The Elusive Female Orgasm with Dan Snow

There will be giggling and gasping galore! And that's just when you listen to this episode! Dan Snow quizzes Kate on all things female pleasure. When was the first recorded female orgasm? Has there always been an orgasm gap? And is there any possibility of it closing? Kate's new book is 'FLICK: The Story of Female Pleasure'. This episode was edited by Hannah Feodorov. The producer was Sophie Gee. The senior producer was Freddy Chick. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener surveyhere https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK. All music from Epidemic Sounds. Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards! UK & Ireland listeners please place your vote on the Spotify mobile app here: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Kate Lister?

  Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? Well, sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles. Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 0:37Speaker 01

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• 1:19Kate Lister?

  Hello, my lovely Batwicksters. It's me, Kate Lister. Welcome back once again to Batwickster Sheets. Hello. Thank you for dropping by once more. It's fab to have you here. But before we go any further, I do have to tell you once again, and will keep telling you from now until the time the podcast becomes unprofitable, this is an adult podcast, spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things and an adulty way of covering age-related subjects, and you've been an adult too. Right, did you feel safer? Do you really? Do you feel okay to keep going? All right then, let's do it.

• 1:56Kate Lister?

  Finish climax, peak, lapetti, more to the big O, coming, creaming, hitting the jackpot? Or perhaps you just want to say it like it is and call it an orgasm. Whatever it is you call it, that is what we're talking about today.

• 2:34Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheet, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. We've spent a lot of time talking about female pleasure on this podcast, so much in fact, that I took myself off to write an entire book about the history of female pleasure. So I think it's about time we got really focused on it today. And who better to get focused on female pleasure with than the lovely and dashing Dan Snow? Well, I sat down to talk to Dan about the history of the female orgasm and asked the question, where did the orgasm gap come from? Because that is one of the many things that I've been researching for my new book that is out this month, which is called Flick: The Story of Female Pleasure. Do you want to see how Dan handled it? Yep, so do I.

• 3:24Kate Lister?

  Well, hello, Dan Snow.

• 3:25Speaker 02

  Hey, Kate.

• 3:26Kate Lister?

  Thank you so much for coming on to the podcast.

• 3:28Speaker 02

  Well, I'm on the podcast, but actually I want to point out, I feel I'm guest hosting.

• 3:32Kate Lister?

  Yeah, you kind of are.

• 3:33Speaker 02

  Yes, I am.

• 3:34Kate Lister?

  Slightly here, not under duress, but you're here.

• 3:38Speaker 02

  No, I'm, this is my favourite podcast. I've never guest hosted anything before. This is cool.

• 3:42Kate Lister?

  But you're guest hosting and asking me questions.

• 3:44Speaker 02

  You're damn right. Well, because I haven't got any answers on this one, let me tell you. Because what subject are we talking about today?

• 3:49Kate Lister?

  The history of women orgasming.

• 3:51Speaker 02

  You're right. So it's very much, I'm very much in questioning mode.

• 3:55Kate Lister?

  Well, let's, maybe, maybe you'll learn something.

• 3:57Speaker 02

  Well, I certainly will. And I want to, well, the first thing I want to learn is we're sitting here in my flat now, and we've got a wall of books by us. And I mean, I'm just looking up at these books. I mean, I can see probably in this wall alone, five books about the Battle of Waterloo.

• 4:09Kate Lister?

  Yep.

• 4:09Speaker 02

  Right? And that took place in one day, 200 years ago.

• 4:13Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 4:14Speaker 02

  How many history books have been written, scholarly history books have been written about female pleasure, female orgasms that you came?

• 4:19Kate Lister?

  Oh, not that many. Certainly, there's probably less than there are books on the Battle of Waterloo in this apartment.

• 4:27Speaker 02

  Which is, I mean, that tells us something about history, the thing that we call history, doesn't it?

• 4:31Kate Lister?

  Yeah, it absolutely does.

• 4:32Speaker 02

  This is something that, well, hopefully, not as many people as you'd like, but like, this is something that is part of the lives of 50% of humans who have ever lived.

• 4:41Kate Lister?

  Yeah, it is. And we have a real issue with the orgasm gap today. That, I mean, to give you some stats just today, as we're walking around on earth, a study came out, I think it was Rutgers University in 2019, and it showed that heterosexual women are orgasming in about 65% of the time that they're having sexual intercourse, whereas straight men are getting their rocks off 96% of the time. So one half of this coupling is getting off 65%, the other one 96%.

• 5:12Speaker 02

  And why is that? I mean, are we straying into, is this biology we're now going to talk about, or is this cultural history and?

• 5:22Kate Lister?

