Twentieth century progress and limitations

So good, so good, so good New summer arrivals are at Nordstrom Rack stores now. Get ready to save big with up to sixty percent off brands like Rag and Bone, Levi', Adidas, and Free People. Join the Nordy Club to unlock exclusive discounts, shop new arrivals first, and more. Plus, buy online and pick up at your favorite rack store for free Great brands, great prices. That's why you rack 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 as the old saying goes. But in this episode of the History Extra podcast, Kate Lister, whose new book is Flick, 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 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 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? 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. I mean, you dont have to look too far to find that narrative. It's all around us. The ide you know that women need love 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 d And I get so angry with it because it's nonsense 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 time. When you were growing up, like you kind of learn when you were a woman navigating in the world like male sexuality is Like somehow like not all men, I a hashtag not and God bless the nice ones of your Yeah. But like when you m to say and text me when you get home and like you know, you're using keys between your fingers as a weapon and you've got to be on your guard all the time and be careful and don't drunk, donon't wear a shortsirt and don't do this, 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 drivers 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 en masse, like all wetting themselves and fainting. Don't tell me women's sex drive is weaker than a man'. 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. And as we will soon be finding out, that sexual script goes back a rather long way, doesn't it? It really does. Okay, so let's start at the beginning there. What is the earliest evidence we have of people thinking about or having sex? Right. Now this is controversial because now we're in 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.' like 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 wereere they like what was this? We're just not sure. But we do representations of erect penises that go back I from the earliest are about thirty seven thousand years old. and we do have what's thought to be a vulva carved on a cave wall in France that's forty two thousand 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 whatever it is that they think it is. but clearly from our earliest ancestors, we have been very aware of fallacies vul 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 of sex itself We're looking at ancient Mesopotamia, the Uruk period. so we're looking probably about five thousand to three thousand BCE. And that's when we start to get records leftos in Kiform tablets that detail sex liives, sex goddesses kind of behaviour that we can see a bit more of what's going on here. So yeah, it has a very, very, very long history indeed. Okay, so if we're thinkinking about sex goddesses then What kind of ideas are these deities promoting and what stories are being told about them? 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 Inana is a Deity are very contradicting She is the goddess of sex and she's a goddess of war as well. Some like crrudish historians in the nineteenth century of Fert is like 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 DemMuzi or Demuzed, who's a god of the storehouse And there's lots of they're called wedding hyns or wedding babels. She's talking to him when she's marrying him and she's saying things like, comeome plow my furrow Be your ground, come and plow 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 furrow, water my lettuce. and she's really hungry for her husband. It's clearly there is no shame in the way that we would recognize shame. They have different types of shame. You want to be really careful when you look at the ancient world and it's very tempting to go, lookook, they got it right And we've messed it up somehow. they very much had their own hang upps. There's evidence from these cultures about adulterous wives being covered in pitch and tar. like it's not be sex positive community in the way you might want it to be. But Ananna is certainly revered for her sexuality and her sexual appetite was legendary. 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 Gananna would have been worsihiped 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? O you're on controversial territory there, Charlte. I know. this will start a bunfight amongst ancient historians. So the subject you're kind of getting towards there is the subject of what's been called sacred stitut the idea that in the ancient world that women could worship various goddesses. I mean, Aphrodite descends from Ananna and Ishtar. There is a very clear link between the two of them. So there's an idea that women once might have worshihiped these goddesses by essentially going on the game and then giving money to the temple. And it's a really appealing and seductive idea 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 L the best will in the world. He's just there's not a lot of evidence that he'd ever been there and like the things that he's saying. really, this is about smearing the Babylonians as feminate, 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 want to say it never existed because we do have evidence for it in other E modern day cultures like the Devadasi in India for a long time, they're devoted to, I think one of the goddesses is Yelema. 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 about it, Pably not. Okay, so even if we're not entirely sure how these deities were being worshihiped The idea of a sex positive female deity is still an important one. It's still an important one, especially because when Christianity and the Abrahamic faith has come to sort of supplant this poolythyic. 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 the Christian God and all the gods that that god replaced He doesn't have sex There's just one of him 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. It definitely is. and before we dive into that change, I just wanted to pull out a little bit more about our modern perceptions of this history. The idea of sex positive ancient deity. It challengge is 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. Yeah. Why do you think it's so important to tell a history of sexual female pleasure, particularly? 