Kenneth Glad
Recent reports about declining sexual activity have turned private habits into public concern. A historian argues that today’s debate has older roots than it may seem.
Many current stories focus on frequency. Dr. Jean Menzies, however, writing in a column in The Guardian in connection with her book Aphrodisia, points instead to a harder question: Whether sex is freely chosen, satisfying and understood on women’s own terms.
Ancient Greece and Rome are sometimes imagined as sexually freer worlds. Menzies argues that this picture is misleading, especially for women.
In the Hippocratic Corpus, doctors promoted the false theory of the “wandering womb”. They claimed the uterus could move through the body and cause illness if a woman lacked sex.
The proposed cure was regular penetrative intercourse, normally with a husband. That made sex sound medical, but it also placed women’s bodies under social control.
Pleasure ignored
Menzies cites ancient male authors who treated acts linked to women’s pleasure with contempt.
In The Knights, Aristophanes wrote that it “pollutes the tongue”. Galen later compared the same act to eating faeces.
That hostility matters. In Come As You Are, sex educator Emily Nagoski argues that pleasure depends on context, safety and individual response, not just physical mechanics.
The ancient record, then, does not simply show different sexual customs. It shows how often women’s pleasure was judged, narrowed or ignored.
A familiar pattern
There are other traces. Menzies points to Sappho’s poems, Pompeii graffiti and ancient references to dildos as evidence that women still pursued desire in restricted worlds.
The Vindolanda phallus is one example. Found in Roman Britain, it was once catalogued as a tool, but a 2023 reassessment suggested it may have been used sexually. That interpretation remains a scholarly possibility, not a settled fact.
Some modern commentary now casts women as less interested in sex, almost the reverse of ancient claims that they were dangerously lustful.
Both frames miss the same point. Women’s sexual lives cannot be reduced to a single story.
Menzies’s central warning is practical, not nostalgic: Counting encounters tells us little unless pleasure, consent and freedom are part of the conversation.
Sources: The Guardian essay by Dr Jean Menzies; Aphrodisia by Dr Jean Menzies; the Hippocratic Corpus; Aristophanes, The Knights; Galen; Emily Nagoski, Come As You Are.
