Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Sex & Pleasure in the Ancient World

Episode Date: June 2, 2026

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.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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? We'll 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 forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. How the hell are you doing? It is wonderful to see you around 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, an adult who are coming arranged.

All subjects and you should be an adult too. That's the fair do's warning, and let's get on with it. Holy fuck, it is hot, isn't it? I mean, it is, Balls hot. No, no, no, no, we're not in the UK during one of our intermittent heat waves. 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 mean, wow, wow. I don't usually get starstruck or in this case tit struck, but she is one fine-looking woman. 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. Should we find out more?

I think so. Welcome back to Petricks O'Shee, to The History of Sex Scandal and Society with me, Kate Lester. 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 six thousand years. Well, join 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 hear, I just wanted to say an enormous thank you 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 freaking 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. 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 and Rose's gig instead. Huh. That's a divisive one.

There'll be people listening. Go, Lucy, and other people thinking, huh, I might be on Kira's side here. But as you're both dedicated betwixt the sheet's listeners, I'm going to 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 Betwix the Sheets team. Right. Now we've dealt with that. Should we crack on?

Well, hello and welcome to Betwicks the Sheets. It's only Jean Mingus. How are you doing, lovely? Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. What a nice way to... I was going to say kick off the week, but it's waiting to do. Well, it depends when you start the week, doesn't it?

And so, you know, days... It was a bank holiday. 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. Aphrodisiya, women, sex and pleasure in the ancient world. Very excited. I know. We were just saying this is the year of the sex books. Women's pleasure. Taking centre stage. Very excited about that.

Yeah, I'm just super excited to finally get to talk more about this subject. not just sit in your wee office. I know. I know. That's that weird moment, isn't it? It's where the thing that you wrote and you've done it is now about to be released into the world. And you're just sort of like half excited but also half terrified of it. Yeah. 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? 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 PhD 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 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, no, 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. The closer and closer I got to the end of that, the more and more I was just desperate to look for the nice stuff, the good stuff, the fun stuff, the pleasurable stuff. And I just, yeah, it really captivated me. And I was like, after this is all over and once I've had a wee break, I'm going to go full, like, dive deep into seeing what I can find on the other side of things was what I really wanted. 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 kind of an odd thing to say. And 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 just hideously unpleasurable for women, at least? Absolutely. I feel like so, in 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. There's no, yeah, moments of joy, which couldn't be further of 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. 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 is 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. It's just like, it's happened to me four times today. It's absolutely ridiculous. And these things were still illegal. There was still, like, legal recourse to, in antiquity.

in 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. 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. Yeah. We do. Yeah, we do. Done. You focus a lot on the ancient world. 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 dick ends. 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 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, 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. 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. It doesn't necessarily specifically mention sex but there's this

fantastic letter that the Roman poet Sulpiccia wrote to her friend going, my boyfriend's not going to be here for my birthday. She's so angry about it and I just love those little 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 used to attract women and women used 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 there is yeah but do you know what all history is that like as much as we try and pretend that like 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.

I know. And no source is like neutral. Everything's bias. Everything's biased. Just 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. That we've got to throw into the mix. I should probably should have asked you because this is a starter question. This is a page one question. When was ancient? Greece, Jane.

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 BC.

But then you can also say there was the Mycenae and the anonans beforehand to influence them, but I wasn't looking at that. So I was say 700 BCE. And then I was looking into the time of imperial Roman rule as well. The height to the peak. 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 BC to maybe like 300, 400 CE. 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 can have to go, no, it's this bit to this bit. And then someone will come in and go, yeah, but like they did. at the time they weren't aware.

Like, shut up, shut up, shut up. I'm just doing this bit to this bit and that's what you've got. Yeah, someone else could do the other bits. And it's also like, even within that, that's like a thousand years of a clearly non-homogeneous 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, women in Athens in 600 BCE as it is to be a Greek women in Gorton in like 200 BC. Exactly. When I was still teaching at university, I was always explaining that to the students of like, 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 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? I mean, the limited number of sources helps.

