Pod Insights Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society Sex & Pleasure in the Ancient World About this episode Sex in the distant past is often thought about with all the fun taken out of it.
Pleasure must have been a part of the sex lives of women and men in the past, so what evidence do we have to back this up? What evidence of queer sex and attraction is there? And how did the Victorians try to cover up sex and pleasure in Ancient Greece and Rome?
Joining Kate today is the wonderful historian and author Jean Menzies, whose new book explores all of this and more.
*TW: sexual violence discussed at the start of the episode*
Edited by Hannah Feodorov. Producer by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Freddy Chick.
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0:00 Kate 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.
0:35 Kate Lister? Hello, my lovely betwixters, it's me, Kate Lister. How the hell are you doing? It is wonderful to see you round here once again, but before we can go any further together, I do have to tell you, and I will keep telling you because the lawyers keep telling us that we have to, this is an adult podcast, spoken by adults, other adults, about adult things, and adulty way of covering original subjects, and you should be an adult too. That's the fair do's warning, and let's get on with it.
1:03 Kate Lister? Holy fuck, it is hot, isn't it? I mean, it is balls hot. No, no, no, we're not in the UK during one of our intermittent heatwaves. We happen to be in Cyprus for a very special event. Luckily for you, you've just missed the gruesome precursor of the Titan Cronus castrating his father, the sky god Uranus, followed by him chucking his remains into the ocean. But as you can see, the waters are stirring, and coming to shore is none other than Aphrodite, the goddess of love, creation, and pleasure herself. And I'm trying not to stare, but I've been, wow, wow. I don't usually get starstruck, or in this case, tit struck, but she is one fine-looking woman.
1:45 Kate Lister? Aphrodite is the goddess of sex and pleasure, so she gets to have a lot of it. But was that true for the everyday people living in ancient Greece and ancient Rome? Huh? Did they get to behave like that too? No, no, they did not. Shall we find out more? I think so.
2:28 Kate Lister? Welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. As we know, the ancient world covers a huge span of history. It's enormous, thousands upon thousands of years. So when we're talking about sex and pleasure in the ancient world, we do have to tread very carefully. I mean, think how much things have changed in just the last 10 years when it comes to attitudes around sex and gender, let alone five or 6,000 years. Well, joining me today for this episode is the quite wonderful Dr. Jean Mingis, whose new book explores sex and pleasure in the ancient world. And if anyone can help us answer some of these questions, it's got to be her. And whilst you're here, I just wanted to say an enormous thank you
3:10 Kate Lister? to everyone who came along to the two live shows in the past week, the one in Edinburgh and the one in London. It was amazing and fabulous and wonderful to see you all. And to the people that came in London in 37 degree heat, you absolute fricking heroes on a school night as well. You are all amazing. And in addition to that, we have received an email here at Betwixt HQ pleading and begging for our help to rescue a friendship that has gone awry. So here it is. We have had a special request from one listener, Lucy. Hello, Lucy, who is feeling incredibly guilty for missing her friend Kira's 30th birthday.
3:53 Kate Lister? She's feeling so bad, in fact, that she's written to the show and asked us to please help her beg her forgiveness. And we asked, we said, Lucy, why aren't you going to the birthday? And she said that she's accidentally booked herself to go and see a Guns N' Roses gig instead. Huh. That's a divisive one. There'll be people listening goes, yeah, you go, Lucy. And other people thinking, huh, I might be on Kira's side here. But as you're both dedicated Betwixt the Sheets listeners, I'm gonna have to plead for peace and hope, Kira, dear Kira, that Lucy's efforts to heal the rift by getting me involved will seal the deal. So a very, very happy birthday to Kira from Lucy, from all of the listeners, from me and the entire Betwixt the Sheets team. Right. Now we've dealt with that, shall we crack on?
4:45 Kate Lister? Well, hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Jean Mingus. How are you doing lovely?
4:51 Speaker 01 Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. What a nice way to, I was gonna say kickoff the week, but it's Wednesday.
4:58 Kate Lister? Well, it depends when you start the week, doesn't it? And so, you know,
5:02 Speaker 01 It's a bank holiday.
5:03 Kate Lister? Yes, yes, there was a bank holiday. Yeah, Wednesday's still the start of the week. You're fine. You're fine. How are you doing? Because we're gearing up for the launch of your book. Let's give it its full title, Aphrodisia, Women, Sex and Pleasure in the Ancient World.
5:16 Speaker 01 Very excited. I know. We're just saying, this is the year of the sex books, women's pleasure taking centre stage. Very excited about that. Yeah, I'm, I'm just super excited to finally get to talk more about this subject, not just sit in your wee office.
5:32 Kate Lister? I know, I know. Like, that's that weird moment, isn't it? Is where the thing that you wrote and you've done it is now about to be released into the world. And you, and you're just sort of like half excited, but also half like terrified of it.
5:44 Speaker 01 Yeah.
5:46 Kate Lister? So what made you want to write this work? We were just saying that, like, you know, it's the year of the sex book and sex pleasure. Like, what? Do you remember your inspiration for this?
