To understand the present we have to consider the past. Little is known about sexual behaviour in ancient times, but from the time of earliest recorded history, about 3,000BC, women were considered as property, valued only for reproduction. Adultery was not only a sin but a trespass against a husband. In ancient Greece, a woman was simply called ‘gyne’, which meant ‘bearer of children’. While the Greeks viewed women as chattels and the Romans considered infertility as grounds for divorce, the Christian church after the fall of Rome went even further. The church fathers deemed sex unsavoury and women a threat to male salvation. Nothing, said St Augustine, brought ‘the manly mind down from the heights more than a woman’s caresses and that joining of bodies’. Procreation with such ‘temptresses’ was to be accomplished by passionless, purposeful intercourse.

Even as late as the 19th century, women were expected to embrace modesty, personify purity, and lack all sexual desire. The Victorian era transformed the middle-class housewife into no less than a guardian of the public morality. Her place was at home with her children, protecting the family’s decency and social position. She endured sex with her husband for procreation, but if her husband was a decent soul he subjected her to his animal urges as infrequently as possible.

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For women only: the history of female sexuality