Female Sexuality
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.
www.ivillage.co.uk
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.
www.ivillage.co.uk