to the temple. And it's a really appealing and seductive idea. But the evidence we have for it is quite patchy. It really comes down to Herodotus, who was writing about the ancient city of Babylon. And he's kind of making it up. The best will in the world. He's just, there's not a lot of evidence that he'd ever been there. And the things that he's saying, really, this is about smearing the Babylonians as effeminate sex crazed maniacs. But it's such a powerful and erotic story that it then catches on and other historians are repeating it, it becomes this trope. But I don't wanna say it never existed because we do have evidence for it in other even modern day cultures like the de in India. For a long time they're devoted to, I think one of the goddesses is Yellama. And it's not like often transactional sex workers in like, you know, you give me money, we'll have sex and then I give the money to the goddess. It's more like they secure patrons and then they use the money that the patron has to support the temple. But it's certainly transactional sex. So I don't want to say that it never ever existed because we've got some evidence that it is still in play today. But the way that some historians have written about it and the way that Herodotus talks, probably not.
- [12:45]
Charlotte Vosper
Okay, so even if we're not entirely sure how these deities were being worshipped, the idea of a sex positive female deity is still an important one.
- [12:53]
Kate Lister
It's still an important one especially because when the Christianity and the Abrahamic faiths come to sort of supplant this polytheistic which had gone on for thousands of years before their God is so vastly different from what had gone before. It's one of the major markers between, let's say the Christian God and all the gods that that God replaced. He doesn't have sex, there's just one of them and he doesn't have sex. If you look at the Greeks and the Romans and the Arcadians and the Semitic gods, there's loads of them. It's safety in numbers and they're often having quite acrobatic sex lives. And then suddenly Christianity rolls into town and it's about control and it's about virtue and it's about virgins. It's a huge, huge change.
- [13:36]
Charlotte Vosper
It definitely is. And before we dive into that change, I just wanted to pull out a little bit more about perhaps our modern perceptions of this history.
- [13:44]
Kate Lister
Okay.
- [13:45]
Charlotte Vosper
The idea of sex positive ancient deity challenges the idea which many of us might have about sex in the past, which chimes more with the lie back and think of England kind of idea. Why do you think it's so important to tell a history of sexual female pleasure, particularly?
- [14:04]
Kate Lister
We started by talking about this idea that women have a weaker sex drive than men do, or that they don't enjoy as much sex. Our understanding of the past, even if you're not a historian, our understanding of the past informs that now. It's really important. I mean, the idea that like, oh, women in the Victorian period, they can barely show an ankle and it's only with the advent of feminism that women ever even started to enjoy sex. It just feeds into this idea that sex isn't really for us in the same way that it is for men. So it's important that we unpick that and we show that there have been very different cultural attitudes, there are very different ways of understanding sex, how of understood pleasure, how they've been allowed to experience pleasure. And it's just about puncturing that idea that until second wave feminism and the rampant rabbit turned up, that it was all completely grim and that nobody, nobody was even interested in sex. Weirdly, we think of the past as sexless, and I say we as in like a great nebulous we, the general public. I know there'll be many historians going, I don't. But like, just in general, we have this idea that people in the past, they just, they didn't enjoy sex in the way that we do. So understanding that that is not the case, that there have been multiple narratives and multiple interpretations all contained within that that informs us today.
- [15:22]
Charlotte Vosper
Absolutely. And what we've discussed so far about the deities, I think that indicates to us that in the ancient period, and as we move into the medieval, women were viewed as highly sexed, weren't they?
- [15:33]
Kate Lister
Yes, they were. They were. If you had gone back to someone in the medieval period, a doctor, and had tried to explain that women just aren as erotic as men are, they would have laughed at you. They'd have thought that was such a weird take, because as far as they was concerned, and this goes back to the Greeks and it goes back to the Romans, it might even go back to Inanna herself. We just don't have quite have the medical evidence to prove what they were thinking. But is this idea that women were more horny than men, that's the only way that I can put it, that their sex drives were voracious, that they were rampant, and it comes down to this idea of control. So for the ancient Greeks, the idea of control is incredibly important. You control your baser emotions. I mean, they invented Stoicism for God's sake. You know, control what you eat, control your body, control your mind. And of course, women were thought of as being much weaker than men, more emotional. And what's tied in with that is our libido. So not only are we more emotional, we might cry more or get angry more often, but of course we're hornier as well because we can't control ourselves. And we're still living with that today.