5:55 Speaker 01 It's not the most fun inspiration. It's more of like a reaction to my PhD thesis. When I was, I mean, very important, very proud of my PhD, obviously, but it was on sexual violence. And I think there's like, there's something about, you know, part-time studying for PhDs. So almost seven years of my life was a reading and writing about sexual violence in classical Athens and just everywhere else to sort of immerse myself in the kind of academia. And I, I mean, as a woman, it brings up feelings, doesn't it? It doesn't it? Like, you sort of, you're sitting there, you think, oh, and you remember this time and that time and those times in your life. And it's quite hard. It's like a heavy thing, even if it's important.
6:40 Speaker 01 The closer and closer I got to the end of that, the more and more I was just desperate to, to look for the nice stuff, the good stuff, the fun stuff, the pleasurable stuff. And I just, yeah, it really captivated. And I was like, after this is all over and once I've had a wee break, I'm gonna go full like dive deep into seeing what I can find on the other side of things was what I really wanted.
7:05 Kate Lister? Yeah, misconceptions about sex in the past, they can take many, many forms. And in my experience, they tend to broadly fall into two categories is that either people think that they just weren't having sex in the past, which is a kind of an odd thing to say. And like, well, like when people actually start thinking about it, they're like, oh, no, well, obviously they did because we're all still here. I think what I mean is like kinky sex, sex for fun, sex for messing about. And the other one is that sex must have been violent, brutish and and just hideously unpleasurable for for women at least.
7:37 Speaker 01 Absolutely. I feel like so it's so many layers of like studies from like people within academia to like hobbyists to just random folk on the street. Well, pals, you meet people and they're thinking, oh, well, what's the point in trying to look for pleasurable sides of life for women? Because they were just property and their lives were miserable and there's no complexity and there's no, yeah, moments of joy, which couldn't be further from the truth. I don't think just because women were being treated poorly or were being treated as second class citizens didn't mean that their lives weren't complex and rich.
8:11 Kate Lister? Yeah, yeah. And you can see the way that this plays out. I did a piece of research when I was in academia about Game of Thrones and about how that changed understandings of the medieval period, in particular, sexual violence, because whenever that show was being, and I love Thrones, but whenever that show was being called out for the extraordinary levels of sexual violence, and there isn't a woman in it who isn't threatened with or subjected to sexual violence at some point, the reaction on the internet was almost always, but it's medieval. That's just what it was like in the media, as if women couldn't like go to the shops without being raped again of just like, it's happened to me four times today. It's absolutely ridiculous.
8:50 Speaker 01 And these things were still illegal. There was still like legal recourse to
8:54 Kate Lister? Yes.
8:55 Speaker 01 in antiquity and medieval era to go, something bad happened to me. Can we punish this guy? Like, that was still a thing. It's not that it was approved of. It's very bizarre.
9:04 Kate Lister? It is, isn't it? But we have this idea about sex in the past, particularly women's experience of it, that it must have been violent.
9:11 Speaker 01 Yeah.
9:12 Kate Lister? We do. Yeah, we do. Done.
9:15 Kate Lister? You focus a lot on the ancient world.
9:20 Speaker 01 Yeah.
9:20 Kate Lister? Now, this is really interesting for many, many reasons because I'm a Victorianist by trade and that means that I've got a lot more sources that I can work with than a classicist. So what sources were you working with to try and tell the story of women and sex in the ancient world when women really weren't writing and the men who were writing were often dickheads?
9:41 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah, absolutely. It's so fascinating because even approaching a book where you try to write, or well, I think I did manage to like write about women's pleasure, you inevitably end up with the nonsense that was also said by a lot of men talking, well, nonsense. But I also felt like from the like, from the very beginning, I was always going to privilege what little we did have that could be attributed to women. It is so much less. So like compared to thousands of men's names that we know, even the ones that we don't have texts surviving from, you know, we're more in like the hundred for women. But like those, like that tiny little handful just feels so important.
10:23 Speaker 01 So you've got a little smattering of poetry and you've got a little bit of graffiti and you've got letters between pals, which I love. Doesn't necessarily specifically mention sex, but there's this fantastic letter that the Roman poet Solpici wrote to her friend going, oh, my boyfriend's not going to be here for my birthday. And she's so angry about it and I just love those sort of moments. And also I love, we have cursed tablets and spells that women try to use to attract men. We also have ones that men use to attract women and women use to attract other women. And then it's sort of, you do, you get into, you're having to look at texts that are written by men and reading a little bit between the lines and trying to. Educated guesswork.
11:07 Kate Lister? There is, yeah. But do you know what? All history is that. Like, as much as, as much as we try and pretend that like, that we know exactly what we're talking about, it is almost all, like, you weren't there, you didn't see it. It's always looking at the sources and what we've got available and then making the best possible guess. That's what we're doing. We're telling stories.
11:26 Speaker 01 I know sources like neutral. Everything's biased.
11:29 Kate Lister? Everything's biased.
11:30 Speaker 01 Trying to figure out what those biases were and how they fit into the time period and maybe like the legal evidence you have or the archaeological evidence you have. And there's lots of like great like art and, you know, the physical remains of dildos. So there's archaeological stuff as well.
11:46 Kate Lister? That we've got to throw into the mix. I should probably should have asked you, because this, this is a starter question. This is a page one question. When was ancient Greece, Jean?
