How Frightened Patriarchal Men Have Tried to Repress Women's Sexuality
Through History
Nasty conservative attacks on women would have been well received in
the Roman senate, the Greek agora or most halls of religious power in
early Europe.
May 29, 2012 |
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The sexual revolution was not sparked by a single incident and no
particular group can claim credit (or blame) for carrying it forward.
But all of us agree that it has indeed taken place and that American
society has been transformed. A good gauge of the scope of the sexual
revolution comes from its opponents. If it’s not Rick Santorum, it’s
another conservative leader decrying the threat to our way of life
posed by the loosening of traditional codes of sexual behavior.
But the opposition to the sexual revolution goes much further than
sex. For at least the past half-century, conservatives have cast a
much wider net, lumping together feminism, sexual and reproductive
freedom, abortion rights, and even equal pay with the potential
downfall of America. That broad-based attack is not unusual. While
researching my book, I discovered many historical public debates
almost identical to the ones going on today. Since the dawn of
humankind, men have not only feared women’s sexuality, they have also,
to a surprising extent, measured their power in terms of how
effectively they could suppress the rights of women on a variety of
fronts. The recent comment of the Fox News guest Rev. Jesse Lee
Petersen, that “Wherever women are taking over, evil reigns,” would
have been well received in the Roman senate, the Greek agora, or most
halls of religious power in Europe.
At the beginning ...
In primitive societies, men regarded women with the same dread they
felt toward the natural world. Early humankind was at perennial war
with nature, the forces of which were lethal as well as
incomprehensible. The core of the natural world was the female womb,
from which newborn human life emerged in a gush of blood. It was not
until about 9000 BCE that the link between sexual intercourse and
pregnancy was confirmed. Until then, sex and childbirth were too far
separated in time for people to make the connection, and women spent
much of their short lives either pregnant or lactating. Children
seemed to just appear in the womb. Even more incomprehensibly, and
perhaps horrifyingly, was the blood that periodically flowed from
women’s bodies. Blood was dangerous to lose, yet women bled for days
at a time with no injury, and no one knew why. The one clear fact was
that menstrual blood came from women and from the same place where
human life begins.
The first sexual prohibitions were likely Paleolithic taboos against
intercourse with women during their periods. Perhaps the sudden
appearance of menstrual blood reminded men that, despite their
physical strength, they could not generate life on their own. Most
likely, the rejection of women while their blood flowed was a
precaution to appease the threatening divine presence men felt when
confronted with the unknown.
As time passed, men’s fear of women evolved into outright hostility,
with the result that menstruating women were regarded as equal parts
dangerous and filthy. The belief was amplified in later centuries, but
no one took menstrual fear further into the realm of obsession than
the Hebrews. The Torah decrees that women and everything they touch
are unclean during their periods. The contamination extends to things
touched by people who are themselves touched by menstruating women.
For example, if a man “lies” with a woman during her period and later
sleeps on another bed, that bed becomes "unclean" and must be
destroyed.
Over the centuries, menstrual blood came to be regarded as mystical,
and found its way into recipes for sex potions. Mothers saved their
daughters’ first menstrual flows to later mix into aphrodisiacs to
spark desire in their sons-in-law. In 15th-century Venice, a lower-
class girl used a mixture of her own menstrual blood, a rooster heart,
wine, and flour to make a young aristocratic man “insane” with love
for her. She was put to death; the young man was viewed by the court
as an unwitting victim. As late as 1878, the British Medical Journal
questioned whether or not a ham could turn rancid at the touch of a
menstruating woman.