- [16:39]
Charlotte Vosper
This Greek understanding of women as highly sexed, did that come from a medical understanding of women? Was there a biological grounding behind that?
- [16:49]
Kate Lister
We need to be careful again, what we're saying here because of the sources that are available to us. So this is sort of picking through medical texts that are left that are available that were authored by men. But even then, we don't know how many people would have read those. We don't know how influential they would have been on day to day life. We just know that these texts existed. But what we can glean from authors like the Hippocratic authors is that the understanding of women was that it was all about wombs and that pretty much every ailment you could ever experience as a woman was gonna be from your womb. And they're the ones that came up with this wandering womb theory, which when I first read about it years ago when I was an undergraduate, I thought was some kind of joke. I thought it was like an Internet joke.
- [17:29]
Charlotte Vosper
Sounds ridiculous, it sounds insane.
- [17:31]
Kate Lister
But they really thought that the womb moved throughout the body and that like, if you had a headache, maybe your womb had risen up too high. And if you had a stomachache, maybe it was your womb doing something else. So they were obsessed, the womb obsessed, the womb obsession of the past. And like lots of ideas about trying to get wombs to move back into the places. I mean, there's mad ancient Greek texts about, like getting women to basically squat over camphor wood and fumes and things to try and coax the womb back down to where it should be. We don't know how widespread this was. We just know that those texts exist. But for the ancient Greeks, Greek medical men, it was all about wombs with, with a woman. In fact, passing a Greek medical exam was very easy because they just said, what's, what's the cause of this woman? And they just put wombs answer womb, always the womb. And that was what the ancient Greeks had to say about it.
- [18:31]
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- [19:56]
Kate Lister
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Narrator/Host
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Kate Lister
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Charlotte Vosper
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Kate Lister
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Charlotte Vosper
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Kate Lister
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Charlotte Vosper
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Kate Lister
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- [20:56]
Charlotte Vosper
Okay, so this medical grounded theory of women as highly sexed. How do we see that carrying across into women's sort of social experiences? I know that we have quite limited evidence for this, but one of the examples I read in your book about the Romans using these Greek ideas and Pompeia. I wondered if you wanted to talk to us a little bit about her.
- [21:16]
Kate Lister
Yeah, so this is if you thought that the idea that they understood that women were more hyper, that might mean that women got to enjoy sex more no, it doesn't mean that. It doesn't mean that at all. In fact, it means that you need to clamp down on women. The Romans appropriated a lot of the Greek ideas, so did the Islamic writers. But Pompeia was Julius Caesar's wife. So the first thing that you need to know in this story is that Julius Caesar was an absolute dirtbag. Like all of the sources tell us this about him. He has a reputation as having sex with his friends, wives and his enemy's wives. That's a typical Julius Caesar move. He loves that his troops make up songs about his sexual conquests. They call him the bald adulterer. His hair was thinning. And they make up songs about his Gaelic whores from when he was in the Gaelic wars. He was an absolute dirtbag. But poor old Pompeia. So she wants to host this kind of festival that is a woman only affair. And no one really knows what's going on there. So there's this guy Clodius who thinks he's gonna work out what happens at this festival. The festival's called Dia. And he also fancies Pompeia. So he sneak to the Boadir dressed as a woman, which is a completely crap plan. And he gets rumbled almost immediately. Right now the fact that he is there in this woman's only space is regarded as sacrilegious. And he gets arrested and he gets in a lot of trouble. And he's put on trial for the crime of incestum, which is basically like blasphemy. And he's let off eventually. Don't worry about him, he's fine. But the mere fact that he was there is enough for Julius Caesar to divorce Pompeia. And the famous quote about this is, Caesar's wife must be above suspicion. And I'd like to just stress here that Pompeia had been nothing to do with this. She just threw a party. She didn't know about this guy's intentions. She didn't know what he was gonna do. There's no evidence she reciprocated his feelings, but just a hint of it is enough and she gets divorced. Poor Pompeii. Mind you, I think maybe she's best off out of it because he's. I wouldn't want to have been married to Julius Caesar. And the Romans, especially the Roman emperors, they do have this habit of sending women who have sexually transgressed off to islands to starve to death by themselves. Endlessly sending women off to is. So it's clamped down on very strict. It's Very, very strictly regulated with this idea that you can't give them an inch because they'll turn into absolute sex mad, lunatic banshees and everything will just be upended.