  Biology is quite an important part of this. The, why do we have orgasms? What biological function do they serve? Especially women's orgasms. Evolutionary biologists and anthropologists are still rowing about this. Men's orgasms is pretty straightforward. They need that for the semen to come out, making babies, and then we all go, oh, that makes sense.

• 5:43Speaker 02

  Well, that almost is how we've come to define the sexual act.

• 5:46Kate Lister?

  It is, but that's just what you said there. The bigger point of that, that is entirely how we look at sex, even on a subconscious level, even the way that we talk about sex. We talk about something like foreplay, by which we mean everything apart from penetrative sex, which we've immediately deprioritised.

• 6:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:04Kate Lister?

  A whole raft of sexual activities. And what we've said is the one that actually pleasures the penis most, that's the main event. Everything else is like a precursor to it.

• 6:13Speaker 02

  Well, and the one that's sort of pre-approved of, right, which is making babies, the one that leads to making babies.

• 6:16Kate Lister?

  Making babies. The one that can potentially make babies. And if you speak to people on the street, don't do this, but if you wanted to. You said like, what does losing your virginity mean? Almost everybody would say it's the first time you have sex. And then you say, what do you mean by that? And it's a penetrative sex. So immediately, if you say that losing virginity, the only thing that counts as that is sticking a penis into something. Well, what about fingering or cunnilingus or same sex acts? We've just cancelled a whole load of them because again, we're obsessed with this idea that what counts as sex is heterosexual sex. And it means sticking a willy into something.

• 6:48Speaker 02

  Well, heterosexual sex on a timeline that like mirrors that of the male experience, right?

• 6:52Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 6:52Speaker 02

  The sex is over when the male comes.

• 6:54Kate Lister?

  That's the other thing about it. So looking again at biology, but also cultural and social conditioning. We've managed to get ourselves into a situation where not only is the only thing we actually count as proper sex, penetrative sex. But we've also allowed this situation to develop where the penis basically gets to dictate when it starts and when it finishes. So the penis gets to say, hello, I'm now erect, we will now have sex. And as soon as the man's come, that's it, it's all over. It doesn't matter if you've got yours, he's snoring next to you. And we've created this weird situation where a man's orgasm is an absolute full gone conclusion. That's definitely going to happen. And a woman's is kind of nice if it if it shows up, it's a benefit if it does. And we've got like a whole cultural comedic script around women not orgasming during sex and just not really enjoying it.

• 7:39Kate Lister?

  In fact, this myth has arisen, and this is the reason I wanted to write the book, that women somehow don't enjoy sex as much as men do. That's still with us today. You don't have to look very far to find that. But what if that is complete bollocks? And I believe that it is complete bollocks. What if it's just that the sex they're being offered is shit?

• 7:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, that that's interesting. And you and I have talked before about this, but there have been periods through history where women were said to have been the sort of voracious, horny, troublesome ones.

• 8:05Kate Lister?

  Yes.

• 8:05Speaker 02

  And it was that so so therefore that, well, I'm sure we'll explore that a little bit, the kind of historiography of that. What about i- is it quite hard to find source material here? Like if you're writing about the female orgasms?

• 8:16Kate Lister?

  Yes, it's it's very, very difficult. And you've got to try and understand the language being used, that it's quite coded. If you're going back to like something like ancient Greece is the language that they're being is normally in medical texts and they're talking about sharing seed. That's not when a man pours forth his seed and then they do this weird thing where they talk about a woman's seed. Well, that turns up all the time. And that's what's known as the two-seed theory. And for a long time, that was how they thought that babies were made. There is this man releases his seed and a woman releases her seed. Now, what they meant by women's seed is very much up for debate of like, what is that? Because now we know about ovulation, things like that, but they didn't know that. So what did they mean? So there's a few theories.

• 8:57Kate Lister?

  They might have meant that woman's seed is menstrual blood that the Greeks thought was basically semen that hadn't been heated up to the right temperature to become male. Hashtag science. Okay. It made sense to them. It made sense to them. They thought that it might be like some kind of invisible seed inside the body. Or the one that I think that it probably is, is vaginal lubrication during arousal. Which again, you can see that's the patriarch in action. We don't even have a word for that. The French do, they call it supreme.

• 9:33Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Dan after this short break.

• 9:43Speaker 03

  In a world where swords were sharp.

• 9:45Speaker 04

  And hygiene was actually probably better than you think it is. Two fearless historians.

• 9:51Speaker 03

  Me, Matt Lewis.

• 9:52Speaker 04

  And me, Dr Eleanor Yanaga. Dive headfirst into the mud, blood, and very strange customs of the Middle Ages.

• 10:00Speaker 03

  So for plagues, crusades, and Viking raids, and plenty of other things that don't rhyme. Subscribe to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts.

• 10:24Speaker 02

  But you have found the first documented orgasm?