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. I think it's like we're, you have to accept that you're gleaning moments. You're not gleaning everything. you're glearing 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 examples 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 100 years later, women like this one who wrote the letter was thinking, actually, I don't like this law.

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, a lot of interest. That was what my PhD was on, you know, about how the Victorians retold the medieval period. and 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 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.

Oh my God, wow. So you hear my voice and you think COVID jabs. Yeah. That was a good thing. That's a good thing. I like that. Yeah, get a jab. Get your vaccines.

But yeah, there's this sort of like almost, I feel like now we're finally undoing some of the work that the Victorians did. Yeah. Which was really to brush a lot of the sexual aspects of antiquity under the carpet, like quite. concisely. They were very shocked by it, weren't they? Oh my God. They were appalled and they literally almost tried to rewrite history. Yeah. Because they loved ancient Greece so much. Like to them and it wasn't just the Victorians. Like 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? 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 idealised white culture where we learn 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 idealised intellectual very not body which was wrong yeah masculine yeah very much so and even like oh my god I mean

there was some struggles getting their heads around the idea that men had six other men in antiquity as well for a while real real struggle And it's also like, I don't know, for me, as a women, 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. Yeah. Like, it felt like it belonged to them. And I think, like, we're now undoing some of that negative work. because it is just covering up history. Like, it's just wrong.

I'll be back with Jean after this short break. But did you, like, push past that then? Because that's interesting, because 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, Jane,

and be like, no, fuck you. I'm going to study this stuff. To be fair, I think I've always been a very, adamant person and 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 a state school not studying at school I had excellent parents in that they were very encouraging and my dad oh like very like he was an ex-miner like all that very like traditional 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 going to watch a documentary, I'm going to buy you this kid's book about ancient Rome, we're going to go to the library, and I think that it was like make or break for me and Xenna Warrior Princess.

Yeah. Did you find any Zina Warrior Princesses in your research? No, I wish. Oh. I mean, I mean, you know, there's only so much we know about ancient warrior women and who knows. Who knows? Who knows? But 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 sort, 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 women aren't supposed to feel, that they don't experience pleasure in the same way that men do. How did that look in the ancient world. It's such a contrast, right? Such a contrast. In antiquity, women were perceived as nymphomaniacs. We were all guided.

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 penitative penile sex with your husband, and then you will be healthy and happy. Yeah. Yeah. And did this particular bonkers belief translate to spectacular levels of sexual freedom for women in ancient grief?

Absolutely not. 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. Absolutely. We couldn't solve that problem ourselves either. None of those things would work. 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? And I think that we still live in the shadow of this particularly Greek thought today, that women are guided and rooted by their bio, What do you think? Oh, I mean, first of all, just the complete, utter nonsense that was our understanding of biology in antiquities.

It wasn't great, was it? It was a bit, it was, I always would be careful 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? It's guesswork, right? And like, you know, I always, I always like to give the ancient Greek some credit. There are things that are not wild, and we might laugh at them now. Like one of, 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, well, 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. Like not like. Don't use that, please, listeners. No, no.

Thank you. Just behave yourself. We don't need a load of babies reappeating Jean Mingus babies. You told me olive oil would solve my problems. But that's amazinger. So they were showing some awareness of that? Exactly. They were like, okay, so less babies are being born when we use olive oil. Yeah, let's keep doing that.

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. I think you're right. it's just and also most women's health was actually treated by women like midwives were women male physicians when they were seeing two women's gyneological 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. And we know that there were women physicians, right? 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 then interestingly enough, quite often women who were potentially writing medical treaties

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 Elephantis 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. It might have been better than that. Not that that's anything wrong with that, to be fair. 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? So there's no ancient Greek word for orgasm.

But interestingly, orgasm does come from ancient Greek, from Orgaul. But I think Orgao is such an interesting word, because in some ways, it's both vaguer but also better. For me, like as a researcher, because it refers to the anticipations. 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 helped me think about sex more holistically, I think, when I was researched and 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. And then I realized, that's not really achievable. Yeah, no, you're not. You're not going to write that. God damn it, the source is out of available.