- [23:39]
Charlotte Vosper
Yeah. This idea of women as highly sexed actually serves as a way to control them and oppress women's experiences.
- [23:45]
Kate Lister
Yeah, it does. And Roman history is full of stories of women that weren't controlled, like a Messalina and her legendary stories about how she cheated on her husband and how she went to the brothel. I just don't know how much of any of that is even true. But stories like that serve as this terrible warning that you've got to be careful.
- [24:07]
Charlotte Vosper
So do we see a change in those attitudes towards pleasure by the medieval period, as you mentioned, Christianity started to dominate Europe and that's promoting the worship of the Virgin Mary.
- [24:18]
Kate Lister
Yep.
- [24:19]
Charlotte Vosper
So how does that impact attitudes to sex?
- [24:21]
Kate Lister
Okay, so the establishment and the proliferation of Christianity, it. It's a huge impact on sexual attitudes that had gone before. But one thing that they don't get rid of yet is the idea that women are very pleasurable creatures and that they like to have sex. Right. What you've got. And it kind of starts creeping in in some of the early Christian writers, like my mate St. Jerome, who basically comes up with the idea that the pleasure itself is sinful. Right. Now, it doesn't catch on right away, that idea. It starts to come in more in the later medieval period. And as we're moving into the early modern period, the idea that pleasure itself is a form of sin, that is a very new and radical idea. Throughout most of the medieval period, they have an idea that sex needs to be controlled, that there are right ways and wrong ways of doing it. But they do have quite an open attitude to sex in ways that might surprise you, because we often think of the medieval period as the Victorians thought of it, which was it was all chastity belts and women locked in towers, and it certainly wasn't that. Now, again, I want to be careful that I don't make it sound like it was a fabulous time to be a woman, because it probably wasn't. Recurring theme of this recurring theme. But they have a much more open attitude to sex than you might think. I mean, they're very frank about it in many ways. Like, these are people that, you know, name their streets Grope Lane, where the sex workers were. So they have this very open attitude to sex. They still believe that women are more highly sexed. You can see that throughout almost all medieval literature. If you've Read chalk, you can see that the women are cheating on their husbands left, right and center. But you do get a rise of quite aggressive misogyny coming through. By the late Middle Ages, the teachings of St. Jerome are adopted and St. Augustine. And now you start to get a shift, which is that pleasure itself is sinful, which is a new attitude. It's not just sex itself, it's pleasure. It's to experience pleasure. And now we're in a whole new realm of weirdness, because that really hadn't been thought of before. They punished various sexual behaviors, they punished various sexual transgressions, but pretty much everyone had agreed, sex is fun, just do it the way that we want to do it. And now you get this scripture starting to come in where virgins are venerated. I mean, St. Jerome would have had everybody being a virgin. But obviously this presents a bit of a conundrum for the early church fathers, because if everyone's a virgin written, we're going to run out of Christians pretty quick. So they have to sort of give a little bit of ground and concede. All right, then. Well, you can have sex, but you can't enjoy it.
- [27:00]
Charlotte Vosper
Absolutely not allowed to enjoy.
- [27:02]
Kate Lister
You can't enjoy it. Now, again, just because people, some church people are saying this doesn't mean it translated to the everyday lives of people. But you do get a shift in how pleasure is governed, and you get a vicious, misogynistic narrative even more so, that's starting to develop in the pulpit and in law as well.
- [27:23]
Charlotte Vosper
Do we have any examples of how this did affect people's lives? Do we even have evidence of women responding to these ideas?