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.standing of Fast. Even if you're not a historian, our understanding of the past informs that now 's really important. I mean the idea that like o 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 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 women have understood pleasure, how they've been allowed to experience pleasure. And it's just about puncturing that idea that until secondcond w feminism and the rampant rabbit turned up, that it was all completely grim and that nobody nobody it was even interested in sex. Weirdly, we think of the pastors sexless. I say we is 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 that 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. Absolutely. What we've discussed so far about the deities I think that indicates to us in the ancient period and as we move into the medieval Women were viewed as highly sexed, weren't they? 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't as erotic as men are, they would have laughed at you. They' have thought that was such a weird take because as far as they were concerned and this goes back to the Greeks and it goes back to the Romans. it might even go back to Ananna herself, which just don't have have the medical evidence to prove what they were thinking. But is this idea that women were more Porn even 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 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 Tod, this Greek understanding of women is ye. Hly sexed. Did that come from a medical understanding of women? Was there a biological grounding behind that? 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 going to 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 it was some kind of joke. I thought it was like like like an internet joke. Itounds ridiculous. It sounds insane, but like that's really they really thought that the womb moved throughout the body And if you had headache, maybe your womb had risen up too high, if you had a stomach ache, maybe it was your womb doing something else. they were womb obsessed. wom obsessed The wom 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 camp forward and fumes and things to try and coax the womb back down to where it should be. But we don't know how widespread this was. We just know that those texts exist. But for the ancient Greek medical men It was all about woms with a woman. In fact, passing a Greek medical exam was very easy because they just said, what's the cause of this woman and they' just been wounded Answer, W. alwaysways the wom of that. Wb And that was what the ancient Greeks had to say about it This episode is brought to you by Starbucks. That is fire. Whoa, that's good. This might be the drink of the summer. Okay, I like this one too. I'm not with you, okay? Try it for yourself. Starbucks refreshers concentrates are coming home. Find them in the coffee aisle and make it yours. Okay, so this medical grounded theory of women is highly sex 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 the Romans using these Greek ideas and Pompeia. I wondered if you wanted to talk to us a little bit about her. Yeah, so this is if you thought that the idea that they understood that women were more highly sex, that might mean that women got to enjoy sex more, No, doesn' mean it doesn't mean that at all. In fact, it means that you need to clamp down on women. The Romans appropriate a lot of the Greek ideas, so did the Islamic writers Pompeia was Julius Caesar's wife So the first thing that you need to know in this story is that Julius Ces was an absolute dirt bag All of the sources tell us this about him. He has a reputation as having sex with his friend's wives and his enemy's wives. That's a typical Julius Caesar move. He loves that. Troops make up songs about his sexual conquests. They call him the bold adulterer. hisis hair was thinning and they make up songs about his Gaelic hores from when he was in the Gaelic Wars. He was an absolute dirt bag, 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 going to work out what happens at this festival, the festival is called Der. and he also fancy he's Pompeia. so he sneaks into to the Boair 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. he's let off eventually, don't worry about it he' f H 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 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 going to do. There's no evidence she reciprocated his feelings a hint of it is enough and she gets divorced. Poor Pompe, 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 islands. 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 who and everything will just be upended. Yeah, this idea of women as highly sex actually serves as a way to control them and oppress women's experiences. Yeah, it does. And Roman history is full of stories of women that weren't controlled like a messcealina Her legendary stories about how she cheated on her husband and how she went to the local brothel. I just don't know how much of any of that is even true. Stories like that serve as this terrible warning that you've got to be careful. 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. Yeah. So how does that impact attitudes to sex? Okay. so the establishment and the proliferation of Christianity, 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 Right? What you've got and it kind of starts creeping in in some of the early Christian writers like my mate Stain. Jerome who basically comes up with the idea that 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 that there are right ways and wrong ways of doing it, but they do have quite an open attitude. 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. Reurring theme They have a much more open attitude to sex than you might think. I mean they're very frank about it in many ways. L theseese are people that, you know, name their streets rope lane where the sex workers were. so they have this very attttitude. sex, they still believe that women are more highly sexed. You can see that throughout almost all medieval literature. If you've read Chaucer, you can see that that the women are cheating on their husbands left right and centre. but you do get a rise of quuite aggressive misogyny coming through by the late Middle Ages. The teachings of Saint Jerome are adopted in Saint Augustine, and now you start to get a shift, which is that pleasure itself is sinful which is a new attit 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, Staint Jeran 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 going to run out of Christians pretty quick. So they have to sort give a little bit of ground and concede, all right then, well you can have sex But you can't enjoy it absolutely not allowed to enjoy. 