“The laws of Manu,” continues Havelock Ellis, “attribute to women concupiscence and anger, the love of bed and of adornment. The Jews attribute to women greater sexual desire than to men. This is illustrated, according to Knobel (as quoted by Dillman), by Genesis, chapter 3, verse 16.[70]
“In Greek antiquity, ... in love between men and women the latter were nearly always regarded as taking the more active part. In all Greek love-stories of early date the woman falls in love with the man, and never the reverse. Æschylus makes even a father assume that his daughters will misbehave if left to themselves. Euripides emphasised the importance of women. ‘The Euripidean woman who falls in love thinks first of all: “How can I seduce the man I love?”’ (E.F.M. Benecke: Antimachus of Colophon and the Position of Women in Greek Poetry, 1896).
“The most famous passage in Latin literature as to the question of whether men or women obtain greater pleasure from sexual intercourse is that in which Ovid relates the legend of Tiresias (Metamorphoses, 3, 317-333). Tiresias, having been both a man and a woman, decided in favour of women.... In a passage quoted from a lost work of Galen by the Arabian biographer, Abu-l-Faraj, that great physician says of the Christians ‘that they practice celibacy, that even many of their women do so.’ So that in Galen’s opinion it was more difficult for a woman than for a man to be continent. The same view is widely prevalent among Arabic authors, and there is an Arabic saying that ‘The longing of the woman for the penis is greater than that of the man for the vulva.’[71]
“The early Christian Fathers clearly show that they regard women as more inclined to sexual enjoyment than men. That was ... the opinion of Tertullian (De Virginibus Velandis), and it is clearly implied in some of St. Jerome’s epistles.
“Notwithstanding the influence of Christianity, among the vigorous barbarian races of mediæval Europe the existence of sexual appetite in women was not considered to be, as it later became, a matter to be concealed or denied. Thus in 1068 the ecclesiastical historian, Ordericus Vitalis (himself half Norman and half English), narrates that the wives of the Norman knights who had accompanied William the Conqueror to England two years earlier sent over to their husbands to say that they were consumed by the fierce flames of desire, and that if their husbands failed to return very shortly they proposed to take other husbands. It is added that this threat brought a few husbands back to their wanton ladies.
“During the mediæval period in Europe, largely in consequence, no doubt, of the predominance of ascetic ideals set up by men who naturally regarded women as the symbol of sex, the doctrine of the incontinence of woman became firmly fixed.... Humanism and the spread of the Renaissance movement brought in a spirit more sympathetic to women.... We begin to find attempts at analysing the sexual emotions. In the seventeenth century a book of this kind was written by Venette. In matters of love, Venette declared, ‘men are but children compared to women. In these matters women have a more lively imagination, and they usually have more leisure to think of love. Women are much more lascivious and amorous than men.’ In a subsequent chapter, dealing with the question whether men or women receive more pleasure from the sexual embrace, Venette concludes, after admitting the great difficulty of the question, that man’s pleasure is greater, but that woman’s lasts longer. (N. Venette, De la Génération de l’Homme ou Tableau de l’Amour Conjugal, 1688).”
These and similar quotations, all acknowledging or laying stress on the erotic appetite of women, might be continued indefinitely. Among the other supporters of the opinion quoted by Havelock Ellis are Montaigne (Essais), Schurig (Parthenologia), Plazzonus (De Partibus Generationi Inservientibus), Ferrand (De la Maladie d’Amour), Zacchia (Quæstiones Medico-Legales), Sinibaldus (Geneanthropeia), Senancour (De l’Amour), Busch, Guttceit,[72] Mantegazza (Fisiologia del Piacere), Forel (The Sexual Question), who believed that women are more erotic than men, and Bloch (The Sexual Life of Our Time), who says, “The sexual sensibility of women is certainly different from that of men, but in strength it is at least as great.”
For our part, we find it hard to ignore that overwhelming consensus of opinion among early writers as to the erotic nature of the average woman. Was not this feminine amativeness the theme upon which were built the undying contes and fabliaux of Boccaccio, Bandello, Masuccio, Straparola, La Fontaine, Poggio, Ser Giovanni, Chaucer, Brantôme and a host of others? Are we to label Casanova’s Memoirs as worthless because his women seem, in our modern eyes, erotic beyond all belief? Turning to the literature of the East, where woman’s ‘thirst for coïtion is written between her eyes,’[73] are we to hold the feminine attributes therein described as peculiar to those peoples and times? Must we believe that all these writers fashioned women out of their own lascivious fancy, or that the sexual impulse in the women of those races has totally changed?
Without a doubt, time and custom are responsible for much that seems obscure and irreconcilable. Many of our authorities are writing of an age in which men and women spoke and acted in a manner which to-day seems coarse and inexcusably free. Because in the past woman more readily gave outward expression to her inward feeling, it does not follow now that, by reason of her greater reserve, she lacks these emotions.
History has shown us psychologists and investigators in plenty, but they were not the psychologists of to-day, recording the results of their investigations with meticulous care and detail. The sexually frigid woman, we can confidently assume, was by no means unknown to the ancients. She was, however, unusual, abnormal; and if a sexually frigid woman be accounted abnormal, it is not hard to see why a normal is deemed erotic.