- [27:29]
Kate Lister
We have some evidence of it. I imagine that women have been responding all the way through. It's just that we don't have the sources available, but we do have some examples. One of my favorite is a Welsh poet called Gwyffin Mechen, and she's not known about nearly enough. So she was writing in, I think she's 15th century, and she is part of a broader tradition of body Welsh ballads. But hers are just sensational. Like, she writes this one. It's now titled. It's either titled Ode to Pubic Hair or Ode to a Vagina. But it didn't. The original didn't actually have a title. These are all retrospective ones. And what she's doing is she's taking male poets to task for venerating women's beauty and their hair. And she's saying, but you're not talking about the vulva. You should be talking about the vulva. So she has this really intense celebration of the vulva and how amazing it is. And she talks about its fashion and it's got plumage on it. And she talks about how it's got a fine curtain that flaps in place of a greeting. And it's really, like, visceral and descriptive and celebratory. And there are other poems where she talks about women who like big penises. And it doesn't seem that, like, she was pilloried for this.
- [28:38]
Charlotte Vosper
Okay.
- [28:39]
Kate Lister
In fact, we know about her work not only because her work survives, but because other poets reference her work from the time. So she was clearly well known. This isn't just one mad woman just writing pervy stuff to herself. She had something, a reputation. We don't know much about her life, unfortunately, but her work endures, which shows us that women did have space to talk about these things and did have space to claim pleasure at certain points in certain cultures at least.
- [29:04]
Charlotte Vosper
And it's really important, as you've said, that we listen to those voices when we can access them. But of course, in a wider context, women's sexual pleasure was starting to be seen as. As not quite so good.
- [29:17]
Kate Lister
Yes.
- [29:18]
Charlotte Vosper
How did those attitudes towards female sexual pleasure change when we see Christianity isn't quite the dominating force that it was in society? As we move into the Enlightenment period?
- [29:30]
Kate Lister
So that it's an interesting point in our history for many, many reasons. And you start to get people, big voices coming through and challenging the way things have been done before your Enlightenment writers, and then we had the Romantics who were also doing that. But they're trying to challenge things like, what is the role of man? What is the role of society? Why are we ruled by kings? You start to get science coming to the fore and this emphasis on rationality and logic, and they start to look at everything that had come before, apart from the Greeks and the Romans, as rubbish. Like the medieval period was just this time of barbarism. And all medieval scholars get very upset about that because it's not true. But that was this sort of idea in the Enlightenment. We need to build a world founded on logic and reason. But so much of the science is also just based in madness, and it's wrong, especially when it comes to sex. So you start to get a medicalization of sex come into the fore. Things like masturbation entered the fray as a medical issue in the late 18th century. It starts in, like, quack pamphlets. And I think of them as like, the Internet forum of the 18th century. Like, you've read Something online. And then, oh my God, it must be true. There was a lot of that, but it was like cheaply printed pamphlets and it was known as onanism. And then this guy Tiso, he was a doctor, Swiss doctor, and he published a book called Onanism and really went to town on this idea that masturbation was terribly injurious for your health and that it needed to be avoided and that if you did it you were going to go insane and if you were a man you're going to wither away to nothing. And if you're a woman, you were going to become absolutely deranged and have to be sedated. And then you get this idea of nymphomania starts to enter the conversation as well. Well, you start to get doctors printing tracts on what nymphomania is and what nymphomania means. And it's reading through them, you're just thinking, what is this? Is this a joke, is this satire? But there's enough evidence for it actually within mainstream medical thought for you to think, well, this is at least a presence here. And it's this idea that women can experience so much sexual desire that they become insane, that it then could be classed as nymphomania. And this guy, BM versus, who published his treatise Nymphomania in 1777 and he claims he has all kinds of case histories of women that they became insanely and completely deranged with lust and their eyesight failed them and that then they died and it was all terminal and horrible. And you're just reading it going, no, you didn't. This, it's not true. But it's part of this, like creating fear around sex. Because it's the oldest hustle in the book, isn't it? Is you create a problem and then sell people a solution to it.
- [32:08]
Charlotte Vosper
Yeah.
- [32:09]
Kate Lister
And that's really what's going on, is that you pathologize sex and you make sex the problem and then you tell people that you're the one that can help them with it.
- [32:17]
Charlotte Vosper
Well, I mean, what kind of treatments were being used to treat this so called sickness, Nymphomania.
- [32:23]
Kate Lister
Right. So again, we'll caveat this by saying just because we have some medical texts where people are saying this does not mean that this was widespread. We know that this did happen. But does it mean that your average woman was subjected to this? We're not entirely sure. So nymphomania would often require something like, if you're lucky, you'd get a sparse diet, no spicy food, no Wine, lots of resting, lots of purges. You might get some opium or an occasional chloroforming. If you're lucky, you might get that. And you're gonna have to be observed, of course. Really what they want you to do is get married. Get married straight away, please.