11:55 Speaker 01 Well, I mean, there's lots of broad definitions. What I focused on was sort of from around, well, realistically, I'm not looking at evidence before like 700 BCE. Although I think you could probably say ancient Greece maybe started in 800 BCE. But then you could also say there was the Mycetians and the Noens beforehand to influence them, but I wasn't looking at that. So it was like 700 BCE. And then I was looking into the time of Imperial Roman rule as well. The height to the peak, I like mainly pre-Christianisation of the Roman Empire was like my interest. Like, I like the pagan times. So we're going from like 700 BCE to maybe like 300, 400 CE.
12:36 Kate Lister? We do like a neat cutoff point in historical studies, don't we? But you've got to have it, you've got to call it at some point though, don't you? You've got to like call it, otherwise you're just looking at the whole of human history forever and ever. At some point, you're going to have to go, no, it's this bit to this bit. And then, and then someone will come in and go, yeah, but like they did, at the time, they weren't aware. They're like, shut up, shut up, shut up. I'm just doing this bit to this bit. And that's what you've got.
12:57 Speaker 01 Yeah, someone else could do the other bits.
13:00 Speaker 01 And it's also like, even within that, that's like a thousand years of a clearly non homogenous culture and there's so much variation. There's stuff that seems to be relatively consistent, but then there's other things that are clearly quite different. People are different depending on what city state they live in, what political regime they live under, what century they live in. It's not the same to be a Greek woman in Athens in 600 BCE as it is to be a Greek woman in Gorton in like 200 BCE. It's different.
13:31 Kate Lister? Exactly. When I was still teaching at university, I was always explaining that to the students of like, if you're saying medieval period, because I taught medieval stuff as well, that's a thousand years of history, thousand years, like you're talking about. And if you think about how much attitudes to sex have changed in our lifetimes, like, like if you watch an old episode of Friends now, you can, it's quite jarring sometimes to see it, like you would never say that now. Our attitudes have changed so much in just that short space of time. And you're working with a thousand years of history. How did you navigate that?
14:03 Speaker 01 I mean, the limited number of sources helps.
14:07 Kate Lister? It helps, doesn't it? It's very easy to think it was just like, it all happened on a Tuesday when you've only got like four or five sources that you can actually use.
14:14 Speaker 01 I think it's like, where you have to accept that you're gleaning moments. You're not gleaning everything. You're gleaning like these little moments within that thousand years. And sure, you can extrapolate that maybe 10 years before and after it was similar and that law code was the same. But then the one of the example, I always love as well, that you can like, take like, say like, the Roman imperial law code where adultery is illegal. Women who have sex outside of marriage, they're going to get executed or exiled. But then there was in this law codex that survives, a woman wrote a letter to the magistrate saying, this isn't fair. Men should also be prosecuted. So it's like, well, maybe at one point, everyone accepted that law. And then a hundred years later,
14:57 Speaker 01 women like this one who wrote the letter was thinking, actually, I don't like this law.
15:01 Kate Lister? That's not right. Exactly. And you represent, well, like I say, you represent, but you study another period in history that my friends, the Victorians did a lot of.
15:14 Kate Lister? A lot of, that was what my PhD was on, you know, about how the Victorians retold the medieval period. And they've really, like, the number of historians we go on here and you go Victorians and they go, fucking Victorians. Egyptologists, classicists, Roman historians, medievalists of seething. Tell me what your thoughts are on Victorians.
15:33 Speaker 01 Yeah. Well, I think actually, like now, if we think like in the 21st century, we're getting incredible scholarship about sex, like Curious History of Sex. That was quite like a revolutionary book when it came out. And I remember listening to the audiobook during the pandemic. I think I was going, I've got this really distinct memory of walking to get my Covid jab and I was listening to Curious History of Sex.
15:53 Kate Lister? Oh my God, wow. So you hear my voice and you think Covid jabs?
15:57 Speaker 01 Yeah. That was a good thing.
16:00 Kate Lister? That's a good thing. I like that. Yeah. Get a jab, get your vaccines.
16:03 Speaker 01 Um, but yeah, this is sort of like almost, I feel like now we're finally undoing some of the work that the Victorians did.
16:11 Kate Lister? Yeah.
16:11 Speaker 01 Which was really to brush a lot of the sexual aspects of antiquity under the carpet, like quite concisely.
16:19 Kate Lister? They were very shocked by it, weren't they?
16:21 Speaker 01 Oh my God, they were appalled. And they literally almost tried to rewrite history.
16:26 Kate Lister? Yeah, I suspect because they, they loved ancient Greece so much, like to them. And not, it wasn't just the Victorians, like the, the Enlightenment thinkers, they loved ancient Greece as well. And to them, what you described to me, how, what Greece, ancient Greece meant to them and why they would be so upset that suddenly, my God, there are dicks everywhere. Like, why are they, what did they think of ancient Greece?
16:49 Speaker 01 It's this bastion of like Western culture to the Victorians. And I think we're still dealing with the aftermath of that perception now, in that it was this idealized white culture, where we learnt about all of our philosophy and everything was so educated. And like coming from Edinburgh, Edinburgh in the Renaissance used to be thought of like as the Athens of the North, because of like, all of the, the intellectual philosophers that were coming out of it. And that's what we think of, I think of as, or the Victorians, and then actually subsequent generations very much thought of ancient Greece as this sort of like, idealized, intellectual, very not body, which was wrong.