• 10:28Kate Lister?

  Yeah, so the first woman that we know who wrote about women orgasming was a 12th century German nun called Hildegard of Bingen, Hildegard de Bingen. She was actually, she was an abess and she was the mother superior. And she was a very, very, she was a really impressive woman who had. Visions and she wrote them down and she advised popes and wrote music and she was just a very impressive person, but she also wrote medical texts. And in this one, this is what she writes, this is her description of an orgasm. "When a woman is joined to a man, the heat of her brain, which has delectation in it, first announces the perception of delight in that joining and pouring forth of seed. After the seed has fallen into place, the heat attracts and holds it.

• 11:10Kate Lister?

  So in the woman's kidneys contract, all the organs prepared for opening at the menstrual period are now closed, like a strong man enclosing something in his hand."

• 11:19Speaker 02

  Does that ring true?

• 11:22Kate Lister?

  I mean, what, this is a really medical description in a medical text. So you can see that pouring forth of seed again, this is the two-seed theory and she's talking about delight and she's talking about heat and she's talking about things contracting. That is an orgasm, it's a very medical description of an orgasm. We think she might be the first one to ever describe a woman orgasming, but there are some Greek writers who talk about woman's pleasure during intercourse and heat and contracting and they might be describing an orgasm, possibly.

• 11:51Speaker 02

  But that's so amazing and she's not the only nun. I mean, it feels like these nunnaries could be a safe space for women to think and write and exchange ideas and explore.

• 12:02Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 12:02Speaker 02

  Because there's some other nuns you talk about in your book who also are writing on these subjects.

• 12:06Kate Lister?

  They're kind of writing on these subjects. So Hildegard is writing a medical text and she's trying to understand how babies are made, basically, because she is a good Catholic at the end of the day. But there are other writings by some nuns and some Christian mystics who are highly erotic in nature and they're often talking about their visions of Christ when he comes to, comes to visit them.

• 12:28Speaker 02

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 12:31Kate Lister?

  So one of them, Agnes Blambekin, she wasn't a nun, she was a mystic, she was an Austrian Christian mystic in the 14th century, I think. And she writes, well, she doesn't write, she couldn't write, it was written for her, but she writes about having ecstatic visions where she thought she had Christ's foreskin in her mouth.

• 12:49Speaker 02

  Okay, well, it sounds to me like it's sort of legal. If you can put a Jesus stamp on it, then

• 12:53Kate Lister?

  Then it's fine.

• 12:53Speaker 02

  It's sort of fine.

• 12:54Kate Lister?

  Then it's fine.

• 12:54Speaker 02

  Because you've got another amazing 16th century account of an orgasm, which I love, and that's also known.

• 13:00Kate Lister?

  That, yeah, that's, it's actually, that's not just any known, that's Saint Teresa. So she has an ecstatic vision about an angel coming to visit her, and the angel she dreams pierces her body with a spear. So it's all very metaphorical. And she writes, "The pain was so great that it made me moan, and yet so surpassing was sweetness of the successive pain that I could not wish to be rid of it."

• 13:21Speaker 02

  That's such a great, I love that sentence.

• 13:23Kate Lister?

  That's a good line, right?

• 13:24Speaker 02

  Amazing. Is it because these Christian women were literate and allowed to write these, I mean, why do we think that so many of these sources, early sources, come from them?

• 13:34Kate Lister?

  There's a whole area of study about these erotic Christian visionaries and what's going on there. It's probably what's being conflated is their devotion to God, but it's being expressed physically. There's a lot of scholars that say that we shouldn't read this sexually, that what, this is an ecstatic vision. And then there's other people going, no, it's definitely sexual. Who knows what's going on with this much time's passed? But these are women writing about pleasure. And I think the fact that they're writing about angels and Jesus, like you said, it maybe gives them a safe space to be able to explore it. After all, nuns were supposed to be married to Christ, right?

• 14:09Speaker 02

  Good point. I'm aware at the moment, we're still talking about Europe, and I know that you deal with lots of things going on outside Europe as well, so I'm going to come to that. But I just, I'm interested in this idea, something we talked about before. How the, how the idea of female sexuality, enjoyment of sex, orgasming, how does that change over the centuries? Like, was there ever a time when you suspect the orgasm gap was narrower or possibly inverted? I mean, what's, what's your sense of how things have developed over the centuries?

• 14:36Kate Lister?