- [32:57]
Charlotte Vosper
That would solve the problem, that would solve everything.
- [33:00]
Kate Lister
Immediately. Get her married. The more extreme treatments that you get, and this is really moving into the 19th century, is they start to do things like clitorectomies or oophorectomies, where they cut out the ovaries. Again, it's not widespread, but it does happen and it exists in medical literature. Weirdly, whenever they're talking about it in medical journals and medical literature, it's often somebody going, look, we had this woman, we've cut out her ovaries and her clitoris and she's still horny. We don't understand this at all. So it's. Even when it's being discussed, it's often being discussed as a kind of. I'm not entirely sure that this works, but it definitely exists, it definitely happened. And then you see it turning up in symptoms, reasons that are part of a reason why a woman might have been institutionalized. So it just becomes this catch all term for any woman that isn't behaving the way that she should have done. If you were lucky, you'd get like herbs and an exercise regime and cold baths they were quite fond on. And I found evidence of cold douches, vaginal douches. So you might get that, that as well. If you're very unlucky, then it might be a clitorectomy. Awful, isn't it?
- [34:09]
Charlotte Vosper
It's absolutely horrendous.
- [34:10]
Kate Lister
Yeah, horrendous.
- [34:11]
Charlotte Vosper
As we move into the 19th century, often I think there's a perception of the Victorians as prudes.
- [34:18]
Kate Lister
Yes.
- [34:18]
Charlotte Vosper
Is that true, do you think?
- [34:21]
Kate Lister
I love the Victorians because I'm a Victorianist by trade. And they're just so mad that they're so full of contradictions. So were they prudes? They have an outward message of prudery theory. The thing to remember about the Victorians and indeed any period of time that you're looking at is there's no one narrative, there are multiple. If you look at our own time, there are people that think all kinds of different things, but like the dominant consensus, the one that everybody puts out, that everyone wants to pretend is true in the Victorian period was about controlling sex. And they were outwardly shocked by a lot of sexy things. It's not True that they were shocked by tableau legs. That one's not true. It's not true that they invented vibrators to cure hysteria. That's definitely not true. But they could be very easily shocked. But they were a group of people who were obsessed by sex. So you get government discussing it, you get doctors discussing it, priests discussing it, moralists discussing it. It's discussed everywhere. You've got to remember as well that these are the people that invented photographic pornography and video pornography. And there was a boom in pornographic literature at the time. You don't have to go very far to find the Victorians absolutely enjoyed sex, but they knew that they weren't supposed to. They exist in this state of cognitive dissidents of, like, you're not supposed to, but we do, and if you get caught, then you're going to be in trouble for it. But no, they weren't a bunch of prudes, but I think they'd like you to think that they were.
- [35:44]
Charlotte Vosper
Okay, so they're presenting as prudes.
- [35:46]
Kate Lister
They're presenting as prudes.
- [35:47]
Charlotte Vosper
I think one thing that's important to mention, though, is that so far we've mainly been talking about heterosexual. So what about lesbian women? Did the idea of the highly sexed deviant woman carry across here?
- [36:02]
Kate Lister
Yeah, yeah, definitely. So lesbian history, indeed all of gay history, is absolutely fascinating. There's some amazing scholars working on this. But particularly understanding how lesbian sex was understood within these patriarchal cultures tells us a lot about where our understanding of sexuality came from. And a lot of it is caught up with the idea that there isn't a penis, so it's not proper sex in its most crude and blunt forms. And I know the lesbians are howling with laughter when they hear this, but there's a lot of evidence for this. So, like, if you look back at the Greeks and the Romans, and indeed today, there's a lot of power. And the idea of masculinity is attached very much to a penis and to putting a penis into things. That's still how most of us understand sex today. When we talk about losing virginity, what do we mean? We don't mean the first time you had cunnilingus, we don't mean the first time that you masturbated. And what you get right back to the earliest reference difference of lesbian sex is a sort of a misunderstanding of what they're doing. So some of the earliest terminology we've got for lesbians, it comes from the things the Greek, I think, and it's tribadism, and it means to Rub. And then we have variations on that all throughout time. They're called rubsters. Fricatrice was another one. It's friction. They're rubbing again. And it's this misunderstanding that what lesbians must be doing because they don't have a penis is putting their genitals together and rubbing. They don't have a penis. So they're trying to simulate sex. In the. I think it's the 17th century. A slang terminology arises called playing at flats.