17:31 Kate Lister? Yeah. Masculine.
17:34 Speaker 01 Yeah, very much so. And even like, oh my God, I mean, the there was some struggles getting their heads around the idea that men had sex with other men in antiquity as well for a while. Real, real struggle. And it's also like, I don't know, but like for me, as a woman, coming from like, a working class household, a state school background, where we didn't study classics, where it's still very much even like in the 2000s, when I was considering going to university, felt like this, it was owned by these upper class men. Like, it felt like it belonged to them. And I think like, we're now undoing some of that negative work. Because it is, it is just covering up history. Like, it's just wrong.
18:24 Kate Lister? I'll be back with Jean after this short break.
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19:14 Kate Lister? How did you like push past that then? Because that's, that's interesting. Because I, I went to a state school and I remember feeling as well that like this just isn't, history is a really difficult subject for me to study because it doesn't belong to me. But how did you like, push past that, Jean, and be like, no, fuck you, I'm going to study this stuff?
19:31 Speaker 01 To be fair, I think I've always been a very adamant person. My mum would always say you couldn't get me to do anything I didn't want to do. And if I wanted to do something, I was going to do it. So I think that helped. To be fair, I think even though like going to state school, not studying at school, I had excellent parents and they were very encouraging. And my dad, oh, like very like, he was an X minor, like all that very like traditional um stuff. But then when I was a kid, he decided to go to university. And he studied history at university. And so I think he then imparted that passion on me and was like, right, we're going to the museum together. We're gonna watch a documentary. We're gonna buy you this kid's book about ancient Rome. We're gonna go to the library. And I think that
20:17 Speaker 01 it was like make or break for me and Xena Warrior Princess.
20:20 Kate Lister? Yeah.
20:24 Kate Lister? Did you find any Xena Warrior princesses in your research?
20:28 Speaker 01 No, I wish.
20:29 Kate Lister? Oh.
20:30 Speaker 01 I mean, I said, I mean, you know, there's only so much we know about ancient warrior women and who knows?
20:36 Kate Lister? Who knows? Who knows? But let's, let's talk about your research in the book and what you found, because we're talking about women, sex and pleasure. What kind of so, like, what kind of sources are you working with? And what did you uncover? Because again, the Victorians did a number on it, but they did a number on it with a lot of people because they came in with this idea that that women aren't supposed to feel, that they don't experience pleasure in the same way that men do. How, how did that look in the ancient world?
21:03 Speaker 01 It's such a contrast, right? Like
21:04 Kate Lister? Such a contrast.
21:05 Speaker 01 In, in antiquity, women were perceived as nymphomaniacs. We were all gilded. They were just like, our wombs were basically constantly in need of moisture, roaming about our bodies, thinking, where am I going to find my next fix? And the only way to sort that problem was to have sex. So quickly get married so that you can regularly have penetrative penile sex with your husband and then you will be healthy and happy.
21:33 Kate Lister? Yeah, yeah. And did this particular bonkers belief translate to um spectacular levels of sexual freedom for women in ancient Greece?
21:43 Speaker 01 If anything, it's like a different prison, isn't it? It's like, on one hand, you've got women are prudes and we hate sex and it's all for the men. And that's a prison. And then you've got women all nymphomaniacs whose lusts need to be controlled. And therefore we need to marry them off because, you know, other women couldn't solve that problem. We couldn't solve that problem ourselves either. None of those things would work. Um, it's that they're all prisons. They're just all ways to control women by turning us into this blob. This blob that all think and act the same and all want the same things. We're all guided by our bodies in one way or another. And therefore society has to find a way to fix us. We're always the problem, aren't we?
22:22 Kate Lister? And I think that we still live in the shadow of this particularly Greek thought today that women are guided and rooted by their biology. What do you think?
22:33 Speaker 01 Oh, I mean, first of all, they're just the complete utter nonsense that was our understanding of biology in antiquity.
22:40 Kate Lister? Yeah, it was, it wasn't great, was it? It was a bit, it was, I always want to be careful of stuff like this because it's very easy to point out and laugh. And I do that a lot. But also it's like, they just, you don't know what you don't know. So how did they understand women's bodies in classical antiquity?
22:56 Speaker 01 It's guesswork, right? And like, you know, there's, I always, I always like to give the ancient Greeks some credit in that there are things that are not wild. And we might laugh at them now, like one, I, I think a really interesting fact is that olive oil was seen as both a lubricant and a contraceptive. They thought it was good for preventing pregnancy. I would think, that sounds ridiculous. But then there was some modern studies that showed definitely not a foolproof method, but 50% less likely to conceive if you use olive oil. So not crazy.
23:25 Kate Lister? Like, don't use that, please, listeners. Thank you. Just behave yourselves. We don't need a load of, of babies, reappearance, gene mingus babies.
23:35 Speaker 01 You told me olive oil would solve my problems.
23:38 Kate Lister? But that's, that's amazing. So they, they were showing some awareness of that?
23:42 Speaker 01 Exactly. They know, they were like, okay, so less babies are being born when we use olive oil.
23:47 Kate Lister? Yeah, let's keep doing that.