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 I mean that kind of ignores everything else 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 it's a more complex experience than that so I quite like the idea that Orgao in the ancient Greek act kind of encompasses more of that.

So right in the book, I definitely did have to approach. I searched for references to like lust and desire, to like sex acts, to like also basically female blue balls in regretting not having sex. 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 also an orgasm can be something you experience in a negative context too. it's not a guarantee of like I had a good time. 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 you treat it in the ancient way of like some schools of thought where that 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. Yeah. It's a very neo-tantric way of thinking about it. Today, that's what tantric groups tend to practice. 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 all 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 break it, down what we think of when we think of sex. Yeah, because, yeah, like, I do.

Like, it sort of, I ended, I also thought, like, approaching ancient sex, it was important to read more modern research about, like, our bodies and sex and our responses to pleasure. And one's 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 that made me think about the ancient stuff in that way too. I'll be back with Jean after this short break. 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 hell of phallocentric, 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 me about same-sex sex, sex. And we've got a name drop Sappho in amongst all of this. I mean, I love Sappho with all my heart. I mean, unfortunately, Sappho doesn't really get into the nitty-gray.

She talks a lot about, like, we lay down together. She doesn't really explain exactly what they did when they lay down, although I think we can hazard some guesses. you know. There's been lots of excellent practical lesbian research that's been done. Yeah, so she doesn't necessarily describe in detail. And so one thing I think is 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. Very true. Very true. I think you also have to approach it like that. So Cudalinguists, whether you were a man doing it or women doing it, was seen as very taboo. It was akin to eating feces in some sources. And it shows upon the graffiti in Pompeii as well.

Their number one insult is cunt liquor. They just throw that around. That's the worst thing you can call somebody. Oh no. You pleasured your wife. You terrible person. It's insane. Why do you think that is?

Why is this real fear, phobia, revulsion around performing cunolingus? Because it can't just be the lesbians that they were really upset about. I think it goes back to, there's a 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, you have to be the active partner, which also means you have to be the penetrator. So to perform cunolingus is effeminate. and degrading to your status as a man.

And then if you're doing these things, like if you're a woman using a dildo on another woman, you're acting too much like a man. And it's very much about creating these conforming gender roles, which might differ from our idea of gender rules today, but I think they still very much exist, these kind of ways of defining proper men and proper women. so to lick a cunt

which have been very effeminate and not masculine and not manly Because why would you be doing that when you've got the almighty penis that you could be using? 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

where he says like cunt lickers are either 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. The only possible reason anyone could want to Not to enjoy pleasurable sex with your partner. I think that we still live in the wreckage of that particular idea today about

because I was talking to a brilliant scholar Harry Tanner about the history of homophobia and we were talking about what causes it and we're having a discussion around is homophobia actually just misogyny kind of writ large? We have some ideas about that because it's basically men being scared of being turned into something feminine. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Gender roles are so depressing. There's also I always think

just very important statement. You know, in these sort of like the pickup artists and things like that you'll find a YouTube video be like, is going down on a woman beta? 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 head to get ahead, then it just means that you are crap shag, quite frankly. What about Aphrodite? Because she has, like, she's the legacy from the ancient world as this kind of reprositary of all things sexual and feminine. How does her history play into your research? Going back as well to like the sapphic side of things and the women fancying each other side of things. One of my favourite 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 know 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 Saffo writes poetry to Aphrodite asking for her help to woo women. So we have certain things like curse tablets,

which are examples of ancient magic, where someone would maybe write like, I, Patricia, would like Doreen to fancy me. Eros, Aphrodite, Isis. It will usually be like a mixture of 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. Yeah. 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. Yeah. In the broadest sense, people obviously have their own relationships with religion. Whereas sex is religious, effectively, in antiquity. And there's sometimes one of the euphemisms for let's have sex is let us enjoy the rights of Aphrodite. It's like literally a religious act.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I suppose that was, it's the Abrahamic faiths, isn't it? is that they were noticeably different from what went before because their god is not running around humping everything that moves. Whereas Aphrodite definitely was as were all the other. Well, not all of them. There are virgin goddesses, but a lot of them were.