  Well, now we have this kind of weird idea about women of the past being completely sexless, which wasn't true. And anyone who studies this stuff will run forward to tell you that that's absolutely not true. But a lot of that comes to us from the Victorians, who had a really fucked up idea when it came to pleasure for everybody. But this idea emerges that women are weaker, that they have a weaker desire than men do. We're kind of still untangling that now. For most of history, it was believed that women were far more sexually voracious than men were. They believed that in the ancient world, they believed that in the medieval period, coming through to the early modern period. And it sounds like a win. It's like, yay, we get to have loads of sex, but it didn't play out like that. The theory behind it was that because women were physically and mentally weaker than men,

• 15:20Kate Lister?

  they couldn't control their urges, whereas men could. So men were like the stoic sensible one and women were just these uncontrollable raging sex banshees over here who needed to be um controlled by men and marriage at all points. Now, was the orgasm gap less? You do have this belief, and it starts in the ancient world, you can see it in the Hippocratic writings, that a woman had to orgasm in order to get pregnant. Right? Now, that sounds, again, sounds like a win. It's like, oh, so they should be orgasming then. But there is a really fucked up legacy that stayed with this because you can still see that being cited in rape cases in the eighteenth century.

• 15:59Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 15:59Kate Lister?

  Yeah. So it's the idea that if she got pregnant, she couldn't possibly have been raped because she must have orgasmed, therefore she must have enjoyed it and consented to it. So it's always, it's pretty nasty and pretty tangled, but there was a really strong belief throughout history that if a woman didn't orgasm, she wouldn't conceive. So again, we're very fallacy centric and we're very heterosexual, but they were certainly aware of pleasure and pleasure being important.

• 16:25Speaker 02

  And that sort of, because that sort of releases energy, you know, that almost biological change that comes over you, that it happens in a man, so surely.

• 16:33Kate Lister?

  Surely, exactly, because they, from the ancient world, have believed that women were like men in beta form, basically, like men in draft form, the men, the male, but it's what the Greeks taught. The male body and the female body were different because of temperature, right? So a man's body heated up and became dry, whereas a woman's body was warm and it was wetter. And that's how they understood gender difference largely. So if you were an effeminate boy, your constitution was too damp and too cold. And if you were a masculine woman, it was because you were too dry and too hot, right? But they understood women as being like these pale. Shadowy imitations of men. And you can see that in some drawings, like even going into the Renaissance period, when the drawings of penises,

• 17:15Kate Lister?

  but they look like vaginas and vice versa as well, because they understood a woman as just being an inverted man. So that idea, well, if a man orgasms to get pregnant, a woman must orgasm to get pregnant as well. That's how they understood it.

• 17:28Speaker 02

  Because what's so strange about that in our era, in terms of sex for pregnancy, which is in the minority of cases, but it's actually, there's a very different thing at play. Like you get told, the temperature's right, it's the right time of the month, quickly now. And we have almost joke about the fact, you know, when people are going through IVF or we're going through whatever. Or if the opposite is almost true, you're like, quickly, okay, that's fine, let's go, like, do that now. According to, this is something that I have not experienced personally. But, um, no, the, and, and isn't that interesting? So actually the, there's a, we need to be alive to the possibility that in a thousand years ago, when you were trying to conceive, actually men were going to enormous lengths to make sure women orgasmed.

• 18:05Kate Lister?

  We don't have that evidence. They were supposed to be.

• 18:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:08Kate Lister?

  They were supposed to be, but unfortunately that didn't translate to women being able to cavort around the Parthenon getting their rock off.

• 18:15Speaker 02

  No, that's right. Only with husbands.

• 18:17Kate Lister?

  Only with husbands. Yeah, right. And whenever he wanted it, not too much unless he wanted you to do that. But you're absolutely right. Throughout history, there was a real emphasis on the woman must enjoy sex as well.

• 18:30Speaker 02

  So I was talking to our co-host, Suzanne Lipscomb, the other day about historians are only just looking into the menopause.

• 18:36Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 18:36Speaker 02

  And it's something that has, you know, is just a defining life moment for 50% of people who've ever lived.

• 18:42Kate Lister?

  The French were the kind of the ones to discover the menopause. When you look throughout the ancient sources, they, none of them mention it. Even Hildegard doesn't mention it and she lived to be in her eighties. So she definitely went through it.

• 18:52Speaker 02

  Yeah. So we know, you and I have made a program, we know more about what people were eating in Pompeii snack bars.

• 18:58Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 18:59Speaker 02

  Than we do about how they were having sex with each other.

• 19:03Kate Lister?

  Yeah, we do. And especially when it comes to women's bodies and women's health, because it's just not there. The records just aren't there. What was it like to go through the menopause when you were a woman in Pompeii? You're already dealing with enough without the bloody volcano blowing up.

• 19:17Speaker 02

  Well, exactly. Volcano is a useful metaphor there. Let's take, let's, let's leave Europe behind a little bit. What, what, because I'm sure there must be some fascinating other traditions you may be able to tap into. What, what sources do we have?

• 19:31Kate Lister?