23:49 Speaker 01 Not absolutely wild and out of practice. And I also think if we were lucky enough to have medical writings by women, there would be some less crazy stuff.
23:58 Kate Lister? I think you're right.
23:59 Speaker 01 I it's just, and also, most women's health was actually treated by women, like midwives were women. They male physicians, when they were seeing two women's gynaecological problems, would have always been accompanied by a woman as well. They were never alone really treating women. And therefore, it does feel like a little bit like you've got men sitting in their house or whatever with their wee stylus, writing down these theories whilst women are in the field, actually treating other women and probably orally giving each other very good advice. Otherwise, they would all be dead.
24:33 Kate Lister? And we know that there were women physicians, right?
24:36 Speaker 01 Yeah, absolutely. And like, mainly, we know about them through references to them by other sources, but just because they don't survive didn't mean they didn't exist. And and then interestingly enough, quite often, women who were potentially writing medical treatises that maybe included stuff on abortion and contraception and pleasurable sex and just sex in general, then get turned into, again, nymphomaniacs, sex guide writers, like someone like Elefantis, who may have just been writing about contraception, but then we remember her or hear about her in other sources as writing a book about sex positions for Roman emperors to have at parties.
25:20 Speaker 01 It might have been better than that. Not that that's anything wrong with that, to be fair.
25:24 Kate Lister? Well, it probably was better than that. It's just that what they contributed doesn't survive. So let's talk about how like something like orgasm. How is that understood in the ancient world?
25:38 Speaker 01 So there's no ancient Greek word for orgasm, but interestingly, orgasm does come from ancient Greek, from orgao. But I think orgao is such an interesting word because in some ways it's both vaguer but also better. For it for for me, like as a researcher, because it refers to the anticipation. It refers to the desire, it refers to the enjoyment, it can be used in so many contexts, not just the climax. In fact, it's not really ever used to refer to the climax, but everything else. And actually, that that helped me think about sex more holistically, I think, when I was researching. I was like, when I first sat down to write this book, I was like, I'm going to write a book specifically about orgasms.
26:20 Speaker 01 And then I realised, that's not really achievable.
26:23 Kate Lister? Yeah, no, you're not. You're not going to write that. God damn it, the sources aren't available.
26:28 Speaker 01 It would be a pamphlet. Like, the evidence would be a pamphlet. But then, like, that's not the best way to think about sex as important as orgasms are.
26:37 Speaker 01 I mean, that kind of ignores everything else. It ignores the foreplay, ignores the desire, ignores the anticipation and the enjoyment that can happen from like, the physical act and the intimacy beyond just, well, knocking one out, basically.
26:50 Kate Lister? Yeah.
26:51 Speaker 01 It's it's a more complex experience than that. So I quite like the idea that orgao in the ancient Greek actually kind of encompasses more of that. So writing the book, I definitely did have to approach, I searched for references to like lust and desire, um, to like sex acts, um, to like also basically female blue balls and regretting not having sex.
27:15 Speaker 01 And all of those things. So not just the climax. I had to like give up on that, but also I think that was a good thing to not just be looking for the climax. Because and also, an orgasm can be something you experience in a negative context too. Like, it's not a guarantee of like, I had a good time. Although, again, that doesn't mean we shouldn't be trying for orgasms or we should give up on them. But it's just, I think it's nice to think of it in a holistic way and think of every aspect of it. And think about it more complexly. Because, yeah, then like, because if if you treat it in the ancient way of like, some schools of thought where the like Epicureans believed that, you know, both had to have an orgasm to have a baby, it becomes this quite. Medical, like, not very sexy thing.
28:00 Kate Lister? Yeah, it's a very neo tantric way of thinking about it. Today, that's what tantric groups tend to practise is like they, for men, it's like they don't have the orgasm. And that's why Sting can like go for eight hours because the idea is that you don't ejaculate. But they really try and dismantle this idea that you're chasing the orgasm, that the point of sex is an orgasm, which I've always thought is a very interesting thing to do, just to like, to break it down what we think of when we think of sex.
28:24 Speaker 01 Yeah, because, yeah, like, I do, like, it's sort of, I ended, I also thought, like, approaching ancient sex, it was important to, to read more modern research about like our bodies and sex and our responses to pleasure. And one writer, whose work I really ended up enjoying, was Emily Nagoski. She's a sex therapist and researcher. And I found her research very interesting because she was talking, she talked a lot about the different stages of desire and how those can all build to a better experience of sex and to like a more pleasurable orgasm. So it's like, that's all important, like a kind of ladder. And, and that made me think about the ancient stuff in that way, too.
29:13 Kate Lister? I'll be back with Jean after this short break.
29:21 Kate Lister? Hello, Betwixters. I am 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. Right, let's get on with it.
30:03 Kate Lister? What about same-sex sex? Because one of the things that I sort of noticed when I was doing research in this is that it's hella fallacy-centric, our understanding of what sex is. It's like almost unilaterally across the board, from the ancient world to right up to now. It's sex, we've got this idea that it's sticking a dick in something. That's what real sex is. So talk to me about same-sex sex. And we've got a name drop, Sappho, in amongst all of this.
30:28 Speaker 01 Oh, I mean, I love Sappho with all my heart.