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. Do we have any examples of how this did affect people's lives? Do we even have evidence of women responding to these ideas? We have some evidence of it. I'd imagine that women have been responding all the way through. is that we don't the sources available. But we do have some examples. One of my favourite is a Welsh poet called Gwiffin Mecken and she's not known about nearly enough. So she was writing in I think she's fifteenth century and she is part of a broader tradition of baudy Welsh ballads Hers are just sensational. L she writes this one. It's now titled, it's either titled Oe to pubic haair or Ode to vagina. but itt the original didn't actually have a title. These are all retrospective ones. And what she's doing is she's taken male poets to task for venerating women's beauty and their hair and she's saying, 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 it's fat 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 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 her 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. And it's really important, as you've said, that we listen to those voices when we can access them. course, in a wider context women's sexual pleasure was starting to be seen as not quite so good.. 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. So that it's an interesting point in our history for many many reasons and you start to get B 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. L 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 to the fore. thingsings like masturbation enter the frray as a medical issue in the late eighteenth century. It starts in like quack Pamphlets and I think of them as like the internet forum of the eighteenth century. and like you've read something online and then God it must be true. There was a lot of that, but it was like cheaply printed pamphlets. it was known as Oanism. and then this guy Tiso. doctor, Swiss doctor, and he published Oanism and really went to town on this idea that masturbation was terribly inangerous for your health. that it needed to be avoided and that if you did it, you were going to go insane, and if you werere a man, you werere going to wither away to nothing and if you're 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. 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 sat out? 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 can be classed as nymphomania And this guy Benvill, who published his treaties informania in seventeen seventy seven. 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 then they died and it was all terminal and horrible. And you're just reading it going, No, you didn't 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. Yeah. And that's really what's going on here 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. Wow, I mean, what kind of treatments were being used to treat this so called sickness, lymphania. Right. So again, we'll caveat this by saying becausecause 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 going to have to be observed. Of course really what they want you to do is get married, get married straightay, please. That would solve the problem. That would solve everything immediately get her married. The more extreme treatments that you get and this is really moving into the nineteenth century is they start to do things like clitorectomies. Urect mees where they cut out the ovaries. A againgain 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 a cllitoris and she's still horny. We don't understand this at all. So it' even when it's being discussed, it's often being discussed as a kind of, I'm not entirely sure that this works. Yeah 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 a catchual 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 like cold douches, vaginal douches, so you might get that. as well, if you're very unlucky then it might be a clitorectomy s awful isn't it? It's absolutely horrendous. Yeah, horrendous. As we move into the nineteenth century Often I think there's a perception of the Victorians as prudes.. Is that true, do you think I love the Victorians because I' a Victorianist by trade and they're just so mad that they're so full of contradictions. ere they prude? They have an outward message of prudery 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 table legs. That one's not true. It's not true that they invented vibrators to cure hysteria. That's definitely not true. They could be very easily shocked, but there 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 They exist in this state of cognitive dissidence 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. Okay, so they're presenting as prudes. They're presenting as prudes. I think one thing that's important to mention though is that so far, we've mainly been talking about heterosexual sex. So what about lesbian women? Did the idea of the highly sexed, deviant woman ry across here? 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 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 into 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 Cnol lingus, we don't mean the first time that you masturbated. And what you get right back to the earliest reference 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 I think it's the Greek, I think, and it's tribidism and it means it's to rub. And then we have variations on that all throughout time. They're called rubbsters. Fricatris 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 ' 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 seventeenth century, a slang terminology arises called playing at flats. Oh my go. which Oh my. It is so loaded. 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 he doing 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, yeep, that's us. We just rub each other and that's it We we do get examples of lesbian sex being persecuted almost always get reference to a dildo in the mix especially in Germany and Holland in the early modern period, one of the few places that actually did persecute quote unquote female Soldomites. There wass a very famous one, a German woman called Katherine Link And there's a huge discussion about whether or not this counts as sodomy. she doesn't have a penis, but she did use aildo. so therefore, does that count as sodomy? And like they're really going into 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. 