  Yes. So when you're in Europe, you have this two-seat theory, men must orgasm, women must orgasm, and that's how we make babies. You also get a strange idea emerging that men become weakened, their bodies become weaker if they orgasm too much. Again, that's this idea of control. But you also interestingly see that playing out in eastern cultures like China where with early Taoist texts and they have this idea about energy and about Jing and they believe that semen is very important, should stay inside the body and that that will stoke up your energy. This is still something that's played out in tantric circles today. So when they say that tantric people can go forever and having sex, what they mean is they're not orgasming. That's the game that they're playing.

• 20:14Speaker 02

  And that's found that's now there's a strange part of the manosphere that also emphasizes that.

• 20:18Kate Lister?

  Also do that, right? That, that idea that you mustn't orgasm, that goes right back to this ancient stuff and also the Victorians with their shaming around masturbation. But yeah, there's no November, that goes right back to, to the ancient world.

• 20:32Speaker 02

  I think medically orgasming is really good for you, right?

• 20:33Kate Lister?

  Very good for you.

• 20:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's really good for you.

• 20:35Kate Lister?

  It's really good for you, especially if you happen to have a penis. There was research that came out of, it was one of the big American, I think it was Harvard actually, and they showed that regular orgasming, it reduces your rates of prostate cancer.

• 20:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's just astonishing, isn't it?

• 20:47Kate Lister?

  Just don't do it in the supermarket. That's all that anybody asks.

• 20:50Speaker 02

  Okay. You went a few skips ahead of where I was there, but yeah, okay.

• 20:55Kate Lister?

  Just do it. Yeah, just do it in the privacy of your head. But no, that's absolutely right. From a health point of view, it's really important that you do it.

• 21:02Speaker 02

  And I think there are mental health consequences and all sorts of things as well. Yeah.

• 21:04Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 21:05Speaker 02

  How, but how interesting that at different ends of Eurasia, we both came up with sort of similar issues.

• 21:11Kate Lister?

  Similar ideas. But in China, you have this idea that not only does a man store up his own energy reserves by not orgasming, but if a woman orgasms during sex with him, he absorbs her energy. So you get this real emphasis on you must. Make a woman come and you get these ancient Chinese manuals that are all about pleasuring women and trying to get them to orgasm and teaching men that they mustn't orgasm and that if they don't, they'll be able to live until they're a hundred. And that these practices that he's supposed to be able to have sex fifty times a day and not orgasm at all, but make all of these women come. And it sounds brilliant. Again, it sounds like, God, well done.

• 21:47Speaker 02

  So hang on, for who?

• 21:49Kate Lister?

  Well, for the women who who are orgasming, but this this theory has also been called sexual vampirism by scholars because it's not like an egalitarian act. It's not like, it's feeding. Exactly. It's an energy harvest. So even like, you know, obviously, we know that is crap and doesn't work. So they were still having a great time, but it wasn't being done because they were being really egalitarian about it. It was done to steal essence.

• 22:15Speaker 02

  I mean, we humans are so messed up.

• 22:18Kate Lister?

  We're so fucked up.

• 22:18Speaker 02

  We've come up with all these theories. The one theory we haven't, to be honest, just everyone have an orgasm, just because it's quite nice. Like we, this is we're over intellectualize it. It's like, yeah, it's great because you get to steal their heat. Like, what are you talking about? Both orgasm.

• 22:32Kate Lister?

  Just just have fun.

• 22:33Speaker 02

  That's that's the end of it. Yeah, it's fine.

• 22:35Kate Lister?

  To say we've overthought this is something, it's ridiculous. There's no other species on the planet who comes up with this kind of nonsense.

• 22:43Speaker 02

  Just out of interest, what's your best theory about why the female orgasm exists?

• 22:46Kate Lister?

  Well, you've opened a can of worms there. There's so many different competing theories. I don't know. People listening will be going, because it's fun. It's just fun. But like, there has to be, even if it's just fun, there has to be a reason for it that that it's evolved. So there's so many different competing theories. Some of the madder ones that I've read is that it helps women to lie down. Uh, so like semen will stay in their cervix for longer. Uh, it makes women sleepy was another one. Um, it for pair bonding, that it bonds people together. I've heard various theories and read theories that it's an aid to conception somehow, but all of these kind of fall apart because it's like, well, then why do women orgasm so little during penetrative sex? About eighteen percent of women can orgasm through penetrative sex alone.

• 23:31Kate Lister?

  So if it is for making babies, that is a shit race. That's a terrible system. Uh, my favorite. Theory is that it's actually, it's a by-product when we were all in the womb. And when you're floating around for those first couple of weeks, looking like a little jelly baby, is we're basically all the same. This is the same reason why men have nipples is because then eventually this little jelly baby gets flooded with all these hormones and sex differences arrive. But we do retain some things. So men have still got nipples, even though that we don't use them. And women have retained the ability to orgasm, even though it's more ornamental than anything else. But I really like that theory because it means that the orgasm is just there for fun.