30:35 Speaker 01 Unfortunately, Sappho doesn't really get into the nitty-gritty. She talks a lot about like, we lay down together. And she doesn't really explain exactly what they did when they laid down, although I think we can hazard some guesses, you know? There's been lots of excellent, practical lesbian research that's been done.
30:53 Speaker 01 Yeah, so she doesn't necessarily describe in detail. And so one thing I think's interesting and actually useful about sources written by men is the things they talk about as being taboo then give you an indication of some of the stuff that people are actually doing. Because they're not going to talk about how taboo it is and how disgusting women are for eating each other out if women aren't eating each other out.
31:17 Kate Lister? Very true.
31:19 Speaker 01 I think that you also have to like approach it like that. So Cuddlingus, whether you were a man doing it or a woman doing it, was seen as very taboo. It was like, it was akin to eating feces in some sources.
31:30 Kate Lister? And it shows up on the graffiti in Pompeii as well. Their number one insult is cunt liquor. They just throw that around, but that's the worst thing you can call somebody.
31:39 Speaker 01 Oh, no. You pleasured your wife. You terrible person. It's insane.
31:45 Kate Lister? Why do you think that is? Why this real like fear-phobia revulsion around performing Cuddlingus? Because it can't just be the lesbians that they were really upset about.
31:54 Speaker 01 I think it goes back to, there's a like very strong-held belief in ancient Greek sex, I think, like trickles into ancient Roman sex, that there are passive partners and active partners. And to be a proper masculine man, a grown-up adult man. Um. You have to be the active um partner, which also means you have to be the penetrator. So to perform conalingus is effeminate and um degrading to your status as a as a man. Um. And therefore, so it and then if you're doing these things, like if you're a woman using a dildo on another woman, you're you're acting too much like a man. And it's it's very much about creating these conforming gender roles, which might differ from our idea of gender roles today, but I think they still very much exist.
32:37 Speaker 01 Um. These kind of ways of defining proper men and proper women. Um. So to lick a cunt would have been very effeminate and not masculine and not manly.
32:48 Kate Lister? Because why would you be doing that when you've got when you've got the almighty penis that you could be using?
32:53 Speaker 01 I think I forget, I always forget my sort of like the specific names, but there's one source I talk about in the book. Um. Where he says like cunt lickers are either like too old to get it up or they can't get it up. Like, that's the only possible reason you could want to do that.
33:08 Kate Lister? The only possible reason anyone could want to do that.
33:11 Speaker 01 Not to enjoy pleasurable sex with your partner.
33:14 Kate Lister? I think I think that like we still live in the wreckage of that particular idea today about um. Because I was talking to a brilliant scholar, Harry Tanner, about the history of homophobia. And we were talking about like what causes it and we're having a discussion around, is homophobia actually just misogyny kind of writ large? You know, we have some ideas about that because it's it's basically being men being scared of being turned into something feminine.
33:40 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, yeah. It it oh, gender roles are so depressing. There's also, I like always think, just like a very important statement. Um. You know, in these sort of like the pick up artists and things like that, they talk about, you'll find like a YouTube video be like, is going down on a woman beta?
33:59 Kate Lister? Yes, I've seen all of that crap. It just means you're shit in bed. That's if you don't go, if you're not prepared to give your partner heads to get heads, then it just means that you are crap shagger, quite frankly. What about Aphrodite? Because she is like, she's the legacy from the ancient world as this kind of repository of all things sexual and and feminine. How does her history play into your research?
34:23 Speaker 01 Going back as well to like the Sapphic side of things and the women fancying each other side of things. Um. One of my favorite things I talk about in the book is Aphrodite as a goddess of queer love as well. I think there's almost a concept that because we don't. No of any myths where Aphrodite had sex with other women or fell in love with other women, that therefore she only represented heterosexual love, whereas like Sappho writes poetry to Aphrodite, asking for her help to woo women. So we have certain things like cursed tablets, which are examples of ancient magic, where someone would maybe write like, I, Patricia, would like, would like Doreen to fancy me, Eros, Aphrodite, Isis. It'll
35:07 Speaker 01 usually be like a mixture of like Greek and Egyptian gods. I call to you to make her fancy me, basically. So I think like, even if in the mainstream, men don't, if men mainstream don't see Aphrodite as a goddess of female love, because they don't think like love between and sexual pleasure between women exists, clearly the queer women did. They still saw her as their goddess.
35:29 Kate Lister? Yeah.
35:30 Speaker 01 They look at her and think, you still represent me and I can talk to you about my feelings and my desires. And I think that's quite like a nice, personal thing. And I also think it's quite interesting, because it's not really how we think of religion today. Religion isn't really sexy today.
35:43 Kate Lister? Yeah.
35:44 Speaker 01 In the broad, broadest sense, people obviously have their own relationships with religion, whereas like, sex is religious, effectively, in antiquity. And there's sometimes one of the euphemisms for let's have sex is, let us enjoy the rites of Aphrodite. It's like literally a religious act.
36:02 Kate Lister? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I suppose that was, it's the Abrahamic faith, isn't it, is that they were noticeably different from what went before, because their god is not running around humping everything that moves.
36:13 Speaker 01 Whereas Aphrodite definitely was, as were all the other, well, not all of them, there are virgin goddesses, but a lot of them were.
36:19 Kate Lister? Could you get easily divorced if you were an ancient Greek woman?
