The ancient Greeks believed a woman's womb wandered through her body and made her ill. Medieval Europeans believed a woman's orgasm was necessary for conception. And the Victorians believed masturbation would drive you to madness. Sex historian Dr. Kate Lister — host of Betwixt the Sheets and author of Flick: A History of Sexual Pleasure — joins me for a tour through the wildly strange, often infuriating history of women's sexuality. For most of that history, women were believed to be the more sex-crazed gender. What can we say, girls will be girls...
(01:37) - Intro
(03:06) - "Girls will be girls": women as the emotionally unstable, hypersexed gender
(05:36) - Why is women's sexuality so much more policed th an men's?
(07:40) - The medicalisation and pathologizing of sexuality or the Victorian terror of masturbation
(11:30) - The wandering womb
(13:16) - Women as baby-crazed, emotional beings
(15:20) - Are we talking about the menopause too much?
(16:31) - The first woman to describe a female orgasm (she was a medieval nun)
(21:30) - "Sex means putting a penis into something"
(24:08) - Why lesbians have been relatively left alone
(27:31) - The invention of privacy
(30:02) - Victorian middle-class morality and the angel in the house
(33:42) - Empire and the racialisation of female purity
(36:34) - "Go and ask your mother"
(40:59) - Where does a sex historian find sources?
(42:39) - Why researching the history of pleasure matters
(46:22) - The final question
(49:12) - Conclusion
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