Could you get easily divorced if you were an ancient Greek woman? Well, this is like another example of how it's not a homogenous culture. Okay. 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 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 he was going to be your new guardian. So you were you couldn't own property. and you still retain that kind of status as belonging to a man, whereas one of my favourite, hopefully 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 from a public inscription, 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, 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 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 somebody right okay okay it's a little bar but yeah there's some agency there You'll take what you can get. 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 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 property. So you could live somewhat independently. And also, 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. Wow. Okay.

So that's what I would live. Is there anything in the sources that tells us reasons that you could get divorced? 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.

Wow. Wow. Now, that is an interesting case to hear. Like, how are you proving that? Like, that must have happened at least more than once for that to have made it into law somewhere. 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 impression I get is that you would be given a divorce if you asked for one. Okay, okay. But it's just that like

then you get into the area 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 that's like preserved. It could just be like a rumour 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 arc on to ask for a divorce

and he runs into the street with his pals and drags her home. Fuck, wow. 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 it existed, I think, shows some respect to women

and their decision about their partner, which I like. Absolutely. I'm still sort of stuck on the idea that if you broke up with your partner, you have 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 a relationship,

every time of a situation, ship went south. Jesus Christ, Kate, nor again. Well, if they would list let you have some property, then you'd be fine. Then this wouldn't happen. It wasn't my fucking idea. 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 bummer. Oh, fuck. Wow. I'm just trying to think how that would have played out in my life. You know, you have to get... Yeah. Need your dad's approval. Yeah.

Wow. Okay. Suppose 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 realize that you're not going to do. do that. There's some lines who are going to have to read between. Oh, fuck. Yeah, we'll have to read between the lines. So where is the joy that you found in this book? Because we've covered a lot of stuff that isn't very joyful. That sounds a bit. Sorry. No, no, no, don't apologise. That's the reality of it. It was bleak. But tell me where the joy was that you found. So I think it is in the women's voices. So I 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. 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? But like straw mats were associated with prostitution, like sex. Didn't know that. There you go. Wow. Okay. That's what they're lying down to do.

I have absolutely no doubt in my mind. And then you've got, so Pichia, 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 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

form. I don't know if they ever did. I'm written for her. But in that sense, you've sort of got, okay, these women who are not ashamed of their desire, these women who clearly embrace that feeling of sexuality and that feeling of desire and want to have sex, there's a lot of metaphors like, my heart is burning. Similar to what we say today, really, that kind of like almost, is it indigestion or is it is it hornyness it's a constant struggle that one is to do I need a gamaskon or do I need a good dicking

I'm not absolutely sure which one in the ancient world the solution is always the same because sex is the solution to all medical problems including indigestion that's such a man who came up with that that's ridiculous there's also a poet who I love called Nossis 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, as being like sweet as honey. And you're thinking, oh, that sounds like she had a nice time.

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 graffiti on a wall in Pompeii, anonymous writer but it's from one woman to another women saying leave your man behind, come kiss me let's embrace. Again not a lot of details about the sex act but we can see where it's going

let's be logical. There's a lot of embracing and touching in the poem 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

again just because there might be judgment maybe about like eating your partner out or there might have been judgment about this or that it didn't mean 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 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? I think all of my social social media is under Jean's Thoughts, which is a username.

I think I came up with in like 2012 and it's stuck. And give us the full title of the book. Aphrodisi, women, sex and pleasure in the classical world. It was originally called the Ancient O. The Ancient O, oh, that's good. That was my original title. That's good. I like that. I think Aphrodisi is, I can see why, was that an editor that went like, yeah, yeah.

Yeah. I can see why they did it, but I do like the ancient O. Thanks, thanks. Thank you so much. You've been marvellous. Thank you for having me. 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 wanted to explore a subject, if you just wanted to say hello,

or perhaps you've fucked off your best friend's birthday to go and see Axel Rose, then you can email us at betwixt at history hit.com. This podcast was edited by Hannah Theodorov and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The Senior Producer is Freddie Chick. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.