• 24:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:09Kate Lister?

  It's just there for fun.

• 24:11Speaker 02

  A lucky accident.

• 24:12Kate Lister?

  It's a featured, not a bug. And that, I really like that because it sort of goes to the heart of this idea that women are less sex than men. Well, we're not if our orgasm is just there for us to enjoy. It's built in.

• 24:34Kate Lister?

  We'll be back with Dan after this short break.

• 24:42Kate Lister?

  Hello, Betwixters. I'm jumping in here because I have some very exciting news. Betwixt the Sheets has set up camp on YouTube. That's right, it took us a while, but we are there now. So if you are the kind of person who likes to see your podcasts as well as hear your podcasts, you can now go and find us right there. And the link is in the show notes. And please remember to like and subscribe because the people in charge of the money really do like that.

• 25:11Kate Lister?

  Right, let's get on with it.

• 25:24Speaker 02

  You've got so many examples of the two-seat theory in your book. And I can see why, in, say, England, in the 17th century, science and technology is pretty primitive. I can see why that makes sense.

• 25:34Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 25:35Speaker 02

  Especially when all the authors, lots of the authors are men and the male orgasm is. Is key to conception, so why shouldn't the female, you know, that makes sense. But then what did the, when, when does that fall out of fashion that, what does the Victorians think?

• 25:45Kate Lister?

  They were still raring about that. By the 1840s, the Lancet are still putting out discussions where people write in where they're going, "Look, a woman doesn't need to orgasm to get pregnant." They didn't say exactly like that. But the point is that it's still being debated at this time. And it was disproven in the 17th century, but it's still retained that. So the Victorians still have this idea that a woman has to orgasm in order to get pregnant, even though most of them are going, "No, they don't."

• 26:12Speaker 02

  How does it affect the female experience through sex if, once people start deciding that the orgasm isn't necessary for conception?

• 26:20Kate Lister?

  They start to do weird things with it, the Victorians, because they overly medicalised everything. That was their whole thing, especially sex. Everything becomes this medical issue. So orgasming also becomes a medical issue. Now Freud, a little bit after the Victorians, is really the father of this, but it was in place before. This idea that if a woman couldn't orgasm during penetrative sex, she was medically frigid or impotent, that would have been the words that they would use. So we don't, we're not worrying about women orgasming to get pregnant anymore. But now we get this idea that she's not mentally sound unless she can orgasm during sex with her husband.

• 27:01Kate Lister?

  You see that emerging and the official name for that was impotence in the 19th century. So today we think of impotence as something that men have, but to the Victorians it was also an impotent woman was one that couldn't orgasm through penetrative sex.

• 27:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, you talk about Freud in your book and surprise, surprise, his views on female orgasm are pretty out there.

• 27:20Kate Lister?

  He gets, oh, I always want to defend Freud, but I can't because I hate him.

• 27:26Kate Lister?

  But I know he's a big deal. I know he's a big deal. He did loads of really important work. But when it came to women's sexual pleasure, he was just, he should just be hit in the face with a chair.

• 27:34Speaker 02

  We took him up on the old list of men who've done amazing things, brackets, as long as, as long as he doesn't pay no attention to their attitude and behaviour towards women.

• 27:42Kate Lister?

  Yeah, yeah, he was really good on like the subconscious and, you know, the Oedipus theory. And then he gets to women and it just all goes completely mental. So he had this idea, and it wasn't him, it was in currency at the time, but it was really his work that popularised it, that a vaginal orgasm was sexually mature and that an orgasm derived through clitoral stimulation was psychologically immature.

• 28:05Kate Lister?

  Which is, it's just nonsense, but that idea is actually still with us to this day. You still get people in various magazines or in the corners of the internet, you don't have to look very far to find this, talking about how a vaginal orgasm is better than a clitoral orgasm.

• 28:20Speaker 02

  Qualitatively better, like a better.

• 28:22Kate Lister?

  Like a better that it is, that it's, Freud would have told you that it was more sexually mature, that that meant that you were a full woman and that you were fully developed. And that kicks off a new paranoia that we're all supposed to not only be orgasming all the time, but we're only allowed to orgasm through penetration alone, because what does that do? It removes, basically saying only sex with a penis.

• 28:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:44Kate Lister?

  Is the only sexually mature orgasm that you can have. And this has really big repercussions. I mean, for example, Princess Marie Bonaparte, Napoleon's niece, she got herself into a right tangle, thinking that she should be having vaginal orgasms and she couldn't. So she had an operation three times to move her clitoris closer to her vaginal opening.