- [37:33]
Charlotte Vosper
Oh my goodness.
- [37:34]
Kate Lister
Oh, my goodness. Which is so loaded because it's like, first of all playing like it's not real sex and flats. So it's the flatness. There's no penis there. It's basically, you can see the anxiety of, like, what are they doing now? There's not many good things about that, but one of the things that it has done is it's allowed lesbian sex to fly under the radar and to avoid the same levels of persecution as gay sex between men. In some places, at some times, lesbians have been persecuted very, very heavily. But it's almost this idea that whatever it is they're doing, it's not proper sex, so therefore it doesn't count. Yeah, it's just like jolly japes. Almost like Queen Victoria criminalized. Well, she didn't. Her government did. Criminalized same sex behavior between men and lesbians didn't even get mentioned on the bill. Meanwhile, all of the lesbians are stood back just being like, yep, that's. That's us. We just rub each other and that's it. We do get examples of lesbian sex being persecuted. You almost always get reference to a dildo in the mix. It crops up especially in, like, Germany and Holland in the early modern period. One of the few places that actually did persecute, quote, unquote, female sodomites. There's a very famous one, a German one called Catherine Linked. And there's a huge discussion about whether or not this counts as sodomy because she doesn't have a penis, but she did use a dildo. So therefore does that count as sodomy. And like, they're really going to town and they're trying to wrap their heads around whether this actually counts or not. Unfortunately for Catherine, they decided that it did and she was executed for that crime. But the entire understanding of lesbian sex and women having sex with each other has been understood in broad terms in this very patriarchal world of an imitation of heterosexual sex and therefore that they can't really be having sex. And it's almost always rooted in there Isn't a penis.
- [39:24]
Charlotte Vosper
You mentioned there about Catherine being charged with sodomy for using a dildo when having sex with a woman. What is the earliest known example of a woman using a dildo that we have?
- [39:35]
Kate Lister
It's a very good question. Were these phallic carvings from the Paleolithic period, were they being used as sex toys? I'd probably say not, but, I mean, you know, you can't rule anything out.
- [39:44]
Charlotte Vosper
Yeah.
- [39:44]
Kate Lister
Probably the earliest dildo that has been found. And even this is a little bit controversial. It was very recently reclassified by two archaeologists, Rob Collins and Rob Sands. And it was an item that had been excavated at the Roman fort of Vindolander in the north of England. I think it was excavated like the 1980s. And they'd originally labeled it as a darning tool. So something that would have been used for sewing and ate. So it looks like a penis. It's penis sized. It's got glands carved into the end of it. And they were pretty sure they needed to re look at it. And they examined it very carefully and they found that, like, the shaft had been quite smooth, so it could feasibly be used for as a sex toy. They also noticed that the end of it, the base end, was rounded, so it's not like it could stand up on anything. So it couldn't be used possibly for decorative purposes. And they did conclude very cautiously that we think that this is a dildo. And if it is a dildo, it's the only known one that we have that survived, and that's from the second century. Ace. So it's 2,000 years old. It's pretty impressive, isn't it?
- [40:48]
Charlotte Vosper
Yeah.
- [40:48]
Kate Lister
There are references to sex toys in older material than that in literary texts, especially China, Japan, that go back a little bit older than that. We do have a few examples of dildos that savage posh dildos, usually because they're made of durable material. So things like dildos made of mahogany from the 18th century were discovered. The Science Museum has one that's made of ivory that was discovered tucked away in a chair that used to be in a convent in France that dates to the 18th century. And that one's got a plunger. You'd put like fluid in it. But they survived because they were made of durable material. With the case of Katerina linked, we know that she was using what we'd now call a strap on because it's in the. In the records. And hers was made of leather and stuffed. Now, those kind of things don't survive because the leather Just doesn't survive. But cases like that give us the evidence that sex toys did exist and absolutely exist and were easily fashionable. They just haven't survived.