36:23 Speaker 01 Well, this is like another example of like, how it's not a homogenous culture.
36:27 Kate Lister? Okay.
36:28 Speaker 01 So divorce existed, and how easy it was depends on where you are. And I think that's really interesting, because again, it goes back to that whole idea we're talking about at the beginning, where women's lives were all just like as prisoners of men and had no capacity to express themselves or enjoy any freedoms, whereas there's lots of evidence that women could divorce their husbands, which is really important. So in classical Athens, you could divorce your husband, but you always had to have a male guardian. So even divorcing your husband meant you were just going to go back to your father, or your brother, or your uncle, if he wasn't your husband. And, and he was going to be your new guardian. So you were. You you couldn't own property and you still retain that kind of status as belonging to a man.
37:10 Speaker 01 Whereas like one of my favourite, one of my favourite law codes is the law code in Gorton on Crete. And it's incredible because we actually have this massive portion of this law code survives. And from a public inscription that which was then reused in a Roman theatre that was built in Gorton. And it's a Greek inscription of the classical law code and probably Hellenistic as well. And where women could own property. In Athens as well, you probably couldn't choose your husband. It was kind of chosen for you. Whereas in Gorton, you were encouraged, you know, maybe to marry an uncle or a cousin to keep property in the family. But you could say no if you didn't want to and you could pick someone else.
37:50 Kate Lister? Okay.
37:51 Speaker 01 So you could pick somebody else to be your husband. You just had to give a little bit of money to like the family members to be like, I'm sorry I didn't marry you. But here's some money.
37:59 Kate Lister? Right, okay, okay. It's a low bar, but I, yeah, there's some agency there.
38:04 Speaker 01 You take what you can get.
38:07 Speaker 01 And then you could divorce your husband. And when you divorced your husband, you took all your property with you. It was divvied up like it would be in most divorces today where like.
38:14 Kate Lister? Wow.
38:15 Speaker 01 Half the property, anything you brought into the marriage, you retained and you could take away with you. You weren't then under the guardianship of a man because you could own your own property. So you could live somewhat independently. And also, if it, it doesn't specify how this would occur. But it does say that if it was the man's fault you divorced, you got extra property.
38:34 Kate Lister? Wow, okay, okay.
38:37 Speaker 01 That's what I would live.
38:39 Kate Lister? Is there anything in the sources that tells us reasons that you could get divorced?
38:43 Speaker 01 So not for Gorton, like the only thing we have from Gorton is law code. In classical Athens, you do get like some insights of potential reasons why a woman might want to divorce a man. One example is that her husband wouldn't have vaginal sex with her. He would only have anal sex with her because he didn't want any more children and she wanted children. So she was like, well, I'm divorcing you.
39:06 Kate Lister? Wow.
39:06 Speaker 01 Yeah.
39:07 Kate Lister? Wow. Now that is an interesting case to hear, like that, how are you proving that? Like that must have happened at least more than once for that to have made it into into law somewhere.
39:18 Speaker 01 I think the impression I get from the law is that there's not like you have to meet a certain standard to get divorced. The the impression I get is that you would be given a divorce if you asked for one.
39:31 Kate Lister? Okay, okay.
39:33 Speaker 01 But it's just that, like, then then you get into the idea of like, would there be stigma attached to that? So would you not do it because there's stigma? And there's also the awful example of this, there's this dude called Alcibiades, who everybody hates in antiquity, and everyone hates now, because he kept betraying everybody politically and going to different sides. And his wife, there's a story, which might not even be true. It's like one of those classic stories, it's like preserved. It could just be like a rumor story, you know, to make him look bad. But the story is that his wife tried to divorce him, so she's on her way to the the Archon to ask for a divorce, and he runs into the street with his pals and drags her home.
40:09 Kate Lister? Fuck, wow, okay.
40:10 Speaker 01 And obviously, that could be made up. But I think it does give you that sense of like, of course, women could be physically forced to stay in a marriage, just like they are today. So just because it existed didn't mean women had easy access to it. But the fact that existed, I think, gives, shows some respect to women and their decision about their partner, which I like.
40:29 Kate Lister? Absolutely. I'm just, I'm still sort of stuck on the idea that if you broke up with your partner, you had to go back and live with either your dad or your brother. And I just keep thinking about, like, my poor brother, if I kept having to turn up at his house every time the relationship, every time a situationship went south, which, Jesus Christ, Kate, no, again.
40:48 Speaker 01 Well, if they would at least let you have some property, then you'd be fine.
40:52 Kate Lister? Then this wouldn't happen. It wasn't my fucking idea.
40:55 Speaker 01 There's also a likelihood that in Athens, if your dad didn't like your husband, he could make you get divorced, even if you didn't want to, which is a bit of a bother.
41:03 Kate Lister? Oh, fuck, wow. I'm just trying to think how that would have played out in my life.
41:08 Speaker 01 You know, you have to get, you really need your dad's approval.
41:10 Kate Lister? Yeah, wow, okay. Suppose as a, as a final question then, because I'm sort of sensing that you might have done the same thing that I did when I was writing Flick, is that you start off by going, I'm going to tell the story from women's point of view. And I'm going to go in, and I'm going to find all the examples of sexual pleasure and prove that they were having a great time. And then very quickly, you realise, no, you're not, you're not going to do that.
