What Do Women Want

agreement
with Tiresias about women’s superior ecstasy, described the female role in
conception this way: “By nature much delight accompanies the ejection of the
seed, by the breaking forth of swelling spirit and the stiffness of nerves.”
    Still, this embrace of women’s sexuality, from
Exodus onward, shouldn’t be taken as the prevailing ethos of any period. The
ancient wariness and repression of female eros is a story that barely needs
telling. There is Eve’s position as first sinner: seductress and source of
mankind’s banishment from paradise. There is, from Tertullian, founding
theologian of Christianity, the assignment of Eve’s sinfulness to all women. All
women were destined to be “the Devil’s gateway.” There are Moses’s
transcriptions of God’s warnings in Leviticus. As the Jews encamp at Mount Sinai
on their journey toward the land of milk and honey, God descends in a cloud and
makes clear, again and again, that the center of a woman’s sexual anatomy
overflows with horror, with a monthly blood “fountain” so monstrous that she
must be quarantined, “put apart for seven days, and whosoever toucheth her shall
be unclean . . . and everything that she lieth upon shall be
unclean, everything also that she sitteth upon.” The litany of taint continues,
relentlessly, until the decree that those who “uncover” the fountain and have
sex will be expelled from the tribe, cast away from God’s people.
    For the Greeks, the original woman was Pandora.
Molded by the gods out of clay, her erotic thrall and threat—her “beautiful evil
. . . bedecked with all manner of finery” in the poet Hesiod’s
rendition, her “shameless mind and deceitful nature”—made her as dangerous as
Eve. Lust-drunk witches of the Middle Ages left men “smooth,” devoid of their
genitals; and to the long line of living nightmares caused by female carnality,
French and Dutch anatomists of the seventeenth century contributed the clitoris
that grew with too much touching into a full-blown phallus, turning women into
men who ravished their former sex.
    But if the pre-Enlightenment West had always been
frightened by female heat, sometimes extoling it, yet corralling it carefully
within the bounds of marriage—where, for the sake of women’s as well as men’s
sexual release, England’s early Protestant clergy prescribed conjugal relations
exactly three times per month, with a week off for menstruation—what followed
eventually, with Victorianism, was a focused effort at extinguishing it. Lately
historians have made the case that the Victorian era in Europe and America
wasn’t as prudish as we’ve tended to think; still, on the subject of female
desire, it was a period of ardent denial. As with all the tectonic shifts of
history, this one had uncountable reasons. One explanation has beginnings in the
sixteen hundreds, with scientists’ incipient realizations about the ovum, about
the egg’s part in reproduction. Slowly, incrementally, this ended Galen’s
legacy; gradually it separated women’s ability to ignite from their ability to
get pregnant. The ever-haunting female libido became less and less of a
necessity. It could be purged without price.
    Then, too, at the outset of the nineteenth century,
nascent feminist campaigns and evangelical Christian rallying cries converged
around the theme of irreproachable female morality. The two voices were
intertwined; they amplified each other. Nineteenth-century feminists made
humankind’s salvation, here on earth and forever, their own womanly mission;
Christianity made womanhood its exemplar. American prison reformer Eliza Farnham
preached that “the purity of woman is the everlasting barrier against which the
tides of man’s sensual nature surge.” Without this feminine barricade, “dire
disorder will follow.” And educational crusader Emma Willard proclaimed that it
was for women to “orbit . . . around the Holy Centre of
perfection” in order to keep men “in their proper course.” One well-read
American manual for young brides captured the inextricable feminist and
evangelical spirits: women were “above human nature, raised to that of
angels.”
    This was all a long way from “by nature much
delight accompanies the ejection of seed.” The innately pious had replaced the
fundamentally carnal. The new rhetoric both instilled and reflected a
transformation. In the mid–eighteen hundreds, in a letter about the sexual
lapses of