- [41:49]
Charlotte Vosper
Yeah. Now for any listeners who'd like to learn more about historical sex toys, we've got a brilliant article on our website. Website. It's called From Goat eyelids to history's 12 strangest sex toys. It's a very interesting and eye opening read. I'll pop a link to it in the description of this episode, but you can also find it on our app or our website. But back to today's conversation. There is often an idea that the 20th century was a time of significant change in attitudes to sex. And it was in many respects, you know, in the 1920s we've got the early birth control movement, we've got the so called swinging 60s, but was it really just a century of positive progress, if we can call it that?
- [42:30]
Kate Lister
No, no, I don't want to say that. Important things didn't happen, especially in the mid 20th century. And you're right, we have the birth control movement and the pill arrived. Possibly the single biggest moment in women's sexual history that for the first time ever you could have sex without getting pregnant. That was a game changer. But the idea of calling it a sexual revolution, it sort gives you the idea of like, well done everyone, we're, we're all done now. Congrats, job done, hurrah. And it's not that right. Think of it as like, it's a continuation of events that we are still dealing with today. Things definitely changed. Sex became part of a mainstream conversation in a way that perhaps it hadn't done before. But it's a very male centered sexuality. Some people had a sexual revolution, some people had. But we didn't have, have equality. Women couldn't get a credit card on their own. Until 1975 in this country there were laws about women owning their own property. In France there was like, women couldn't earn as much money as a man. So how are we going to have a sexual equality when we don't have social equality? In fact, there was some pushback from feminists at the time around the pill of like, well, is this a good thing for women? It's a good thing for men. Women can't get pregnant anymore, but is it a good thing for women like that? And the early doses of the hormone in the pill was off the charts. People died, Charlotte. Like in the early days of the pill, like people would die. And then there's this idea of like, well Are women just gonna be pressured to have sex now? They're not gonna get pregnant now. They're gonna be under more pressure to have sex than ever before. So it was a time of profound social change. Our attitudes to sex radically altered. It became part of a mainstream conversation. But it wasn't a sexual revolution for everybody because we didn't have gender equality. Gay people were still horrendously persecuted. There was still segregation going on in America. Racism was absolutely rampant. Did those people have a sexual revolution? There were still mother and baby homes in Ireland. I don't want to downplay how much things did change in the 20th century, but we do need to be careful how we talk about it.
- [44:44]
Charlotte Vosper
Yeah. I think it is important to obviously ignite some huge shifts. Huge. But understand that those are complex shifts and that they don't apply to everybody.
- [44:52]
Kate Lister
I mean, there was this lovely. Just period, just a tiny moment in our history where we'd got penicillin, so now STIs could be treated successfully for the first time ever. And we had the pill. And for about 10 years, it seemed like we'd kind of. It's all looking up, fixed it up. And then antibiotic resistance and HIV turned up. But they changed how people had sex profoundly. And we think about things like the pill as, like, it's just about sex. It's not just about sex. That allowed women to control their reproductive capacity for the first time ever. And that meant things like they could stay in school longer, they could stay in jobs longer, they could establish themselves in a career because they weren't going to get pregnant. The assumption, like, until really quite recently in our history was that if you got pregnant, you'd just go home.
- [45:36]
Charlotte Vosper
That's it.
- [45:37]
Kate Lister
You wouldn't stay in your job. That was it. And the justification for not paying women as much as men was the idea that women weren't supporting a family, that as soon as they got pregnant, they would go home and be supported by a man. So men need to earn more money. That was the justification for it. The idea that women would have a career on their own. The pill allowed that to happen.
- [45:56]
Charlotte Vosper
Yeah.
- [45:56]
Kate Lister
For the first time ever. So it's not just a sexual consequence, it's social as well.
- [46:01]
Charlotte Vosper
Yeah, that sexual and social link is something that really comes through in this history, I think. So then I suppose the next question is, is where are we now? I mean, we still live in a world where outrage is generated by expressions of female sexuality that still continues. How do you think a longer history of sexual pleasure will inform modern perspectives
- [46:22]
Kate Lister
So I often get asked, like, what period in history was the most sexually liberated?
- [46:26]
Charlotte Vosper
Yeah.