• 29:05Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 29:07Kate Lister?

  Sorry. And she never got it. She never got her vaginal orgasm.

• 29:12Speaker 02

  I'm not surprised by that.

• 29:15Kate Lister?

  So that's what Freud did, this idea that a vaginal orgasm is the best and only way to go forward and clitoral orgasms are terrible.

• 29:22Speaker 02

  And is that even a distinction? Is there even, is there a difference?

• 29:27Kate Lister?

  Well, this theory that there are two different types of orgasm, the vaginal one, which was yay, go, and a clitoral orgasm, boo, horrible, that stays with us for a really, really long time. And people still talk about it today. That's what the much mythologized G-spot is people talk about, that there's supposed to be a G-spot inside, inside the vagina. And his thing is, in recent research, I say recent because it's only in within the last 20 years we've been able to prove it, there isn't a G-spot. There is no area on the inside of the vaginal wall, you can do dissections, you could do scans, you can do internal examinations, there's nothing there. What there is, now we know the full structure of the clitoris, is it's the clitoral roots coming down outside the vaginal wall.

• 30:12Kate Lister?

  So there is no G-spot, it's the C-spot. That's the clitoris, it's the clitoral root, and it has been the entire time. So if you orgasm through penetrative sex, hurrah, good for you, but that's a clitoral orgasm.

• 30:24Speaker 02

  Oh, interesting.

• 30:25Kate Lister?

  So we only discovered that when they got the entire structure of the clitoris, which I think was in like 2000. A ten or something like that, but.

• 30:34Speaker 02

  I wonder if we've got the entire structure of the testicles.

• 30:37Kate Lister?

  Pretty early doors, I reckon. Early doors.

• 30:41Speaker 02

  All right, we've done all the estimates, let's just see if we can get down to, eventually we arrive at the clitoris.

• 30:47Kate Lister?

  Eventually.

• 30:48Speaker 02

  Eventually.

• 30:48Kate Lister?

  Eventually.

• 30:49Speaker 02

  Okay, so let's get to the idea of like women's female pleasure, there is discussion around women have to fake it.

• 30:55Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 30:55Speaker 02

  To, I don't know, to make their partner, to make their husband sort of feel good about themselves, maybe. Then because of that narrative, there's discussion around like a woman enjoying it less. So what, where are, where are we with that sort of thing?

• 31:06Kate Lister?

  Well, we've still got a long way to go. There's a lot of work being done at the moment about the invisible labour of women that they do, emotional labour, or they'll do domestic labour at home, that they're the ones picking up most of the slack. And I think that it would be really good if we could focus the conversation on sex as well, because the reason that women are faking orgasms, and it's estimated about fifty eight percent of women have faked it, men fake them too, but women fake them far more. And they're doing it because they want their partners to feel better, or they don't feel able to advocate for their own pleasure. But we need to stop doing it. There's far too many men walking around out there thinking that they are amazing in bed. But everyone's just been faking it the entire time. And, but that is, that's the product of centuries, thousands of years of conditioning

• 31:48Kate Lister?

  that have taught us the only sex that counts is penetrative sex, that men get to have an orgasm, and if women do, then they're just lucky. And men enjoy sex more than women anyway. So all of that comes together to create a situation. And of course, we're obsessed with penetration, and that isn't what's going to make women orgasm anyway. All of this comes together to mean that when we're having that kind of sex, women probably aren't going to orgasm, but they don't feel able to ask for what they would actually like. They would rather pretend.

• 32:16Speaker 02

  You've got some insane quotes from people with the right letters before and after their name.

• 32:20Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 32:20Speaker 02

  You know, PhDs and doctors, quite recently, saying if a woman can't orgasm through penetrative sex, then she has a she's fake it, otherwise everyone will think rightly that she's got a huge problem.

• 32:31Kate Lister?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 32:32Speaker 02

  Mental problem.

• 32:32Kate Lister?

  That she's mentally unwell. I should say, that was, I think that one was late nineteenth century. It's not like someone was writing it like last week, but that, it's a How often you actually see that narrative that if you're not going to be able to orgasm, then fake it, pretend. And we've now got this situation where women, and there'll be many, many listening to this episode, they'll be thinking, I faked it. I guess just what I'd tell you to do is just sit with that for a minute and think, why? Why did you do that? Why didn't you feel able to just say, try something else? Or it's just not going to happen. It's just not going to happen. Why would you rather put on a show? And that's what we need to kind of stop. And we need to change what we understand about sex. And we need to change what women feel entitled to going into

• 33:16Kate Lister?

  these encounters. Because I don't know any men that would want to be having sex with women faking it anyway. Like, it's not helping anybody. Do you know what I mean? It's like, nobody wants to think that sex was amazing, then actually they were just pretending the entire time. It's so much rather that someone went, could you just do that a little bit differently? So, these, these are the cultural scripts, but they're, they're really entrenched and they're really powerful. And they've been thousands of years in the making. But we can change them.

