And how the stereotype flipped.
In the 1600s, a man named James
Mattock was expelled from the First Church of Boston...
His crime?
It wasn’t using lewd language
or smiling on the Sabbath or anything else that we might think the
Puritans had
disapproved of.
Rather, James Mattock had
refused to have sex with his wife for two years.
Though Mattock’s community clearly
saw his self-deprivation as improper, it is quite possible that they had his
wife’s suffering in mind when they decided to shun him.
The Puritans believed that sexual
desire was a normal and natural part of human life for both men and women… as
long as it was heterosexual and confined to marriage, but that women wanted and
needed sex more than men.
A man could choose to give up sex
with relatively little trouble, but for a woman to be so deprived would be much
more difficult for her.
Yet today, the idea that men are
more interested in sex than women is so pervasive that it seems almost
unremarkable.
Whether it’s because of hormone
levels or “human nature,” men just need to have sex, masturbate, and look
at porn in a way that simply isn’t necessary for women, according to popular
assumptions… and if a women does find it so necessary, there’s probably
something wrong with her.
Women must be convinced, persuaded,
even forced into “giving it up,” because the prospect of sex just isn’t that
appealing on its own, say popular stereotypes.
Sex for women is usually a somewhat
distasteful but necessary act that must be performed to win approval, financial
support, or to maintain a stable relationship.
And since women are not slaves to
their desires like men, they are responsible for ensuring that they aren’t
“taken advantage of.”
The idea that men are naturally more
interested in sex than women is ubiquitous that it’s difficult to imagine that people
ever believed differently.
And yet for most of Western history,
from ancient Greece to beginning of the nineteenth century, women were assumed to be the sex-crazed
porn fiends of their day.
In one ancient Greek myth, Zeus and Hera argue about whether men
or women enjoy sex more.
They ask the prophet Tiresias, whom
Hera had once transformed into a woman, to settle the debate.
He answers, “if sexual pleasure were divided into ten parts, only one part would go
to the man, and and nine parts to the woman.”
Later, women were considered to be
temptresses who inherited their treachery from Eve.
Their sexual passion was seen as a
sign of their inferior morality, reason and intellect, and justified tight
control by husbands and fathers.
Men, who were not so consumed with
lust and who had superior abilities of self-control, were the gender more
naturally suited to holding positions of power and influence.
Early twentieth-century physician
and psychologist Havelock Ellis may have been the first to document the
ideological change that had recently taken place.
In his 1903 work Studies in the Psychology of Sex, he cites a laundry
list of ancient and modern historical sources ranging from Europe to Greece,
the Middle East to China, all of nearly the same mind about women’s greater
sexual desire.
In the 1600s, for instance,
Francisco Plazzonus deduced that childbirth would hardly be worthwhile for
women if the pleasure they derived from sex was not far greater than that of
men’s.
Montaigne, Ellis notes, considered
women to be “incomparably more apt and
more ardent in love than men are, and that in this matter they always know far
more than men can teach them, for ‘it is a discipline that is born in their
veins.’”
The idea of women’s passionlessness
had not yet fully taken hold in Ellis’ own time, either.
Ellis’ contemporary, the Austrian
gynecologist Enoch Heinrich Kisch, went so far as to state that
“The sexual impulse is so powerful in women
that at certain periods of life its primitive force dominates her whole
nature.”
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