41:32 Speaker 01 There's some lines we're going to have to read between.
41:34 Kate Lister? Oh, fuck, yeah, we have to read between the lines. So where is the joy that that you found in this book? Because we've covered a lot of stuff that isn't very joyful. It sounds a bit.
41:44 Speaker 01 Sorry.
41:45 Kate Lister? No, no, no, don't apologise. That's the reality of it. It was bleak. But tell me where the, where the joy was that you found.
41:53 Speaker 01 So I think it is in the women's voices. So. I like very intentionally chose to dedicate the first chapter of the book to the sparse sources we did have written by women. Because I then wanted the readers and myself to have those voices in mind when reading everything else. Because I think it helps you again read between the lines, see where women might have disagreed, see where women might have found loopholes. Um, and in those voices, we have people like Sappho who are talking about, I love this woman and we dedicated crowns to Aphrodite and then we lay down on straw mats and then dot, dot, dot. Who knows? Uh, but like straw mats were associated with prostitution, like sex.
42:38 Kate Lister? Didn't know that. There you go. Wow. Okay.
42:41 Speaker 01 That's what they're lying down to do. I have absolutely no doubt in my mind. Um, and then you've got Solpichia, she was a Roman poet. Who talks a lot about this boyfriend she had and there's one poem where she's like, oh, I really regret not having sex with you. You're like, okay, so she, she was feeling horny and it's nice to see a woman acknowledge that, even if she didn't see it through. She's like, oh, next time I won't say no. Next time, let's do it. That's what she says in her poem. I don't know if they ever did, uh, written for her. But in that sense, you've sort of got, okay. The, the, these women who are not ashamed of their, their desire, these women who clearly embrace that feeling of sexuality and that feeling of desire and want to have sex.
43:24 Speaker 01 There's a lot of metaphors like, uh, my heart is burning. Very like similar to what we say today, really, that kind of like almost, is it indigestion or is it, is it horniness?
43:34 Kate Lister? It's a constant, it's a constant struggle, that one. Do I need a gavaskon or do I need a good decking? I'm not absolutely sure which one.
43:40 Speaker 01 In the ancient world, the solution is always the same because sex is the solution to all medical problems, including indigestion.
43:47 Kate Lister? That's such a man who came up with that. That's ridiculous.
43:52 Speaker 01 There's also a poet who I love called Nosis, who not a lot of people talk about. And we've got like a few fragments of her poems and she's from maybe like two centuries after Sappho. And she was a big fan of Sappho as well. Her poetry doesn't indicate whether she's talking about men or women, but she talks about desire and erotic love, specifically like eros, so we're talking about sexual love, not just like platonic love, um, as being like sweet as honey. And you're thinking, oh, that sounds like she had a nice time.
44:19 Kate Lister? Yeah.
44:19 Speaker 01 I don't know what the details were, but if it was sweet as honey, that's got to be good. And then there's this fantastic poem that's actually been graffitied on a wall in Pompeii. Anonymous writer, but it's from one woman to another woman saying, leave your man behind, come kiss me, let's embrace. Again, like not a lot of details about the sex act, but we can see where it's going. Let's be logical.
44:42 Kate Lister? Yeah.
44:43 Speaker 01 Like, there's a lot of embracing and touching in the poem. And, and I think if nothing else, even if they're not sharing the specific details of the sex act, they're showing a willingness to embrace their sexuality. And I think like, um, again, just because there might have been judgment, maybe about like eating your partner out, or there might have been judgment about this or that. It didn't mean they, they all felt that, that they all felt shame. And actually they might have been like finding ways, which I think is kind of what we've got to accept that maybe it would have been hard, but that doesn't mean the women weren't finding ways.
45:18 Kate Lister? Absolutely. Oh, Jean, you have been wonderful to talk to. I knew that you would be. If people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?
45:27 Speaker 01 I think all of my social media is under Jean's Thoughts, which is a username I think I came up with in like 2012. And it's stuck.
45:37 Kate Lister? And give us the full title of the book.
45:39 Speaker 01 Aphrodite, Women, Sex and Pleasure in the Classical World. It was originally called The Ancient O.
45:45 Kate Lister? The Ancient O, oh, that's good. That's good. I like that. I think Aphrodite is, I can see why, was that an editor that went like?
45:54 Speaker 01 Yeah.
45:55 Kate Lister? Yeah, yeah.
45:58 Kate Lister? I can see why they did it, but I do like the Ancient O.
46:01 Speaker 01 Thanks, thanks.
46:03 Kate Lister? Thank you so much. You've been marvelous.
46:05 Speaker 01 Thank you for having me.
46:09 Kate Lister? Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Jean for joining me. 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've got a brand new mini-series, The Super Sluts of History. Hurrah! Where we will be exploring and celebrating sexually liberated women of the past who just couldn't get enough of it. Starting with none other than the Empress Theodora herself. And if you want us to explore a subject, or if you just wanted to say hello, or perhaps you fucked off your best friend's birthday to go and see Axl Rose, then you can email us at [email protected] . This podcast was edited by Hannah Theodorov and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer is Freddy Chick. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast by History Hit.
46:54 Kate Lister? This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.
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