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? It's a very good question. Were these phallic carvings from the Paleolithic period, W they being used as sex toys? I'd probably say not. But I mean, you know you can't rule anything out. Yeah. The probablyb the earliest dildo that has been found and even this is a little bit controversial. It was very recently reclassified by two archaeologists, Rob Culling and Rob Sandans. and it was an item that had been excavated at the Roman fort of Vindellanda in the north of England. I think it was excavated by the nineteen eighties, and they'd originally labeled it as a darning tool So something that would have been used for sewing an eightes 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 need to reook at it. And they examined it very carefully and they found that the shaft had been quite smooth so it could visibly be used as a sex toy. They also noticed that the end of it, the base end was rounded, so it's not like I 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 Edildo. And if it is Edildo, it's the only known one that we have that's survived. and that's from the second century ACE. so it's two thousand years old. It's pretty impressive, isn't it? Yeah. There are references to sex toys in older material than that in literary especially China, Japan that go back a little bit older than that. We do have a few examples of dilders that survive h dilds usually because they're made of durable material. So things like dilds made of mahogany from the eighteenth 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 dang to the eighteenth 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 withith the case of Katherina Link, we know that she was using what we would now call a strap on because it's 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. Cases like that give us the evidence that sex toys did exist and absolutely exist and were easily fashionable, they just haven't survived. Yeah. Now for any listeners who'd like to learn more about historical sex toys, we've got a brilliant article on our website. It's called From Goat Eyelids to Bread, History's twelve Strangest Sex Tys 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 T to today's conversation But there is often an idea that the twentieth century was a time of significant change in attitudes to sex. and it was in many respects. know in the nineteen twenties, we've got the early birth control movement.. We've got the so called swinging sixties Was it really just a century of positive progress, if we can call it that? No. No. I don't want to say that importantportant things didn't happen, especially in the mid entieth 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 of gives you the idea of like, well, well done everyone We're all done now. Crats, Job done. hurrah and it's not that. Right? Think of it 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 ality women couldn't get a credit card on their own until nineteen seventy five this country. There were laws about women owning their own property in France. There was 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 al 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? 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, a women just going be pressured to have sex now? They're not going to get pregnant. Now they're going to 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 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. They don't want to downplay how much things did change in the twentieth century, but we do need to be careful how we talk about it. Yeah, I think it is important to obviously acknowledge Some huge shifts understand that those are complex shifts and that they don't apply Yeah to everybody. I mean, there was this lovely period, just a tiny moment in our history where we'd got penicillin, so now STIs could be treated successfy the first time ever. and we had the pill. And for about ten years, it seemed like we'd kind of looking up. fixed it. And then antibiotic resistance and the HIV turned up They changed how people had sex profoundly. And we think about things like the pill is like it's just about sex. It's not just about sex. That allowed women to control every reproductive 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 until really quite recently in our history was that if you got pregnant, you'd just go home. That's it. 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 Pill allowed that to happen. Yeah for the first time ever. So it's not just a sexual consequence, it's social as well. Yeah, that's sexual and social linked. That's something that really comes through in this history, I think. So then I suppose the next question 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? So I often get asked like what period in history was the most sexually liberated? Yeah 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 point where we're the most sexually liberated, with're the most progressive, with're the most willing to talk about consent and about rights to each other's bodies. And that is exciting and terrifying in equal measure. So 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. but 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, hereere you go, absolutely, and have a job while you're at it. These things were fought for, tooth and nailed. 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. 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 it And we've seen that people are going to fight and they will fight tooth and nail. So things are changing and they're going to 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 phalocentric 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 reallyally enjoy I would love that. if there was a revolion, if en mse women stopped pretending that they're enjoying the sex that they having and started asking for what they would like. 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.ill there. Yeah. There was a piece of research conducted in twenty seventeen that found that heterosexual men experience orgasms, ninety six percent of the time. they have a sexual encounter. Heterosexual women experience it sixty five percent of the time. That's incredible that gap, isn't it? Lesbians, eighty six percent 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 work. And it's really, really important Be we're doing it in the bedroom too. 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? Oh, the first person to describe a woman orgasming was a nun in Germany in the thirteenth century. It was a card. Yes. Yes. I was hoping you might bring that up. That was just that's just wild. She wasn't just a nun. she was the mother ofs superior and she was like a poolymath, 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 Sapia writing about sex? Because it's about procreation And she does write this kind of very medicalized description of women orgasming and it's maybe the Greeks got there first. There's some kind of writing where a hipppocratic writer is talking about heat in a woman's brain and pleasure and it might be an orgasm. But Hildegard is definitely talking out an orgasm. love that. So she's probably the first one. so I was like, yes, go Hildegard. Yes, Hildegard. A brilliant note to end on. Thank you so much for talking to us today about your new book. Thank you That was Kate Lister, speaking to Charlotte Vosper c as a historian, columnist, and host of the podcast Bwixt the Sheets. She has published widely in the field of sex history. and her latest book is Flip The story of female pleasure