The Bible also, of course, mandates circumcision for males, which one
major Jewish sage, Isaac Ben Yedaya argued was useful in preventing
wives from straying to other men. To Ben Yedaya, the absence of a
foreskin increases male erotic sensation to the point of sparking
premature ejaculation, which leaves the wife unsatisfied, “ashamed and
confounded.” This was a good thing, he said, because giving a wife
sexual pleasure invites a new host of problems:
She too will court the man who is uncircumcised in the flesh and
lie against his breast with great passion, for he thrusts inside her
a long time because of his foreskin, which is a barrier against
ejaculation in intercourse. Thus she feels pleasure and reaches an
orgasm first. When an uncircumcised man sleeps with her and
then resolves to return to his home, she brazenly grasps him,
holding on to his genitals, and says, “Come back, make love to
me.” This is because of the pleasure that she finds in intercourse
with him, from the sinews of his testicles—sinews of iron—and
from his ejaculation—that of a horse—which he shoots like an
arrow into her womb.
The Greeks thought circumcision was disgusting, but they shared the
belief that women’s sexuality was something to be controlled. To
Aristotle, women’s bodies were passive receptacles for men to deposit
their seed, what Sophocles called a “field to plow.” Since the key
function of women was to produce children, Athenians thought it was
pointless to educate them or allow them to participate in public life.
Instead, they were kept in airless, womb-like inner rooms, interacting
only with slaves or family. Indeed, spending too much time with women
was potentially toxic to a man’s reputation. A man “under the
influence of a woman” was classified along with the old, insane and
sick as incompetent to testify in court. Wives were so removed from
their husbands that a law had to be passed requiring periodic marital
sex. Otherwise, there would have been too few legitimate children.
Women’s rights were not a disputed issue in Greece, but in Rome they
sometimes were. In 195 BCE, there was a raging debate over a set of
rules, called the Oppian Law, which curbed women’s abilities to own
gold, wear flashy clothing and travel around town in carriages. The
Oppian Law had been passed decades earlier as a wartime austerity
measure, but after the war ended women were unhappy that the
restrictions were still on the books. To Cato the Elder, the holder of
Rome’s political highest office, the issue was really about male power
and the dangers of female sexual license.
A crowd of angry women jeered at Roman senators as they gathered to
decide whether the Oppian Law should stay or go. The mob had been
growing for two days, swollen by women pouring in from nearby towns.
Inside the Senate, Cato scolded his brethren for letting matters get
so far out of hand. Men’s liberties were now in danger of being
“crushed and trampled on,” he warned. If the Senate allowed the Oppian
Law to be repealed, it would be a slippery slope to equality of the
sexes, or worse:
Give loose rein to [women’s] uncontrollable nature and to this untamed
creature and expect that they will themselves set bounds to their
license...it is complete liberty, or rather if you want to speak the
truth, complete license they desire...From the moment they become your
equals, they will become your masters.
To a Roman man, nothing could be worse than that. Cato’s appeal was
passionate, but the Oppian Law was nevertheless repealed. Mark one
small victory for women’s rights in Rome. There would be few others.
Rome's highest priestesses were known as the Vestal Virgins. They were
“vestal” because they served the goddess Vesta, and “virgins” in that
their untouched bodies were seen as essential to the safety of Roman
society. No one else in Rome was expected to stay a virgin, but a
single sexual detour by a Vestal was thought to bring pestilence,
losses in war and divine displeasure. On several occasions, when no
one could figure out why some calamity had befallen Rome, Vestals were
accused of no longer being virgins. For that crime, they were buried
alive in a tiny room and covered up without a trace.
The Vestal Virgins lasted for 1,000 years, until they were outlawed by
a Christian emperor, but the move to Christianity signaled no shift
away from the tradition of controlling women’s sexuality. To the
Christian fathers such as Tertullian, women were the “doorway to the
devil,” creatures whose burning sexual desires needed to be carefully
husbanded for everyone’s safety. This belief only amplified over the
years, especially during the fever dream that was the witch-hunting
craze of the 16th and 17th centuries, when about 60,000 women and
girls were accused of joining with the devil to harm crops, kill
children and spread disease. Sex was always involved in these
persecutions, either through accusations that the witches had bizarre
carnal relations with the devil or his minions, or through
molestations of the women during the trials. (Seems like the search
for “devil’s marks” often took court investigators below the waist.)