• 33:42Speaker 02

  When we talk about female pleasure, are you thinking foremost about orgasms?

• 33:46Kate Lister?

  Orgasms are a big part of it, but that's not the only thing. So I've got a chapter on the history of sex toys, and about how they've been culturally understood, but also a chapter on lesbianism, and sex and the older woman, menopausal women, on this idea that women were once more highly sex than men, and where did that go? What changed? Why? And then the final chapter, I think probably the one that I liked the most is, where did women learn about sex in the past? How did they learn about it? I mean, we're recording this today, and we've just got back from Marie Antoinette exhibit at the V and A. And that was a woman who famously didn't consummate her marriage for seven years. And no one's entirely sure quite what was going on. But the best evidence we have is that they just didn't quite know what to do.

• 34:28Speaker 02

  My grandpa apparently had to ask his father-in-law that was a doctor.

• 34:31Kate Lister?

  It's like, the idea that we just know that nature just takes its course is not right. So where do people learn about it in the past? I mean, if the Queen of France didn't have all the information, where do people learn about it?

• 34:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's a great moment in a Stefan Zweig book that I read the other day about how the Second World War came about. And he's just musing about his childhood. And he said it was very fascinating. He talks about the class structure in Austria-Hungary. And he got all of these really unhappy, well-bred.

• 34:59Speaker 02

  Educated young men and women in the upper class who are just like sexually a complete shambles because they're not allowed to have sex, the men sometimes going to have sex with sex workers. And then he goes, you used to go out through the countryside and see the farm boys and girls just having a lovely time, rosy cheeks, shagging away. And even then, they were aware that it was quite weird.

• 35:18Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 35:18Speaker 02

  These strictures they built, this architecture they built around sex, what it was for, what it wasn't for, in elite society. It's so strange, isn't it?

• 35:26Kate Lister?

  And who, who's going to tell you what you can do and where on earth are you going to learn about that? And we do have some evidence from the 19th century when sex surveys were first being done about where women were learning about sex. And almost universally, it was ask your mother. So that's what they were expecting was that the mother would explain what sex was to a daughter, which is a tall order for anyone to do, let alone in the 19th century. And obviously, there's going to be some areas that you are going to miss out.

• 35:52Speaker 02

  And I suppose that in those conversations with young people about sex, the pleasure bit is almost the hardest bit to talk about as well.

• 35:59Kate Lister?

  And we still don't talk about that.

• 36:00Speaker 02

  So if it's, if it's mother, daughter transmission, then you're probably going to lean more, you know, I suppose maybe you're going to lean more into kind of the biomechanics.

• 36:08Kate Lister?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. And that's what they do in schools. And there's a whole initiative, I think it's by, is it by the World Health Organisation? It's about the sex, the right to sexual pleasure and how important that is. And one of the key aspects that they bring out is that we still talk about sex as problematic behaviour when we're educating people about it. It's still this kind of like, don't get pregnant. This is how you get pregnant. Don't get pregnant. And it's scary. Who talks to their child about actual pleasure, about sexual pleasure, and that it can be nice?

• 36:35Speaker 02

  It's gonna be great, guys. It's one of the few things about this veil of tears that makes it worth living.

• 36:40Kate Lister?

  Right? That's not what you tell your kids.

• 36:46Kate Lister?

  Too far, too far. Bring it back slightly. But the point is a really sound one, is that we don't talk about sexual pleasure and who has a right to it, which we all do.

• 36:56Speaker 02

  Kate, quick, tell us what the book's called?

• 36:58Kate Lister?

  The book is called Flick, A History of Female Pleasure.

• 37:01Speaker 02

  It's out now, folks.

• 37:02Kate Lister?

  And it's out now.

• 37:03Speaker 02

  Kate Lister, thanks for coming on the podcast. If you've enjoyed this episode of Bitwix the Sheets, make sure you like, subscribe, wherever you get your pods, and you won't miss another episode.

• 37:12Kate Lister?

  Thank you very much, Dan. You've been loads of fun.

• 37:14Speaker 02

  Come on, anytime.

• 37:19Kate Lister?

  Thank you for listening and thank you to Dan for joining me. That wasn't easy. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like, review and follow along, whatever it is you get your podcasts. Coming up, we are going to see what got you cancelled throughout history. And if you'd like us to explore a subject or if you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at [email protected]. This podcast was edited by Hannah Fyodorov and produced by Sophie G. The senior producer was Freddy Chick. Join me again, Betwixt a Sheet, it's the history of sex scandal in society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.