- [46:27]
Kate Lister
Was there a point in history where we nailed it, where we fixed everything? And the answer to that is our own. We are now living in a point where we're the most sexually liberated, with the most progressive. We're the most willing to talk about. About consent and about rights to each other's bodies. And that is exciting and terrifying in equal measure. So, like, sometimes when you look around and you go, really? This is the best that we've come up with. Oh, my God, this is awful. There is vicious pushback, as you said. But the thing is, there always has been, all throughout history. These rights aren't easily given. It's not like that. When women went, could we have the vote, please? They went, certainly, ladies, here you go. Absolutely. And have a job while you're at it. These things were fought for tooth and nail. They're not handed over ever. Race rights, gay rights, rights for women, you have to battle. And what we're seeing now with this backlash, with this kind of aggressive misogyny that exists in certain pockets of the Internet, not everywhere, but they're very loud about it, is that is just part of the process. That's part of the fight that we've got to have because we're moving forward, and I'm optimistic. We have, unfortunately, seen in America how fast rights can roll back, but we've also seen the resistance to. And we've seen that people are gonna fight, and they will fight tooth and nail. So things are changing, and they're gonna change, and we're on the right track. But I think what I'd really like from the book is for people to dismantle what sociologists and psychologists call sexual scripts, which is the messages that we receive around sex. And I would like women to feel empowered to their right to pleasure, because I think so many of us perform sex instead of actually enjoying sex, like faking orgasms, like most women have faked an orgasm at some point. But I want to dismantle those scripts, those sexual scripts, because we've been so phallocentric in our culture that it permeates into the bedroom that sex starts and ends with a penis. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Let's try and dismantle that and prioritize experiences that women really, really enjoy. I would love that if there was a revelation, if en masse, women stopped pretending that they're enjoying the sex that they're having and started asking for what they want, would like.
- [48:34]
Charlotte Vosper
I think that's what's so crucial about this history, is that it actually plays out every day, every time women are having sexual experiences, this history resurfaces.
- [48:43]
Kate Lister
Still there?
- [48:44]
Charlotte Vosper
Yeah.
- [48:44]
Kate Lister
There was a piece of research conducted in 2017 that found that heterosexual men experience orgasms 96% of the time they have a sexual encounter. Heterosexual women experience it 65% of the time.
- [48:57]
Charlotte Vosper
That's incredible, that gap, isn't it?
- [48:59]
Kate Lister
Lesbians 86% of the time. But straight women really are, like, dwindling here. And there's loads of work being done at the moment about uncovering the invisible labor that women are doing in the home and at work. And it's really, really important because we're doing it in the bedroom, too.
- [49:15]
Charlotte Vosper
Yeah, absolutely. I think it's a really important message that the book inspires. And I suppose, finally, then, for a bit of fun, after that very important message, which we are absolutely sending out, what surprised you the most when you were writing this book and doing the research?
- [49:31]
Kate Lister
Oh, the first person to describe a woman orgasming was a nun in Germany in the 13th cent.
- [49:38]
Charlotte Vosper
Hildegard. Yes. Yes. I was hoping you might bring that up.
- [49:42]
Kate Lister
That was just. That's just wild. She wasn't just a nun. She was the Mother Superior and she was like a polymath. And she did all kinds of amazing stuff. And she wrote long medical treaties as well. And she writes a lot about sex. And why is a Catholic Mother Superior writing about sex? Because it's about procreation. And she does write this kind of a medicalized description of women orgasming. And it's. Maybe the Greeks got there first. There's some kind of writing where Hippocratic writer's talking about heat in a woman's brain and pleasure. And it might be an orgasm, but Hildegard is definitely talking about an orgasm.
- [50:14]
Charlotte Vosper
Love that.
- [50:15]
Kate Lister
So she's probably the first one. So I was like, yes, Go, Hildegard.
- [50:18]
Charlotte Vosper
Yes. Hildegard. A brilliant note to end on. Thank you so much for talking to us today about your new book.
- [50:23]
Kate Lister
Thank you.
- [50:26]
Narrator/Host
That was Kate Lister speaking to Charlotte Vosper. Kate is a historian, columnist, and host of the podcast Betwixt the Sheets. She has published widely in the field of sexy history, and her latest book is Flick the Story of Female Pleasure.
- [50:47]
Kate Lister
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Kate Lister
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Kate Lister
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Kate Lister
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