The explanation was simple: “All witchcraft comes from carnal lust,”
said a priest/prosecutor, “which is in women insatiable.” Said another
witch hunter: “All wickedness is but little to the wickedness of a
woman.”
Witches were hunted down and killed for another reason, too: they were
thought to neuter men. The vast literature of witch hunting is filled
with nightmares of castration and lost virility. Most famously,
witches were said to collect the penises they severed and keep them
hidden while the afflicted men wandered the earth looking for their
lost members. It was of “common report,” a popular legal guide assured
the reader, that witches kept their penis collections in birds’ nests,
where they wiggled by themselves and ate oats and corn. Perhaps
inadvertently revealing too much, the churchman who wrote the book
added that in one case the “big” penis in the nest belonged to a
priest.
The witch trials were over by the 18th century, but the urge to
control female sexuality persisted. Quack science emerged as another
justification for repression. As the spread of syphilis and other STDs
became increasingly unmanageable, “good” girls were thought to be less
likely to pass on venereal diseases than the “bad” ones. In any case,
men were innocent victims. “[M]en contact this evil from women that
are infected,” according to one medical source, “because in the [sex]
act...the Womb being heated, vapors are raised from the malignant
humors in the womb, which are suck’t in by the man’s Yard.” In this
way, held another authority, “the Pocky Steams of the diseased woman
do often evidently imprint their malignity on the genitals of the
healthy play-fellows.”
That is why nearly all official measures against venereal disease were
directed exclusively against women. In the 19th century, many European
governments legalized prostitution, but only to the extent of
subjecting real or suspected prostitutes to punishing medical
inspections, often called “instrument rapes,” which probably resulted
in the transmission of a variety of harmful infections. One French
woman described the process in detail:
It is awful work; the attitude they push us into first is so
disgusting and so painful, and then those monstrous instruments—often
they use several. They seem to tear the passage open first with their
hands, and examine us, and then they thrust in instruments, and they
pull them out and push them in, and they turn and twist them about;
and if you cry out they stifle you....
In Vienna, all single women with active sex lives were seen by police
as potential prostitutes, and some were put on the list of prostitutes
after they showed interest in undercover agents who flirted with them
on the street.
Opposition to the laws galvanized early feminist movements, especially
in England, including the beloved Florence Nightingale, religious
zealots, muckraking journalists and civil libertarians. The English
laws were finally repealed in 1885, but only after a 20-year
legislative battle. In the United States, prostitution was legalized
when St. Louis passed a “Social Evil Ordinance” in 1870, patterned
after European prostitution laws, but it was repealed after 100,000
people signed a petition against it. Those ushering the massive
document into the Missouri legislature were flanked by young girls in
white gowns.
American anti-pornography laws also took abortion and birth control
information out of circulation. The 1873 Comstock Act, zealously
enforced by the Olympian busybody Anthony Comstock, outlawed the
transport not only of “lewd” and “lascivious” materials, but also
anything used for “prevention of contraception or procuring of
abortion.” One pamphlet, called “Words in Pearl,” which counseled
married couples on birth control, was ruled so obscene the jury was
not allowed to see it. The judge held that even medical advice given
by a doctor could be illegal if it was mailed.
Fortunately, Comstock is gone, birth control is still widely available
and the right to choose still stands. It’s no surprise that women (at
least those in the US and Europe) have it much better now than ever
before. The question is what to make out of the current backward rush
toward the “good old days” when, for example, a husband could never be
accused of raping his wife. Are the proponents of the hundreds of
bills affecting women’s health and sexuality just crackpots? Or are
they following deeply held, legitimate beliefs that the freedom of
women to direct their own sexual lives destabilizes society?
There is no doubt that the beliefs of Anthony Comstock or Sen. Rick
Santorum, for that matter, can be genuine. Judging by the examples
above, they also can lay claim to historical precedent. But the fact
that something was done before does not make it legitimate. The "good
old days" never existed. In fact, it is the fear-driven desire of men
to control female sexuality and reproduction that should be corralled
by the law, not reproductive choices.
